Re: 9/15/09 - New Haven Independent: City, Yale Learned From Jovin In Annie Le Case
City, Yale Learned From Jovin In Annie Le Case
by Paul Bass | September 15, 2009 12:01 PM
(Updated 2:09 p.m.)
Every Monday, “cold case” investigators gather to reexamine Suzanne Jovin’s unsolved 1998 murder and the paltry, mishandled evidence.
Meanwhile, a week after Annie Le was murdered, cops have closed in on a suspect while they await lab results on bloody clothing found at the scene.
Both gruesome murders involved Yale students. Both shocked the city. Both brought the national press streaming into town. Rick Levin presided over Yale then and now; his university secretary, Linda Lorimer, oversaw the crisis response. The city’s mayor, then as now, was John DeStefano; the top state prosecutor on the case, Mike Dearington.
The similarities end there.
The specter of the botched Jovin case has haunted the Annie Le case from the start — and, observe those familiar with the crisis and police responses, New Haven and Yale learned important lessons.
The biggest difference has been in the law enforcement reaction.
Yale senior Suzanne Jovin (in left photo) was found lying dead, stabbed 17 times, at the corner of tony Edgehill and East Rock roads in the East Rock neighborhood the night of Dec. 4, 1998. The New Haven police took over the investigation — and rejected repeated pleas to bring in outside law enforcement agencies to help.
“You’ll recall that in the late evening of Dec. 4, Henry Lee, at the time the [state] commissioner of public safety, called the NHPD and offered to send the state forensics people,” noted David Cameron, a Yale political science professor who has researched and written extensively about the Jovin case. “The NHPD inexplicably said no thanks, we can handle it. The result is a case that remains unsolved 10 1/2 years later.”
Major evidence was mishandled; a Fresca bottle at the scene wasn’t tested for DNA, for instance.
At the time, the police detective division was in disarray. It was botching other murder cases too — like the investigation of a murder of a prostitute, at which a concrete block with blood samples was dropped to the ground and broken. (Two split juries failed to convict the suspect in that case, for whom the department had only weak, circumstantial evidence.) The top detectives on the case ended up leaving the department under a cloud of suspicion in unrelated controversies.
With little evidence to go on, cops publicly floated the name of a Yale professor as a “person of interest” — immediately leading to the public perception that he did the crime. The tactic failed to pressure the professor to confess. In fact, no evidence ever surfaced tying him to the crime. But the episode did wreck his career, he said.
In November 2007, State’s Attorney Michael Dearington reopened a “cold case” investigation of the Jovin murder. No word on any progress since. Dearington said Tuesday that the team does meet every Monday; he declined further comment.
Fast forward to last week, when Annie Le (in right photo at top), a 24 year-old pharmacology grad student, went missing.
The FBI and state police immediately joined the case. New Haven cops — now under strong leadership with a retrofitted detective division that has been cracking not just new cases, but old “cold” ones — worked hand in hand with the two agencies and the Yale cops.
“A lesson learned [from the Jovin case] was to try to make sure that in the very first days you try to marshal all the expertise you can to solve the crime,” Yale University Secretary Lorimer said Tuesday.
In some ways New Haven and Yale got lucky — because the Le case at first looked like a possible kidnapping across state lines, the FBI could come in as a matter of routine. Which it did in a big way, joining a force of over 100 law enforcement officers. It also helped that local cops, Yale cops and the local FBI have engaged, low-ego leaders who work well together.
On Sunday, when state police found Le’s body in a basement wall at a Yale medical building, New Haven cops took over the investigation. But the agencies were already working together, and continued to do so. They had gathered plenty of evidence, including bloody clothing found in a ceiling, which went to the lab for testing.
And no suspects’ names were floated. It turned out the cops have a “strong” suspect, a lab tech who worked in the same building as Annie Le and reportedly failed a lie detector test when interviewed about the incident. As word leaked out about the suspect, police declined to confirm it, or float his name. (The suspect retained a lawyer. He’s no longer working at Yale. The state’s judicial website shows only one previous case involving the suspect, who was born in 1985; he was nabbed for “traveling unreasonably fast.”)
“We don’t want to destroy people’s reputations,” Chief James Lewis said in an interview Monday about the tight lid being kept on fast-developing information.
Meanwhile, amid a newshunt as intense as the law enforcement manhunt, police aggressively and promptly shot down false stories appearing in the national press.
Mayor DeStefano noted that the two crimes differed in important ways that helped drive investigations in different directions. Le’s case started as a missing persons case; the death occurred in a contained area with 70 security cameras. Jovin’s was a homicide case from the start. It’s unclear where the murder unfolded; there was less evidence available.
While the FBI, state police, and city police all have different leadership from in 1998, City Hall’s and Yale’s leaders haven’t changed.
“In terms of Yale and the city, I think this was an awful event in the context of a relationship where people have working relationships We have working relationships. The staffs have working relationships. [We] have a regular sense of contact,” DeStefano said Tuesday.
“Whether it was because of the early involvement of the FBI and state police in a missing person’s case, the different times and locations involved in the two cases, the new leadership in the NHPD or, most likely, a combination of all three, the point is the investigation was done right this time,” David Cameron said.
Tech Lessons
Yale has also learned about the importance of using technology to communicate within the university community, Lorimer said.
In both murder cases, she said, her office put a premium on supporting the victims’ families and keeping an uneasy campus informed. In 1998, she said, “we learned that people really followed email, and that that was the most effective and efficient way to get knowledge as soon” as possible.
In one way, communication proved trickier this time, she said — because, unlike in the Jovin case, officials at first didn’t know if Annie Le’s was missing person case or a murder. Once again, email proved crucial, Lorimer said.
It added this new option.
“We’ve learned that we should try to use all the new technologies and use them as much as we can to communicate — not only email, but also dedicated websites, which 11 years ago which were not as prevalent,” Lorimer said.
Jovin’s Family Speaks Out
Also on Tuesday, Suzanne Jovin’s family released an open letter to Gov. M. Jodi Rell expressing its sympathy for the Le family — and calling on the governor to make improvements at the state forensics lab.
“This facility, once regarded as a leading forensic unit in the country, is suffering from understaffing and inadequate funding. As a consequence, the unit is struggling to satisfy the needs of ongoing and emerging investigations, not to speak of ‘cold cases’ such as the murder of our daughter,” the letter read.
Click here to read the letter. newhavenindependent.org
Rell’s office responded by citing an August press release announcing that the state will be spending almost $2 million in federal stimulus money to improve its DNA operation. Click here to read that release. recovery.ct.gov
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