Re: 4/20/00 - Murder suspect blasts police, Yale negligence
Murder suspect blasts police, Yale negligence
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MICHAEL HORN
YDN Staff Reporter
Published 4/20/00
Former Yale lecturer James Van de Velde, the only publicly named suspect in the Dec. 4, 1998 murder of Davenport senior Suzanne Jovin '99, agreed to answer questions e-mailed by YDN Staff Reporter Michael Horn.
YDN: Describe your relationship with Suzanne Jovin.
Van de Velde: My relationship with Suzanne was typical, normal and professional. I thought extremely highly of her; she was an excellent student. I wrote a glowing recommendation for her file at her request in October 1998 that records this. We never argued over anything, we had no relationship, I never tried to have a relationship with her, I knew nothing of her personal life and I never saw her outside class or office hours.
YDN: Tell me about this whole incident from your perspective.
Van de Velde: The case is a fiasco. The investigation is nowhere. Extrapolating from the questions we have received and the information we have learned, the police have no leads and no direction and never did. The New Haven Chief of Police, Melvin Wearing, stated in June 1999 that all the police needed was a "break." What he really meant is that all the police need is for the murderer to walk into the New Haven police station and confess to the crime. The case may be officially "open" but the police are not "investigating" anything and have been misleading the community about this case from the very beginning.
YDN: What were you doing that weekend?
Van de Velde: I worked that Friday evening late, until around 8:15 p.m. in my office at the political science department. A friend visited at around 6 p.m. at my office for about 20 minutes to chat and has confirmed to numerous people and to the police that I reported to her that I had no plans but to work late. I ducked into Ingalls Rink at around 8:00 p.m. for a couple minutes to check on the Yale-Princeton hockey game but I didn't stay (Yale was losing 3-2). I returned to my office and departed about 8:15 p.m. Saturday morning I went jogging at 9 a.m. with my friend and went to the office at 12 p.m. to catch up on work where I first learned through an e-mail from a student that Suzanne had been murdered.
YDN: What were you doing at the time of her murder?
Van de Velde: I was home having dinner, watching Friends on tape, channel surfing and watching Channel 30 News at 11 p.m.
YDN: Why do you think you were named a suspect?
Van de Velde: I can only guess that the New Haven police questioned me because I appeared on the Channel 30, 11 p.m. evening news on Saturday, Dec. 5, to give a one sentence tribute to my slain student, because I brought flowers to the last class to sit in silence with classmates, and because I suggested to the Dean of Yale College that Yale hold a walk or vigil in Suzanne's memory. (The Dean wrote that a walk would appear as an attack on the "institution" and opposed it.)
The police were speculating that I was expressing guilt or remorse instead of grief and concern for my other students. They were incredulous that I showed so much concern for my students and were suspicious of my popularity and success. The biggest issue to the detectives during my interview was the fact Suzanne and I tried (but failed) to schedule a lunch in early November to discuss her senior essay. They were incredulous that Yale professors have "lunch" with their students and repeatedly argued that this lunch was a social lunch. (My lawyer had to send them a copy of an e-mail I sent to all my students suggesting that they schedule a lunch to discuss their term or senior essay.) Another detective claimed that I seemed very "sad" that Suzanne had been murdered and told my students that my success as a professor seemed "cult-like." He also was incredulous that Channel 30 asked me to appear on the News (he assumed that I asked Channel 30 to appear). The police were speculating that I had had or wanted an affair with Suzanne.
YDN: What do you think of the police's handling of the case, and why?
Van de Velde: It has been 16 months now and, of course, nothing was uncovered to link me to this horrific crime, not even logical speculation. Yet the New Haven police, in concert with Yale University, labeled me a "suspect" in the crime and now refuse to retract their label. The police refuse even to tell me why I was named a suspect in the first place. The police know well that I had nothing to do with this heinous crime but hide behind me to protect themselves from exposing the fact that they botched the investigation.
I spent most of my four hours in interrogation on Tuesday evening Dec. 8, 1998, discussing utterly irrelevant issues about my personal life. I spent little time discussing the Jovin case since there was nothing to discuss. I knew nothing about Suzanne's personal life; I did not even know where she lived.
