There is a lot of biographical information on Jim Van de Velde in the Vanity Fair Article posted on SI (#15)
Message 12191387
One thing that I found interesting looking back on this part of the article was that the article does mention that her "Best Buddy" was briefly suspected and then dismissed as a suspect.
Also, it mentions that Roman had been her boyfriend since her freshman year and took a leave of absence from Yale after the murder. This would help explain why he was not interviewed or quoted in any of the follow-up articles.
<<From the outset, it appeared that the police believed that Jovin was murdered by a man, one whose motive was probably jealousy or desire or anger. "Every guy she knew was interviewed by the cops, the cops were all over them," says the woman friend. "They asked if they'd slept with her." Her mentoring "buddy" was briefly a suspect, but he was cleared by the police almost immediately, as was Roman Caudillo, her boyfriend since freshman year, who took a leave from Yale after the murder. "Roman really loved Suzanne," says a friend. "His family adored her. When the murder happened, Roman's parents were in New York [from Texas] before Suzanne's family was [able to get here]."
In the months since Van de Velde was linked in the press to the killing, his friends--as shocked and disbelieving as Jovin's--have rallied around him. They have written letters to the local media defending him, they have sat with him when he's broken down crying from the stress, afraid to go out in public. "You walk down the street and get the feeling everybody's looking at you and thinks you're a murderer," says Ira Grudberg. Van de Velde's friends say he is the last person they could imagine breaking the law, let alone killing someone. "You know the old TV show Happy Days?" asks Ken Spitzbard, a friend of Van de Velde's since the second grade. "Jim is Richie Cunningham. Could you conceive of Richie Cunningham doing something violent and horrible?"
Van de Velde was president of the student council at Amity Regional High School, in the wealthy New Haven suburb of Woodbridge. He was captain of the soccer team, played on the tennis and baseball teams, and was a member of the National Honor Society. His date to the senior prom was the most beautiful cheerleader at Amity. His pictures in the high-school yearbook are of a stereotypical American golden boy--big, athletic, somewhat shy-looking. The second of James and Lois Van de Velde's three children, and their only son, Van de Velde grew up in Orange, Connecticut. His mother worked as an administrative assistant at Yale, and his father in the media business, for the local ABC affiliate and also for Showtime. A driven workaholic, he died of lung cancer when his son was in graduate school. The family was staunchly Roman Catholic. "Jim," says a friend, "really was an altar boy."
Van de Velde majored in political science at Yale. He sang in the university's wellknown Russian chorus his freshman year and twice traveled to Asia on internships. He was a serious student who graduated with honors. After Yale, Van de Velde went to Boston to Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, from which, in 1987, he received his Ph.D. in international-security studies. In 1988 he was selected for a prestigious Presidential Management Internship and was assigned to work at the Pentagon and at the State Department, where he stayed for four years, working on U.S.-Soviet disarmament issues.
In 1988, Van de Velde also joined the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves, in which he still holds the rank of lieutenant commander, with a "Top Secret" clearance. Trained in intelligence work, he was assigned to Singapore, Brussels, and Panama, where he analyzed the drug trade out of Latin America. In 1993, after Bill Clinton defeated George Bush, Van de Velde, who was a political appointee and a Republican, left the State Department. That fall he was back at Yale as the dean of Saybrook College.
Jason Criss, a 1996 graduate, remembers when he first met Van de Velde, the week that all the freshmen were moving in. "I was a sophomore and Jim was the new dean.... The first couple days he looked like he was going yachting: blue blazer, white starched pants, he wore them everywhere. He was very formal and proper." Like almost all of the former Saybrook students interviewed for this story, Criss remembers Van de Velde "as in some ways... the model dean."
As dean, Van de Velde was supposed to supervise the academic affairs of Saybrook's 475 students, and by all accounts he took his job very seriously. He ate meals in the dining hall and knew all the students by name. He attended their student-council meetings, gave them dean's excuses when they were ill, and tried to help them out when they were in trouble. "He actually got involved," recalls one woman. "We had rats in our room, and he did something about it." During study breaks, he would invite students to his apartment. "He was a terrific cook," Criss recalls. "He'd cook us sesame noodles and Asian dumplings."
"He had this aura about him because we'd heard that he worked for the C.I.A.," another woman recalls. "He said he'd studied handwriting analysis, and he would do it for us in the dining hall," says another. Michael Ranis, who went to high school and to Yale with Van de Velde, says that his friend really enjoyed being a dean. "He liked the students a lot, the idea of being there for them," Ranis says. "He was shy and awkward socially, but he really tried. He wanted to do everything fight," says one woman.
