Re: Van de Velde seeks state inquiry of Jovin murder
Local prosecutor plans to keep case
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BY MICHAEL KOLBER
YDN Staff Reporter
Published 2/2/00
The lawyer for former political science lecturer James Van de Velde -- the only publicly-named suspect in the 14-month investigation of the murder of Suzanne Jovin's '99 -- asked the chief state's attorney to take control of the case from the New Haven state's attorney this week.
In a letter to Chief State's Attorney John Bailey, Van de Velde's lawyer David Grudberg said he believes New Haven police can no longer be objective. He asked Bailey to assign the investigation to his office's cold case squad, which investigates long-unsolved murders.
But Bailey said Tuesday he lacks the authority to take over the case. Cases are assigned to the cold cases squad by the local state's attorneys after the investigations have been dormant "for a period of time," Bailey said. The Jovin case remains an active investigation, he added.
New Haven State's Attorney Michael Dearington said he will continue investigating the case and will not release it to the cold cases squad.
"We're the prosecutors involved in that case, and that's the way it's going to stay," Dearington said Tuesday. "It's much ado about a non-issue."
Grudberg was not available to discuss the case Tuesday.
The Jovin murder was the only unsolved New Haven murder in 1998. Van de Velde has long been critical of the New Haven Police Department's investigation -- one that left him as the only suspect publicly known. Van de Velde is one of a number of suspects in the case, New Haven Police Chief Melvin Wearing said in December. But Wearing refused to name the other suspects.
Van de Velde, a former Saybrook College dean and Jovin's senior essay adviser, has not been charged and has maintained his innocence throughout the investigation.
The highly publicized case has ruined Van de Velde's career, he and his lawyer have said. He was dismissed from a graduate program in journalism at Quinnipiac College shortly after the murder, and Yale did not renew his teaching contract last summer.
Near the one-year anniversary of Jovin's murder in December, Van de Velde urged the New Haven Police Department to release the case to state or federal investigators since he believed the department had "clearly exhausted its expertise."
But Jovin's father Thomas Jovin said he remains optimistic the present investigation will result in an arrest.
"I am convinced that it will come to pass, and that the arrested person will be tried and convicted," Thomas Jovin wrote in a January e-mail to the Yale Daily News. The police department has briefed him on the progress of the investigation.
In that message, Thomas Jovin criticized the University for not including his daughter's death in its 1998 campus crime statistics. However, such statistics only include incidents that occur on campus or in areas patrolled by the University Police in the campus' immediate vicinity.
Jovin's body was found Dec. 4, 1998, in a residential area about a mile north of the central campus.
Jovin, a 21-year-old political science major, was found dying from multiple stab wounds at Edgehill Avenue and East Rock Road around 10 p.m.
Neighborhood residents told police at the time they heard the sound of a man and a woman arguing just before Jovin's body was found.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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