| Van de Veldt is a jewish name ,,,,,Jewess Author
|
|
 |
Theodor Hendrik van de Velde - Dutch Jew (1873-1937) A Dutch physician. He is the author of the revolutionary sex manual Perfect Marriage. Velde broke away from the moralizing duscussion of the standard missionary position and sexual behavior in general. He described 10 different positions for intercourse and dared to advocate the 'genital kiss' as an acceptable part of foreplay. |
|
|
|
|
 |
In his August 2007 letter to Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane,
Van de Velde attached the following list of suggestions for investigators
to consider:
AVENUES TO INVESTIGATE IN THE
SUZANNE JOVIN COLD CASE HOMICIDE
Crime Date: December 4, 1998, approximately 9:45 pm
Jovin found at the corner of East Rock and Edgehill Roads,
New Haven, Connecticut bleeding from multiple stab wounds
1) The Fresca soda bottle found at the
crime scene had on it two fingerprints: Jovin’s and that of a
not-yet-identified person. If the bottle is still available (i.e., if the New
Haven police did not destroy the evidence or allow the fingerprint to degrade),
the DNA of the second
print should be discerned and compared to the DNA found under the victim’s
fingernails. If there is a match, the likelihood that this is the killer’s DNA
is enormous. The only chance of innocent contact would be if the convenience
store clerk who stocked the Fresca also happened to be at the cashier’s station
when Jovin visited and somehow had his palm scratched by Jovin when retrieving
change. Other than that extremely unlikely scenario, if the DNA under the
fingernails and on the soda bottle match, the DNA belongs to the perpetrator.
2) Since several witnesses report seeing a suspicious van parked at the crime
scene at the time of the crime, investigators should compare the circumstances
of Jovin’s death to deadly or potentially deadly abductions known to have been
carried out in by Connecticut men driving vans. Notice should be taken of John
F. Regan and William Devlin Howell, both of whom used vans in their abductions.
If the Jovin crime scene DNA (bottle and/or fingernail) has not been compared to
the DNA of each of these criminals, it should be. Regan, of course, is the
Waterbury family man who was much in the news in 2005-6 because of the latest of
his sexual assaults: using his van in a failed attempt in Saratoga Springs, NY
to abduct a 17-year-old high school female athlete. Regan subsequently pled
guilty and was sentenced in July 2006 to 12 years in New York prisons for the
attempted kidnapping. Earlier, at Governor Rell’s November 21, 2005, press
conference trumpeting the value of Connecticut’s DNA
Data Base, Henry Lee described how DNA evidence had broken open an
11-year-old case about a woman kidnapped and raped by John Regan in 1993. Howell
is the Connecticut man now at the top of the Cold Case Unit’s website listing of
solved cases. On January 30, 2006, he pled guilty to the July 2003 abduction and
murder of Nilsa Arizmendi of Wethersfield. It was the victim’s blood found in
his van—by North Carolina police on a Connecticut warrant—that led to his
arrest. Additional blood was discovered in his van and was never identified, as
the Connecticut Cold Case Unit’s very own website makes clear. The State, in
fact, appealed to the public for help to discover whose blood was in Howell’s
van.
3) The crime-scene DNA and the DNA for Regan and Howell should be compared to
all possible CODIS names in Connecticut and elsewhere.
4) The tip of the knife used in the
Jovin attack was broken off and lodged inside Jovin’s head. The metallurgy of
the knife tip should be discerned and traced to a manufacturer. If a
manufacturer can be identified, perhaps the type of knife can be too.
5) A microscopic forensic analysis should be conducted on Jovin's
sweatshirt--reported covered with blood—to determine molecular trace elements
deposited on Jovin's clothing. Such an analysis could identify dirt and tire
molecules, among other unique substances, which can be traced to a specific
region or vehicle. A microscopic forensic test might show whether Jovin's
clothing was in contact with the floor of a Dodge B250 van, the type the New
Haven police said was seen at the crime scene, or of some other van.
6) The DNA found under Jovin’s fingernail and the DNA discerned from the
fingerprint on the soda bottle found at the crime scene should be entered into
the Connecticut and Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) and periodically compared
with the samples entered not only in CT but in the other states.
7) The DNA in the blood under Jovin’s fingernails had a rare or unusual marker.
That might allow the DNA to be compared more easily than would otherwise be the
case, by limiting the comparison to samples that have that marker. Furthermore,
that unusual marker should be made public, in the hopes that the public could
help identify suspects.
8) Determine the age of the individual through testing the hormones left within
the fingerprints found on the Fresca soda bottle found at the crime scene. (The
State’s forensics lab could perform this test.)
9) Conduct a sweat print analysis on the clothing. Dale Perry of the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory in California can do one as small as 10 micrometers
across - smaller than a single fingerprint ridge. He uses a synchrotron, a
particle accelerator to produce intense light that, when shone at the sample, is
absorbed and reveals a chemical makeup that may be unique. If not unique to a
person, it can at least segregate age and sex. This technique requires very
little sample.
10) Determine the ethnicity of the individual through analysis of the DNA found
under the fingernails of Jovin. Any result could be potentially helpful.
Consider the possibility that the individual is Indo-European, Asian or African.
Then match the ethnicity with the age of the individual, and one has a new lead.
11) Perform a microscopic forensic analysis to determine molecular trace
elements deposited on Jovin's clothing, which could identify dirt and tire
molecules, among other unique substances, which can be traced to a specific
region or vehicle. A microscopic forensic test might show whether Jovin's
clothing was in contact with the floor of a Dodge B250 van, the type police said
was seen at the crime scene, or of some other van. Skip Palenik in Chicago, for
instance, could perform such analysis (see: www.microtracescientific.com/).
12) The NHPD failed to investigate or even interview some of the more likely
individuals associated with the last event Jovin attended: the party at the Best
Buddies (Special Adult) program in New Haven the very evening of her death. The
director of that Program, Ms. Dawn DeFeo, claims only a few individuals from her
organization were interviewed regarding the crime and none, as far as she knows,
was asked to provide a DNA sample. Yet one of the individuals of the program was
no longer included in the program in part because of a complaint filed by Jovin
concerning his treatment of a Program member. That individual had an ‘anger
management’ problem and perhaps had access to Marrakech Program vans which were
used to transport program members. Some relevant facts, according to DeFeo:
• Jovin was upset with the Program (named Marrakech; she had complained about
the staff assistant in particular).
• There was a fire in her buddy’s apartment that she believed was caused by the
assistant's negligence. The assistant allowed her Buddy to operate the stove in
the apartment, which he wasn't supposed to do, and the result was a fire.
• The staff assistant did other things she thought inappropriate.
• He was subsequently moved to a position that could be regarded as a demotion.
• He had an "anger management issue" problem.
• The individual has not been asked for a fingerprint or DNA sample.
In addition, regardless of how many of these suggestions are explored, the
unsolved Jovin slaying should be posted--as soon as possible--as a current cold
case (with the exceptional $150,000 reward noted) on the Chief State's
Attorney's website.
Respectfully,
James Van de Velde, August 7, 2007
Re: 4/1/01 - Hartford Courant: Are You Wrong About James Van de Velde? (Part 1
of 4)
Are You Wrong About James Van de Velde?
Story by LES GURA
The Hartford Courant
April 1, 2001
[picture]
James Van de Velde believes the police never properly investigated the Suzanne
Jovin slaying, that Yale University improperly removed him from teaching and
that the media perpetuated the image of guilt the police and Yale created. Now
working for the Department of Defense, Van de Velde was photographed by Tom
Brown in Washington, D.C.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The bright red type signifying a new Lotus Notes message popped up late in the
morning on Sept. 19, 2000.
"James Van de Velde."
I stared at it. Why would the former Yale University lecturer and only named
suspect in New Haven's most notorious
unsolved murder, the Dec. 4, 1998, stabbing death of 21-year-old Yale
senior Suzanne Jovin, be e-mailing me?
True, I had a connection with Van de Velde; he had been a student in the
graduate journalism course I'd taught at Quinnipiac College that fall. But I
hadn't seen or spoken to him since Dec. 7, 1998, 36 hours before his name was to
become publicly linked with Jovin's. When The Courant, where I am city editor,
sought insight into the case in early 1999 and asked me to reach out to Van de
Velde, he never answered my message. So why now?
I showed a couple of colleagues the e-mail message with the infamous name, still
unopened in my message folder. Eyebrows were raised, smart-aleck remarks ("So,
the killer wants to talk with you, huh?") prevailed. Van de Velde's messaging me
had good titillation value in a cynical newsroom whose collective gavel had long
ago, like that of most people who had ever heard about the case, banged down on
the guilty side.
The e-mail got me to thinking about Van de Velde and the other seven students
who comprised MC 504A, Newsroom Clinical. They were curious, intelligent and
driven by a desire to succeed. Everyone had done well in the class, with three
going on in newspapers. There was the doctor who loved to write op-ed pieces
about our problem-plagued health-care system but who longed to improve his
prose. There was a television producer, and two people in public relations; they
would each go on to find new jobs in the two years that came and went. And there
was Van de Velde, whose future would change so dramatically the day after our
final session, our goodbye dinner the night of Monday, Dec. 7.
I had started the class that night in the regular setting, the computer room
inside Quinnipiac's communications building, set in the shadow of Sleeping Giant
State Park in Hamden. One last time we sat around the oval desk, and I gave them
my final speech, to strive always for the best, to work hard and to remember the
three questions they should ask themselves before writing: What's the story,
what's the significance of the story, and what's my point? The latter question
deals not with personal viewpoint so much as the ability to understand the
motivation for writing a story. In short, it is an admonition to think.
After class, we departed in separate cars for Dickerman's, a quiet restaurant
and bar five minutes away. There, we reassembled around a long, rectangular
table. At one end was Van de
Velde,
flanked by me and Zoe
Stetson, Carla Yarbrough on Stetson's other side. That was how the
conversation divided that night: the four of us, and everyone else.
Yarbrough, then a producer at WTNH, Channel 8, asked Van de Velde if he knew the
student who had been slain the previous Friday night. Yes, he told her. In fact,
she was in one of his seminars, and he had been her senior essay advisor. She
was an excellent student, he said. In class, I had found Van de Velde a calm
man, who spoke quietly but with authority when he chose to. That night, he kept
his voice under control, but words came haltingly, his face betraying emotions
he was struggling to control. He said that earlier that day had been the last
meeting of his class, and it had been tearful and difficult for his students.
Later, I would review over and over the words and meaning of that night at
Dickerman's. I always came away thinking Van de Velde's was exactly the reaction
I would have had, if something similar had happened to one of my students.
The Sept. 19 e-mail from Van de Velde cut right to the chase. "The Jovin case
has been an intelligence test for the Connecticut media, which it has profoundly
failed: can the New Haven Police and Yale name `anyone' a suspect in a crime and
the media obligingly massacre the person in public with no regard to the facts,
accountability or ethics. The answer to date is a resounding yes."
So began my more than two-month e-mail dance with Van de Velde, he lobbing
brickbats even as he enlisted my help in writing about the Jovin case and his
status as one in a "pool of suspects" cited by police and Yale University.
Sept. 21: "Frankly, I am checking you out, not the other way around. ... I have
never had anything to fear except shoddy journalism and corrupt cops. Once you
hear the story, you will have many phone calls to make to certain people to
corroborate the facts. If you are smart, you will understand why certain people
will refuse to talk with you. And then you will be faced with your true test:
will you have the personal strength to write what you believe based on my story
and your intuition, or will you fall apart and degenerate into rumor repeating
and `It's still possible he did it since he says he was home watching television
alone.'"
Oct. 5: "The way I see it is this: my life is destroyed yet there is nothing I
have ever done that I feel ashamed of. You can't take away my dignity. Yet yours
is gone; you just don't see it. The fact that you tolerate the state `naming'
and destroying people based on speculation is an embarrassment for you, not me.
"Why does the moronic media ask the New Haven Police blandly `So what is new in
the Jovin case?' (As if they would explain.) And then accept the banal,
`Nothing.' And then never bother to follow up, `well, what exactly are you
doing? Are you checking other crimes involving knives? Are you checking with
other municipalities? Are you checking the floors of impounded cars for trace
evidence? Are you soliciting information from arrested felons?' No one asks. As
I see it, the Connecticut media is no better than the Germans in the '30s and
'40s who sat by blindly and questioned nothing as a group of political criminals
took over the country and led it into murderous ruin."
Oct. 31: "There is a reason why the constitution protects privacy and insists on
equal protection - it's not to protect the victim, but to protect society from
capricious investigation. By definition, I AM INNOCENT! I have not even been
arrested, yet many have condemned me. This should alarm and concern you
tremendously. Yale University and the State ended my political career, my
broadcasting career, my academic career, many friendships and relationships and
drained my life savings - merely by purposefully whipping up hysteria and naming
me within days of the crime, before investigating the crime. It's a form of
character destruction which the Courant participated in. It is an utterly
frightening and disgusting aspect of our current society. All journalists and
editors first and foremost, like doctors, should pledge to do no harm. Yet in
this case, CT journalists were willing partners of the State and may have kept a
murderer free by participating in capricious State activity. The case is clearly
an absolute joke. It's a joke of an investigation, an insult to our careful
judicial system, an insult to the Edgehill and Yale communities and left the New
Haven community weaker.
"My goal, since no one in the Connecticut media seems interested, is to bring
some critical thinking to the investigation."
Van de Velde's cutting words hit home in a couple of ways. First, critical
thinking is the key to my profession, and the point I stress above all others
when I teach. Second, what became crystal clear, not just in those e-mails but
in five months of investigation, is despite all his outrage, Van de Velde is
desperate for help from the same media he blames so much for his situation.
James Van de Velde loathes us.
James Van de Velde needs us.
[picture]
Suzanne Jovin was a political science major at Yale University completing her
senior year when she was murdered Dec. 4, 1998. (Photo courtesy New Haven
police)
Inevitably, the two adjectives used in newspaper and magazine articles and in
television interviews to describe Suzanne Jovin are "brainy" and "beautiful."
The daughter of American scientists, Thomas and Donna Jovin, she lived in
Gottingen, Germany, where they worked, before entering Yale in September 1995.
Jovin was an excellent student with broad interests. As her senior year began,
the political science major was accepted into one of the two seminars being
taught that fall, 1998, by Van de Velde, "Strategy and Policy in the Conduct of
War." She also asked Van de Velde to be her senior essay advisor; she would be
one of six students he advised that term on essays. Unlike many upwardly mobile
Yale students who ask high-profile professors to be their senior essay advisors
- the better to use for future reference as they head out into the world - Jovin
stuck with a lecturer whose specialty was the field she wanted to pursue.
