Re: 6/11/09 - New Haven Register: Investigators hope reunion sheds light on Jovin slaying
Investigators hope reunion sheds light on Jovin slaying
Thursday, June 11, 2009
By William Kaempffer, Register Staff
NEW HAVEN — Yale University’s class of 1999 returned to New Haven last weekend to celebrate 10 years since their graduation.
A letter awaited them with an appeal for information from a team of investigators trying to solve the murder of their classmate, Suzanne Jovin, who was fatally stabbed Dec. 4, 1998, in the city’s East Rock neighborhood.
“Although he is most reluctant to mar this weekend of celebration, Assistant State’s Attorney James Clark has asked the University to seek your assistance in the continuing investigation of your classmate, Suzanne Jovin,” Linda Koch Lorimer, Yale’s vice president and secretary, wrote in the letter. “It is heart-wrenching that this horrible crime has not been solved.”
It’s been 10 1/2 years since the 21-year-old was stabbed 17 times in the back and neck and left for dead at the corner of East Rock and Edgehill roads. The slaying was investigated by New Haven and Yale police, and later by private investigators hired by Yale University.
Most recently, a four-man team of retired state police investigators was assembled to revisit the cold case with fresh eyes.
The team has made public appeals twice before, first to help identify a man seen running near the intersection where Jovin was killed, and weeks later for assistance in identifying the person to whom Jovin had loaned study materials for the Graduate Record Examination. Neither question has been answered.
Less than an hour before she was found stabbed, Jovin sent an e-mail to a female classmate promising to return the next day some materials she had borrowed for the GRE, but indicated that she first had to retrieve them from “someone.” Police never determined the identity of that “someone.”
Jovin, whose parents were scientists in Germany at the time, wrote the e-mail in German.
John Mannion, a former head of the state police Central District Major Crimes Unit who, with Clark, assembled the group of retired investigators, said they heard about the reunion from several of Jovin’s classmates.
“We thought it would be somewhat appropriate and beneficial to our case if we could just get the word out that we’re still alive, well and committed,” Mannion said, “and not only would we like to talk with someone from Suzanne’s class who had some thought or recollection that they hadn’t shared before, but also get word out to people who had previously been interviewed by the New Haven Police Department to contact us because we would like to interview them ourselves,” Mannion said.
Clark, a 1973 Yale graduate, thought the letter was a “tasteful and appropriate way” to bring the case to people’s attention without imposing on the reunion. “I was happy with the way the university approached it,” he said.
The four, who were brought in by the state’s attorney’s office in 1997 at a salary of $1 a year, now are special inspectors with the state’s attorney’s office, earning the hourly wage of a grade-one inspector.
Jovin was last seen alive at 9:25 p.m. after returning keys to a university van. She was found stabbed and near death 30 minutes later.
Mannion always found it “peculiar” how Jovin’s e-mail referred to a “someone,” he said, and they even had it translated by several people fluent in German to see if they might extract a different nuance.
He’s driven, he said, by a “deep sense of commitment” to the Jovin family, Clark, New Haven police and “most importantly, the memory of Suzanne.”
“Have we moved the investigation forward? Have we opened up different avenues of thought? Have we pursued different possibilities and people? Yes,” Mannion said. “Is it imminent for an arrest? No. But it could be just around the corner. We just don’t know that.”
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