Ted Bundy's presence at Temple University in 1969 prompted authorities a decade later to look for ties between the serial killer and the murder of Betsy Ruth Aardsma, but a member of the executed murderer's defense team calls the library slaying decidedly "non-Bundyish."

"None of his needs would be fulfilled," said Art Norman, a Portland, Ore., psychologist who examined Bundy during the mid-1980s. "He wasn't into guns or knives. He was much more into choking people, bashing them."

Aardsma, 22, a graduate student in English from Holland, Mich., was found in the stacks of Pattee Library 20 years ago this afternoon. She died minutes later of a single stab wound to the heart.

The murder remains unsolved.

Authorities have interviewed more than 5,000 people, but much of their investigation centered around a man who emerged from the stacks and said to library goers, "Someone better help that girl."

Police distributed a composite around Pennsylvania and sought the man for questioning, but he was never found.

District Justice Clifford Yorks, who was a State College police sergeant when Aardsma was murdered, said he had heard that Bundy, an illegitimate child, received information his father was a professor at Bucknell.

"(He may) have visited a major university in central Pennsylvania over Thanksgiving 1969," Yorks said. "I understand Pennsylvania did have, when he started confessing, someone go to Florida and speak to him about this case."

The Only Living Witness, a Bundy biography by journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, said Bundy left Temple in the summer of 1969 and drove to California.

"But he did once have a tip his father was at Haverford," Aynesworth said.

Cpl. Jeff Watson, a trooper at the state police at Rockview who has taken over what remains of the Aardsma case, said Bundy's habit of lying to get more media attention made it difficult to determine who he did and did not kill.

"I don't want to say that he was asked specifically about Betsy Aardsma," Watson said. "When you have someone like Ted Bundy, you don't give a lot of specifics. He was a 'riddle me this' type of person."

Watson did say, however, that police from as far away as California and Florida have followed up leads on the Aardsma case.

Bundy went to Florida's electric chair in January for the murder of Kimberly Diane Leach, a seventh grader who vanished from her school only weeks after Bundy rampaged through a Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, killing two female Florida State University students and injuring several others.

He was also convicted of 12 other murders, many in the state of Washington.

And though his connection in the Aardsma murder remains dubious, many who came in contact with Bundy are just as reluctant to rule it out.

"It sounds like it could be a Bundy because it was at a university, and that's the only place he could feel at ease," Aynesworth, a national reporter for The Washington Times who interviewed Bundy extensively in 1984 and 1985, said in a recent telephone interview from Dallas.

"He also knew it was a good place to pick up girls," Aynesworth said. "He did work college campuses, and that was where he was really comfortable."

What seems to steer experts away from possible ties between Bundy and the Aardsma murder is his penchant for excessive violence. Many of Bundy's murders involved bludgeoning, and he often "liked to take his bodies somewhere and play with them," Aynesworth said.

But in published interviews conducted by Aynesworth and Michaud, a former Newsweek reporter, Bundy -- who referred to himself in the third person when discussing his killings -- said he preferred minimal violence.

"We've established the infliction of violence was not something this individual craved," Bundy said in Conversations With A Killer. "It would be quick."

The evidence suggested otherwise.

Norman, who stressed that his ideas were pure speculation, also would not rule out Bundy's involvement.

"It just doesn't fit him at all, but that doesn't mean someone doesn't break out of a pattern, especially early on. Never say never," Norman said.

Bundy said he killed women as early as Memorial Day 1969 in New Jersey, Norman said.

Watson, who says a good possibility exists that Aardsma's murder was a random act, considers Bundy's January electrocution the end to any chance conclusive proof could be found connecting him to Aardsma.

"We'll never know," the trooper said. "If he did it, he took it to the grave. He fancied himself as smarter than you and I. And maybe, in a way, he was."