Re: 4/1/01 - Hartford Courant: Are You Wrong About James Van de Velde? (Part 4 of 4)
Van de Velde also has taken another step trying to prove his innocence. The police challenged him to take a lie detector test on the one-year anniversary of Jovin's death, but when they never called him or his attorney, he said, he arranged to take one on his own. In fact, he took four lie detector tests. An initial one found him too emotional to gauge a response. Subsequently, he has taken three others - two quizzing him about the Jovin slaying and the third about his relationships with the television newswomen - and he passed them all. Francis M. Connolly, a retired FBI agent who spent the final eight years of his 29 with the bureau specializing in polygraphs, administered the last three tests. He says it is common for subjects to get cloudy results the first time a polygraph is taken because the test gauges emotional disturbances. Anyone who is falsely accused is subject to emotional disturbance about it, but the underlying emotion is righteousness; if the polygrapher can limit a person's runaway emotions, the truth will be determined, Connolly says. Connolly initially administered an indirect test about the slaying in which Van de Velde gave a lengthy written statement about the case and his lack of involvement and then was asked if he had been truthful. He passed. A few months later, Connolly gave him another test in which he directly asked Van de Velde if he had anything to do with the stabbing death of Jovin, and again he passed. "I think what happened here was they settled on him and didn't look very far in other areas," Connolly says. "I'm convinced they had the wrong fellow here with this guy."
When asked why he stopped cooperating with the New Haven police, Van de Velde bristles. He says he has never stopped cooperating, and that his lawyer has tried for months to engage police and the prosecutor's office in a conversation - all without response. Nor have any legal authorities responded to requests by Van de Velde and his relatives that the behavior of police be investigated, or that the Jovin probe be turned over to another agency, such as the state police.
Both New Haven Chief Wearing and Mayor John DeStefano defend the city's efforts. Interviewed on consecutive days, they take similar approaches to questions. They note that New Haven's success rate in closing cases is better than the state and national average. They say one of their concerns with this case was that it not result in less attention being paid to other homicides. They say they felt no unusual pressure to solve this case. They each blame the media.
"The media was very aggressive. I don't say that in a judgmental fashion. It was a Yale student and the media perceived it as a different kind of a story than if it had been someone who was selling drugs. It was sensationalized," DeStefano says.
"The media put him (Van de Velde) out there," Wearing says. "He was on television every day. ... They made him a suspect."
Wearing at least acknowledges some fault for the leak.
"It got out there. That's not a good thing for someone's name to get out there," he says. "It was a case that took on its own life. You can blame the police to some extent; (but) his name was out there even before we began focusing on Mr. Van de Velde."
Van de Velde himself doesn't doubt that police had reason to question him, given the circumstances of the crime and his role as Jovin's advisor and teacher. But Wearing wouldn't say, and DeStefano couldn't say, what still makes Van de Velde a suspect given the apparent paucity of evidence against him.
"You would have to say based on many factors in this case that he is a person that we cannot eliminate from this process," Wearing insists, declining again to cite any factors. Nor would he respond to questions about statements from the witness Van Pelt or possible problems at the crime scene. Wearing says the police were not in the habit of inviting Henry Lee to join them at many crime scenes, and he insists things were done properly in this investigation. When asked if there are other suspects, he replies "absolutely." He declines to name them. "If you could help me to eliminate Mr. Van de Velde, nothing would thrill me more."
Though the police continue to investigate the slaying, the biggest turn in the case occurred with the news late last year that a private investigator had been hired by Yale, at the urging of the Jovins and with the blessing of the state's attorney's office. The investigator, a longtime New York City cop who is now a private detective, Andy Rosenzweig, has been working behind the scenes for several months. Van Pelt, the witness who saw the small red sedan leaving the vicinity the night of the murder, says Rosenzweig reminds him of Peter Falk's "Columbo" character. Rosenzweig, Van Pelt says, told him he was going to "start from scratch. He found it very common that police would overlook things. And so he was looking for things they would overlook; he got me to remember a couple of things I had not remembered." Rosenzweig, who owns the cleverly named "Book `Em" in Newport, R.I., declined comment for this story.
DeFeo, the former Best Buddies host site coordinator, is another person who's spoken with Rosenzweig. Familiar with Jovin after working with her for four years, she also knows Van de Velde. Expressing a reluctance to talk for fear she may offend the Jovin family, DeFeo nonetheless says she thinks Van de Velde was unfairly targeted by the police. "I honestly don't believe that he, given his history and training ... could do such a thing. My own experience with the New Haven police ... whenever they responded or when my clients needed them, they weren't always there. I think maybe there's evidence that they could have found." The police never spoke with DeFeo, and she says they also weren't complete in talking with everyone involved in the Best Buddies program, from administrators to clients to the people who provided transportation.
Sometimes, it is the smallest details that help complete a portrait. Stephen Malinconico is the New Haven dentist who Van de Velde had an appointment with the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 9. That is the day the Register published "Yale Teacher Grilled in Killing," and the morning Van de Velde was ambushed by a television reporter. Malinconico, making chatter the way dentists do, recalls the visit clearly. "I said `Jim, I just read an article about a professor who allegedly murdered this student. Do you know anything about it?' He said `The guy they're talking about is me.' " Van de Velde then told Malinconico about the travails of the previous night's questioning; the dentist says he seemed forlorn and aggravated by his plight.
