** Re: Welcome Hartford Courant Readers! Part 1 **
Note: The following is a summary I have compiled in an attempt to inform new readers of the events surrounding the murder of Suzanne Jovin. I do not claim to be a news reporter nor do I claim to be objective, although I have tried to support my opinions with fact as often as possible. My opinions are also solely my own and not necessarily representative of those of anyone else posting messages here. If you are not a Silicon Investor member and wish to comment, either publicly or privately, please e-mail me at jmitchel@optonline.net.
- Jeff
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On Friday, December 4th, 1998, Yale senior Suzanne Jovin was savagely murdered. A lot has been written about the case since then, in publications as diverse as Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, and the Yale Daily News. We've been told lots about the victim and lots about her senior thesis advisor, the only person the police have ever named as a suspect. But what about the crime itself? Has not a single journalist thought it might make a good story to try to figure out what really happened that night? Is the lure and entertainment value of "professor kills student" so great that we don't really want to consider the actual evidence appears to point to a random senseless act of violence?
Before devising any theories of how the murder took place, let's first make sure we have our facts straight... as straight as we can, of course, given that the New Haven Police don't feel like sharing what they know, even if all they really know is apparently largely irrelevant to solving it.
The night of the murder, Yale senior Suzanne Jovin was at the Trinity Lutheran Church on 292 Orange St. cleaning up after a pizza-making party she had organized for the local chapter of Best Buddies, an international organization that brings together students and mentally disabled adults. Sean Glass, then a Yale freshman, who was present at the party, told me Suzanne was in a good mood and that all he recalls her telling him was how she was looking forward to seeing her family soon. By 8:30pm she was driving another volunteer home in a borrowed university stationwagon. At about 8:45 she returned the car to the Yale owned lot on the corner of Edgewood and Howe and proceeded to walk one block south on Edgewood before turning east for a half a block to reach 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 work that night, but never specified on what. 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 the lobby. The text of the message to which she was responding is not known. At 9:10 she logged off. It is uncertain if she made or received any calls; calls within Yale's telephone system are supposedly not traceable. She wore the same soft, low-cut hiking boots, jeans, and maroon fleece pullover she had warn at the pizza party. It is not known what she dropped off or took with her but the police report her wallet was later found in her apartment although they would not reveal its contents.
Very shortly thereafter, Jovin headed out on foot to the Yale police communications center under the arch at Phelps Gate to return the keys to the car she had borrowed. She likely headed through the locked gate at Davenport College, across York Street, between a couple of buildings, across High Street, and finally across Yale's Old Campus. Shortly before reaching her destination, at about 9:17, Suzanne 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." Stein told me (as well as the police) that Jovin was holding a piece of white 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper in her right hand. Stein also told me Jovin was walking at a "normal" pace and did not look nervous or excited.
An early New Haven Register article quotes Yale as saying Jovin did return the keys that night, somewhere around 9:30pm, although it's not clear if that is an estimate. Suzanne was last seen alive at between 9:25-9:30pm walking northeast on College St, but not yet past Elm, by another Yale student who was returning from a Yale hockey game. It is not known if she were still carrying the white paper. I have been unable to locate and speak to this witness.
At 9:55 someone dialed 911 and reported a woman bleeding at the corner of Edgehill and East Rock Rd. where 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. A witness told me no one was "working on her" and no one was in any hurry to rush her into a waiting ambulance, the inference being she was already dead. Jovin was officially pronounced dead at 10:26 at Yale New Haven Hospital.
No witnesses I talked to remember seeing much blood at all at the crime scene. None reported seeing any blood drops on the street or on the grass around Jovin. The police dug out the grass over which Jovin lay so presumably that is the one spot, other than on her clothes, that had some. One witness even thought at first glance Jovin had fainted. The medical examiner reported finding no evidence of a sexual assault, no defensive wounds, and said she hadn't even scraped her hands. The tip of the knife was found lodged in her skull. Perhaps most significant of all was that Jovin was approximately 1.95 miles from Phelps Gate.