Friends, Yale officials and those who knew her can't always put into words what
made Jovin special. "Suzanne was just one of those people who are absolutely
incredible, just warm and brilliant," said Bailey Hand, a friend in the Strategy
and Policy seminar. "I remember thinking Wednesday of that week (two days before
Jovin was slain), I looked at her while she was saying something in class,
thinking how wonderful that someone like that is alive in this world, 'cause
she's going to make such a difference." Susan Hauser, the former director of
Yale's undergraduate career services office where Jovin worked, described her as
"extremely bright, interested, generous, considerate, warm, fun." In her senior
year, Jovin became president of Yale's campus chapter of Best Buddies, an
international program that pairs people with mental retardation with college
students for social get-togethers. Dawn DeFeo was the host site coordinator for
Marrakech Inc., the New Haven-based agency that matched the adults with the
students. She called Jovin, who had been with Best Buddies all four of her Yale
years, "inspirational in everything she did. She was very bubbly, and the type
of person everyone would admire because of the energy level she had and the
enthusiasm."
Jovin began the last night of her life, Friday, Dec. 4, with a pizza party for
Best Buddies at Trinity Lutheran Church on Orange Street in New Haven, a few
blocks from her university-owned apartment on Park Street. It was the end of the
semester, and Jovin told friends she was looking forward to a chance to return
to Germany. She also had been through some turmoil with her senior essay, on the
international terrorist Osama bin Laden, sweating out until Wednesday, Dec. 2,
until she could review her first draft with Van de Velde, who had been tardy in
reading it and giving her feedback. Still, on Friday afternoon, she swung by
Brewster Hall, the white-pillared political science building on Prospect Street,
and dropped off a second draft, asking Van de Velde in a breezy, handwritten
note to peer at some of the revisions she had made. Her final draft was due the
following Wednesday. Sean Glass, a sophomore in the Best Buddies program,
recalls Jovin being "very happy" at the party that night, talking about seeing
her family again. "I don't remember her seeming to be upset about anything."
The sequence of events once the party ended, about 8:30 p.m., has been pieced
together from various sources - some from the police, others from witnesses.
Jovin, after helping clean up, left the party in a university-owned car
available to students for such events, dropping off at least one person, then
parking the car at a lot at Edgewood and Howe streets, and walking a couple of
short blocks back to her apartment. There, she e-mailed a friend just after 9
p.m., promising to leave some books for her in her building's lobby.
 |
|
Half an hour later, at 9:58 p.m.,
Jovin's
body was found face down, feet touching the street and body stretched across a
grassy part of sidewalk, nearly two miles away, at
Edgehill
and East Rock roads, an upscale residential section. A soda bottle was found in
bushes nearby; it bore only
Jovin's fingerprints. Police
reported that witnesses heard a man and woman arguing loudly about 9:45 p.m.
Jovin
had been stabbed 17 times in the back, neck and back of the head. The tip of the
weapon used was later recovered from her head. Although police in the early
stages confirmed certain information, such as the number of wounds and the fact
that they believe the crime was committed by someone who knew the victim, they
have never discussed many logical questions, even the simplest ones. What was
the substance of the argument reported? What about the question overheard by
some witnesses: "Why are you doing this to me?" Is it known whether anything
overheard that night was, in fact, connected to
Jovin's
death?
[picture]
Van de Velde was an altar boy at Holy Infant Church in Orange, Conn. Here is
pictured with the Rev. Howard Nash (Photo courtesy James Van de Velde).
Inevitably, the two adjectives used by
reporters to describe Van de
Velde are "cool" and "mysterious."
But that appears to be an outgrowth of his professional background. Ironically,
his training is rooted in honor and trust, traits Van de Velde's family and
friends say were evident from his earliest days; they say he didn't get into
fights or adolescent hijinks. He grew up in Orange and was a top student and
athlete at Amity Regional High School in Woodbridge before going on to
graduate from Yale in 1982. His higher training - he holds a doctorate in
international security studies from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law
and Diplomacy and has a top secret government security clearance as a lieutenant
commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve - led him through a series of government and
education positions in the U.S. and abroad for the State Department during the
administration of President George Bush.
Van de
Velde
left government service to rejoin his alma mater as dean of
Saybrook
College, one of Yale's residential dormitories, in the fall of 1993. He
held the position, which included
supervising Saybrook's
475 students, for four years, and during that time taught some unusual
policy courses within the political science department, classes he designed
himself. Evaluations of Van de Velde by students were glowing; he studiously
prepared and handed out class notes for each session. His "International Drug
Trafficking: National Security Dimensions and Drug Control Strategies" class was
named by Spin magazine as one of the most interesting college courses in the
country. Van de Velde brought crisis management games to Yale, working with
friends from the Naval War College, where he did his work in the Navy Reserve.
In the spring of 1997, he took a leave from Yale on a Navy assignment to help
monitor the status of peace in Bosnia from a base in Italy. After returning to
finish out the term, he left Yale to become
deputy director of the Asia/Pacific
Research Center, part of Stanford University's Institute for International
Studies. But the position on the West Coast didn't work out. Henry Rowen,
Asia/Pacific's co-director, said after just a few months, several faculty
members had come to him to discuss problems with Van de Velde, who he indicated
was "a little stiff" in handling administrative matters. Rowen and Van de Velde
talked largely about the job's focus on administration rather than policy. The
result was an agreement that the job wasn't best for Van de Velde, who was far
more interested in policy, Rowen said. Van de Velde decided to come back home.
Professor David Cameron, then chairman of Yale's political science department,
hired him as a lecturer of two fall seminars: the Strategy and Policy course,
and "The Art of Diplomacy: Negotiating, Crisis Management and the Role of Force
in International Politics."
[picture]
Van de Velde as an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve.
With his training and combined government and education backgrounds, Van de
Velde was beginning to figure out his life's goal. What he really wanted was to
be a television commentator on foreign affairs who also could find time to be a
college lecturer. Toward that end, he enrolled in Quinnipiac's master's program,
which he hoped would give him the basics in journalism. And he sought to obtain
an internship at one of the state's local television stations. Months later, the
story of how Van de Velde moved from one television station to another became an
eyebrow-raising issue among the media. Yet the story is quite simple, and
confirmed by the parties involved. Van de Velde had sent out queries to all of
the stations, and was initially accepted as an intern by WTNH Channel 8 in New
Haven. He started there in early September. That week, however, were the first
sessions of his seminar and the start of his news reporting class at Quinnipiac.
He had more than 80 students enroll in each of his two Yale seminars, and he had
to whittle that down to about 20 in a week. Faced with that task and his other
demands, he told WTNH he wouldn't be able to do the internship, and the two
sides parted company amicably. Meanwhile, Van de Velde began settling into his
routine at Yale and Quinnipiac. Two weeks later, he suddenly heard from a news
official at WVIT, Channel 30, in West Hartford who had been away on vacation.
Feeling more in command of his time, Van de Velde agreed to begin work at WVIT
two days a week.
As his professor at Quinnipiac, I was annoyed when Van de Velde twice failed to
hand in assignments. His classroom presence was quiet; he was not confident of
what he was learning and held back more than the other students. Several of his
Quinnipiac classmates said they thought Van de Velde was aloof and unfriendly.
One, Joyce Recchia, recounted a story in which she approached Van de Velde
during a class break to inquire about a Yale doctoral program in political
science. Recchia had obtained a master's degree in the field, same as Van de
Velde's. She said he told her she wouldn't like it, but that the message he
conveyed was she couldn't handle it. She said she felt his response was so cold
that she avoided him as much as possible the rest of the semester. Several
others recalled an incident I had forgotten, during which, as the students
pursued an in-class writing assignment, I went around asking various questions.
When I got to Van de Velde and asked him about the missing assignments, he
turned around and said curtly, "I don't have them," and turned back to his tube.
It didn't help his reputation among his peers.
What I remember about Van de Velde was his pursuit of his goals and the
swiftness with which he learned a new trade. His work started out mediocre,
common for fledgling reporters, but by semester's end was quite good. Van de
Velde also wrote me a lengthy e-mail - sign of things to come - in mid-semester
apologizing for his failure to complete some assignments and advising me to give
him an "F" on those papers. In the e-mail, he mentioned his dream of doing
foreign affairs, and spoke of WVIT possibly giving him a chance to do short
background detail pieces on foreign issues such as "Kosovo, the Middle East
peace talks, North Korea, ballistic missiles." He asked if, rather than working
with him on the varied assignments we would have for the rest of the semester, I
would help him by editing such pieces (I offered to look at the TV pieces as a
favor, but wouldn't let him off the hook on the class assignments). He said he
didn't plan to complete the Quinnipiac program, mentioning that this might be
the only course he would take.
He said in the e-mail:
"Of course, your course teaches the basics well and I should study the basics
hard to attempt to add the discipline of journalism to my credentials. But
frankly, my life precludes this realistically:
"I teach full time at Yale;
"I have 8 [sic] senior essays, a directed reading project, two articles pending,
a grant proposal, a web site, a web game, two new courses to design, and spend
two full days a week at WVIT! My students at Yale, you can understand, come
before anything else in my professional life, especially my personal interest in
learning the art of journalism; and preparation for course teaching is quite
time consuming.
"I am a Navy reservist and spend one weekend away every month!
"I endeavor to be a normal human too!"
For Van de Velde, the future would be anything but normal.
Van de
Velde
visited the White House in 1989 while he was executive secretary to an
ambassador in the U.S. delegation to nuclear space and arms talks with
the Soviet Union.
Hours before he raised a glass with his Quinnipiac classmates at
Dickerman's,
Van de Velde had been questioned briefly by police at his office. They
asked if he knew of anyone who might want to hurt Jovin, if he was aware of any
problems she had been having. All the routine stuff you would ask those in a
certain circle, he said. The session with the two detectives lasted 15 or 20
minutes.
The next day, Tuesday, Dec. 8, Van de
Velde
arrived home from the gymnasium in the late afternoon and saw a police car
outside his place, in the church house at Bethesda Lutheran Church on St.
Ronan Street. Detectives knocked on his door after he got inside and asked him
if he minded coming to the station for some more questions. So he drove his
candy-apple red Jeep down to the station. Thus
began a four-hour interrogation that Van de
Velde
says had all the elements of classic policing. He had learned about
interrogation during some of his military training. Although it was unpleasant
to be the brunt of such a probe - which alternates accusatory questions with
manufactured witnesses, lies and sympathy, all in an effort to entice the
subject to confess - Van de Velde said a part of him was fascinated to see such
techniques in action. He said, however, he calmly answered every question put to
him, and offered the police the keys to his vehicle, as well as to take a lie
detector test, give blood and have his apartment searched. The police took him
up only on searching the car.
The police have never given their version of what went on in the interview.
Van de
Velde
went home convinced, he said, that "that was that." He said he figured
they were doing this with quite a few people who were closest to Jovin. But the
next morning, The New Haven Register's lead headline was "Yale Teacher Grilled
in Killing." Though the story didn't name him, it didn't take long for many to
determine who the suspect was. Van de Velde saw the story while at his office;
dazed, he walked out Prospect Street for a 9:45 a.m. cleaning and checkup with
his dentist. The idea that police had leaked his being questioned to the media
made him realize his was not a routine experience shared by others. As if to
pound the point home, a television news reporter approached Van de Velde on the
street and, with cameras rolling, abruptly asked if he would ever harm Jovin.
The image of a startled Van de Velde, not quite knowing how to respond (he
answered "no"), or even whether to respond, helped cement a public perception of
guilt that still lingers for many who watched the noon news on Channel 8 that
day.
The New Haven Police Department has kept its theories about Jovin's death to
itself. Police Chief Melvin Wearing declined to discuss specifics for this
story, saying the case remains an open investigation.
Though there was little official news from the beginning, the police anonymously
leaked many tidbits in the days and weeks after the slaying. Members of the
media were quick to go after each morsel, beginning with the big one, that a
Yale lecturer was being questioned. (The initial Register story was attributed
to "city and university sources close to the case," but clearly, the police had
to have been talking to others for the information to get to the newspaper.)
What the police believe happened can be deduced by examining department
statements over the months, and by looking at the fact that Van de Velde
continues to be the only named suspect.
When investigating a homicide, police look for motive, means and opportunity.
Van de
Velde,
who lived less than half a mile from where
Jovin's
body was found, had no alibi. He has insisted he worked late the night in
question, then went home, where he remained, watching television and eating
leftovers.
With opportunity in hand, police looked to motive. Their initial theories of a
potential love interest between Jovin and Van de Velde didn't materialize; none
of the students interviewed even hinted at such a possibility, though police
would continue to try even months later to get students to confess to having had
affairs with Van de Velde. Soon after the murder, though, police learned from
family and some friends that Jovin
had been extremely upset with Van de
Velde
because he had taken so long to give her feedback on her senior essay.
David Bach, one of her closest friends on campus, and Jovin's parents have told
reporters she was in tears over the lack of feedback. The police also learned
that Van de Velde had applied for an assistant professorship that fall, a
tenure-track position. Perhaps most important, they interviewed some television
newswomen, including one Van de
Velde
had dated a year earlier. What these women said appears to be one of the
central issues in Van de Velde's becoming the focus of the police investigation.
Their comments apparently gave police the idea - again, an idea later leaked
anonymously to reporters - that Van de
Velde
could have a history of stalking women.
Now police felt they had a possible motive -
Van de
Velde
and Jovin
get into an argument and she threatens to report him for something - and
they believe there is opportunity, since Van de Velde couldn't prove his
whereabouts. So how does that translate to the murder in question? Jovin was
last seen walking north on College Street near Elm Street, which means police
must follow one of these theories:
Van de Velde meets Jovin on the street, perhaps following her from her
apartment, and he persuades her to come with him in his Jeep, which must have
been parked nearby.
Van de Velde, perhaps waiting in his Jeep outside her apartment, sees her leave
through the Old Campus and cruises the neighborhood, eventually persuading her
to come with him.
Van de Velde waits for Jovin, sees her return to her apartment and calls her
there to arrange for a brief meeting, perhaps with the enticement of returning
the second draft of her essay. A slight variation here would be that the two
made an appointment earlier, perhaps when she dropped off the second draft
earlier in the day, for later in the evening.
