Recently in Autobiography Category

I was on the Penn State campus the day of Betsy Aardsma's fatal stabbing, in fact, I had been in the stacks earlier that day.

Aardsma was in a narrow row of shelves that now houses bound foreign-language periodicals when she was set upon, according to the locations given in police reports.

She was stabbed once in the chest and grabbed a shelf, sending a row of books cascading down. Some students overheard the noise and found Aardsma on the floor.

They tried to help and initially thought she had fainted. She was wearing a red sweater and red dress on which blood did not show, but she bled into her lungs and died in the library.

So I've long been interested in the case but had assumed that no one was actively pursuing it after nearly 40 years.

That assumption was wrong:

Trooper Kent Bernier inherited the Aardsma case with another state police trooper two years ago, after the previous investigators retired. [...]

"We're just looking at it differently and trying to do different things that haven't been done yet," Bernier said.

Their search for new angles on the old slaying includes modern forensics testing unavailable to the 1969 investigators.

"It's possible now that DNA might be a big breakthrough for us," said Bernier.

He would not give specifics on what was to be tested.

Read the full story of Betsy Aardsma's murder case.

There is even a web site: whokilledbetsy.com

The previous post reminded me of an incident that happened over 20 years ago.

In those days I was working in a place called the Defense Personnel Support Center (or DPSC) in the Subsistence directorate, which was responsible for supplying our warfighters with (what else?) their food. This involved everything from fresh fruits and vegetables to something known as MREs.

That stands for "Meal, Ready-to-Eat", which probably sets a record for fitting three lies into four words. The military had recently replaced its traditional canned rations with MREs, and a problem had developed.

There was no way to track the original ingredients from the supplier to the finished end item, so when a problem was discovered, an entire supply of end items had to be recalled, rather than just those items which had come from the offending source.

A co-worker (call him "Joe") developed a tracking system (written in dBase III) for deployment at the manufacturers' plants, and I pitched in with some utilities to add a few capabilities that dBase lacked. We tested as thoroughly as we could, and then sent it off the the contractors.

But there was a problem: when the contractors tried to run the program, it crashed their PCs.

This was in the days of DOS (remember DOS?), and to make a long story short it turned out there was a nasty bug in my code that caused my program to overwrite a part of memory that rightfully belonged to DOS.

Why hadn't we noticed the problem? As it happened, the area of memory that it overwrote was called the Environment, which was used to store (what else?) environment strings. On all of our PCs, we had the Environment filled up with all sort of assorted strings, so when my program invaded that area, there was no problem because the Environment space was large enough to handle the invasion.

But the PCs at the contractor's plants didn't use the Environment at all, so when that area of memory was overwritten, it crashed their systems.

Fixing the program was easy, but it would take several days to get the fix out to the contractors, so we gave them a temporary workaround:

We suggested that they add a string to their Environment when they started up their PCs. I don't remember exactly what we suggested, but it was something like "SET DPSC=A_FINE_BUNCH_OF_FELLOWS".

Thursday during the late afternoon rush, there were probably eleven people muttering under their breath, as they made their way home; they could have left at least an hour earlier, if only that one juror hadn't been so stubborn.

That's speculation, of course, and wouldn't be admissible as evidence in a court, but it is true that one lone juror did extend the deliberation period by at least an hour.

I was that juror.

The trial wrapped up today, as expected. The jury deliberated, had some spirited, passionate discussions, and eventually reached a verdict.

I expect to write about the details of the case as soon as I can clear my head; it was an emotional day.

And no, the jurors weren't really angry. Considering that we were debating issues that would affect the liberty of a human being, we all remained remarkably civil.

I didn't write down their names, but I did try awfully hard to learn to associate them with their numbers. (There were also two alternates, but I won't try to spell their somewhat uncommon names.)