But some saw Van de Velde as too tightly wound. He was always formal and rarely used contractions in his speech. "He was no-nonsense; he wasn't really personable," says another former student. "Freshman year everyone called him Dean Anal. He was by the book, he didn't make any exceptions." Van de Velde, who Spitzbard says has never taken illegal drugs and rarely drinks, got the reputation for being extremely strict on the issue of alcohol and drug use at Saybrook. "Dean Van de Velde was the biggest straight arrow at Yale, more straight-arrow than any dean," says Jason Karlinsky, who graduated in 1997.
Students say that by 1995 Van de Velde seemed tired of the job. "I knew he was going to resign two years before he did," says one woman who was friendly with him when she was at Saybrook. "He never liked being dean. He didn't know what he really wanted. I think he wanted something in Washington." As the years went by, he appeared to some students to become more aloof. "He gave the impression of being sort of really inaccessible," says a woman who graduated from Saybrook this year. "Men had a better rapport with him because he played on some intramural teams. For women it was more difficult; he wasn't particularly friendly."
After the slaying, the police asked students if Van de Velde had ever had an affair with a student. Whether they liked him or not, all the Saybrook students interviewed for this story say that there was never a hint of anything untoward. "There were no rumors of him having problems with women or relationships with students," says Criss. Only after she graduated several years ago, says one woman, did Van de Velde even mention women to her. As she told the police when they tracked her down in December after finding her number in his phone records, "He said that it was odd being a young guy as dean, seeing all these freshmen who are so beautiful and that it's hard not to notice," the woman recalls. "They wanted to know if I'd had an affair with him," the woman recalls, "I told them I had not."
Van de Velde took a leave of absence from the dean's job, early in 1997, to go to Italy on assignment for naval intelligence. He came back that April to complete the semester, and then left Yale to go to Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center as its executive director. In May 1998, nine months into a five year contract, he resigned and returned to New Haven. Van de Velde, a friend says, had been miserable in California. "There were older professors who came [to work] in shorts. Jim wears suits and ties every day," she says. "It did not click with anyone. He didn't have a social life. He wasn't happy."
Nevertheless, Van de Velde was upset at having to leave. "He's an overachiever" says this friend, "and basically he'd been let go." It was Van de Velde's "first real setback," says Ranis. "Most of us go through a lot of them by the time we reach 38; Jim hadn't." Van de Velde became depressed, friends say, to the point where he began seeing a therapist and was briefly put on an antidepressant.
During the summer he got back in touch with a woman he had dated before he went to California. Exactly what went wrong is not clear, but the results were disastrous. It appears that at some point during the fall of last year the woman, a local television reporter, went to the police and complained that she was being harassed by Van de Velde. "Supposedly she claimed that he was looking in her window, that he was stalking her somehow," says Ira Grudberg. The police have not confirmed the existence of this complaint, but after Jovin was killed the local press reported that apparently two women who worked for local television stations had spoken to the police about their relationships with Van de Velde. The other woman is believed to be a friend of the first. He sent the second woman flowers anonymously. She learned his identity from the florist and later discovered that he was involved with her friend.
"We have asked both the police and through the state's attorney's office, 'If there is a complaint, give us the date,'" says Grudberg. "Maybe he was out of the state. We don't know. One of the cops claims that he spoke with Jim and told him to keep away, but Jim says that never happened.... Jim was never arrested. He was never questioned." Van de Velde "flat out denies" that he stalked his former girlfriend, says Grudberg, but the attorney also believes that whatever this woman told the police has become a central element in their suspicions about Van de Velde. "I think they are convinced that he is a weird guy," he says.
"I think she understandably got upset," says a friend of Van de Velde's, who believes he really cared about this woman. "He would phone her, run into her on the street. He wasn't taking 'no' for an answer." (David Grudberg, Ira's son and law partner, who went to high school and college with Van de Velde, objects to this account. Van de Velde, he says, only ran into this woman, and phoned her once. Grudberg denies that Van de Velde was pursuing her.) "The thing with Jim is this circumstantial evidence coinciding with his personal life," says the friend. "Here he is, not letting go of a woman, and then people wonder: Was it the same with Suzanne?"
Jovin was accepted into Van de Velde's seminar Strategy and Policy in the Conduct of War, in September 1998. She was among the 169 students who had applied for the 40 places in that course and Van de Velde's other seminar, The Art of Diplomacy. During his time as dean of Saybrook, Van de Velde had also taught in the political science department, and he developed a reputation as one of the best lecturers at Yale. His teaching style was riveting and creative. To demonstrate how force changes the balance of power in international relations, he once pulled out a fake handgun in the middle of a class simulated negotiation. He organized "diplomatic receptions" for his students and gave each of them the assignment of answering a question about someone else in their class without letting that person realize that he or she was being pumped for information. He took them on field trips, including one to a nearby naval base to tour a nuclear submarine, and, says one student, "we got to touch a cruise missile.">> |