Regardless of the theory, police believe Van de Velde hooks up with Jovin -
one witness told Vanity Fair magazine she saw him walking behind
Jovin
on College Street, though she didn't report this to police until after
she saw Van de Velde's face on the Channel 8 interview. Van de Velde begins to
drive Jovin toward his side of town for reasons unknown - police may speculate
he wanted to soothe her anger, or perhaps they believe he was secretly smitten -
and something goes wrong. She leaves the vehicle, and Van de Velde follows, at
some point in a murderous rage, stabbing her 17 times on the street and driving
off.
Following this rage theory, it stands to reason police must believe the murder
was not premeditated. Clearly, if Van de Velde, a smart, disciplined person, had
planned it in advance, he would have had an alibi. Also, if he had planned this
in advance, why would he take the
enormous risk of being seen with
Jovin downtown on a warm Friday
night? Likewise, if they had made an advance appointment, he would have
been taking a risk that she might tell someone else. Thus, police must believe
the murder is an act of rage, and possibly passion, done spur of the moment.
Logically, since it was not planned in advance, police must believe Van de Velde
used his own vehicle and that he had a propensity for either carrying a knife or
having one in his vehicle. The weapon used to kill Jovin was never found.
Suzanne Nahuela Jovin (b. January 26, 1977, Göttingen, Germany - d. December
4, 1998, New Haven, Connecticut) was a senior at Yale University in New Haven,
CT when she was brutally stabbed to death off campus. The city of New Haven and
Yale University have offered a combined $150,000 for information that leads to
the arrest and conviction of Jovin’s killer [1]. The crime remains unsolved.
Jovin was born and raised in Göettingen, Germany, the third of four daughters,
to scientists Donna and Thomas Jovin. Fluent in German, English, French, and
Spanish, and a visitor of four continents, Jovin chose to expand on her passion
for international diplomacy and public service in college, majoring in political
science and international studies. It was this love of public service – of doing
good for others – that motivated Jovin to join the New Haven chapter of Best
Buddies. Jovin also volunteered as a tutor through the Yale Tutoring in
Elementary Schools program, sang in both the Freshman Chorus and the Bach
Society Orchestra, co-founded the German Club, and worked for three years in the
Davenport dining hall. [2]
Contents [hide]
1 The Murder
2 The Evidence
3 The Investigation
4 Litigation
5 Theories
6 External links
[edit] The Murder
After dropping off the penultimate draft of her senior essay on the terrorist
leader Osama bin Laden, at approximately 4:15pm on December 4, 1998, Suzanne
Jovin began preparations for a pizza-making party she had organized at the
Trinity Lutheran Church on 292 Orange St. for the local chapter of Best Buddies,
an international organization that brings together students and mentally
disabled adults. By 8:30pm, after staying late to help clean up, she was driving
another volunteer home in a borrowed university station wagon. At about 8:45 she
returned the car to the Yale owned lot on the corner of Edgewood Ave and Howe St
and proceeded to walk two blocks to her second floor apartment at 258 Park
Street, upstairs from a Yale police substation.
Sometime prior to 8:50, a few friends passed by Jovin's window and asked her if
she wanted to join them at the movies. Jovin said no-- that she was planning to
do school work that night. At 9:02, she logged onto her Yale e-mail account and
told a friend to she was going to leave some books for her in her (Jovin’s)
lobby. At 9:10 she logged off. It is uncertain if she made or received any
calls; calls within Yale's telephone system were not traceable. She wore the
same soft, low-cut hiking boots, jeans, and maroon fleece pullover she had worn
at the pizza party. [3]
Very shortly thereafter, Jovin headed out on foot to the Yale police
communications center under the arch at Phelps Gate on Yale’s Old Campus to
return the keys to the car she had borrowed. Shortly before reaching her
destination, at about 9:22, Jovin encountered classmate Peter Stein who was out
for a walk. Stein is quoted by the Yale Daily News as saying "She did not
mention plans to go anywhere or do anything else afterward. She just said that
she was very, very tired and that she was looking forward to getting a lot of
sleep." [4] Stein also said Jovin was not wearing a backpack, was holding one or
more sheets of white 8 ½ x 11 inch paper in her right hand, that she was walking
at a "normal" pace and did not look nervous or excited, and that their encounter
lasted only two to three minutes [5].
Based on the timeline, it is presumed
Jovin
returned the keys to the borrowed car at about 9:25. She was reportedly last
seen alive at between 9:25-9:30pm walking northeast on College Street, but not
yet past Elm Street, by another Yale student who was returning from a Yale
hockey game. The two never spoke. [6]
At 9:55, a passerby dialed 911 to report
a woman bleeding at the corner of
Edgehill
Rd and East Rock Rd, a posh neighborhood 1.9 miles from the Yale campus where
Jovin
was last seen alive. When police arrived at 9:58, they found
Jovin
fatally stabbed 17 times in the back of her head and neck and her throat slit.
She was lying on her stomach, feet in the road, body on the grassy area between
the road and the sidewalk. She was fully clothed and still wearing her watch and
earrings, with a crumpled up dollar bill in her pocket; her wallet later found
to be still in her room. Suzanne
Jovin was officially pronounced
dead at 10:26 at Yale New Haven Hospital [7].
[edit] The Evidence
Many items and observations have been reported by the police and media as
possible evidence over the nine plus years of the investigation, much of which
has either been discredited, deemed hearsay, unreliable, or been explained. The
most reliable physical evidence appears to be: 1) DNA found in scrapings taken
from under the fingernails of Jovin’s left hand [8], 2) Jovin’s fingerprints and
an unknown person’s partial palmprint found on a Fresca bottle in the bushes in
front of where her body was found [9], and 3) the tip of an estimated
4-5 inch non-serrated carbon steel blade lodged in her skull [10]. The
most reliable observation appears to be the sighting by more than one individual
of a tan or brown van at the precise location where Jovin’s body was found.
The existence of the tan/brown van was not made public by the New Haven Police (NHPD)
until March 27, 2001, when they wrote: “witnesses have said that as they
approached the corner of East Rock and Edgehill Roads, they saw a tan or brown
van stopped in the roadway facing east, immediately adjacent to where Suzanne
was found.” [11] Although members of the Yale faculty had reported the police
were asking privately about the van at the inception of the investigation, no
explanation has ever been given why it took more than two years to release the
information to the public. Although the New Haven Register reported on November
8, 2001, that the NHPD had impounded a brown van as part of the Jovin
investigation, no link has ever been confirmed [12]. There have been no reports
of anyone witnessing Jovin enter or exit any vehicle nor has the observed van
apparently been found.
The existence of the Fresca bottle came to light on April 1, 2001, by Hartford
Courant reporter Les Gura [13] The only store in the vicinity of campus that
sold Fresca open at the hour Jovin was last seen alive was Krauszers market on
York St near Elm St – precisely one block south of Jovin’s apartment. Although
Krauszers maintained a video recording of its customers for security purposes,
the police never asked to view their tape and have never reported seeking
assistance from store employees or customers about whether they had seen
anything unusual that night. The foreign palmprint has yet to be identified.
The first mention of the existence of the DNA was on October 26, 2001, following
a solicitation by the New Haven police for colleagues, friends and acquaintances
of Jovin to come forward and give DNA samples voluntarily [14]. No explanation
has ever been given why it took nearly three years for the fingernail scrapings
to be tested for DNA. No match has yet been found.
[edit] The Investigation
A mere four days after the murder, the name of Jovin’s thesis advisor, James Van
de Velde, was leaked to the New Haven Register as the prime suspect in the case.
Fifteen months later, criminologist John Pleckaitis, then a sergeant at the New
Haven Police Department, admitted to Hartford Courant reporter Les Gura: "From a
physical evidence point of view, we had nothing to tie him to the case ... I had
nothing to link him to the crime." [15] Famed criminologist Henry Lee’s offer to
reconstruct the crime scene was accepted by the police but for reasons unknown
never acted upon [16].
Based on subsequent questioning of the Yale community, and based on Van de
Velde’s name being released prior to the completion of his police interrogation,
it became apparent the NHPD
had for reasons unknown convinced itself that Van de
Velde
and Jovin
must have been having an illicit or unrequited affair-- a notion that
friends of Jovin, not to mention her boyfriend, found offensive, false and
wholly unlikely [17]. Nevertheless, with no physical evidence nor a motive, the
NHPD continued to maintain that their naming of Van de Velde was not
presumptuous. An apparently unquestioning Yale, under the guidance of
Dean Richard Brodhead, then chose to
cancel Van de Velde’s
spring 1999 classes citing his presence as a “major distraction” for students,
thus destroying his reputation and academic career [18]. Brodhead would later
become the President of Duke University where he became best known for his rush
to judgment in disbanding their lacrosse team based on equally dubious
accusations that were later proven to be false and malicious. [19]
In 2000, Van de Velde and colleagues strongly and eventually publicly encouraged
Yale to hire their own private investigators to study the case. In December,
2000, under additional pressure from the Jovin family,
Yale relented and hired the team of
Andrew Rosenzweig,
former chief investigator with the New York district attorney's office, and Bill
Harnett, a former homicide detective from the Bronx, NY [20]. It was at their
insistence that the NHPD finally allowed the state forensics lab to analyze
Jovin’s fingernail scrapings for DNA. Neither the resulting DNA nor Fresca
bottle fingerprint was a match to Van de Velde, prompting Harnett to label Van
de Velde “Richard Jewell with a Ph.D” [21] [Jewell was a hero security guard
falsely accused by the FBI of the Centennial Park bombing during the 1996
Olympics in Atlanta, GA]. No explanation has ever been given why Yale has chosen
to keep the results of their investigation a secret.
The
NHPD
responded by contacting the US Navy, Van de
Velde’s
primary employer at the time, urging them to reconsider their contract work with
him-- going so far as to travel to Washington DC to offer their “assistance.”
A thorough review was conducted that resulted in Van de Velde being allowed to
keep his job and his security clearance [22]. Sensing the investigation had
dead-ended on him, Van de Velde undertook a letter writing campaign urging the
Connecticut State cold case unit to take over the case [23]. When the Chief
State’s Attorney refused, Van de Velde began pressing the police to undertake
additional state-of-the-art forensic tests on the evidence [24].
On September 1, 2006, nearly eight years after the murder, the Jovin
investigation was officially classified a cold case and moved to the
Connecticut’s Cold Case Unit [25]. However, the case was never added to the Cold
Case Unit web site nor was there any mention of the reward being
offered—prompting Van de Velde once again to write letters of complaint. On
November 29, 2007, Assistant State’s Attorney James Clark admitted that the case
had been secretly reassigned back to New Haven in June of that year, this time
under the auspices of a handpicked team of four retired detectives. According to
Clark: “no person is a suspect in the crime, and everyone is a suspect in the
crime.” [26]
[edit] Litigation
On January 12, 2001, Van de
Velde
sued Quinnipiac University for wrongfully dismissing him from a graduate program
he was enrolled in there [27]. Van de
Velde
agreed to drop the lawsuit on January 26, 2004, in exchange for $80,000. [28]
In December 7, 2001, Van de Velde sued the NHPD claiming they violated his civil
rights by naming only him publicly as a suspect while claiming that other
suspects existed as well [29]. Van de Velde added Yale as a defendant on April
15, 2003. [30] Both suits were dismissed on March 29, 2004 [31]. Van de Velde
appealed, but in April 2006 Connecticut District Court Chief Judge Robert
Chatigny ruled against him. Van de Velde asked Chatigny to reconsider in May of
2006, resulting in the judge reinstating just the state claims on December 11,
2007. [32]
[edit] Theories
Google satellite maps of Jovin’s most probable route on the night of her murder
may be viewed at: http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=24166152
Jovin’s
route across Yale’s gated Old Campus, which is off-limits to cars, makes it
quite unlikely she was trailed by someone in a vehicle. The timeline,
distance to where she was found dead (1.9 miles), her clothing, what she said to
friends, etc. strongly indicate a vehicle was used to transport her off campus,
making it also quite unlikely Jovin was followed on foot. Combined, this
significantly lowers the chances Jovin was stalked.
The witness who saw her on the Old Campus said she wasn’t holding a Fresca,
which means she most likely bought one (note: Jovin was known to like Fresca,
making it less likely someone had offered her one randomly) at Krauszers market
on the corner of York St and Elm St. on her way back home. The only place for a
car to be introduced here would be in front of the store or, more likely, on the
secluded stretch of Elm between York and Park next to, or in front of, the
boarded up Daily Café.
To establish a “she knew her killer” scenario would require, after just telling
people how very tired she was and looking forward to being home to rest, in the
one-block area between Krauszers and her apartment: a) she ran into someone she
knew well enough to get into their car, b) she had a compelling reason to get
into their car, c) whatever conversation that took place got heated enough in a
matter of minutes to lead to a vicious murder, *and* d) this unscheduled
encounter involved someone who just happened to have a knife on them. Possible,
yes, but not probable.
The Fresca bottle containing both Jovin’s fingerprints and an unknown person’s
palmprint was found in the bushes in front of where her body was found. People
who flee from a car driven by an attacker likely do not take their soda bottles
with them. People who are run down outside and stabbed 17 times would likely
scream loudly and consistently for help, put up a fight, and leave a trail of a
massive amount of blood. There is no evidence any of the above happened, let
alone all of it. The most likely scenario is Jovin was attacked in the tan/brown
van observed by several witnesses and then dumped, along with the Fresca bottle,
which would account for her proximity to the road. That Jovin a) did not drop
her Fresca prior to entering the vehicle, b) was not able to flee the vehicle,
and c) had no defensive wounds, likely implies overwhelming force, suggesting
perhaps more than one person was involved in her abduction.
While multiple stab wounds often indicates a crime of passion, it can indicate
rage or drug use as well. As foreign DNA does not ordinarily transfer to
underneath one’s fingernails with merely “routine” contact, it is reasonable to
conclude that Jovin scratching her attacker might have precipitated his rage.
However, given a) the reported 4-5 inch
size of the knife used to stab
Jovin, b) that the tip of the
knife broke off in her skull, c) that the killer saw fit to slit her throat,
likely after stabbing her 17 times, and d) that she was found barely
alive, one has to consider the possibility that perhaps the flimsy nature of the
murder weapon necessitated inflicting the high number of wounds.
