A couple of general comments about the Register articles...
1. Having personally spent time with Les Gura of the Hartford Courant and Andrew Paciorek of the Yale Daily News I can at least say that no matter how they interpret the available evidence when writing their stories about the Jovin case that they at least took the time to consider it and to try to place everything in context. I get the feeling that the Register reporters haven't made it beyond the "he said-they said" stage. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure they took great pains to try to capture what both sides said as accurately as possible, and for that they should be commended... it's just that their questions themselves don't at all appear to me to show a deep understanding of events and circumstances surrounding the investigation.
2. If I'm the Jovin family, I'm probably getting pretty tired of reading "Van de Velde said this" and "Van de Velde said that." I'm sure they'd much rather be reading stories about how wonderful a person their daughter was and how the police were hot on the trail of her killer(s). They can blame the New Haven police for that, not Jim.
Every time I urged Jim back in '99 and '00 to be aggressive and speak out about how the police were wasting valuable time focusing on him he would tell me it was best to work behind the scenes to get the state, the FBI, PIs, etc. to help out or perhaps take things over. Note that in the Dartmouth Murders the local police immediately enlisted the help of others and solved that apparently random crime very quickly. Here is Connecticut renowned forensics expert Henry Lee was literally on standby to reenact the crime yet the New Haven police never availed themselves of his services save for analyzing a few fibers. To this day, to my knowledge, the investigation is still almost entirely being run by the local police.
I would hope the Jovin family understands that Jim's attitude is not "you have nothing on me so stop calling me a suspect," but rather "if you stop focusing on me and analyze the available evidence you'll not only conclude I couldn't possibly have been remotely involved but you'll be that much closer to finding the real killer(s) as well." Sadly it has come down to sabre rattling in order to prevent stagnation in the investigation. However, the bottom line is that all of us want the same thing: closure. At this point, more than two years after the crime, everyone (the police, the Jovins, Jim, Yale, the press, etc.) need to do whatever it takes to find the real killer(s), decorum be damned.
- Jeff |
