Re: 12/2/07 - Hartford Courant: Has Case Gotten Colder?; A Decade After The Murder Of Suzanne Jovin In New Haven, The Case Is Back In The Hands Of The Department That First Fumbled It
Courant.com
Has Case Gotten Colder?
A Decade After The Murder Of Suzanne Jovin In New Haven, The Case Is Back In The Hands Of The Department That First Fumbled It
By DONALD S. CONNERY
December 2, 2007
On Dec. 4, 1998, a bright and beautiful Yale senior, the final draft of her thesis on Osama bin Laden completed just hours before, was stabbed 17 times and left for dead on a dark street corner two miles from the university's central campus.
The Ivy League setting, the false rumors of a student-professor romance, the spotlight thrown on an innocent scholar whose name was leaked as a suspect — all combined to make the crime a national media sensation in its first year.
Then the curtain came down on the drama. The cops and prosecutors went into their shells. The killing became the coldest of cold cases.
On Dec. 4, 2005, the Sunday Courant's NE magazine published my long article, "Pride And Prejudice In New Haven." The subhead said it all: "Their Fixation On One Man Led Them Nowhere. Now, Seven Years After Yale Student Suzanne Jovin's Murder, City Cops Are Stymied — and Too Proud to Ask Top State Investigators For Help."
By no means was I the first to say that the stalled investigation should be transferred from New Haven to the state's cold case unit, said to be composed of crack detectives, set up just months before Suzanne's killing.
The most persistent voice calling for action had been that of James Van de Velde, the Yale lecturer, Navy lieutenant commander and former White House appointee to the State Department whose academic career had been destroyed by the recklessness of New Haven lawmen and the university's abandonment of the principle of presumption of innocence. Van de Velde was wrongly and hastily named a suspect in the case within a week of the murder.
Christopher Morano, then the chief state's attorney, had told me that he would take on the case, but only if veteran New Haven prosecutor Michael Dearington indicated a willingness to give it up. Morano couldn't insist because that would be too pushy. Yet his small force of cold case specialists existed precisely to take on major crimes too difficult to solve by local cops throughout Connecticut.
Nine more wasted months went by. Finally, in late August 2006, Dearington announced, without taking questions, that he and the New Haven police were sending the frozen murder mystery to Rocky Hill to be thawed out by the cold case cops.
Good news at last! Or so it seemed. Silence reigned for the next 14 months. The longtime New London prosecutor, Kevin Kane, was now the new chief state's attorney. Morano had been forced from office by what had all the earmarks of a palace coup organized by Dearington and other state's attorneys ruling their independent fiefdoms.
Supposedly, the cold case unit was on the Jovin case big time. Yet Suzanne's name, photograph and crime details never were posted on Kane's Division of Criminal Justice website, where a listing of unsolved cases asks for help from the public. No mention was ever made of the whopping $150,000 reward for critical information.
My February and November letters to the chief state's attorney asking for assurance that an investigation was actually underway were not answered. A Van de Velde letter in August offering a list of forensic and other investigative ideas to catch the killer was ignored.
Recently, New Haven Register reporter Randall Beach could not even pry from Kane the name of the detective in charge of the Jovin case. But he was assured that "we're working on it." Dearington told him, "It is being diligently investigated by the cold case unit on a daily basis."
Then came Thursday's scoop in The Courant revealing that the Jovin case is back in New Haven. We learned for the first time that a quartet of retired detectives had been recruited many months ago by Michael Dearington to do what the misled public believed was being done all along by the cold case cops.
Kevin Kane's role is murky. I am reminded of the famous utterance by attorney Brendan Sullivan during a Senate hearing on the Iran-Contra scandal: "I am not a potted plant!"
Bottom line: The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, having run the investigation into the ground during the waning years of the last century, is once again in charge. Whatever the results of the latest effort to solve the crime, Dearington and James Clark, the investigator who obsessed on Van de Velde for so long, get to write the case history and bury the unpleasant details.
In my former life writing for Time and Life magazines, I was one of those Cold War foreign correspondents sitting in Tokyo and Hong Kong reading tea leaves about what was going on behind the walls of Mao's Red China, or else divining the Soviet Union's intentions by observing the facial expressions of the party bosses lined up at Lenin's Tomb for the May Day parade in Moscow.
So I feel qualified to describe the deceptions and manipulations of the Jovin affair as Kremlinesque.
Still, I am not surprised by anything that goes on in the law enforcement culture. The search for truth and justice almost always takes a back seat to the perceived need to protect the institution and its people from embarrassment. Avoid accountability at all costs.
We need to ask: Who "owns" an old unsolved murder? Must it be the exclusive property of law enforcement? Who cares the most? Law officers or the family and friends of the victim? What about concerned citizens?
Certainly in the first weeks and months of a crime, police and prosecutors can justifiably keep the public in the dark about leads and key crime details.
But if years and years go by and everything seems mired in endless ineptitude, and the deceptions never stop, don't we all deserve better?
Donald S. Connery of Kent has written about the criminal justice system for nearly 30 years, focusing largely on false and coerced confessions. He is on the advisory boards of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School and the National Center for Reason and Justice in Boston.
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Suzanne Jovin Case Timeline
Friday, Dec. 4, 1998
• 8 p.m. Pizza party for local mentoring program "Best Buddies" ends. Yale senior Suzanne Jovin, 21, drives home her "buddy" in a van she rented from the university.
• 9:25 p.m. A student walking down College Street passes Jovin near Phelps Gate on campus.
• 9:30-9:35 p.m. A Yale biology student returning to her apartment hears a man and a woman arguing on the street, about two miles from where Jovin was seen walking.
• 9:45-9:50 p.m. The student, a doctor out for a walk and a young boy in a nearby home hear a woman screaming, they later tell police.
• 9:56 p.m. The doctor finds Jovin's body on the corner of Whitney Avenue and Edgehill roads and calls 911.
• 10:26 p.m. Jovin is pronounced dead at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Late December 1998 - Forensics expert Henry C. Lee is asked to aid in the investigation.
Jan. 11, 1999 - Students arrive for Yale University lecturer James Van de Velde's classes to find that they have been canceled. Officially, he is reassigned to research duties because he is, according to New Haven police, among a "pool of suspects in the murder."
Jan. 12, 1999 - Van de Velde releases a statement proclaiming his innocence.
December 2000 - Yale hires private detectives Andrew Rosenzweig and Patrick Harnett to assist in the search for Jovin's killer.
January 2001 - Van de Velde files lawsuits against both The Courant, for libel, and Quinnipiac University, for defamation, in relation to his dismissal from the school's graduate journalism program. Quinnipiac later pays an $80,000 settlement to Van de Velde.
Oct. 26, 2001 - New Haven State's Attorney Michael Dearington reveals that DNA taken from under one of Jovin's fingernails did not match Van de Velde's DNA.
December 2001 - Van de Velde files a civil rights lawsuit again the city of New Haven and Yale University for defamation. The suit is later dismissed.
Aug. 23, 2006 - Dearington announces that he's turned over the investigation to the cold case unit of the chief state's attorney's office. But sources say the unit does little work on the case.
Sources: Courant reporting; The Associated Press; research by Sandy Csizmar
Suzanne Jovin Case
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