As Jovin was fully clothed with no reported tears in her outfit and
no defensive wounds, while an attempted sexual assault can not be ruled
out, there is no basis to assume this was the motive. As Jovin was found in a
residential area that was void of ATMs, was still wearing her jewelry, and still
had a dollar bill in her pocket, it is hard to assume that her abduction was a
robbery gone bad… unless the killer became enraged that she had left her wallet
in her apartment or unless the killers were looking for quick cash en route down
East Rock Rd to East Rock Park to buy drugs, a known druggie hangout. Some have
speculated Jovin’s thesis on
Osama
bin Laden may have made her a terrorist target, but given she used no
live sources, given this was nearly three years prior to 9-11, and given Al-Qaeda
has no history of such attacks, this notion seems quite improbable.
[edit] External links
Nine years later, murder of Yale senior still unsolved
As Jovin Investigation Team debuts, interviews suggest holes in original police
inquiry
Print Email Write the Editor Share Digg Facebook Newsvine Reddit Rachel Boyd
Staff Reporter
Published Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Your Name
Your Email
Friend's Name
Friend's Email
Message
Submit Close
Less than six hours before she was killed, Suzanne Jovin, a 21-year-old Yale
student, turned in a draft of her senior essay.
It was Dec. 4, 1998, just a week
before the final copy was due. In 21 single-spaced pages on “Osama bin Laden and
the Terrorist Threat to U.S. Security,” she examined the terrorist’s already
prominent organization. Her paper was virtually complete, except for the
conclusion. In neat handwriting on the margins of page 20, she wrote about the
final paragraphs: “I’m saving the conclusion for last.”
“She had a few hours more work to go,” says
James Van de
Velde
’82, her senior essay adviser and the instructor of her political science
seminar, “Strategy and Policy in the Conduct of War.”
In the unfinished paragraphs, which were provided to the News by Van de Velde,
she ended her paper with a warning to foreign-policy makers: “To ultimately
defeat bin Laden in his ‘holy war’ against the United States and the
non-Muslims, we must be prepared to ‘stand some more heat.’ Certainly, there is
nothing to suggest that this ‘holy war’ will turn cold anytime soon.”
But Jovin would never know how true her words were. On that December night,
almost three years before Sept. 11, she was stabbed to death just two miles from
the Yale campus. And while al Qaeda’s holy war has certainly not turned cold
since 1998, it seems to Van de
Velde
that Jovin’s
unsolved murder investigation did — at least until two weeks ago.
Since September 2006, when Jovin’s case was handed over to Connecticut’s Cold
Case Unit, details about the investigation were almost impossible to come by.
The Unit refused to release any information about the status of their work, and
its Web site, which features photographs and details of nine other unsolved
murder cases dating back to 1982, had no mention of Jovin.
As the ninth anniversary of Jovin’s death approached, Van de Velde began to say
repeatedly that he wanted that to change — whether out of self-interest or not
is anybody’s guess — calling publicly on the Cold Case Unit to renew its
efforts. Van de Velde’s interest, after all, extends beyond that of a teacher
concerned about his student.
The former
Saybrook
College dean is also the only person ever named as a suspect in the murder.
His wish came true, or so it seems. At a Nov. 30 press conference outside the
New Haven Superior Court, State’s Attorney’s Office officials unveiled a new
Jovin Investigation Team charged with solving the Yale senior’s murder by
bringing fresh eyes to a crime that may have needed a more thorough effort from
the start, interviews with Jovin’s friends, police officers and local reporters
at the time have revealed. And just yesterday, after more than a year of
judicial silence, a federal judge resurrected Van de Velde’s claims against Yale
and the New Haven Police Department.
But whether the new team is anything more than a strategic response to Van de
Velde’s recent criticism — and whether the investigators will bring real closure
to the nine-year-old mystery — remains uncertain.
The stabbing
For early December, the Friday of the murder was unusually warm.
Jovin, an international studies and political science double major who grew up
as the daughter of scientists in Goettingen, Germany, spent the early evening at
New Haven’s Trinity Lutheran Church at a holiday pizza party with Best Buddies,
an organization that matches students with mentally disabled adults. She had
been involved with Best Buddies since her freshman year and was director of
Yale’s chapter.
Dawn DeFeo, who was then the coordinator of the supervised living arrangements
program at Marrakech, Inc., a not-for-profit provider of residential,
educational and career services for mentally challenged adults, says she met
with Jovin weekly to help organize Best Buddies activities. DeFeo was unable to
attend the Dec. 4 party, she says, because she was working part-time in order to
spend time with her young children. DeFeo says she tried, without much success,
to recruit other people from Marrakech to help Jovin coordinate Best Buddies
activities.
“It was really hard for Suzanne because I would put other people in charge, and
they weren’t really that responsive,” she says. Because no one from Marrakech
had volunteered to bring the buddies home after the party, Jovin had borrowed a
University station wagon so she could drive some of them back herself, DeFeo
recalls.
Around 9:25 p.m., a classmate, Peter
Stein ’99, saw Jovin
on Old Campus, he told newspapers soon after the crime. He said
Jovin
told him that she was returning the keys to the car and was planning to return
to her apartment on Park Street.
“She did not mention plans to go anywhere or do anything else afterward,” Stein
told the News in April 1999. “She just said that she was very, very tired and
that she was looking forward to getting a lot of sleep.”
Stein declined to comment for this article, saying he could no longer remember
details from the night of the crime.
Less than 20 minutes after Stein saw her,
Jovin
had been attacked.
At 9:58 p.m., police found her bleeding on the corner of Edgehill Avenue and
East Rock Road, about 2 miles from Old Campus, according to a 1998 NHPD press
release. The murder had occurred at about 9:45, according to the Department’s
description of the crime posted online in 2001.
Jovin
had been stabbed multiple times in the head, neck and back.
Some witnesses report having heard a scream and an argument between a man and
woman; others say they saw a tan or brown van in the street next to where
Jovin’s body was later discovered, according to the description.
Jovin’s
friend DeFeo
says she still does not think it was plausible that
Jovin
walked from Old Campus to the crime scene in just 20 minutes. She said she
doubts it was a random attack.
“I find it hard to believe that she
would have just gotten into a vehicle with somebody who she didn’t know; it
seemed it would have been more somebody who she knew,”
DeFeo
says. “But you hear so much, and it’s been such a long time.”
The ‘pool’ of suspects
Davenport Dining Hall Manager Jim Moule had planned an intense Saturday of
preparing for the college’s annual holiday dinner. The dining hall and common
room would be decked out with lights, white linens, ice sculptures, train sets
and dozens of pies and roasts by the night of Dec. 5.
But the usual cheer at the dinner was lost. Jovin, after all, had been a
favorite student worker for two years. “We were in a state of shock all day,”
recalls head pantry worker Pat McGloin. “We were all just walking around like
zombies.”
“It was very difficult to grieve when you had TV cameras aimed at the front and
back gates of the college,” Davenport College Master’s Senior Administrative
Assistant Barbara Munck says. “It was to me an imposition of our home.”
If the Yale community was looking for answers, so were the police. And officials
thought they might have found one in Jovin’s adviser, Van de Velde.
On the afternoon of Monday, Dec. 7, New Haven police officers interviewed him
briefly in his Yale office, for “10, 15 minutes tops,” according to Van de
Velde.
On Dec. 8, he says, police interrogated him for several hours at
NHPD
headquarters, asking him, among other things, whether he had killed
Jovin.
Then it all went public.
The next morning, The New Haven Register reported that a Yale “educator” was the
lead suspect in the investigation, citing “city and university sources close to
the case.” The bold banner headline, “Yale teacher grilled in killing,” was
one-and-a-half inches high. The Register claimed in the sub-heading that the
“prime suspect lives near where slain student was found, sources say.”
The article did not name Van de Velde outright, but at that point, he had
effectively been identified to the public, Van de Velde says. He lived only .6
miles from the scene of the crime, at 305 Ronan St., and since he was working as
a lecturer in the political science department, he was not a professor — a title
the Register article had been careful to avoid.
On Jan. 10, 1999, then-Dean of Yale
College Richard Brodhead called Van de
Velde
into his office, telling him that his spring term courses would be canceled and
that he could not advise any senior essays or directed readings, Van de
Velde
says. On Jan. 11, Yale Public Affairs Director Tom Conroy issued a statement
announcing that Van de Velde
was in a “pool of suspects,” although the University presumed him to be
innocent.
“Yale relieved Van de Velde of his spring term teaching after the New Haven
police identified him as in the pool of suspects for the Jovin murder,” Brodhead
wrote in an e-mail to the News last month. “The decision involved no presumption
of his guilt by myself or the [U]niversity. It followed from the recognition
that it would be inappropriate for his classes to take place under these
circumstances. He was not ‘fired,’ but
put on paid leave for the remainder of his appointment.”
Despite this declared presumption of innocence, students say the University’s
actions contributed to their suspicion of the faculty member.
“When Yale canceled his classes, I think most people on campus assumed that we
were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop, that the next thing you were
going to read about in the paper was that Van de Velde was arrested and charged
with the murder,” a former News reporter, Blair Golson, says. “I think we
assumed that Yale wouldn’t have done
what it had done unless it was acting maybe on more information than was
publicly available.”
Golson says that since he does not know what University administrators knew at
the time, he does not know whether the University made the right call.
Van de
Velde
was never charged, and no evidence has ever been presented to the public
to link him to the crime. Yet when he asked former Political Science Department
chair Ian Shapiro to re-hire him
after his one-year term expired, Van de Velde says, Shapiro refused. Shapiro did
not respond to phone and e-mail requests for comment on why Van de Velde was not
re-hired. His secretary said he was out of the country.
_____ until proven guilty
In his academic and professional life, Van de Velde often found himself coming
back to Connecticut.
He grew up in Orange, a middle-class suburb just miles from Yale. After studying
political science at Yale and graduating with honors in 1982, he earned a Ph.D.
from Tufts University in 1988. He went on to serve as a diplomat with the
Department of State, later joining the
U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves and serving in several positions, from
Sarajevo to Singapore.
But Van de
Velde
says his true love was teaching. After serving as a lecturer in the Political
Science Department and Saybrook
College dean, Van de Velde
spent a year working in an administrative position at Stanford University’s
Asia-Pacific Research Center. In 1998, he returned to Yale because, he says, he
missed teaching college students, “didn’t particularly like being an
administrator of a research program,” and did not get along with a Stanford
faculty member.
After his one-year appointment at the University, he says he applied for a
“tenure-track” position within the department. His competition, he says, was
“All But Dissertation” graduate students and those with newly minted Ph.Ds. “I
feel that it was an outrage that I was not given the open tenure-track
position,” he says. “I am sure the Jovin matter had a lot to do with my not
landing [it].”
After the Jovin case, no university — or virtually any other organization —
would touch him, he says.
“For about a year, I couldn’t get a job
anywhere,” Van de Velde
asserts. “I applied to over 100 positions and couldn’t get an interview.”
Eventually, his prospects began to improve. The Navy gave him a series of 30-
and 90-day assignments in Washington, at one point assisting the Pentagon as a
“Y2K watch officer.” In 2003, the Department of Defense sent him to Cuba twice,
where he says he “interviewed detainees” at
Guantanamo
Bay. He says he then held a “top secret/codeword security clearance” with the
Department of Defense.
Van de
Velde
now resides with his wife and their 3-year-old son in a small town outside of
Washington, D.C., where he works on government contracts for
Booz
Allen Hamilton, a private consulting firm. He says he feels
“extraordinarily lucky for many reasons.” But he cannot leave the Jovin case
behind, because, he says, it will not leave him.
“It damaged my professional life; it damaged my personal life,” he says. “I lost
more or less all my professional acquaintances.”
Demonstrating how damaging the initial headlines were to Van de Velde’s
reputation, one Yale staff member who
claims to have known Jovin
says that even though Van de
Velde’s DNA does not match that
found under Jovin’s
nails, he could still have been involved in the crime. “I don’t know if he did
it or not, but I’m sure he was capable,” the staff member says, offering
no proof and insisting on remaining anonymous. In an e-mail to the News, Van de
Velde said the staff member’s statement is “trash.”
“Very few people in history have ever had their lives so totally inspected and
prodded through more than Van de Velde,” says Donald Connery, an author and
independent journalist who over the past 60 years has worked with NBC, Time and
Life magazines and United Press International. “And the authorities in this
state — the New Haven State’s Attorney General, the police, the Chief State’s
Attorney’s office — no one has the guts or the morality to simply say that this
man was falsely identified and is in no way a suspect.” In the 1970s, Connery
reported on Connecticut teenager Peter Reilly, who was wrongly accused and
convicted of his mother’s murder.
In 2001, Van de
Velde
began to come back onto the media’s radar. He filed defamation lawsuits
against Quinnipiac University — where he had been dismissed from a degree
program in broadcast journalism — and the Hartford Courant. The Courant lawsuit
is pending, and the Quinnipiac lawsuit was settled out of court in 2004 for a
“pretty generous” $80,000, according to Van de Velde. Lynn Bushnell,
Quinnipiac’s vice president for public affairs, and John Morgan, Quinnipiac’s
associate vice president for public relations, were both named in the lawsuit.
Both declined to confirm the amount of the settlement or to comment on the
lawsuit.
But the more attention-grabbing defamation lawsuit is the one in which Van de
Velde’s state claims were reopened yesterday. Van de Velde filed the lawsuit
against the NHPD in 2001 and added Yale officials to the lawsuit in 2003. He
claimed that the University and the
police leaked not only the fact that a “male Yale teacher” was the lead suspect,
but also that Van de Velde
himself was the suspect.
University President Richard Levin told the News last month that neither he nor
any other Yale officials acted as a source for the Register article. And when
asked whether Van de Velde is — or ever was — a suspect, New Haven Chief State’s
Attorney Michael Dearington said: “I wouldn’t get within 5,000 miles of that
question. I have never commented on that, and hopefully no one in my office has
ever commented on that.”
Cold case or no case?
In August 2007, 11 months after Jovin’s case was turned over to Connecticut’s
Cold Case Unit, Van de Velde sent a letter to Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane,
who oversees the unit. He urged Kane to post Jovin’s case on the Cold Case Web
site and asked him to examine 12 “avenues to investigate in the Suzanne Jovin
cold case homicide.”
“As both a citizen wrongly accused by the police and an analyst in the national
intelligence community, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the case and
how it might be solved,” Van de Velde wrote in the letter. “As you may know from
numerous press accounts, I have been, since the beginning of the case, the most
vocal advocate for a vigorous and truly professional police effort to solve the
crime.”