Like Malinconico, I keep wondering why a guilty person would make such an acknowledgement.
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WHERE SHE WAS ON THE NIGHT OF DEC. 4, 1998
SUZANNE JOVIN'S ROUTE
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8:30 p.m. Jovin leaves a pizza party she hosts for adults with mental retardation at Trinity Lutheran Church on Orange Street.
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8:45 p.m. Jovin parks a university car she had borrowed at this lot at Edgewood and Howe streets and walks a couple of short blocks to her apartment.
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9 p.m. A quick stop at her apartment above storefront offices, include a Yale police substation, on Park Street, where Jovin e-mails a friend.
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9:15 p.m. Jovin meets a classmate, and tells him she's tired, on her way to Phelps Gate, the main entrance to Yale's Old Campus, where she drops off the keys to the car she had used.
[picture]
9:58 p.m. This strip between the sidewalk and the street, at the southeast corner of Edgehill and East Rock roads is where Jovin's body is found.
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Picture a box, more than 6 feet tall, and inside is a man pushing up, banging, scraping, trying in vain to get out. That's the kind of box Van de Velde sees himself in. The police threw him in there, Yale slammed the lid and the media is sitting on top. Others have found themselves in similar boxes in the past. Take Dr. Ed Friedland, who spent nearly five years in a box, and continues to this day working to extract himself.
Friedland went through four years of innuendo in which police detectives tried to link him to the brutal July 1990 slashing death of his wife, Kim Thomas, in their home, a crime for which they did not recover any forensic or physical evidence. Friedland had been cheating on his wife, information that was leaked by authorities, even though he was a prominent kidney specialist in Charlotte, N.C., and dozens of friends and colleagues police interviewed said they did not believe he was capable of committing the crime. Friedland's vindication didn't come until 1995, a year after he was finally indicted on a charge of murder. Once compelled to release their files to Friedland's attorneys, it turned out the police had ignored evidence pointing to another possible suspect - an ex-convict living nearby with a history of violence against women - and that investigators were relying on a questionable report about the time of Kim Thomas's death. Reputation savaged, forced to resign from his practice, Friedland had to leave North Carolina to salvage his medical career.
"It really makes me heartsick that people think that (I did it)," Friedland says in a telephone interview from Pensacola, Fla., where he is working a weekend shift at a hospital. "I realize now that I can't (control) what people are thinking. I just do what I can on an ongoing basis to push the truth in this case. I'm innocent. And I am happy and proud to fight back against people who have been wrong in this." He's doing so with a multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit against the city of Charlotte and its police force. "My wife was murdered. Nobody's been charged; the guilty party has not been brought to justice. They can bluster. They can threaten. They can try to tear me down as much as they like. It's very emotional for me."
David Rudolf, Friedland's attorney and the man who recently defended former NFL star Rae Carruth in a murder case, says he's spoken with Connecticut's Henry Lee about the problem of police going after suspects on intuition. Lee was hired as a consultant on the Friedland case on crime scene analysis, to study what police did and didn't do, and what they should have done. One of the problems in that case was a crime scene in which far too many people were allowed inside the Friedland house. "He (Lee) talks about tunnel vision, that police officers get tunnel vision. ... They're overworked, they're stressed, they have pressure to solve cases. And so there's a tendency on their part to look at what they consider to be the obvious suspect and then proceed to try to gather evidence against that person," Rudolf says. "And I guess oftentimes that's an efficient way to go about doing it. The problem is that when they're wrong, they're really wrong."
Righteousness and intensity are found in the voices of both Friedland and Van de Velde. For Van de Velde, frustration is more than a tone of voice; it is a way of life. When asked whether police requested in their lengthy interview of him to see his hands, Van de Velde wearily acknowledges "of course." That's the first thing they did, he says, a common thing to check. As anyone who followed the O.J. Simpson case knows, people who wield knives frequently cut themselves, even through gloves. Van de Velde says he was clean, and police know it. O.J. also ran when he was accused (the televised Ford Bronco chase on Southern California freeways), another common step for guilty people. Van de Velde hung around Yale the entire second semester and beyond, despite the media noose.
Unlike Friedland, Richard Jewell or even O.J. Simpson, for that matter, there is no legal proceeding under way or in the works that can compel public disclosure to help resolve Van de Velde's status. That leaves him at the mercy of those who cast him as a suspect. Van de Velde says his lowest point of the past two years was when the Jovins said in a television report that if Suzanne had not taken his course, they believe she'd be alive today. Still, even as he expresses anger at being blamed, he acknowledges his pain is nothing like what the Jovins must be going through.
From their home in Germany, the Jovins declined to be interviewed for this story, saying they know too much about the investigation and could reveal information given in confidentiality. Yet Thomas Jovin, in an e-mail, was willing to share some thoughts about the case. He says the family is not focused only on Van de Velde and retains "an open mind" about culpability in the slaying. He says he and his wife are aware mistakes have been made by police, Yale and the media. "However, at this point in time, we are confident about the ability and commitment of the police officers, prosecutors and private investigator working on the case. And they are working in a systematic and comprehensive manner. We also choose to think that they will be successful."