I had planned on contacting the vice president of Yale to inform her of my experience and my deep reservations about the investigation the following day, Wednesday, Dec. 9, but the morning newspaper reported my interview and the Yale and New Haven police leak and exploded the innuendo that I might have been responsible for Suzanne's murder. Worse, Ned Berkowitz, a reporter from WTNH, Channel 8, staked me out outside my dentist's office on the corner of Trumbull and Orange streets that morning, Dec. 9, 1998, darted across the street when I arrived at 9:40 a.m. for an appointment, stuck a microphone and camera in front of my face and asked me whether I hurt Suzanne. He put his scoop on the Wednesday noon broadcast and the investigation then became fatally derailed. (How did he know to park outside my dentist's office at 9:40 a.m. that morning?)
YDN: How was it handled, and why?
Van de Velde: For a case that required extraordinary care, it was handled atrociously:
Despite no rational reason or an iota of evidence to support the outrageous claim, New Haven detectives and Yale officials leaked the fact that I was interviewed in the case to the New Haven Register and characterized me as their "prime suspect." The subsequent ambush interview by WTNH invited false testimony from the community and served to misinform the community and shut down leads from the public that might have helped solve the case.
On Dec. 26, 1998, the New Haven police posted flyers along the front door of the Yale political science building and along the street in front of my apartment stating that Ms. Jovin "had been seen in this location" the evening of her death when, in fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that she was anywhere near the Yale political science department or my apartment the evening of her death. This act also invited more false testimony.
When questioning two individuals who reported a car speeding through the intersection of East Rock and Prospect streets about the time of the crime, New Haven detectives asked leadingly whether the car they had seen was a "red Jeep." (I drive a red Jeep.) They denied it was, though the detectives repeated the leading question. They also showed them my picture and asked whether the driver of the car was me. They specifically denied that it was.
In questioning students, colleagues and members of the Connecticut community, New Haven detectives stated inflammatory and untrue things about me. Individuals interviewed would typically call my lawyers or me to inform them of statements expressed by New Haven detectives. We have compiled quite a list of statements from individuals interviewed.
Of particular note, the detectives in charge of the case who interviewed me seemed influenced by the false and malicious comments made by an individual I once dated. It never occurred to these so-called veteran detectives, who couldn't tell the difference between Dudley Do-Right and a depraved murderer, that maybe the dumped, ex-girlfriend had an agenda of her own. We have understood this from day one of the investigation but the New Haven police chose to give credence to these rumors over the truth and thereby botched their own investigation.
Of course, the New Haven police purposefully leaked the "fact" of "two complaints from female broadcast reporters" to the Hartford Courant in January 1999 to insinuate that I am some sort of harasser of women. Subsequent media reports resuscitated them as credible and relevant. The Courant printed the rumors without confirmation, elaboration, my comments or any investigation whatsoever.
YDN: What do you think of the fact that the case is still not solved?
Van de Velde: The best chance for this crime to be solved is for the State or FBI to assume control and start anew. If the case remains within the purview of the New Haven police, the case will never be solved. I have doubts now, given how responsible the police and Yale are for creating this mess, how eagerly the New Haven police are working to solve this crime.
By leaking my interview to the press, the police and Yale invited false testimony and purposefully insinuated my guilt. The case required hard, careful investigatory work and the constant solicitation of assistance from the public. This didn't happen.
Vice President Lorimer glibly and immediately repeated the New Haven police's assessment that Suzanne "knew her killer" both on campus and in alumni meetings to allay Yale concerns. Her responsibility should have been to all Yale students and to Suzanne's family. Instead of repeating the self-serving speculation to serve Yale's parochial interests, leadership demanded that she insist on a coherent defense of the assessment or, better, an arrest, before repeating such speculation.
YDN: What do you think of the fact that you were named as a suspect?
Van de Velde: It has been extraordinarily hard for me to live with the fact that my life has been destroyed because I agreed to appear on television to give a tribute to Suzanne that prompted baseless and wild police speculation.
Mine is a story about the dangers of a capricious police investigation, media hysteria and the moral imperative of integrity by anyone in a position of authority. People have a moral responsibility to act responsibly. If they don't, the system collapses.
YDN: Something that puzzles me, and I don't quite understand, is the car manual incident. Can you explain that to me? How did it get buried?