Among Van de Velde’s suggestions were examining the DNA of a set of fingerprints
on a Fresca soda bottle found at the crime scene; looking into other murders
committed by men driving vans, as may have been the case in Jovin’s murder;
examining a knife tip found in Jovin’s head to determine a manufacturer and type
of knife; comparing DNA found under her fingernails to DNA in the Connecticut
and Combined DNA Index System; conducting a sweat print analysis on her
clothing; performing a microscopic forensic analysis to determine the presence
of dirt, tire and other molecules on Jovin’s clothing; and looking into the Best
Buddies program.
Connery, the criminal law writer, sent a similar letter to Kane in February.
In an interview in mid-November, Kane said he received both letters but that he
chose not to respond. He declined to say why, and also declined to comment on
whether he had taken any of their suggestions. Kane says he does not believe all
cold cases are listed on the Cold Case Unit Web site. He declined to say why
Jovin’s is not.
Dearington, who was overseeing the investigation in New Haven, said in
mid-November that he had been forwarded Van de Velde’s and Connery’s letters,
but that he had no further comment. “I do know that the case is being actively
investigated by extremely experienced and qualified investigators,” he said. He
declined to say how many people are working on the Jovin case, although he
suggested that he would be more forthcoming in the future. “If you caught me on
a sunny day, maybe I’d say more,” he said Nov. 15. “I think, though, that as the
ninth anniversary [of Jovin’s murder on Dec. 4] approaches, we may provide more
information about what’s going on.”
A ‘brand new’ approach
In late November, Dearington’s words rang true. At the Nov. 30 press conference,
Assistant State’s Attorney James Clark announced the formation of a four-person
team of retired Connecticut detectives to look into the crime independently.
Each will earn just $1 a year for his work. The team will re-evaluate all
previously gathered information and will also seek out new leads, he said.
“The idea is to approach the case as if it were brand new,” Clark said.
“Therefore, no person is a suspect in the crime, and everyone is a suspect in
the crime.”
Also present at the press conference was Ellen Jovin, the sister of Suzanne
Jovin. Her family has long remained silent about the case – her parents declined
to comment for this article and her other sister, Rebecca Jovin, did not return
calls for comment. At the November press conference, Ellen Jovin spoke briefly,
asking people to contact the new squad if they have any information.
“Not knowing what happened to Suzanne is devastating for our family,” she said.
“Please do not let one more day pass in silence.”
In an interview five days after the team was announced, John Mannion, a retired
state police officer who is heading up the investigative team, said he had
already received information through new telephone and e-mail tip lines, but he
declined to give any more detail. Since June, he said, the team has been
reviewing the “expansive” case file on the murder.
Although state officials interviewed say the team has been meeting since the
summer, they gave different reasons for why the squad was not announced until
the end of November. Earlier in the month, both the Register and News published
front-page articles about Van de Velde’s unanswered letters; Van de Velde also
published a letter to the editor in the News in which he called on Yale
officials to clear his name and to push the Cold Case Unit to conduct tests on
evidence from the crime.
State’s Attorneys Clark and Dearington said the timing of the announcement had
nothing to do with Van de Velde’s recent appearances in the media and letters to
the State’s Attorney’s Office. But Mannion says media pressure had in fact
played a role in the announcement. “We thought it would be the appropriate time
because there was some inquiries being made,” he explains, “and we wanted to tie
it in with the anniversary [of Jovin’s murder] to see if we could rekindle some
memories.”
But Van de Velde says he is skeptical about how much work the Jovin
Investigation Team will actually accomplish, saying that they are not forensic
specialists or computer forensic specialists and will likely work part time, for
an unknown amount of time. Mannion confirmed that the team meets “periodically,”
saying the four try to meet once a week. Although Mannion has not yet
interviewed Van de Velde, he says that he has looked at Van de Velde’s 12
suggestions for the investigation. But he did not say whether any had been
pursued. “It became part of the official file, and it’s something we will
consider as we march down this long road,” Mannion said.
In his letter, Van de Velde also offers suggestions of specific people to
contact. One is DeFeo, the Best Buddies coordinator from Marrakech. Despite the
fact that Jovin’s last activity the night of her death was at the Best Buddies
party, DeFeo says neither she nor anyone from her office who was at the party
was ever contacted by the police.
“It was really surprising to me,” DeFeo says. And the police waited days, she
says, before contacting any of the mentally disabled clients Jovin drove home
Dec. 4, an exclusion DeFeo says she finds worrying. “If it was any other person
who didn’t have a disability … they certainly would have pursued it a lot more
than they did,” she says.
Former FBI agent
Foria
Younis,
who now trains police departments on Arab and Muslim cultures and terrorism
issues, says she is surprised that the Marrakech staff, according to
DeFeo,
were never contacted. “If that wasn’t done, hopefully this new team would
be able to [interview them],” she says.
NHPD Chief Francisco Ortiz, who became chief in 2003 and will be leaving his
post in January, declined to comment on details of the investigation and says
simply “we certainly stand by our work.”
Another person Van de Velde mentions is Skip Palenik, president of Microtrace
Scientific, a private laboratory that examines and identifies small particles
and quantities of unknown materials. Van de Velde said in the letter that this
kind of microscopic forensic test could show whether Jovin’s clothing was in
contact either with the floor of a type of van police said was seen at the crime
scene, or with that of some other van. Microtrace is often called into cases by
cold case units, Palenik says, and has worked on high-profile cases such as the
JonBenet Ramsey murder.
Palenik says Van de Velde has never contacted him and that Van de Velde’s
suggestions to Kane indicate “a layperson’s general knowledge of the subject.”
It is possible, although time-consuming and labor-intensive, to develop
investigative leads from dust molecules, Palenik adds. But in order for the
analysis to serve a purpose, he explains, the investigators usually must have
something they can compare the findings to.
“The question is,” he says, “ ‘will it be useful?’ ”
Aimless violence or traceable logic?
Still, Van de Velde argues that this and other tests can and should be
conducted. “Why doesn’t President Levin call for these forensic tests to be
performed?” Van de Velde asked in an e-mail. “A Yale student was murdered and
the investigation into her death was a travesty. Everyone on the campus knows
it. There is no harm in following my forensic suggestions. There is no chance an
innocent person could be implicated.”
Yale officials, Connery said, should make it known to the public that they
believe Van de Velde to be innocent. “There’s hardly anything worse that could
happen to you than to be accused of a crime you didn’t commit,” Connery said. “I
just feel there’s a tremendous responsibility on everyone involved here not just
to solve a murder but to see that a man’s reputation is restored.”
Levin declined to comment on specific tests, saying the decision to pursue those
leads is up to the authorities. “But every sensible avenue should be taken to
resolving the unanswered questions in this case, including reconsidering Mr. Van
de Velde’s status as a suspect,” he wrote in an e-mail. He said Yale officials
encouraged the police “years ago” to reconsider whether Van de Velde should
continue to be regarded as a suspect.
Although the current investigators will not say which tests they are conducting
or which people they are contacting, some people familiar with the crime say the
case has been mishandled from the start. Eytan Halaban, a longtime associate
resident fellow of Davenport College who was friends with Jovin, said he thinks
police focused their efforts on identifying Van de Velde as the murderer too
early.
“All the things they did in the research, like combing the ground where she was
found, it was just to pin evidence on [Van de Velde],” Halaban says. “It was
pathetic.”
Meanwhile, he speculates that the police may be ignoring what he thinks is one
of the most likely scenarios for her death: that it was in some way linked to
her senior essay on al Qaeda.
In her Dec. 4 draft, Jovin did not list any primary sources in her footnotes.
And just a few weeks before her death, Halaban says that Jovin told him she was
worried that she did not have enough research to give a Mellon Forum, a senior’s
presentation to his or her college about a research project. “If my theory is
correct and the New Haven Police would have pursued this crime and investigated
what happened in New York,” Halaban argues, “9/11 would not have happened.”
***
Just beneath Halaban’s Davenport apartment, at the back of the college’s lower
courtyard, is a memorial stone. The black slab lies between grass and flowers,
near a hammock in which Davenport students often relax. Its simple inscription
reads:
Suzanne N. Jovin
In Loving Memory
Jan. 26, 1977 – Dec. 4, 1998
By now, her classmates are in their early thirties, working as coaches, doctors,
lawyers and writers. Jovin had just as promising a future.
Yale awarded her a posthumous degree on commencement day in 1999. She received
an A- in Van de Velde’s class, and she graduated cum laude, with distinction in
both her majors. At a May 23 ceremony awarding her the Roosevelt L. Thompson
Prize for commitment to and capacity for public service, law professor Stanton
Wheeler recounted her tutoring and mentoring activities.
“It was always absolutely clear that her driving motivation was to help people,”
Wheeler says. “In death as in life, Suzanne Jovin left many lives forever
changed. No student has done more to inspire others.”
Just before the final sentences of her senior essay, Jovin wrote that bin
Laden’s use of terrorism “follows a self-dictated, but traceable logic, unlike
the irrational acts of a fanatic or the aimless violence of a criminal
delinquent.” This finding, she wrote, is reassuring, since “it suggests that bin
Laden will be susceptible to the application of a judicious long-term
counter-terrorist strategy.”
But as far as Van de Velde can tell, no such logic may ever have been applied to
Jovin’s death, and no clear long-term strategy seems to be in the works.
Bin Laden is still on the loose. Nine years after her death, Jovin’s killer may
be, too.
COURTESY OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Susanne Jovin, DC '99.
t was exactly four years ago this week that
Suzanne
Jovin,
DC '99, was found stabbed to death less than two miles off campus in the
normally sedate East Rock section of New Haven. No arrests have been made
in the case, and the only named suspect, former Yale professor James Van de
Velde, has moved on to a new city and a new job. Little mention of the case is
ever made. Last year's graduating class was the last to have been on campus when
the murder took place.
By all accounts the trail has gone cold. With no new evidence in an
investigation that many have claimed was mishandled, the murder remains just as
much of an enigma today as it was four years ago. More irritating still, the
state and the New Haven Police
Department have managed to successfully fend off attempts by journalists and
private citizens to access the fruits of the investigation through a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA)
request.
The murder itself was tragic. I spoke just last week with someone who was with
Jovin the night of the murder. She recalled, as a freshman, meeting Jovin, a
senior, through the "Best Buddies" program, a program Jovin coordinated that
year which sets up Yale students with mentally disabled "buddies." There was a
Best Buddies pizza party the evening of the murder, and she remembered eating
with Jovin, then saying goodbye before heading home. Jovin was discovered dead
less than two hours later. In the days that followed the murder she went through
the ordeal of speaking with police, watching them investigate Jovin's friends
and everyone else she had encountered that evening, including Jovin's mentally
disabled Best Buddy. She could never bring herself to return to another Best
Buddy event, severing ties with everything that reminded her of the tragedy.
Last spring, she graduated in Davenport courtyard, near the small memorial that
is the last remaining evidence of Jovin's time at Yale.
But despite the horrid nature of the murder and the intense sadness attached to
her death, I find myself almost compulsively captivated by the mystery that
remains. Jeffrey Mitchell, a close friend of Van de Velde's, started an online
message board dedicated to solving the crime in an effort to exonerate his
friend. Since its inception in December 1999, over 1,100 messages have been
posted by amateurs across the country seeking to crack the case. The postings
discuss the details of the investigation, posting new theories on who the killer
might be. It's macabre reading, to say the least, and yet I managed to read
through nearly all of them over a span of a few nights, following years of back
and forth between those who have followed the case closely.
The murder was almost immediately
identified as a crime of passion—Jovin
was stabbed 17 times in the neck, back, and head, leading many to assume that
deep-seated feelings motivated the attack. Money was discovered in one of
her pockets, and her earrings and watch had not been taken, suggesting robbery
was an unlikely motive. Based on those
conclusions, speculation raged that Van de
Velde,
who was her thesis advisor, had murdered her because she had spurned him as a
lover. And while no evidence ever emerged to justify such a theory, it
nevertheless managed to ruin the former professor's life and academic career.
Meanwhile, Jovin's thesis was on international terrorism, with a specific focus
on a Saudi citizen by the name of Osama bin Laden. Even then, some thought that
the subject matter might have gotten her killed by sparking the interest of
those who sought to protect the terrorist and his work.
The temptation to play armchair detective is all the more intense because of the
strong signs that the New Haven Police Department botched the investigation; the
lead detective on the case was later tried on charges of mishandling and hiding
evidence related to a separate case. Needless to say, despite my reading on the
subject, I have not uncovered the smoking gun, found a new crucial witness, or
discovered the identity of the murderer. But I feel like we owe it to Jovin's
family and to the community, to keep going. Her murder was tragic. But it would
be even more so if it remained forever unsolved. The city should reopen the case
and seek the assistance of outside agencies, including the state's Cold Case
Unit, a special crime-solving agency created in 1998. Moreover, the city and the
police department should end their challenge to FOIA requests and release
information related to the investigation to the media and the public. If nothing
else, such a release would focus new energies on a case authorities have been
unable to crack.
I've read interviews with many of the students who knew her or saw her that
night. I've read the statements made by her family, including an angry letter
from her parents concluding that "it was a tragic mistake to send our daughter
to Yale College for an education." The only way to make it right, to provide the
closure the family and the University needs, is to solve the case.
Suzanne Jovin was murdered in the East Rock section
of New Haven on December 4,
1998, at about 9:45 p.m., on the south side of East Rock
Road.She
was stabbed numerous times in the head, neck, and back and left lying near a
grassy patch adjacent to the
sidewalk.In spite of intense and sustained efforts of investigators, the
case remains unsolved.
Shortly before Suzanne's body was discovered,
witnesses reported hearing what sounded
like an argument between a man and a woman, and some reported hearing a
scream.Other witnesses have said that as they approached the corner of East Rock
and Edgehill Roads, they saw a tan or brown van stopped in the roadway facing
east, immediately adjacent to where Suzanne was found.
At about 9:25 p.m., Suzanne was seen
walking north on College Street towards Elm Street, coming from the direction of
Phelps Gate on the Yale campus.This
was the last time witnesses saw Suzanne prior to her meeting the person
responsible for this vicious attack.
East Rock and
Edgehill
Roads are in a residential area about two miles from Phelps
Gate.Suzanne
could not have walked to the scene from Phelps Gate in the time that passed
before she was murdered.Police
believe that someone she knew drove Suzanne
there.It
is very unlikely that she would have voluntarily gotten into a car with a
stranger, or that she was forcibly abducted without someone witnessing
something.