But the frustrations of a family that has lost a daughter are evident when another e-mail arrives from the Jovins later. It comes just after authorities captured two teenagers and accused them in the slaying of Dartmouth College professors Half and Susanne Zantop. Jovin compares the two cases. "A concerted and massive effort involving the local police, university, state agencies including the State's Attorney's Office and the FBI led to rapid results in the investigation of the recent tragic murder of two faculty members of Dartmouth College. One seeks in vain for evidence of such a constellation on and following Dec. 4, 1998, in New Haven. For example, Henry Lee, one of the foremost forensics experts in the United States and a resident of New Haven (County) was not called into action."
The pain is palpable and still pours from Roman Caudillo, Jovin's boyfriend. Now living in Austin, Texas, where his family is, Caudillo is reluctant to talk about the stabbing or its aftermath. "Everything I shared with her is very personal to me." His words come in heavy, quiet phrases. He is not happy with Van de Velde, believing, as the Jovins do, that something was wrong with "his lack of attention for her, for her paper." Caudillo is equally unhappy with the "20/20" television show that for the first time gave Van de Velde a public stage to make his case. "What was the program really about? Was it about this terrible crime that was committed and this beautiful life that was lost or was it like some Yale professor in a bow tie that lost his job and is a victim of the press?" Asked about the fact that the case has gone unsolved for so long and that there seems little chance of resolution, the telephone line goes quiet for nearly 30 seconds. "It seems unbelievable that this happened," Caudillo says, finally. "That there's no evidence. Just the whole thing."
What comes next is hard to say. Pleckaitis, the former New Haven sergeant who worked forensics on the case, says he doesn't believe the Jovin case will ever be solved, "unless somebody has a guilty conscience."
The police, at a press conference Tuesday, announced that Yale is contributing another $100,000 to the reward fund for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case, bringing the total reward to $150,000. The police used the occasion - an event attended by Suzanne Jovin's half-sister, Ellen - to announce a new telephone hotline, 1-866-888-TIPS. They also said they were now seeking the public's help in coaxing someone who may have been in or seen a tan or light brown van leave the scene of the crime on Dec. 4. Chief Wearing declined to say why the police waited more than two years to seek information regarding the van. He reiterated before a battery of newspaper and television cameramen and reporters that Van de Velde could not be eliminated as a suspect. "We, as investigators, have to look at the totality of the case," he said. When asked about other suspects, Wearing said there were "a few."
Besides the police, there is the work of the private detective, Rosenzweig, which continues. And the case seems likely to remain in the public through Van de Velde's legal actions, which, defense attorneys point out, open him up to sworn depositions, another peculiar action to take if you are guilty of a crime.
High up in Crystal City, Van de Velde points out the view of the White House. It is a spectacular panorama, with planes coming in at nearby Reagan Airport. The view Van de Velde would prefer is the sweeping gothic architecture of Yale and his native Connecticut. He says the possibility of winning money from legal action is important, but not as critical as winning back his reputation. The combination of forces - the police, Yale, the media - placed Van de Velde in the box from which he has yet to figure an escape. "It was a synergistic shared responsibility," he says. "These institutions fed off one another. None of them served the purposes of justice or truth." And yet in the face of such feelings, he continues to send letters of application to Yale, almost like the marathoner lurching near the finish line. Why bother? he is asked. "Because I want to redeem my life," he replies, pausing for effect. "In total."
Van de Velde's mission is all but impossible. Steven Drivin, a Northwestern University law professor, says you only need to look at Richard Jewell. "Jewell still can't shake the stigma of having been labeled the Olympic bomber," Drivin says. "All the money in the world can't give him back his reputation." Knight, the New Haven defense attorney, says there is no legal obligation for law enforcement authorities to clear people falsely accused. "It would be so heartening to have law enforcement come forward and clear someone; it would show on the side of justice," she says. As for Van de Velde's specific case, she says, the evidence is clear. "They crucified him. I can't say it more emphatically. That is criminal what they did to this guy. They ruin a career, a life, a social life, his reputation, for absolutely no reason. And there's no accountability, either." Knight lit into Yale as well. "I was completely disgusted with Yale's cowardice. They really let practicality take the place of principle ... especially in light of the fact that there was no evidence. Just the mere accusation was enough for Yale to tuck its tail between its legs and basically cut this guy down at the knees."
The e-mail arrives on Monday night, Jan. 22, the day Van de Velde returned from San Diego, the by-now-familiar red "James Van de Velde" listed among a dozen new messages on my screen. He might have been recuperating from hypothermia that attacked him in the final steps of his marathon, but it wasn't enough to keep him from getting off a short, triumphant note.
"4 hours 10 minutes.
FUCK YOU NEW HAVEN PD"
For James Van de Velde, one marathon - the one he could control - was complete. He can only envision the finish line of the other, and keep pushing others to help him get there.
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