** Re: The Suzanne Jovin Murder -- Part 1: The Facts of the Case **
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 totally 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
=====
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. It was also the subject for an entire hour long prime-time, sweeps-week edition of the ABC show 20/20. 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 Jovin 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 station wagon. 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 her (Jovin’s) 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, 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." Stein told me (as well as the police) that Jovin was holding a piece of white 8 ½ 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. Jovin 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. Vanity Fair reported that this witness "passed" Jovin, implying no words were spoken between them. The magazine goes on to say that upon reading of the murder in the Yale Daily News at 2am the next night she become nearly hysterical and called the police. It is not known if Jovin were still carrying the white paper. As the name of the witness has never been in print, I have been unable to locate and speak to her. However, I did confirm with the Yale Police that no paperwork is required when returning keys; you just drop them in the receptacle on the counter under the bullet-proof class. As neither the police nor any media source have ever disputed this was the last time Jovin was seen alive, I have no reason not to treat this very important piece of information as being credible.
At 9:55 someone dialed 911 and reported a woman bleeding at the corner of Edgehill and East Rock Rd. 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. 20/20 reported Jovin was wearing a watch and earrings with a "crumpled up" dollar bill in her pocket, and her wallet was reportedly still in her room. (Suzanna Andrews of Vanity Fair told me she had heard a rumor Jovin also had a checkbook on her, and a local newspaper reporter said he heard the police had found a soda can with Jovin’s fingerprints nearby, but I should stress I’ve never heard either one confirmed by the police, Yale, or the Jovin family.) A witness at the scene 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 returning from New York City that night. They also ruled out Jovin's Best Buddies mentoring "buddy" who apparently had an alibi. On Monday, December 7th, police briefly interviewed Jovin's thesis advisor, Professor James Van de Velde, whom Jovin had met for "probably seconds" around 4pm the day she was murdered. Jovin had stopped by Van de Velde's office at 135 Prospect Street to drop off the penultimate draft of her senior 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 evening, December 8th, Van de Velde volunteered to be interviewed again by the police, this time for four hours. He chose not to have a lawyer present, offered the police the keys to his car, which they searched, and the keys to his apartment, which they chose not to search, although for some reason they claimed they did. He also offered to provide a blood sample and take a polygraph test, both of which the police also declined to do. Nevertheless, even before the meeting was concluded, New Haven and Yale University sources told reporters from the New Haven Register that a male Yale educator who had taught Jovin and who lived near the crime scene was the lead and prime suspect in the investigation. Police sources as well as the Chief and head of detectives subsequently publicly denied throughout the month of December that any Yale professor was a suspect in the crime.
On January 10, 1999, the day before he was to teach his first spring term class, Van de Velde was asked to visit Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead's office. At their late evening meeting, Brodhead informed Van de Velde that in response to repeated inquiries and after many conversations, Yale officials were finally told that Van de Velde was in a "pool of suspects" for the crime, and therefore Yale had decided to immediately suspend him from teaching. The next day, Yale University’s public affairs office issued a press statement formally announcing this ruling.
According to the New Haven 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 had had a secret romance. For example, the January 19, 1999 issue of the Yale Daily News quotes Michael Gordon ’00 as saying "They asked me 101 questions about dating, Suzanne, 'Did you hear him and Suzanne interact?' and so on…Even if I said, 'No, no I never saw him interact with Suzanne,' they continued with questions about him and Suzanne." Although the police found no evidence of such, either past, present, or planned, they still 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, an acquaintance of Jovin's, insinuating there was acrimony between the professor and his student. The story was repeated on television and in the local papers. What was not reported by these other sources was Yun Kim's scathing letter to the Yale Daily News the next day in which she stated: "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 a new theory to try to link Van de Velde to the murder.
Jovin's parents are on record as saying Jovin had expressed extreme displeasure to them over Van de Velde’s handling of finding time to discuss the first draft of her senior essay. They say she was so upset she even complained to Dean Susan Hauser, although they admit that 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." It’s also important to note that Van de Velde was not required to comment on Jovin’s thesis, but extended her that courtesy, and that Jovin’s most vocal disappointment reportedly was after Van de Velde was one day late in handing back his voluntary comments to her.
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 pure speculation. 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 the media 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 the 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 evidence they had was Thomas Jovin, Suzanne’s father. It would not be until nearly five months later, April 20, 2000, when an AP reporter called the investigating scientist, Dr. Stephen J. O'Brien (the director of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Institutes of Health), that the public would finally 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."
Given the purported significance the New Haven police and the press seemed to attach to the cat hair, and how it was very much implied it might be the smoking gun they needed to finally tie their only suspect to the crime, it was imponderable enough to me why it took two thirds of a year to send it out for testing. But what struck me as downright sinister was that although the evidence was sent back to the police the very next month, it took almost another five months for the results to be reported. Wanting an explanation, I wrote Dr. O'Brien to ask why. Shockingly, he told me he had also sent his report back to the New Haven District Attorney's Office in December. It’s interesting to note that despite the AP story and despite my confirmation of it, the New Haven police have never confirmed or denied the reported results. Had the AP reporter not taken the initiative to call, the police might still be withholding the, for them, highly unfavorable and embarrassing results. If so, given the recent Grand Jury finding that the top cop assigned to the Jovin case, Captain Brian Sullivan, had withheld evidence in another high-profile murder -- a crime for which he was subsequently arrested -- it wouldn’t be the first time.
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?" There have been only three other local university students murdered in the past three decades (all in the ‘90s): Yale students Christian Prince and Gary Stein, and Southern CT State student Guy Young. In each case the killer was found, tried and convicted. And in each case the killer was a stranger to the victim. Might Suzanne Jovin also have been killed by a stranger? I think the evidence very much points in that direction. I’ll summarize my thoughts on this in Part 2.
- Jeff |
