Re: 4/1/01 - Hartford Courant: Are You Wrong About James Van de Velde? (Part 2 of 4)
It is a blindingly bright November day in the nation's capital when Van de Velde greets me at Ronald Reagan Airport, offering his hand and his direct gaze. We ride in his same red Jeep back to his 20th floor apartment in one of a string of seemingly endless modern brick apartment towers in the Crystal City section of Arlington, just outside Washington. Many of the apartments are owned by the government and used to put up employees such as Van de Velde, who is working on a continuous consulting contract, helping in a massive government document declassification project. In one moment, Van de Velde expresses hope that the new Republican administration will hold the promise of a permanent job, possibly overseas, where he has always wanted to go to be part of global peace efforts. But then he thinks about his situation and dejection creeps in. "I don't know if that's a realistic thing to pursue. The political sensitivities are heightened ... if Yale University won't hire me, why would a new administration hire me?"
Conversation is a bit awkward; though I was Van de Velde's teacher, we didn't really know each other. Ironically, this is much the same relationship Van de Velde says he had with Jovin and has trouble getting people to understand. Here I am to report a story that, in Van de Velde's mind, must say he is not a murderer and has been unfairly accused for two years. Despite what occasionally occurs in television shows or movies, newspapers don't typically solve crimes. I tell Van de Velde this. I also warn him that any story I do can't possibly clear him either. He is bitter, not just over the local media, but about national outlets that cast an eye on the story - The New York Times, which did a Sunday magazine profile in September 1999; Vanity Fair, whose story appeared in August 1999; "20/20", the television show that devoted a full hour to the case in March 2000. Van de Velde believes everyone has tried to take a slant on the story of one side vs. the other. The same facts are spewed out - police say this, Yale did that, Van de Velde denies the other thing, Jovin's family believes something else - without any critical decision-making or deep reporting about what may be accurate. The result, he says, simply reinforces people's existing beliefs. Van de Velde accepts that I am not going to solve the case. But in 17 hours of interviews over two days, he is vehement that enough information is out there to resolve his status, if not the case, if any investigator or journalist put his mind to it.
Physically, Van de Velde has changed little in the two years since I last saw him. He is now 40, without any trace of gray in his neatly combed blond hair. He is about 6 feet tall and athletic looking, and speaks in the same quietly authoritative manner that I recalled from class. His dress is crisp as ever, with casual pleated pants and starched collar shirts. In short, Van de Velde is the same well-groomed, handsome man projecting the same measure of control that I saw during the fall I knew him. As we sit down in his living room, he lays out individually labeled manila file folders on the coffee table for handy reference. The teacher in Van de Velde comes out as we begin. He starts with a premise - "To my eyes, I see four aspects of the story..." - and gives a 20-minute overview before pausing. "Now let's start."
His tale of what has happened to him begins with his relationship with Barbara Pinto, the former New Haven bureau chief for WFSB-TV, Channel 3, in Connecticut. Van de Velde, who admits he has spent irrational amounts of time trying to analyze why he became the suspect in Jovin's case, has come to believe that what police learned from Pinto about the friendship affected their thinking. He goes into excruciating detail about a relationship that never got beyond the movie and dinner stage, in which two people never talked about much more than work or headlines or surface issues. They met when she was covering a rally for vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp in late 1996. Van de Velde, whose father had been vice president for standards at Showtime and once worked for the local ABC affiliate in Connecticut, was drawn to the business and to people like Pinto, who were everyday practitioners. At the time, Van de Velde was wrapping up his first stint with Yale; he had accepted a three-month assignment to monitor Bosnia from Naples, Italy, and was granted a leave from the university. Before he left, he had a few nights out with Pinto.
After he returned, they had a couple more get-togethers. During this time, he saw WTNH, Channel 8, reporter Anna Sava do a news report about sending flowers by telephone. Van de Velde, finding Sava attractive, anonymously sent flowers to her at her station with a cryptic note that said, "How'd they do?" He meant the flower service. "I thought it was a hilarious joke." Sava, he says, tracked him down via the flower shop the bouquet came from and the two struck up a conversation and made plans to have coffee. They never did connect, though.
In July 1997, Van de Velde left for his new position at the Asia/Pacific Research Center in Stanford. The following March, Van de Velde knew he would be leaving Stanford, and he came back to Yale to interview for a lecturer position. He saw Pinto do a television report on a fire at St. Mary's Church, where he and his mother were members. He dropped her a note; she called him back. When he returned in June, he sent her another note, expressing regrets about how their relationship ended. "I wanted to end it friendly, or see if there was a future." Pinto says she didn't write back because they never really had a relationship. She says she wasn't interested in being more than friends and wasn't happy with all the attention.