Van de Velde: The car manual incident was a farce. Last April, the New Haven police elicited the help of a metal detector club to search for evidence from the crime scene and invited the Connecticut media to tag along. The group was directed to search the area and then walk a half-mile to my apartment to search the area around my home. A club member found my Jeep owner's manual near where I parked my car, which had been tossed into some light trees when my car was broken into in October 1998 and my glove compartment was ransacked. Police on the scene called it "evidence," and the media reported it as such. The New Haven Register even reported it, at first, as a "metal object." Another police leak the following day revealed that it was, in fact, only a car owner's manual. My lawyer later proved to the police that a break-in of my car had occurred in October. I never heard that the manual was "buried." No media bothered to print or air that it proved to be no evidence whatsoever or decry their manipulation by the police.
YDN: What are your feelings about Jovin's family and their actions?
Van de Velde: I feel terrible for the Jovins, their pain is unimaginable, and especially so because they have been misled by the New Haven police. I doubt they have a good understanding of the case. Their actions are those of a family in great pain and confusion. They are victims twice over.
From the outset, the New Haven police told the parents of Suzanne (and some friends of Suzanne) that the case would be wrapped up quickly and insinuated that I was guilty of murdering their daughter. They also purposefully characterized my teaching and character darkly.
YDN: What are your feelings about the media?
Van de Velde: The New Haven Register has acted, not as the people's vanguard, but as an accomplice in reporting police speculation and innuendo. I consider it complicit in the derailment of a homicide investigation. I believe that had reporters of the New Haven Register applied the minimal amount of analytical skepticism of the police's speculation and avoided rumor and innuendo, they would have assisted the community and perhaps helped to solve the case. I feel similarly toward the Hartford Courant, WTNH and Vanity Fair.
Time after time reporters from the Register, WTNH and Courant simply accepted vague statements and innuendo from the police without the slightest challenge and printed such statements as news. Reporters would learn only positive comments from my students and friends about me but refused to print or air them, since they contradicted the story line they wanted to push. The default attitude of any responsible journalist in a healthy democracy should be skepticism of any authority to protect both the innocent and the public from shoddy police work. This is a case, not of yellow journalism, but downright irresponsible media conduct. Worse, several members of the Connecticut media may be responsible for the investigation to have become derailed in the first place.
Just six months ago my lawyer asked the Head of Detectives of New Haven whether he had ever heard the testimony of a woman who lives on Edgehill Avenue who had seen what she described as a suspicious car parked at the very corner of Edgehill and East Rock with two to three individuals inside about the time of the murder, which drove away when she approached it. She also saw a couple, whom she says was not Suzanne or me, "looking tense" and walking down East Rock Road toward Whitney Avenue at the time of the murder. (This couple, therefore, could have been the couple heard "arguing" by the neighbor who lives on the corner of Whitney and East Rock -- a long block away from the crime scene -- and therefore had nothing to do with the murder.) She told these accounts to a detective on the scene the evening after the murder, but the information somehow never reached the two detectives in charge of the investigation. It took 11 months and my lawyer to get the State's Attorney in charge and the witness together. Yet my lawyer shared this testimony long ago with a reporter from the New Haven Register, who declined to report it, a reporter from the Hartford Courant, who declined to report it, and a reporter from the New York Times, who even interviewed the witness but who declined to report the testimony.
I remember reading last year in the Yale Herald an editorial that the "media had uncovered damaging things" about me. This is absolutely false. The allegations that I had been fired from any job anywhere is absolutely false; the allegation that I have harassed or bothered any woman anywhere ever in my life is absolutely false; the allegation that I was suspended from Quinnipiac College's journalism program for academic reasons or for not completing an internship is false and libelous. I deny ever harassing, bothering or threatening any woman or any person ever in my entire life.
YDN: How do you feel the University handled the incident?
Van de Velde: If they sat around and planned it, I don't think the Yale administration of Dean Richard Brodhead, Vice President Linda Lorimer, General Counsel Dorothy Robinson and the Yale Office of Public Affairs could have performed any worse. People have a moral responsibility to show the minimal amount of strength and integrity. Individuals have a moral responsibility to confront capricious authority.
First, December to January 1998 to 1999, it was Yale who pressured the New Haven police to either clear me or call me a "suspect" to justify their decision to pull me from teaching. It was Yale who first announced me as a suspect in the crime.
Brodhead thought that having me teach during an investigation would elicit negative publicity for Yale, and he handed me a statement restricting me from teaching the night before my spring term class was to begin. He made it clear that there was to be no discussion and no member of the Yale administration had asked me to come in and discuss the situation beforehand. Neither Brodhead nor Lorimer understood that by pulling me from teaching they would create the very negative attention and innuendo that they were desperately trying to avoid (they even asked me if I wanted to assist in writing the press statement announcing the cancellation of my classes).
