‘They’ve just kind of been forgotten.’ New book focuses on World War II-era murders in Pa.
Maryland-based author Derek Sherwood spent about eight years researching three World War II-era killings around Penn State to establish a base for his second book about unsolved murders around Centre County.
“Who Killed Betsy?: Uncovering Penn State University’s Most Notorious Unsolved Crime” was his first. Betsy Aardsma’s death — she was fatally stabbed at Penn State’s Pattee Library in 1969 — “sounded more like an urban legend,” Sherwood said.
He researched Aardsma’s death to ensure it was not an erroneous story passed down over time and discovered that Margaret Martin, Rachel Taylor and Faye Gates were also killed in Pennsylvania between 1938-1940.
Sherwood, who grew up in York County and lived in Centre County for a few years in the 1980s, said he realized the killings were “a much bigger thing for the State College area and for Penn State.”
Martin, 19, could be consider an outlier. She was found naked and dead by a trapper in Wyoming County in 1938. Taylor, 17, and Gates, 24, were each found dead in Centre County.
Taylor, who was found nearly naked and dead in 1940 by a janitor for the College Township School in Lemont after she returned to Penn State following Easter Break, and Gates, who was found dead under similar circumstances weeks later, have more in common.
Richard Millinder confessed to killing Gates and was convicted of murder, but nobody has been charged in connection with Martin and Taylor’s deaths.
Shortly after Gates’ death, according to Sherwood’s book — “Nittany Nightmare: The Sex Murders of 1938-1940 and the Panic at Penn State” — a former state police superintendent said “there is running loose in Centre County a sex-crazed maniac.”
Sherwood expounded on each of the killings in several chapters of the 301-page book and said he believes the killings were unrelated. Instead, he argued, they were conflated by state police, which merged with the state highway patrol in 1937.
“Two-thirds of the force were guys that had been ticketing people for speeding the day before and had never done a criminal investigation,” Sherwood said. “They really started to impact Penn State, enrollment was down ... young women were just canceling in droves.”
Sherwood’s new book also examines former Penn State president Ralph Hetzel’s decisions during the same period. The university’s 10th president presided over the university from 1926 to 1947.
Starting with the 1930 football season, Hetzel eliminated athletic scholarships for 19 years after he adopted the recommendations of a Carnegie Foundation report and transitioned control of collegiate athletics from alumni to the university’s administration.
The Nittany Lions’ football team did not finish above .500 for the first seven seasons after Hetzel instituted the policy and had an overall winning percentage of .395 — far below its all-time winning percentage of .686.
“When you realize that all these things are in flux, it just represents a fork in the road where Penn State could have gone either direction,” Sherwood said. “It was a series of really rough waters and what amazed me was how, within five or 10 years after the conclusion of the war, Penn State football had become big; the college had become big; the state police had become big. Everyone came out of it improved. The murders were just something that happened along the way that never did get improved, which was kind of surprising. They’ve just kind of been forgotten.”
Sherwood referred to the relationships between the two institutions and the killings as a “confluence,” though former university archivist and Centre County Historical Society board member Lee Stout said it seems more like coincidence.
“I just find the idea of putting these murders and the evolution of the state police together with the history of Penn State football kind of strange,” Stout said.
Absent the football connection, Stout agreed the post-Great Depression and pre-World War II period was an “important juncture” in the university’s history.
There was a “fairly strong” sense among students to not get involved in the war, Stout said, while the university hosted all branches of the armed services for specialized training and established several undergraduate centers throughout the state.
“I would encourage people to read the book as more of a history of Penn State and a window into something you’ve never seen before, rather than as a straight true crime,” Sherwood said. “It’s gonna give you a filter to lay over the way things happen now and once you understand how it came about, everything makes a lot more sense.”
This story was originally published August 1, 2019 at 7:03 AM.