"What up, dear child?" Writers and fans said, for all to hear, that Paterno couldn't win the big one at the critical moment. But nothing prepared her for the experience of sitting in the courtroom when Todd Hodne spoke for the first time. And I was like, 'What?' She didn't know the football players who came into the Train Station because she didn't particularly care about them: "I was not boom-boom rah-rah. "He was trying to ascertain if I was going to go to [the Betsy Sailor hearing] and if the police had discovered anything concrete. Hodne's daughter was born when he was in jail awaiting trial, and he married her mother when the trial began. She was wearing "black slacks and a tan sweater with suede patches at the elbows." Even before he put on all that muscle, even when he was all shoulders and long legs and arms, he could ring bells, he could make the guy on the other side of the line quit or at least reconsider being a hero. Before Jerry Sandusky, there was Todd Hodne. They had evidence.". Four decades later, Grine, who became Sharp's successor on the bench, is still baffled by Sharp's decision: "I've never had anybody else do that. He was, however, not punished or taken off the streets by those charged with his supervision and control." We have examined hundreds of pages of surviving, often heavily redacted, documents and have done hundreds of interviews with Hodne's friends, girlfriends, family members, teammates and coaches, as well as those who investigated and prosecuted his crimes. Hodne could hit. I was right about the yellow car. He remembered that the case came down to three fingerprints lifted from Betsy's apartment and phone calls traced from Susan's phone. "I'm Todd Hodne," he said. His ferocity was what brought him to St. Dominic. ", The next morning, June 18, 1978, there was something else Hodne wanted. "A normal person shouldn't do this," Hodne says in the statement he gave to Nassau County police about his attack on the 16-year-old girl. That night, he wound up driving her home from the bar. That was not only a loss in itself, but fans felt the pain of it even harder because he was the kid brother of Franco Harris, who had graduated six years earlier. As Betsy answered the phone, she hoped she could find someone like Lisa again. She had heard some of the other women had received phone calls after their assault, possibly from the assailant. He was the man behind the desk. I don't know if that ever went away. '", The only surviving member of Penn State's public information department at the time is Dave Baker, who was assistant sports information director in 1978. Hodne was one of them, along with a teammate from the Levittown Red Devils travel team, Dave Smith. She didn't know her father was no drug dealer but simply a man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. When we first called Karen in the summer of 2021, she asked why anyone would be interested in the story of what happened to her. She was 11 years old and had missed the bus, so the mother of a friend drove her. And it made me realize my strength in myself." Then he picked her up and planted her face down on her bed, and from his lack of strain or even apparent effort, she understood that his outsize strength made him particularly dangerous. And when she realized who it was, she wondered immediately how he knew her name: "Karen, this is Joe Paterno," the man said. Paterno asked to be recontacted on Sunday 10/15/78 at 1830 hours for further information.". Even when he flipped her over and sat on her chest, with his knees straddling her shoulders, she kept trying to see around the margins of her blindfold and then the pillowcase he had put over her head, kept trying to glean information she could use later to identify him or use now to stay alive. ", Betsy liked taking the calls. " she heard him open the back door (outside exit) and then he came back in. And that's what I heard from everyone involved in this: not enough evidence. Years later, when we told him of the full extent of Hodne's crimes, Vernaglia said, "Are you serious? "And he says, 'If you ever tell anyone, I will kill your father. It took a few hours for the police to produce a warrant for his arrest. Now go try and take care of yourself.'". Todd took away a lot from her. Actor then began to rape complainant and she said, 'Please don't cum inside because I'm not using birth control and don't want to become pregnate [sic] over something like this.' She let him in. She lived with two Siamese kittens. In the days before turning himself in, Hodne had tried to convince Brickowski to vouch for him regarding one of the nights Musser was interested in. Pankey was part of the crowd that went to the Train Station on Tuesday nights. "I remember being in a group for dinner and people were discussing this," Ann Sailor says. How is that even possible? Over the course of his investigation into Betsy Sailor's rape, Penn State University police officer Duane Musser contacted members of the school's football team, one of whom described instructions from Joe Paterno. Two days before, she had placed a classified ad in the Penn State student newspaper, the Daily Collegian. At each stop, Betsy came away with documents that both validated her memories and gave her information about what happened to her. HDFS 129: 367 shares By Brian Linder | blinder@pennlive.com Bodies have been washing up on the shores of Lake Michigan and rivers around Chicago. Now he is just too big for his rental car, especially after four hours behind the wheel. "I'm beginning to think I didn't do such a good job," Musser would say, especially when he was reminded of the outcomeof what happened when one conviction wasn't enough to keep Hodne in jail. Hodne was from Wantagh, a comfortably middle-class town between the little boxes of Levittown and the fulfillment of Robert Moses' vision in the boardwalk of Jones Beach. "I seem to recall that somebody told me that he was concerned about it and that he might reach out to me," she says. But I spent my entire freshman year praying I wouldn't be arrested. But the football coach, Tom Capozzoli, had been at St. Dom's for about a dozen years, and now he had a star playerhis son Tony, who had won the national Punt, Pass & Kick championship two years in a row. She thought it was a safe place to be"good times all the time. And it was his voicelow and flatly declarativethat now caused her to gasp and brought her to tears and prompted Grine to ask her to step out of the room to collect herself. And he went over to the dumpster and took his sweater, the sweater that he cherished so much, and threw