Suzanne Jovin was the director of the Best Buddies Program for Yale, a volunteer
program that seeks to enhance the lives of mentally disadvantaged adults from
the New Haven community by providing one-to-one friendships with Yale students.
During the late afternoon and early evening of December 4th, Suzanne was
actively involved with her volunteer work at Best Buddies.She had organized a
holiday pizza party for the Best Buddy clients and their Yale counterparts at
the Trinity Lutheran Church, at Wall and Orange Streets, that started at about
6:00 p.m.Suzanne borrowed a car from the Yale car pool, and used it to transport
some of the Best Buddies to and from the party.Shortly before 9:00 p.m., she
returned the vehicle to a parking lot on Edgewood Avenue near Howe Street.She
then went to her apartment at 256 Park Street for a brief time, and at
approximately at 9:20 p.m., she was seen walking toward the Yale Police office
at Phelps Gate on College Street between Elm and Chapel Streets where she turned
in the keys for the borrowed Yale vehicle.
Interviews with friends, associates, and anyone who knew or came in contact with
Suzanne Jovin, make it abundantly clear that she was a wonderful young woman, an
outstanding student and extremely popular.More importantly, she was greatly
admired as a person with a social conscience who gave so much of herself as a
volunteer assisting people less fortunate than herself.
Yale University, in its continued interest in seeking justice in this case, is
contributing $100,000 to the existing reward fund, making the total reward
$150,000 for the person or persons who supply information leading to the arrest
and conviction of the person responsible for this brutal crime.
We urge anyone with information - anyone who saw Suzanne between Phelps Gate and
East Rock Road, or who knows anything about the tan or brown van, or who can add
anything else about the case --- call the New Haven Police Department at
1-866-888-TIPS.If you have any information that may be helpful, don't hesitate,
please call police. We believe that there are other citizens, who have not
talked to police, and may have information that can assist us in this
investigation. You can earn a reward of $150,000. All calls will be kept
confidential.
Case Profiled For TIPS Hotline:3/27/01
More than seven years after Suzanne Jovin's murder, the search for her killer
continues.
Murder Most Yale: The Postscript
Seven months after the vicious stabbing
of Yale senior Suzanne Jovin,
in a wealthy neighborhood near campus, in December 1998, the entire university
knew that her thesis advisor, former dean James Van de
Velde,
was a suspect. More than seven years later, despite a number of
developments in the case, Van de Velde has never been charged, but he has never
been formally cleared of suspicion, either; furthermore, the police appear no
closer to identifying Jovin's killer. The original article, below, which ran in
V.F.'s August 1999 issue, re-traces what happened that fateful night that linked
Van de Velde to the crime
By SUZANNA ANDREWS
he weather in New Haven, Connecticut, was unusually warm the evening of December
4, 1998. Children played in the streets, and people were out walking their dogs.
At Yale University, whose vast campus, with its neo-Gothic architecture, sprawls
through the center of the city, students were out in shorts and T-shirts,
throwing Frisbees on the college's lawns. The balmy weather made it a perfect
night for undergraduates to celebrate the end of fall-semester classes before
reading week and final exams. Parties were being thrown in several of Yale's
residential colleges and in off-campus student apartments. At the David S.
Ingalls Rink, situated about a mile north of the turrets and bell towers of the
main campus, hundreds of Yale students and faculty were out in force to cheer
their hockey team on against Princeton. For nearly three hours—from 7:30 until
approximately 10:00—they sat in the bleachers of the Eero Saarinen–designed
building, under the soaring roof from which the banners of Yale's hockey rivals
and its 12 residential colleges hang. Screaming themselves hoarse, the
spectators watched the Princeton Tigers defeat the Yale Bulldogs, 5–2. Less than
a mile north of Ingalls Rink, in the wealthy East Rock neighborhood, with its
huge mansions and manicured lawns, people were also out enjoying the warm
weather. Several of those later interviewed by the police said they saw nothing
unusual. LaJeune Oxley, who lives at the corner of Edgehill and East Rock Roads,
says she and her husband spent most of that evening in their kitchen listening
to Bach. For some reason she had shut the kitchen door. If she hadn't, Oxley
believes, she would have seen or heard something that might have enabled her to
help the police or perhaps even to prevent what happened.
As it was, Oxley heard only a loud banging on her front door just after 10 p.m.
She walked out of her kitchen and saw immediately, through her sitting-room
window, the flashing lights of the police cars and the ambulance across the
street. "As soon as I opened the door, a police officer said, 'There's a lady
down,'" Oxley recalls. Terrified that something had happened to her 28-year-old
daughter, Daphne, who had not returned from walking the family dog,
Oxley ran across the street, where a
young woman wearing jeans and boots lay near the curb. Oxley saw right away that
it was not her daughter. The woman was Suzanne
Jovin,
a 21-year-old senior at Yale, who was horribly injured. About 15 minutes later,
at 10:26, Jovin
was pronounced dead at Yale–New Haven Hospital. She had been murdered savagely,
stabbed 17 times in the back and neck.
During the past months, Oxley has gone over and over in her mind the details of
what she saw that night and of what she afterward learned. She knows that some
of her neighbors heard an argument
between a man and a woman around 9:45 and, shortly after that, a scream.
She knows from the newspapers that no weapon has been recovered. The mystery of
how someone was able to stab Suzanne Jovin 17 times in a well-lit neighborhood
where people were out walking their dogs and where at least one party was going
on is among the many strange aspects of that night. In the months following the
murder, the questions have multiplied and become even more troubling.
"You see that tree across the street?" says Oxley, looking out the giant bay
window of her antique-filled living room to a towering oak across East Rock
Road. "The body was right next to that tree. She was facedown. Her feet were
almost in the street. We call that grassy area [between the curb and the
sidewalk] the parkway; the body was across the parkway, at an angle. She looked
to me as though she was trying … to get to that house and didn't make it," says
Oxley, turning away from the window with a stricken expression. "We have lights
on every single street here. … It's not secluded. I just couldn't imagine that
anything like that could happen, number one in the neighborhood and then
certainly not there."
t took several hours for the news of Jovin's murder to filter into the Yale
community. The first student to learn that she was dead—Amy Chiou, one of the
victim's freshman-year roommates—was awakened around midnight by a call from the
police, who had entered Jovin's apartment and dialed every number on a list
taped near the phone until they reached someone. Most of Jovin's friends were
partying that night; several were at the movies. Her 22-year-old boyfriend,
Roman Caudillo, an engineering student, was on his way back to New Haven after
spending the evening in New York City. "The police sent a car to get Amy, and
they took her to identify Suzanne's body," says a friend of Jovin's. "The police
told her Suzanne had 'expired.' She had no idea what was going on. She thought
Suzanne had gotten into a problem or something. Amy had a friend with her who
said, 'Amy, she's dead.'"
By noon the next day, many had heard the terrible news, and flowers piled up at
the gates of Davenport, Suzanne's residential college. Devastated students
sobbed in the courtyard. It seemed like a nightmare happening all over again. In
1991, Christian Prince, a sophomore lacrosse player and fourth-generation Yale
man, was shot to death near the president's house as he was walking home from a
party at the Aurelian Society, a secret society akin to the more famous Skull
and Bones. Prince's murder had traumatized the university, which responded by
investing more than $2 million in campus security. Over the years, Yale also
pumped millions of dollars into the troubled, crime-ridden neighborhoods that
surround the spectacular campus. But Christian Prince was the victim of a random
killing. Suzanne Jovin, the police believe, was murdered by someone she knew.
Jovin
was last reported seen around 9:25 near Phelps Gate, the main entrance to Yale
on College Street. At 9:58, someone called 911 to report that a woman lay
bleeding on the corner of Edgehill and East Rock, nearly two miles away. How had
Jovin traveled so far in approximately 30 minutes? The police think that
she must have been driven there, and her
friends are certain she would never have accepted a ride from a stranger.
But whose car had she gotten into? Who could have killed her so brutally and
left no clues? And why would anyone have wanted to kill Suzanne Jovin? Brainy,
beautiful, and hugely popular, she was considered extraordinary, even among
Yale's overachievers. She spoke four languages, sang in the Bach Society
Orchestra, co-founded Yale's German club, and spent much of her free time doing
volunteer work, tutoring inner-city children and running a program for mentally
disabled adults. "Suzanne was just an angel," says
Michael Blum, a 1998 Yale
graduate who had known Jovin since her freshman year.
 |
|
As the weeks wore on, Jovin's murder became more and more mysterious. F.B.I.
specialists in profiling the perpetrators of serial murders and unusual, often
psychologically based crimes tried to piece together a portrait of the killer.
Dr. Henry Lee, Connecticut's public-safety commissioner and a well-known
forensics expert who worked on the Nicole Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey murder
investigations, examined the clothes that Jovin was wearing the night she was
killed. The New Haven police searched the sewers around the crime scene and
enlisted local treasure hunters to comb the neighborhood with metal detectors;
hoping to find witnesses, they set up roadblocks and interviewed scores of
people—including Yale students and faculty members. In March, at the request of
New Haven police chief Melvin Wearing, who acknowledged that the investigators
had hit a dead end, Connecticut governor John Rowland offered a $50,000 reward
for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Jovin's killer. Still,
seven months later no arrest has been made. "This is a profoundly unusual case,"
says one observer. "It's like the JonBenet Ramsey case of New Haven."
In January, police confirmed that Van de Velde was "in a pool of suspects."
Although the police have never said it publicly, today it is a pool in which he
seems to be swimming alone. How he could have done it and why, and how he could
have covered his tracks so thoroughly, are baffling questions that the police
have so far not publicly answered. "It sounds like they have zero evidence,
zero, against Jim," says his attorney
Ira Grudberg,
who is one of Connecticut's top criminal lawyers. And yet the police
persist.
"The situation has been so extraordinarily perplexing," says Richard Brodhead,
the dean of Yale's undergraduate college. "Someone has been murdered; no one
knows who did it months after the fact. Allegations have been put in motion.…
There is a confirmation by the police that he is a suspect, but then there is no
arrest."
hen I think of Suzanne, I mostly remember how much fun she was," says a woman
who was a friend of Jovin's since their freshman year. "Suzanne laughed a lot.…
At Naples [a popular New Haven hangout] she'd go nuts when we got on the dance
floor.… We went caroling freshman year and had so much fun, we glommed on to
some crazy Christian group, and we ran around singing and somehow ended up
drinking schnapps all night." It is an evening in late April, right before exam
week, and three friends of Jovin's have agreed to meet over dinner at Caffé
Adulis, an elegant Eritrean restaurant near the campus, to talk about her.
Over elaborate platters of African food, they recall how beautiful Jovin's
singing voice was, how much she loved to go to the theater, how much fun she was
to laugh with. "Suzanne was sparkly," says one friend. "She was so cool," says
another. Tonight Jovin's friends want to focus on happy memories of her, but
they start to cry when one of them brings out pictures of her. The photographs
show a beautiful young woman with deep-blue, slightly dreamy eyes and a dazzling
smile: Suzanne in an emerald-green dress on the way to "Casino Night" freshman
year, Suzanne in Florida sophomore year, and Suzanne at a dinner party just two
weeks before she was killed. "She did everything in her own way," says one
friend. "She was different," says another.
uzanne Nahuela Jovin had not lived in the United States before she arrived at
Yale in the fall of 1995. She was born and raised in Göttingen, a beautiful
medieval town in the western part of Germany. Her parents, Thomas and Donna
Jovin, are American scientists—molecular and cell biologists—who work there at
the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. The elder of the Jovins' two
daughters, Suzanne grew up living in a 14th-century castle; by the time she was
a teenager, she had traveled extensively throughout Europe and spent vacations
in Mexico, where her grandparents lived. Suzanne was raised "as [an] American in
Germany with all that implies," her father wrote in one of a series of E-mails
to me. She grew up speaking English and German fluently, although German was the
language she usually spoke with her sister and closest friend, Rebecca, who is
20. Educated in the rigorous German school system, Suzanne began to study Latin
in the fifth grade and French in the seventh. She played the piano and the
cello. In high school, at the Theodor-Heuss Gymnasium, she took a double major
in biology and chemistry, passing her exams with top marks.
In press accounts after her murder, Jovin was described in ways that made her
seem very serious, even dull. But she was not that at all. "She was really
lively," says Rebecca Jovin. In high school she sang with several rock bands.
"She was full of exciting contradictions," says her friend David Bach, a Yale
graduate who is from Germany. "She was extremely serious academically, but also
just a great person to have fun with and hang out with … She was very
traditional and stylish and feminine, but then also very rebellious and
liberal."
It was always assumed that Jovin would go to college in the United States. Her
mother had gotten her Ph.D. from Yale, and Ellen and Diana Jovin, her older
half-sisters from her father's first marriage, with whom she was close,
graduated from Harvard. Today, Suzanne's grief-stricken parents say they deeply
regret having encouraged her to go to the university, but Suzanne loved Yale
from the moment she arrived. She immediately got involved in volunteer
work—something her mother had done when she was at Yale, and had urged her
daughter to do. Although she started out intending to major in one of the
sciences, she switched to a double major in political science and international
studies, friends say, after doing poorly in an advanced course in cell biology.
"Suzanne and I both decided to take a graduate-level cell-bio class freshman
year," a friend remembers, laughing. "We were both from Europe and thought we
could do it.… Cell bio, that was the only time I saw her not confident."
"I think Suzanne held herself to very high standards partly because her parents
were both these brilliant scientists," says another friend. At the time of her
death, Jovin was considering a career in the diplomatic service and was
finishing applications to graduate schools in the field—including, her parents
say, Tufts, Columbia, and Georgetown. She wasn't interested in making money. She
hadn't been raised that way, her family says. "She always came down to, you
know, helping people and being influential [as] more important," says Bach.
n their early reports of Jovin's murder, newspapers and television stations used
the same photograph of her. It made Jovin appear fragile, a delicate sparrow of
a woman. Her friends were taken aback by the picture. "It didn't look anything
like Suzanne really was," one recalls. To begin with, friends insist that Jovin,
who was five feet five inches and weighed 125 pounds, was physically quite
strong. She jogged, played squash, skied, and sometimes took step-aerobics
classes at Yale's Payne Whitney gym.
Whoever killed her, her friends say, was very strong or, says one, "someone who
knew what they were doing." Nor was Jovin as shy and hesitant as the
photograph made her seem. "'Strong-willed' isn't the word," says a friend. "If
you were talking about things Suzanne knew about, she would knock you out if she
disagreed." "She had very strong opinions," says Rebecca Jovin. "Sometimes she
lacked self-confidence, but overall she was the strongest person I ever met."
