I agree.
However, while it's reasonable to assume the worker may have recognized Jovin, I draw a very rigid line when it comes to surmising that he had targeted/stalked her.
The murder has to have been a spur of the moment thing. Jovin apparently wasn't planning to meet anyone that night; she told the friend she met just before dropping off the car keys that she was tired and intended to go home to bed. What made her change her mind in the space of a few minutes?
We know that nothing out of the ordinary happened as she was returning the keys, and if memory serves, no one saw what direction she took when she left. There aren't many possibilities:
1. She decided that because it was a nice and unusually warm evening for December she'd take a walk. This has always seemed implausible to me, but perhaps that's just because it's something I'd never do.
2. She actually DID have an appointment, but didn't want anyone to know about it. While an intriguing idea, I think it's unlikely. If she were in the habit of meeting someone clandestinely, at least a few of her friends, and perhaps her boyfriend, would have noticed unexplained absences and would have told the police about them after her death.
3. Just after returning the keys, she ran into a person (or persons) she knew, and was persuaded to take a walk (or a ride) with them. If so, nobody noticed, but then why would they?
4. After she turned in the keys, she realized she needed or wanted something. When her body was found, she only had a few dollars in her pocket (again, if memory serves) but that doesn't mean she didn't have more when she set out. What if it suddenly occurred to her that she was nearly out of toilet paper or coffee or whatever, and decided to stop by Krauszer's to get some? While there, she got a Fresca as well, and started home. Maybe she'd even bought something relatively heavy or bulky, and so accepted when someone offered her a lift. In this scenario, these additional items would have been left in her abductors' car.
I don't think the abductors would have been workers from the market; they couldn't have just walked off the job without having to answer questions the next day. They could have been people she knew casually, and encountered either inside the market or shortly after she left. They could also have been strangers. We all know it's dumb to accept rides from people you don't know, but when I was in college I did it fairly often.
Krauszer's receipts from that night should have been gone through, but I suppose it's too late for that now.
Of course, all this falls through if she was seen on College Street AFTER she would logically have stopped at the market; I no longer remember the geography clearly enough to guess at her probable route. The witness who claimed to have seen her didn't see a bottle of Fresca, in any case. But as you know, I've always had doubts about the reliability of that witness.
Since I think it more likely than not one wouldn't plan to abduct someone in their home town here they might be recognized...
Why not? If you're crazy enough to go on an improv killing spree, you're crazy enough to believe you'll get away with it. As in fact happened. The chances of anyone actually recognizing the abductors would have been very slim. Their real problem would have been the car's license plate, which someone might have written down. But I very much doubt that this was a violent abduction: if it had been, Jovin would immediately have dropped the Fresca bottle and whatever else she'd bought in order to fight off her attackers.
The fingerprint, unfortunately, is a partial print. However, since the police admit it doesn't match Van de Velde, it must have some value for matching. Perhaps while it couldn't provide a singular match it could at least be used to gather a pool of hits and then those hits could be thinned out manually for suspects.
Palm prints are as unique as fingerprints; even a partial would probably be adequate for the purpose of making a match. The problem is that fingerprint records--of government workers, people who've served in the armed forces, people who've been arrested, and so on--don't include palm prints.
The position of the palm print on the bottle could offer some clues, however. How would a checker at Krauszer's have picked up a (presumably small) Fresca bottle? I doubt he'd have grasped the body with his whole hand; more probably he'd have lifted it with his fingers to pass it over the scanner. Depending on how things were set up, he could also have lifted it by the top, or not have touched it at all. Where on the bottle was the print? In a position that would suggest that the owner of the bottle had lifted it to take a drink? Are there any superimposed prints, and if so, whose are on top?
All this is interesting, but not really very helpful. There's another possibility: that the Fresca belonged to one of Jovin's attackers, and that he offered it to her, perhaps to keep her off guard.
btw, I forget: where was the bottle found? |