it into the dumpster. Jean also remembers that when Hodne was arrested, Clyde had reminded her that the three of them had run into him at The Saloon a few weeks before the attack. When Paterno called, she had hoped that he was calling out of concern for her. They were a little wild, if you want to know the truth; they had a CB radio, and when they weren't singing along with eight-track tapes, they were flirting with truckers and joining their convoys. At the end of Oct. 13, the lead investigator on the case, Duane Musser, wrote a report summarizing the efforts that he and his partner, Garry Kunes, had made to find Hodne: "At 1920 hours Off. When Georgette told him that her husband was not at home, he asked if he could leave his name. In November 1979, shortly after Hodne entered the Pennsylvania prison system, psychologist Ed Perry evaluated him and came to this conclusion: "His remorse appears hollow as he tends to project the blame for his misfortunes onto others or simply bad breaks. It was when Kathleen moved to Sarasota, Florida, to be with her mother that she finally began to understand what happened on April 23, 1979. She told her parents, and they suggested she must not have been careful enough. Karen felt as though she were being pushed aside and forgotten. He had a deep solemnity about him that belied his penchant for good times. Her family not only never really knew what happened to her that night, they couldn't quite bring themselves to believe what she told them about it, especially as Denise kept on her difficult and erratic course, swallowed up by substance abuse. 1 than others in his profession." "His photo and the above information were placed on the Daily Bulletin for patrol alert. "He wanted no smiling and no emotion from me whatsoever," she says. She was afraid of being alone. He kept shoving things in my mouth and gagging me, and I kept ripping them out," she said in a recent interview. The Sailors were a family of schoolteachers, and Betsy would have made a great one, calm and kind, cheerful and strong, given to striking up long conversations with strangers she encountered on campus. ", "When it came up in a staff meeting, Joe read the report and a puzzled look came across his face. There was no question in my mind that Joe was doing the right thing. Todd Hodne is seen as dismissed, inconsequential, sent home. Several months later, in May, 2021, we obtained an unredacted copy of Musser's report. His daughter had made him feel more empathetic, he said: "I've never been out there for her . Shemp was the fourth Stooge. Betsy remained one person, because although Karen, Susan and Adrienne Reissman all wanted to bring charges against Hodne, none were deemed to have enough evidence to do so. ", Betsy had heard what happened to women who accused men of raping them in open court"the horror stories" of what awaited them when they took the stand. On Aug. 19, 1978, two months after the burglary, Penn State held a scrimmage, and afterward, Paterno told gathered reporters that Todd Hodne had been suspended for the season. Call Betsy." He had been, in a phrase repeated again and again in any discussion of Paterno's decisive discipline, "sent home. He ran. ', Betsy won. He misses, but not by muchthe knife sticks in the wall, vibrating like a tuning fork, a few inches from Poggioli's head. She was not gone long, and when she returned, her landlord, a motherly woman with whom Betsy was close, told her that the kittens had gotten frisky in her absence. KATHLEEN PIRKL, on the moment her mother told her about Todd Hodne's attack. Then she spoke to a caller who connected with her over common interests and made her decision. I don't know if they do it in Philadelphia or New York or not but, they sure don't do it here in the country. There was the team captain who refused to finish a lap; the star cornerback who, along with two others, was ruled academically ineligible; the running back caught driving drunk; the linebacker arrested for fighting and the lineman busted for drinking on campus; and, finally, at the Liberty Bowl, the substitute tight end who showed up in a suburban bedroom in the middle of the night and was lucky he didn't get shot. The apartment provided no refuge. They escorted her out of the courtroom, and Betsy Sailor never saw Todd Hodne in person again. ", Paterno kept his own counsel and maintained his own doghouse, which had a number of rooms. She didn't know who Todd Hodne was; she didn't know how strong he was, how persuasive and how violent. And I'm like, 'Fine.'" We love that image. But maybe we judged her wrong, looking at the events of the following years.". And she was country. When the phone rang, the call came through a line that a few weeks before had been cut by the blade of a knife. "What woman doesn't ask what she looked like?" Kathleen was lucky to be at school when Hodne invaded their home, but the more she learns about what her mother and grandmother survived, the more she understands the generational obligation survivorship entails. There is no prescription for surviving the trauma of sexual assault. ", They thought they got him. I hope this gives you some peace and closure after all you have gone through. And I said, 'But you need to still be gentle with me.'". Instead, Delin accepted his pleas and sentenced him to minimum of seven years and a maximum of 21, his Pennsylvania and Nassau County sentences to be served concurrently. It does not say he was convicted or sentenced. I can't believe nobody's dug up what happened in the '70s there. "After he got done, I'm like, 'I'm dead. Delin said he had been inclined to withdraw his sentencing offer after he read the accounts of Hodne's attacks but that the letters of support Hodne had received had changed his mind. "I didn't want to do it, to be honest," Ragucci says. She asked not to be quoted on the subject of her father. There were a few short wire service updates that ran in a few Pennsylvania newspapers. He was involved in the case, early and late. Paterno, in those days, was famous for doing the right thing. But when she went back to Hodne's dorm room, he wouldn't be there, and when he waswell, one time she knocked on the door and his roommate came out and stopped her from going in: "No, no, no, you don't want to go in there." A tan sweater with suede patches at the elbows., for all to hear, that Paterno could win. Hodne in person again of them, along with a teammate from the Levittown Red Devils travel,... When Todd Hodne, '' he said: `` I 'm Todd Hodne is seen as dismissed inconsequential. 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