Re: 12/3/99 - A year later, guarded optimism surrounds unsolved murder
A year later, guarded optimism surrounds unsolved murder
Police appear to make progress with forensic evidence while friends remain optimistic about case.
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BY MICHAEL BARBARO
YDN Staff Reporter
Published 12/3/99
It has almost been a year to the day since Yale stood still on Dec. 4, 1998 -- a year to the day since one family lost their daughter, a lecturer became the subject of relentless speculation and a university fell under the bright lights of the international press.
Yet 364 days after the murder of Suzanne Jovin '99, 21, an international relations major from Goettingen, Germany, friends, police and criminal justice experts remain optimistic that New Haven's only unsolved murder case of 1998 will eventually be cracked.
They said the absence of an arrest does not mean police are not close to catching a suspect and that new evidence -- including animal hairs reportedly retrieved from the fleece jacket Jovin wore the night of her death -- may tie a suspect to the crime.
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Jovin, a Davenport senior, was killed at about 9:45 p.m. on a warm Friday during the last week of classes for the fall semester. Police found her suffering from more than 17 stab wounds in a residential neighborhood a mile north of campus.
Police appear to be redoubling their effort in the last few weeks, re-interviewing Yale students and professors and handing some aspects of the case over to Dr. Henry Lee, Connecticut's public safety commissioner, who gained national notoriety for his work on the O.J. Simpson and the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder cases.
"A murder case is never done and this case, I assure you, is not over," said Nicholas Pastore, former New Haven chief of police and current fellow at the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation.
So far, police have found neither an eyewitness nor a murder weapon.
The only named suspect in the case, Jovin's senior thesis advisor and former Yale lecturer James R. Van de Velde '82, left Yale after his one-year contract with the University expired last semester.
Van de Velde emphatically denies any connection to the murder.
Pastore, who directed dozens of homicide investigations during his seven-year tenure, said he is "confident the case will be resolved very soon.
"Just because it's a year, there is no reason to lose the optimistic momentum," Pastore said. "Everything could change with a phone call or a single forensic test. A reluctant witness may come forward and instantly, the investigation will take new direction."
New Haven Chief of Police Melvin Wearing declined a request to be interviewed for this article. Wearing will, however, speak about the case at a press conference today.
"What little we have, it's not earth-shattering and won't solve the case for us," Wearing said in June. "It's an isolated case and it's difficult to solve."
New Haven police solve about 90 percent of homicide cases, according to city records; nationally, about 65 percent of murder cases result in conviction, according to the FBI.
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Although they have been hamstrung for months by a lack of forensic evidence, New Haven police appear to be making progress.
Last month, detectives sent samples of cat hair harvested from Jovin's body to Dr. Stephen J. O'Brien, chief of the National Institute of Health's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity in Maryland.
O'Brien is the only scientist in the country with the capability to perform the DNA animal hair analysis. If the cat hair matches other hair harvested earlier in the investigation, police may be able to link a suspect with the crime, sources said.
O'Brien was out of the country this week and unavailable for comment. Dr. Marilyn Menotti-Raymond, a scientist who works with O'Brien in the lab, said Friday she could not speak to the press without the permission of the NIH.
Detectives re-interviewed a handful of Yale professors in the political science department earlier this month, according to those interviewed, who asked that they not be identified.
They said police asked them about Suzanne's character and her academic work. Jovin, a double major, was planning to complete her second senior thesis about French political identity in the spring of her senior year.
Lee confirmed that he is planning to perform a "reconstruction" of the murder and the crime scene this month, but denied reports in the New Haven Register that he plans to re-enact the crime.
"We don't do that anymore," Lee said. He said he will examine the "sequence of the murder, look at the timing and distances involved, which is what we usually do."
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As for why there has been no arrest in a year, officials disagree. Sources familiar with the case said the police investigation so far is based on circumstantial evidence and that they have been reluctant to seek an arrest warrant.
"They are very much trained and alerted that they must never go out on a limb," one source said.
The case's only public suspect, meanwhile, continues to lash out at Yale, the New Haven Police Department and the media.
"Speculation, malicious leaks, false statement and a lack of good investigatory work have marred the investigation into the murder of my student, Ms. Suzanne Jovin," Van de Velde said in a statement. "It has been nearly one year now, and not surprisingly, nothing has linked me to this horrific crime."
Van de Velde said his life has been ruined by the case. He is now unemployed and has left his apartment on St. Ronan Street near campus.
"The New Haven Police, in concert with Yale, labeled me a 'suspect' in the crime last January," he said. "Notwithstanding the complete absence of supporting facts, they refuse to retract this destructive label."
Thomas Conroy, a University spokesman, denied Thursday that Yale ever labeled Van de Velde a suspect.
Jovin's parents, who live in Germany, declined to be interviewed for this article.
But her close friends, many of whom graduated in 1998 and 1999, said they remain hopeful the case will be solved. Some said their original disbelief at the brutal nature of the crime lingers.
"It is easy to believe that this is a one-year nightmare and I will wake up and things will be okay," said David Bach '98, a German native and one of Jovin's closest friends at Yale.
"There are things that happen that you have no control over. You can lose someone to an accident or a disease and you know people who this has happened to," Bach said. "But here, someone purposefully took a life in a way that just shouldn't happen."
Michael Blum '98, also from Germany and a friend of Jovin, said "hope is the only thing we have."
"I'm trying to stay realistic. You can cling to hope and fall into despair. But of course you have it because you want it so terribly much," he said.
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