Police ruled out Jovin's boyfriend, Roman Caudillo, as a suspect as he was on a train to New York City that night. They also ruled out Jovin's Best Buddies mentoring "buddy". On December 7th, police briefly interviewed Jovin's thesis advisor, Professor James Van de Velde, whom Jovin had met for "probably seconds" between 4-4:30pm the day she was murdered. Jovin had stopped by Van de Velde's office on 70 Sachem Street to drop off a new draft of her thesis on the terrorist Osama Bin Laden. On it she wrote a note saying: "Feel free to e-mail me over the weekend if you have questions or run into any major problems," signed "Suzanne." The next day the police questioned Van de Velde again, this time for four hours, and accused him of the murder. Van de Velde chose not to have lawyer present, offered the police the keys to his car which they searched, the keys to his apartment which they chose not to search although they said they did for some reason, and offered to take blood and polygraph tests which the police also chose not to administer. Nevertheless, the police leaked Van de Velde and only Van de Velde's name to the media as a suspect.
According to the Register, by late January, 1999, the police had interviewed more than 150 of Jovin's classmates, teachers, and friends, as well as four local television reporters. They also read her diary. It was apparent by their questions that their theory was Jovin and Van de Velde were having a secret romance. Although they found no evidence of such, either past, present, or planned, the police refused to remove the suspect label from Van de Velde.
On January 18, the Yale Daily News ran a headline "Jovin was upset with Van de Velde". The story focused on Yun Kim, a friend of Jovin's, insinuating there was great acrimony between the professor and his student. The story was repeated on television and in the local papers. What was not reported at all was Yun Kim's scathing letter to the editor saying, in part, "My distaste with the article lies in its use of hearsay as truth and its inappropriate use of tangential information to link Van de Velde to the murder." Even the original article itself quoted another student of Van de Velde's as saying "He was great. I found him extremely helpful. He's the best professor I could have gone to." Nevertheless, the original flawed premise became the cornerstone of new theories to try to link Van de Velde to the murder.
Jovin's parents are on record as saying Jovin had expressed extreme displeasure with Van de Velde days before her death. They say she was so upset she even sought out Dean Susan Hauser for aid, although they admit she instructed the Dean not to take any action. Even if we accept Jovin's unhappiness as fact, there is no evidence to support that Van de Velde actually was at all aware of it; Van de Velde himself describes his conversations with her as "cordial, polite and concerned with the academic issues at hand."
Considering there is no tangible evidence -- blood, fiber, fingerprints, murder weapon, etc. -- to link Van de Velde to the murder, a fact the police have admitted to the press numerous times, we can only conclude their entire case against Van de Velde is and always has been based on motive. Worse, although the police have abandoned their original wildly speculative motive of a secret romance, rather than remove the suspect label from Van de Velde they have instead tried to make him fit the crime by switching to an even more flawed and wildly speculative motive.
Nobody likes to think an unknown vicious killer may be roaming around their neighborhood. There is no denying that throwing Van de Velde to the wolves has taken pressure off the New Haven Police. It allows them to assure the community not to worry, that they have their man and it's only a matter of time before they gather enough evidence to put him away.
Indeed the police have also been good at throwing bones to the press that make front page news, and keep them at bay. One such incident was on April 18, 1999 when the police solicited the help of treasure hunters to search the crime scene with metal detectors. Captain Brian Sullivan was quoted on the front page of the New Haven Register the next day as saying "I can confirm we found forensic evidence?" --in an area right in front of Van de Velde's residence at the time. If not for one of the treasure hunters talking to the press the next day, we might never have known that the "evidence" was simply Van de Velde's car manual that was tossed from his car when it was broken into in October of 1998. Two weeks later, Yale informed Van de Velde he would not be invited back to teach for 1999-2000 academic year.
Another such bizarre incident began on March 1, 1999 when the Register first boldly proclaimed in a front page headline that "Fibers may nab Jovin killer". Sources are quoted as saying "The fibers will be compared to those taken from another location" and that "it is expected to take several weeks to analyze and match the fibers." Van de Velde was, as usual, the only person identified by name from a purported "pool of suspects". The public was left to ponder this seemingly potentially damning evidence until November 7, 1999, when, again, the Register ran a front page story "Cat hair could be key: Investigators test feline DNA in Jovin murder case." Apparently the only person with the common sense to question why it took eight months for the police to analyze the only piece of potential physical they had was Thomas Jovin, Suzanne's father. It would not be until April 20, 2000, when an AP reporter called the investigating scientist at the National Institutes of Health, that the public would learn no DNA could be extracted from the cat hair rendering them useless?prompting Connecticut's renowned forensic expert Henry Lee to abandon his planned analysis of the murder, saying "You cannot reconstruct the abstract. You have to have physical evidence."
The problem with being the only named suspect in a high profile murder is that people are forced to ask the question "If not that guy, then who really did murder Suzanne Jovin?" I'll summarize my thoughts on that in Part 2 later this weekend.
- Jeff |