 1 Lisa
 2 Mathew
 3 Sandra
 4 George
 5 Patricia
 6 Kenisha
 7 Yasseline (pronounced more like Jocelyn)
 8 Veronica
 9 Linda
10 James (that would be me)
11 Joseph
12 Ellen

Hope I got that right. Thanks to all!

There was a brief discussion of the price of gas as The Jury was chatting today.

Someone mentioned that gas cost about a dollar a gallon when she learned to drive.

So I chimed in that it only cost 30 cents a gallon when I learned to drive.

I think I just revealed my age...

Today was the first day of the trial, and tomorrow may well be the last.

It was also the first day that the jury gathered together as a distinct group. Yesterday, our panel of 50 prospective jurors made little attempt at conversation, which made the three-hour morning wait extremely excruciating.

But now that we have become The Jury, and there are only 14 of us (including the two alternates), we've started the process of "Getting To Know You".

And you'll never guess who kicked off the process.

That's right. It was The Curmudgeon.

The Court Crier had given us a list of our juror numbers and first names, and I was simply trying to match up the names with the numbers.

I knew that Number Nine was Linda, as she and I had begun talking the day before and had always been next to each other. And Number Eight had made a spectacular entrance this morning, so I knew who Veronica was. And I knew Number Eleven, Joseph, from yesterday's session.

But uttering this out loud, and admitting that as Number Ten I was James, started a round robin of name claiming.

That broke the ice, and so the conversations started.

As Sandra said a little bit later, "James, you got us going and now you're just sitting back and taking it all in."

Guilty as charged.

BTW, this seems to be a great group of people. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Unlike most folks, I enjoy jury duty. At least, I enjoy the trial part, if I get chosen, and so far I've been impaneled three times; twice in criminal cases and once in a civil suit.

In fact, I have a pretty good track record; each time that I've made it to the voir dire and been questioned, I've been selected.

And my track record remains unbroken, as I've just been selected for another trial, starting tomorrow!

Can't write about it until it's over, of course.

One thing I can say, however. It's made me rethink my strategy of owning an iPhone to reduce the number of gadgets that I have to carry. The Criminal Justice Center requires one to check all cell phones at the door; which meant that the long hours of waiting to be called were all that much longer without having my podcasts to ease the tedium...

It was interesting listening to the questioning of the prospective jurors, as each side tries to decide who will make a good juror for them. They ask questions to see if a person has any biases that might keep her from making a fair decision, and I suppose that's reasonable.

But what they really should be doing, in my opinion, is trying to find the folks who have good critical thinking skills.

Yeah, I know. That's easy for me to say.

I will say, though, that it's been my experience that jurors really do try to come to a fair decision, though obviously my experience is limited...

The good news first. No humans were hurt and property damage, even including the damage in the park, was minimal.

The bad news: the fire didn't burn all the bamboo.

And we're still waiting word from the wildlife. Hopefully, none of their homes were damaged.

I didn't actually see or smell the fire. I heard it. It sounded like some squirrels were prancing on my roof, so I didn't pay it any attention at first.

But after five or ten minutes, I decided the squirrels had had enough fun, so I went out on the deck to chase them away.

That's when I realized that those sounds were not the prancing of some animals on my roof, but the crackling of a good sized fire that was blazing in the park behind my house.

First thing to do, call 9-1-1. It took a bit of explaining when I said that the fire was actually in the park, not in my house (yet). The dispatcher didn't understand the Hundred Steps, either. But eventually the information was communicated.

Then I grabbed my camcorder.

And called my neighbor, JC.

Then I realized that I better get out my garden hose, because the fire was getting too close to my property. JC manned the hose while I worked the camcorder.

The fire department arrived a few minutes later and had the blaze under control in no time.

I'm still not sure what caused it. A tossed cigarette? Some kids playing with matches? I'm just glad that I was at home. Because if I hadn't been, who knows how long it would have been before someone noticed it.

Still, it would have been nice if the fire had consumed more of that blasted bamboo...