The administration subsequently did everything possible to distance itself from me, though I had led an exemplary career as dean of Saybrook College and as a lecturer in the political science department. Dick Brodhead, an individual I once considered a friend, refused to utter a single praiseworthy sentence on my behalf these past 14 months. His comments in The New York Times Magazine about the importance of the presumption of innocence made me nauseous given the fact that he has done nothing to defend that principle and everything to abuse it.
There is no point to writing and teaching principles or law if one immediately abandons them because their defense would require a little personal strength. Courage is a virtue because it is hard, not because it is bestowed as part of a Yale tenure package. The silence of the Yale faculty on this case has spoken to Yale students the loudest.
Other than Dean James Thomas, not a single member of the vaunted Yale Law School has uttered the slightest concern about the fiasco that is the Jovin investigation. Instead, the faculty sat back and watched my life be destroyed and allowed the investigation into the homicide of a Yale student to become derailed.
YDN: Do you harbor bitterness toward Yale? Have you considered filing suit against the University, or taken steps to do so?
Van de Velde: Even recently when Suzanne's parents attacked Yale for "academic malpractice" for hiring me, Brodhead could not muster even a small supportive comment of me, despite my success as a dean and a lecturer, but instead stated that a reform had been instated to require two letters of recommendation from applicants -- insinuating that Yale had made a mistake by hiring me. He could not be bothered to add that he would have been one of the recommenders he would have had to have checked to approve me as an instructor.
Brodhead, Political Science Chair Ian Shapiro and the Yale Press Office also lied to the Yale community last spring when they stated that I was not reappointed because I had filled a temporary need in the political science department and that lecturers are not normally reappointed. In fact, many political science lecturers have been renewed for many years and my courses were the most heavily subscribed and unique in the department.
With Professor Westerfield's retirement, my course on intelligence would have continued a Yale tradition. (I note that the department is now scrambling to fill the course subject void.) I also note that the department has recently constructed a new course on strategy, similar to the course I taught last fall 1998, no doubt to fill that course void too. My other two courses on diplomacy and drug trafficking were even more successful and unique.
YDN: University administrators did cancel your classes, and you have said on the record that you essentially disagree with that decision. What would you have done?
Van de Velde: I would have acted on the presumption of innocence, asked my employee and colleague to tell me what had happened, supported him vigorously in public until he was arrested or incriminating evidence was revealed, stood up against capricious authority, decried the trial by rumor and innuendo and advanced the investigation in any manner I could.
YDN: Do you understand their reasoning?
Van de Velde: What reasoning? No, I don't understand their reasoning.
YDN: Talk about the other actions taken by officials of the University too...
Van de Velde: Yale Counsel acted equally shamefully. No Yale Counsel was present during meetings between New Haven detectives and Yale students during which students were told slanderous statements about me. No Yale Counsel was present when a former student was taken down to an interview room in the New Haven Police department and told against her protestations that she had had a relationship with me and that she should admit it and who was later picked up again by New Haven police, driven around the city in the back seat of a police car, and told again to "admit" the relationship with me. No Yale Counsel has objected to the slanderous statements uttered or the press leaks by the New Haven Police or the trial by innuendo. No Yale Counsel or professor from the Yale Law School has objected to the trial by innuendo or the violations of my rights.
I offered to meet with members of the Yale Administration last spring to discuss the investigation. My offer was rejected by the Yale General Counsel with a curt letter stating that it would be "inappropriate" for Yale to meet with me, with copies sent to the New Haven and Yale Police chiefs. Yale doesn't want to know what happened.
YDN: How do you see this ending?
Van de Velde: It is deeply saddening to me to see how apathetic the Yale faculty and administration are over the investigation into the homicide of a student. The citizens of Connecticut and the students of Yale have to ask themselves whether they are satisfied with insinuation as a form of justice in Connecticut or whether they demand more from their institutions, in particular the minimum level of competence and professionalism from the police and the minimum amount of integrity from the Yale Administration. So far, there has been much complacency and little accountability for Yale's and the New Haven Police's actions. If allowed to stand, the result will be that a murder investigation will never be resolved, my life will remain damaged and Suzanne's memory will be stained by the unaccountable actions of the New Haven Police, the current Yale Administration and the Connecticut media.
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