"She was so not a victim," says a friend. Jovin, says another friend, "had a
very, very strong sense of justice and righteousness.… She could just be furious
if she thought somebody she cared about or herself was treated unfairly.… She
would make that clear, that she wouldn't put up with everything."
"We tried to encourage self-confidence in our daughters to the extent of
recognizing their worth and capabilities and of exerting their rights while
avoiding arrogance. We encouraged them to never feel limited by their sex," her
parents say. "We were very proud of Suzanne and admired her greatly. She
suffered no fools and could identify them with ease.… It pains us terribly to
imagine that she may have met her fate as a victim of her very positive, but
critical, outlook."
n the night she was killed,
Jovin
spent the early part of the evening at Trinity Lutheran Church, four blocks from
the campus, at a pizza-making party she had organized for Best Buddies, an
international organization that pairs students with mentally disabled adults.
She had worked with the Yale chapter since her freshman year, and ran it
by the time she was a senior. She would spend hours on the phone with her
"buddy," Lee, taking him to Yale games with her friends and arranging outings
and social events. People later told the police that Jovin seemed tired that
evening, but that she appeared to be in a good mood. She left the church
sometime before 8:30, after she'd helped clean up, and then used a borrowed
university car to drive other volunteers home. She left the car in a parking lot
and then walked to her apartment,
on the second floor of a two-story, Yale-owned building on Park Street. Sometime
between 8:30 and 8:50, a group of friends passed by. "We waved to her and said,
'We're going to the movies—do you want to come?'" one of them remembers. "She
was at her window and waved back. She couldn't come—she was planning to work on
her senior essay." At 9:02, she sent an E-mail to a friend, telling her she was
leaving some books for her in her apartment lobby. She logged off at 9:10.
If she made or received any
phone calls from within Yale's telephone system, they may be untraceable,
because the phones function like extensions of Yale's central-exchange numbers.
By 9:15,
Jovin
had made her way to Old Campus, where she ran into a classmate, Peter Stein, who
was out for a walk. She told him
she was going to the Yale police communications center at Phelps Gate to turn in
the keys to the university car. "She did not mention plans to go anywhere
or do anything else afterward," Stein later told the Yale Daily News. "She just
said that she was very, very tired and that she was looking forward to getting a
lot of sleep." "Stein walked off, and when he turned around, Suzanne was gone,"
says Blair Golson, who covered the murder for the Yale newspaper. Suzanne was
seen again, between 9:25 and 9:30, walking north on College Street. If she was
going home, it appeared she was taking a roundabout way.
The witness who says she saw her close
to 9:30 was a student who had left the Yale-Princeton hockey game early
and was walking, alone, to an off-campus party. She passed Jovin, but didn't
think much of it until the next night, when she read about the murder in the
Yale newspaper. Nearly hysterical, she called the police at two in the morning.
"They told me to write down everything I saw, everything," she recalls. What she
saw was "a Hispanic or black guy in a hooded sweatshirt" going north. Behind
him, also walking north, was Jovin, and walking in the same direction several
paces behind her was, she says, "a blond man with glasses … a white guy dressed
nicely."
Less than a half-hour after this witness
saw her, Jovin
lay dying 1.7 miles away. According to the police, there was no evidence
of a sexual assault. The viciousness of the stabbing suggested that robbery had
not been her murderer's motive. Police believed she was stabbed from behind at
the spot where she was found. It
appeared she had gotten out of a car, before or after having had an argument
with a man. She did not appear to have called for help or to have put up
a struggle. "The police said she didn't scrape her hands. They didn't think she
was running away," says a woman friend whom detectives questioned.
From the outset, it appeared that the police believed that Jovin
was murdered by a man, one whose motive was probably jealousy or desire or
anger. "Every guy she knew was interviewed by the cops, the cops were all
over them," says the woman friend. "They asked if they'd slept with her." Her
mentoring "buddy" was briefly a suspect, but he was cleared by the police almost
immediately, as was Roman Caudillo, her boyfriend since freshman year, who took
a leave from Yale after the murder. "Roman really loved Suzanne," says a friend.
"His family adored her. When the murder happened, Roman's parents were in New
York [from Texas] before Suzanne's family was [able to get here]."
n the months since Van de
Velde
was linked in the press to the killing, his friends—as shocked and
disbelieving as Jovin's—have rallied around him. They have written letters to
the local media defending him, they have sat with him when he's broken down
crying from the stress, afraid to go out in public. "You walk down the street
and get the feeling everybody's looking at you and thinks you're a murderer,"
says Ira Grudberg. Van de Velde's friends say he is the last person they could
imagine breaking the law, let alone killing someone. "You know the old TV show
Happy Days?" asks Ken Spitzbard, a friend of Van de Velde's since the second
grade. "Jim is Richie Cunningham. Could you conceive of Richie Cunningham doing
something violent and horrible?"
Van de Velde was president of the student council at Amity Regional High School,
in the wealthy New Haven suburb of Woodbridge. He was captain of the soccer
team, played on the tennis and baseball teams, and was a member of the National
Honor Society. His date to the senior prom was the most beautiful cheerleader at
Amity. His pictures in the high-school yearbook are of a stereotypical American
golden boy—big, athletic, somewhat shy-looking.
The second of James and Lois Van de
Velde's
three children, and their only son, Van de Velde grew up in Orange,
Connecticut. His mother worked as an
administrative assistant at Yale, and his father in the media business, for the
local ABC affiliate and also for Showtime. A driven workaholic, he died
of lung cancer when his son was in graduate school. The family was staunchly
Roman Catholic. "Jim," says a friend, "really was an altar boy."
Van de
Velde
majored in political science at Yale.
He sang in the university's well-known
Russian chorus his freshman year and twice traveled to Asia on internships. He
was a serious student who graduated with honors. After Yale, Van de
Velde
went to Boston to Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, from which, in
1987, he received his Ph.D. in international-security studies. In 1988 he was
selected for a prestigious Presidential Management Internship and was assigned
to work at the Pentagon and at the State Department, where he stayed for four
years, working on U.S.-Soviet disarmament issues.
In 1988, Van de
Velde
also joined the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves, in which he still holds the
rank of lieutenant commander, with a "Top Secret" clearance. Trained in
intelligence work, he was assigned to Singapore, Brussels, and Panama, where he
analyzed the drug trade out of Latin America. In 1993, after Bill Clinton
defeated George Bush, Van de
Velde, who was a political
appointee and a Republican, left the State Department. That fall he was back at
Yale as the dean of Saybrook
College.
ason Criss, a 1996 graduate, remembers when he first met Van de Velde, the week
that all the freshmen were moving in. "I was a sophomore and Jim was the new
dean.… The first couple days he looked like he was going yachting:
blue blazer, white starched pants, he
wore them everywhere. He was very formal and proper." Like almost all of
the former Saybrook students interviewed for this story, Criss remembers Van de
Velde "as in some ways … the model dean."
Too close to students
As dean, Van de
Velde
was supposed to supervise the academic affairs of
Saybrook's
475 students, and by all accounts he took his job very seriously. He ate
meals in the dining hall and knew all the students by name. He attended their
student-council meetings, gave them dean's excuses when they were ill, and tried
to help them out when they were in trouble. "He actually got involved," recalls
one woman. "We had rats in our room, and he did something about it." During
study breaks, he would invite students
to his apartment. "He was a terrific cook," Criss recalls. "He'd cook us
sesame noodles and Asian dumplings."
"He had this aura about him because we'd heard that he worked for the C.I.A.,"
another woman recalls. "He said he'd studied handwriting analysis, and he would
do it for us in the dining hall," says another. Michael Ranis, who went to high
school and to Yale with Van de Velde, says that his friend really enjoyed being
a dean. "He liked the students a lot, the idea of being there for them," Ranis
says. "He was shy and awkward socially, but he really tried. He wanted to do
everything right," says one woman.
ut some saw Van de Velde as too tightly wound. He was always formal and rarely
used contractions in his speech. "He was no-nonsense;
he wasn't really personable,"
says another former student. "Freshman year everyone called him Dean Anal. He
was by the book, he didn't make any exceptions." Van de Velde, who Spitzbard
says has never taken illegal drugs and rarely drinks, got the reputation for
being extremely strict on the issue of alcohol and drug use at Saybrook. "Dean
Van de Velde was the biggest straight arrow at Yale, more straight-arrow than
any dean," says Jason
Karlinsky, who graduated in 1997.
Students say that by 1995 Van de Velde seemed tired of the job. "I knew he was
going to resign two years before he did," says one woman who was friendly with
him when she was at Saybrook. "He never liked being dean. He didn't know what he
really wanted. I think he wanted something in Washington."
As the years went by, he appeared to
some students to become more aloof. "He gave the impression of being sort
of really inaccessible," says a woman who graduated from Saybrook this year.
"Men had a better rapport with him because he played on some intramural teams.
For women it was more difficult; he wasn't particularly friendly."
Too_much_temptation
fter the slaying, the police asked students if Van de Velde had ever had an
affair with a student. Whether they liked him or not, all the Saybrook students
interviewed for this story say that there was never a hint of anything untoward.
"There were no rumors of him having problems with women or relationships with
students," says Criss. Only after she graduated several years ago, says one
woman, did Van de Velde even mention women to her. As she told the police when
they tracked her down in December after finding her number in his phone records,
"He said that it was odd being a young
guy as dean, seeing all these freshmen who are so beautiful and that it's hard
not to notice," the woman recalls. "They wanted to know if I'd had an
affair with him," the woman recalls. "I told them I had not."
Van de Velde took a leave of absence from the dean's job, early in 1997, to go
to Italy on assignment for naval intelligence. He came back that April to
complete the semester, and then left Yale to go to Stanford's Asia-Pacific
Research Center as its executive director. In May 1998, nine months into a
five-year contract, he resigned and returned to New Haven. Van de Velde, a
friend says, had been miserable in California. "There were older professors who
came [to work] in shorts. Jim wears suits and ties every day," she says. "It did
not click with anyone. He didn't have a social life. He wasn't happy."
Nevertheless, Van de Velde was upset at having to leave. "He's an overachiever,"
says this friend, "and basically he'd been let go." It was Van de Velde's "first
real setback," says Ranis. "Most of us go through a lot of them by the time we
reach 38; Jim hadn't." Van de Velde became depressed, friends say, to the point
where he began seeing a therapist and was briefly put on an antidepressant.
Jew_charged _Stalking?
 |
|
"We have asked both the police and through the state's attorney's office, 'If
there is a complaint, give us the date,'" says Grudberg. "Maybe he was out of
the state. We don't know. One of the cops claims that he spoke with Jim and told
him to keep away, but Jim says that never happened.… Jim was never arrested. He
was never questioned." Van de Velde "flat out denies" that
he stalked his former girlfriend,
says Grudberg, but the attorney also believes that whatever this woman told the
police has become a central element in their suspicions about Van de Velde. "I
think they are convinced that he is a weird guy," he says.
"I think she understandably got upset,"
says a friend of Van de Velde's,
who believes he really cared about this woman. "He would phone her, run into her
on the street. He wasn't taking 'no' for an answer." (David Grudberg,
Ira's son and law partner, who went to high school and college with Van de Velde,
objects to this account. Van de Velde, he says, only ran into this woman, and
phoned her once. Grudberg denies that Van de Velde was pursuing her.) "The thing
with Jim is this circumstantial evidence coinciding with his personal life,"
says the friend. "Here he is, not letting go of a woman, and then people wonder:
Was it the same with Suzanne?"
ovin was accepted into Van de Velde's seminar Strategy and Policy in the Conduct
of War, in September 1998. She was among the 169 students who had applied for
the 40 places in that course and Van de Velde's other seminar, The Art of
Diplomacy. During his time as dean of Saybrook, Van de Velde had also taught in
the political-science department, and he developed a reputation as one of the
best lecturers at Yale. His teaching style was riveting and creative. To
demonstrate how force changes the balance of power in international relations,
he once pulled out a fake handgun in the middle of a class simulated
negotiation. He organized "diplomatic receptions" for his students and gave each
of them the assignment of answering a question about someone else in their class
without letting that person realize that he or she was being pumped for
information. He took them on field trips, including one to a nearby naval base
to tour a nuclear submarine, and, says one student, "we got to touch a cruise
missile."
Jovin,
friends say, began the semester like many students, enthralled with Van de
Velde. Indeed, she was
impressed enough that she decided to do her senior essay with him as her
adviser—actually, she had taken the unusual step of writing two senior essays,
the other in international studies. She chose a subject in Van de Velde's area
of expertise: the international terrorist Osama bin Laden, who is believed to
have masterminded the bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Van de
Velde
appeared equally taken with Jovin.
"I think he liked Suzanne's enthusiasm. It was flattering that a student would
be so deeply involved in his topic," says a student who was in the class.
At some point in the semester, however,
Jovin's
enthusiasm seemed to falter. She didn't go on either of the two field
trips. "She thought they were a waste of her time," says a friend of hers. She
also had reservations about a project on terrorism. The
project, which was optional but which the class had voted to pursue, involved
using the Internet to show how easy it would be for a terrorist to get
information to create a weapon of mass destruction. "We decided to plan
to use chemicals in a plane that we'd fly over the Super Bowl in Miami," says
one student. "We figured everything out except how much water to put in the
chemical to make it fall from the plane—no one would give us the proportions for
that." According to Jovin's parents, the chemical in question was the warfare
agent sarin. "Suzanne expressed to a fellow student that we, her parents, might
have that information," the Jovins say, "but that we would be opposed to the
project on moral and ethical grounds and that she therefore would not proceed
further." Faced with students'
objections, Van de Velde
stopped the project. He does not recall any complaints from
Jovin.
The initial speculation by the police was that Van de Velde and Jovin were
having an affair that went horribly wrong. Although they pursued that theory
aggressively in the first weeks after the murder, they seem to have found no
evidence of a romantic relationship. Jovin was happy with Roman Caudillo, her
friends and parents say, insisting that she never so much as hinted to anyone
that she was involved with Van de Velde. For his part,
Van de
Velde
seemed to be in search of a relationship, not in the throes of one. "He really
wanted to meet someone," says a friend.
f the police found no evidence of a romance, they did, however, learn something
else. By November, it appears, the
professional relationship between Van de
Velde
and Jovin
had broken down almost completely. Although Van de Velde had written her
a glowing recommendation for graduate school in late October, Jovin began to
feel that he had no time for her. According to a friend of Jovin's, she had
tried repeatedly to meet with Van de Velde about her senior essay and had felt
that she was rebuffed. In the weeks before she died, says this friend, "she
complained bitterly about a bunch of things in that class, and especially his
lack of support for her project. He had shown no interest in her work." For a
college-thesis adviser basically to check out on a student trying to get
feedback on her senior essay would be unusual in any case. But for Van de Velde—a
devoted teacher noted for his availability,
who would take his students to lunch to
help them with their work, and who answered their E-mails within
minutes—it would have been downright bizarre.
