Re: 8/99 Vanity Fair -- Letter from the Ivy League; Murder Most Yale
Letter from the Ivy League
Murder Most Yale
Seven months after the vicious stabbing of Yale senior Suzanne Jovin in a wealthy neighborhood near campus, the entire university knows that her thesis adviser, 39-year-old former dean James Van de Velde, is a suspect. But the police have made no arrest. Will this become the Ivy League version of the JonBenet Ramsey case?
by Suzanna Andrews
Vanity Fair Magazine
August, 1999
The 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 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 Saarin-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 a towering oak across East Rock Road. "The body was right next to that tree. She was facedown. Her legs 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 tile 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."
It 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 innercity 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.
What no one was prepared for was the shocking news that one of Yale's own--James Van de Velde, Jovin's 38-year-old senior-essay adviser--was a suspect in her killing. Van de Velde was a brilliant and well-liked political-science lecturer, who had previously held positions at the Pentagon and the State Department. He was also a 1982 graduate of Yale and a former dean of Yale's Saybrook College. In the week following the stabbing, Van de Velde vehemently denied any involvement in the crime and twice went in to be questioned by the police without bringing a lawyer. He gave the police permission to search his red Jeep Wrangler and his apartment, which was a half-mile from the crime scene. According to one of his attorneys, Van de Velde also offered to take a blood test and a polygraph-- offers, his lawyer says, the police did not act on.
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."
"When 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, fight before exam week, and three friends of Jovin's have agreed to meet over dinner at Caffe 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.
Suzanne 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 Gottingen, 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 lull of exciting contradictions," say's 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.
In 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."
On 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 Vale 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 tile 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]."
In 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 wellknown 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.
Jason 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."
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 fight," says one woman.
But 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."
After 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.
During the summer he got back in touch with a woman he had dated before he went to California. Exactly what went wrong is not clear, but the results were disastrous. It appears that at some point during the fall of last year the woman, a local television reporter, went to the police and complained that she was being harassed by Van de Velde. "Supposedly she claimed that he was looking in her window, that he was stalking her somehow," says Ira Grudberg. The police have not confirmed the existence of this complaint, but after Jovin was killed the local press reported that apparently two women who worked for local television stations had spoken to the police about their relationships with Van de Velde. The other woman is believed to be a friend of the first. He sent the second woman flowers anonymously. She learned his identity from the florist and later discovered that he was involved with her friend.
"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?"
Jovin 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 t |