During November, it appears that
Jovin
was trying to pin down a time to meet with Van de
Velde.
"They never did get together [then]," says Ira Grudberg. "They couldn't
get the dates right and so forth." According to David Grudberg, Van de Velde was
unaware that Jovin was concerned. "He invited all his students to meet with him,
especially those writing senior essays under his direction," he says. "If she
had complaints about the way he was advising her on her thesis, she never
expressed them to him."
Jew is irate with the student
By Thanksgiving,
Jovin
had become upset; her essay was due on December 8. "Suzanne indicated to us
during the Thanksgiving break—we were together in California—how deeply she
resented the lack of mentoring by this senior thesis advisor," her parents
recall. Although Van de Velde denies having received it, Jovin's parents
say she had handed in a draft on November 17. She left a second draft with Van
de Velde right before the Thanksgiving holiday. Jovin told friends that Van de
Velde canceled a meeting on Monday, November 30, because he hadn't read the
paper yet, although he says no meeting was scheduled.
At a meeting the next day, December 1,
he still hadn't read it. "He'd gotten tied up over Thanksgiving and hadn't done
it," says Ira Grudberg.
"He was very apologetic, and he could see she was upset. That very day
and night he made a lengthy review of it and met again with her on December 2,
at which time he discussed it with her. She was much, much happier."
according to her parents and a close
friend, however, Jovin
was far from happy after that meeting. "The last time I talked to Suzanne
was … on that evening, very late in the evening," the friend says. "She was
still furious … and she was very insecure about what would happen."
Jovin was concerned, her parents say, that the second reader of her essay would
not be happy with it. Her parents say
she spoke to a member of the Yale administration about the problem "in a highly
emotional, tearful session," but did not make a formal complaint. "She
thought she could handle the situation," her parents say. "I tried to calm her
down on Wednesday evening," says the same friend. "She was still upset.…
Furious is how she was. That's the way to describe how she was in those last
couple of days with him."
 |
|
Van de Velde spent most of the evening of Friday, December 4, at his office, Ira
Grudberg says. A friend, who stopped by around six p.m. to ask him to go to a
movie, says he was planning to work all evening. According to Grudberg, Van de
Velde went over Jovin's revisions that evening and was going to give her his
comments the following morning. He took
a short break at one point and walked up the street to
Ingalls
Rink, to watch part of the hockey game, then returned to his office, and then
went home, which is where he was, alone, says
Grudberg,
at the time of the killing.
rudberg says that he and his son David have spent the past seven months trying
to understand why the police consider Van de Velde their chief suspect. As much
as they have been able to, they have followed the police's tracks, swooping in
behind them to interview people who were questioned, hoping to get some insight
into what the police believe to be the case against their client. "There was a
witness who saw a car hightailing out from that area who spoke with the police,"
says Ira Grudberg. "He described it as a small red car, and [the police] asked
him 14 times if it was a big, red Wrangler.… And they showed him pictures of
Jim, and he said that's absolutely not who was driving the car." Grudberg says
he's stumped. "Among other things, talking about a motive. Word got back to us
supposedly from some people that [talked to the police] that Suzanne was going
to make a complaint about the way he was handling her paper and therefore he
killed her," says Grudberg. "It's just kind of strange.
If, for some reason, she climbs in a car
with him downtown, why drive a half-mile past his house and kill her on a
corner? It doesn't make sense."
The police, says Ira
Grudberg,
first questioned Van de Velde
on the Monday after the slaying. The session was brief, he says, and
there was no suggestion that Van de Velde was a suspect. For some reason,
however, by the next night the police appeared to have become persuaded that Van
de Velde was guilty. They interrogated
him for four hours, "accusing him of the murder," says Grudberg. Choosing
not to call a lawyer, Van de Velde offered them the keys to his car—which they
searched—and his apartment, and also offered to let them do blood and polygraph
tests on him. Grudberg says that the police did not perform these tests, and
although the police had told the New Haven Register that they had searched the
apartment, Grudberg says they did not.
 |
|
"I think that everything Jim did that weekend," says Michael Ranis, "the police
think is suspicious—that he put himself out there, that he was exposed."
Whatever he may have felt about Jovin before her death, Van de Velde seemed
stricken by it. He showed up at
Davenport College on Saturday, December 5, when Yale's president, its dean, the
chaplains, the psychiatrist, and the chief of its police force met with
Jovin's
college-mates to discuss the killing. That weekend he also appeared on
the local television news being interviewed about what an extraordinary person
Jovin had been. On Monday morning he showed up in class with "red and puffy
eyes," one student remembers, and placed a bouquet of three dozen white
carnations at Jovin's seat. That day, Van de Velde spoke to the New Haven
Register, in which he said again how wonderful Jovin was.
anis says that Van de Velde went on television only because the station called
him. He had been working on a master's degree in broadcast journalism at nearby
Quinnipiac College and had had an internship at the station. "Where I come out
on this is: How can being straight make you a suspect?" Ranis says. "The police
probably aren't used to having someone sit there for four hours answering
questions without a lawyer. That is unusual. But that's how Jim is. He's so
honest."
On the morning of December 9, the New
Haven Register ran a banner headline: "Yale Teacher Grilled in Killing."
The story did not name Van de Velde, but its details were so specific that many
people knew it was about him. On his way to the dentist that morning, Van de
Velde was waylaid by local television reporters. "They put a microphone in front
of him on the street and said, basically,
'Did you see the Register this morning?
They did everything but name you.' And Jim said it sure seemed that way, but
'I'm innocent,'" Ranis
says. The fallout from that interview was damaging for Van de
Velde.
Many people who saw the news that night say it made him look guilty. He seemed
tired and looked down at the ground when he spoke. His words—"I never hurt
her"—struck people as odd. There was, and still is, much discussion of
whether the press at that moment, without breaking any rules, nevertheless went
too far, crossing the line of fairness.
But what the police do know is that one person who watched the news that night
phoned them, stunned at what she saw.
The woman who had seen Jovin
walking on College Street at around 9:25 on the night of the stabbing saw Van de
Velde
on television and started shaking. "I got chills," she says. "I didn't
know Van de Velde. I go home and turn on the news and I see him. This guy,
talking to reporters, he was blond, with glasses. I could not believe what I
saw. I went back to my notes and saw the description I wrote, that I saw a blond
man with glasses." The man she claims
she saw walking behind Jovin
near Phelps Gate the night of the murder so closely resembled Van de
Velde's
image on television that she believes it was he.
If this is a crucial element of the police case against Van de Velde—a tentative
identification that could be highly biased by the television-news context in
which it was made—it is obviously not enough for an arrest. In response to the
claims of this witness, David Grudberg says flatly, "It was not Jim."
miss everything about Suzanne," says Rebecca Jovin, who was in the middle of her
freshman year at college when her sister was killed. "When she left for college
… I cried for weeks on end. I feel the same way now, but now I know the
separation is permanent," she says. "I often think about the way in which
Suzanne died and the questions that will never be answered, and that really
traumatizes me. I cannot deal with that at all, I just have to let it pass when
it comes to my mind."
Suzanne Jovin's family has said little publicly about the investigation into her
death. Indeed, her parents spoke to Vanity Fair with deep reluctance and then
only to clarify aspects of their daughter's life that they thought were
important to understand. "For us, there remains a void in our life that can
never be filled," Thomas and Donna Jovin say.
The
Jovins
have not mentioned Van de Velde's
name in public, but an anguished letter from Donna
Jovin
that was published in Connecticut newspapers on April 14 seemed to many to be
directed at Van de Velde's
mother. "I personally appeal in this open letter to the mother of [Suzanne's]
killer, assuming that she resides in the greater New Haven area," she wrote. "As
a moral and rational human being you will not be able to live with yourself if
you withhold knowledge or suspicion of your son's complicity. Come forward to
the police, talk to them. Demand that your son tell the truth."
 |
|
Ever since Yale canceled Van de Velde's courses for the spring term last
January—claiming that it would be a distraction to students to have a murder
suspect in the classroom—he has had little to do other than focus on the horror
of being the chief suspect in a savage
killing he insists he didn't commit. His friends, who believe he is
innocent, say that Van de Velde is beyond desperate. "At this point, Jim has got
to be formally absolved, or else his life will forever be under this cloud," say
Ken Spitzbard. Says James Thomas, dean of admissions at Yale Law School, "This
guy has been ruined. Suppose it turns out some vagabond did it? Jim can never
get back what he lost."
No search warrant
"To get a search warrant or an arrest
warrant an officer must present relevant facts under oath before a judge.
That has not been done," says David Grudberg. "To brand someone 'a suspect' all
you have to do is pick up the phone and call the local newspaper. There is
something very wrong with that when the potential consequence is the destruction
of someone's life."
"I know how hard you have worked on the story about Suzanne. You have no idea
how much I wish I could speak with you," Van de Velde wrote me in an E-mail in
late May. "My best wishes for your success. We very much hope that your story
will advance the investigation and ultimately help bring peace to Suzanne's
parents, the Yale community, my family and all those horrified at Suzanne's
tragic death."
y graduation day, May 24, the police posters of Jovin that had been tacked to
the trees of Old Campus had long since been torn by the wind or ripped down. All
of the pride and pomp and glory of Yale's 298-year history was on display that
day as the 1,361 members of
Jovin's
class paraded in their black caps and gowns across the New Haven Green
through Phelps Gate and into Old Campus. Looking exhausted and somewhat hung
over, they stopped and posed for their proud parents, who were standing with
cameras on the sidelines. As degrees were conferred, a loud roar filled the Old
Campus courtyard as Jovin's classmates rose from their seats and cheered.
Suzanne Jovin was on many people's minds that day. In the smaller ceremony at
Davenport after the main commencement, Yale conferred a degree on Jovin. She
graduated cum laude with distinction in both her majors. Her classmates had
placed a slab of black stone as a memorial to her in Davenport's smaller
courtyard. Nestled in a flower bed under a linden and a dogwood, it reads:
Suzanne N. Jovin
In Loving Memory
January 26, 1977–December 4, 1998
The candle that students had placed on the stone had been extinguished by the
rain that poured down on graduation day, a torrent that also drenched the
bouquets of flowers and a lone rose. Still, says a friend, "it was as though
Suzanne was there." In the months since the murder, says one woman who graduated
that day, "a lot of us would wake up in the morning saying, Today maybe we'll
find out that so-and-so killed Suzanne. And then we realized that we might not
know before we leave Yale. Now we might never know."
Suzanna Andrews is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Her profile of model
Gisele Bündchen appeared in the October 2004 issue.
An interview with Suzanne Jovin's father
In an exclusive interview via e-mail, Thomas Jovin, father of Suzanne
Jovin, responded to questions from The Yale Herald about the police
investigation efforts, Suzanne's concerns during the week of her murder, and the
events to be held at Yale in her honor next month.
The Yale Herald: Has the New Haven Police Department (NHPD) kept you informed
about the status of the investigation? What information have they shared with
you? What are your thoughts on the latest piece of evidence (reported to be a
car owners' manual) found at the crime scene by the Nutmeg Treasure Hunters, a
group that works with metal detectors?
Thomas Jovin: Captain Brian Sullivan of the Investigative Services Unit and
other members of the New Haven Police Department have kept the family very
well-informed about the course of the investigation through frequent phone calls
and face-to-face meetings. We have also had intensive contact with the Yale
Administration and faculty, as well as with the offices of the State Attorney
and State Commissioner. We cannot comment on the nature or significance of
any evidence.
YH: I realize that this is a difficult question, but does your family harbor any
suspicions as to who might have committed this vicious act? In your wife's
letter to campus publications and to local papers, she suggested that a man was
probably the killer. Police also believe
that Suzanne knew her killer. Can you even give us a vague idea of what
your suspicions are? Is there any particular reason that the letter was
addressed to the mother of Suzanne's killer rather than the community at large?
TJ: The family cannot and will not make comments about possible suspects. That
the killer is a man can be surmised from the nature of the crime. The person has
not confessed. He presumably gets up every morning, has breakfast, brushes his
teeth, and goes to work. In issuing her
statement last week, my wife assumed that the mother of such a depraved and
calculating individual can best see through the prevarications and urge him to
display some degree of remorse and humanity.
YH: Do you have any idea why she would have been by herself at nighttime, 1.5
miles away from campus? Do you know what kinds of things she was occupied with
the week before her tragic murder?
TJ: We know nothing about the circumstances that led Suzanne to the site of the
crime. During the week of December 4 she was very concerned about the progress
and evaluation of her senior thesis, dealt with applications to graduate school
and interviews for postgraduate employment, and was heavily involved in her Best
Buddies activities. She was looking forward to her future, of which she was
cruelly denied by the brutal murderer.
YH: Do you feel that Yale or the NHPD needs to step up its efforts? If so, what
else would you like to see them undertake in the investigation? Have you been
involved with the investigation?
TJ: The degree of commitment at the personal and technical level has been
extremely impressive. The case is admittedly difficult, as is apparent from the
lack of an arrest after 5 months. The analysis of forensic evidence is being
conducted with the best resources available in the state and country;
unfortunately, this takes time. We find it counterproductive that details about
the investigation have been leaked to the press on so many occasions. We have
tried to be helpful to the police and the Yale Administration.
YH: Are you confident that this crime will be solved soon?
TJ: We wish we could be.
YH: Do you have any message you would like to send to the Yale community? Could
you tell us a little bit about the events Yale will hold to honor your
daughter's memory?
TJ: The support we have received from all segments of the Yale and New Haven
community has been overwhelming. We hope that the tragedy leads to mechanisms
for better insuring the safety of all students at Yale University.
On May 6, during the course of the annual Elm-Ivy ceremony, our daughter
Suzanne's extracurricular activities benefitting the Yale and New Haven
communities will be honored. The recipients of the Suzanne Jovin Memorial Fund
will be announced and family members (two sisters and I, the father) will be
visiting those organizations during the day. We hope that Yale will also find a
way to honor Suzanne's academic excellence.