Like Sava, Pinto was interviewed by the police just a couple of days after the Jovin slaying. Among other things, she told police about an incident that had riled her, when she believed Van de Velde had been spying on her because he knew she had a fan in her bedroom when he had not been there. Van de Velde denies that he ever spied on Pinto, and says he never learned of that accusation until August 2000.
Today, Pinto, who works for CNBC in New Jersey, says Van de Velde never physically threatened her. "He's a nice person, and he's a good person," she says. "He just seemed a bit odd."
Among the numerous rumors that came out of the Jovin case was one that had Pinto giving Van de Velde a set of steak knives, which is a reason the police might focus on him as a suspect. An incredulous Van de Velde, told of the rumor, says Pinto gave him a 2-inch paring knife. Pinto confirms this. "He had picnic silverware. You couldn't even cut a piece of meatloaf with the knives he had," she says. "That knife was a joke, it was just a complete joke."
Coincidentally, Sava had had a series of hang-up calls at her home in September 1998 and had decided to file a police report. When police asked her if she knew the origin of the calls, she told them no, but did mention that she had received two letters at work from Van de Velde, sent in the wake of the flowers. She also told police "there was nothing offensive or improper within the text of those letters." The police asked her if she wanted them to contact Van de Velde, and she said no. Like the fan incident with Pinto, Van de Velde says he had no idea a report had even been filed until he learned it through his lawyer in May 1999. Saying she has never even met Van de Velde, Sava declined to comment about him.
Bill Otwell, former news director at WTNH, says newswomen can be spooked by incidents such as Pinto's fan story. That was what occurred in this case, he says. "At the time, they were all single, living alone, (or) as roommates. They're just very vulnerable people." Otwell says the police came to his station on the Monday after Jovin's death and spoke with him and Sava. The fact that Sava called police when she had the telephone hang-up calls is hardly unusual, says Otwell, recently hired as director of television and radio for The Courant. It is done as a precaution, he says. "To kind of prevent (harassment), the rule of thumb is contact police, get them on the record ... let them know what's going on."
Van de Velde later expresses anger that anyone would consider him "creepy," a word used in some media reports. "You will not find a single person to characterize me this way," he says in an e-mail.
Yet there are people who use exactly that word to describe Van de Velde. They include his classmates at Quinnipiac. John Pettit, a sports writer for the Record-Journal in Meriden, says, "He came off a little creepy." Lee Sataline, the doctor in the class, recalls an incident in which he helped Van de Velde by getting him a telephone number he could use for a story, and how he never got a word of thanks. "Eventually ... he said, `Oh, that was very helpful,' and I thought what a strange duck this was. Never said thank you."
Still, Sataline, a 71-year-old who's been practicing medicine in Connecticut for 39 years, has a simple take on all of the personality rumors about his former classmate - the gossip that fed into the public image of Van de Velde as murder suspect. "Maybe he's just an insecure guy, afraid to engage in conversation. He's certainly not the warmest guy I've ever met," he says. "You get this gut feeling as a doctor that you think you know people. My feeling is he's aloof and he's kind of a snoot, but I don't think he's a killer."
Part of the Van de Velde mystique is his military background. After graduating from the Fletcher school, Van de Velde joined the U.S. Department of State in arms control. "I wanted to tackle the biggest issue in life at that time," he says. He also joined a special program in which the government takes up to 50 people each year into the Naval Intelligence Reserve. He continues in the reserve after 12 years, and carries Top Secret clearance from the Department of Defense and Specialized Compartmentalized Intelligence clearance from the CIA. His intelligence work is largely his duty in Newport helping to organize and direct war games. The work he did while overseas for the State Department was mostly ceremonial and observational. He says he went to a lot of functions and parties and reported on the changes in atmosphere as the Communist world began to crumble. By the time Bill Clinton was elected president, security issues were no longer a government priority, and Van de Velde took an opportunity to join Yale. As dean of one of its residential colleges, he served as sounding board, advisor and supporter of hundreds of students. Most people, including himself, believe he did it well and took to his work enthusiastically. But he says he knew the dean's job was a high burnout position, demanding and not particularly well-paying. In rapid order, he took a leave, found the Asia/Pacific job and left Yale for a year, before returning in the fall of '98.
Van de Velde's story of what he did on Friday, Dec. 4, 1998, has never wavered. He says he had an early afternoon coffee appointment at the Starbucks inside a Barnes & Noble store in Farmington, down the street from WVIT, where he had interned. After he returned to Yale in the afternoon, Jovin stopped in at some point and he saw her briefly and obtained a second draft of her senior essay. He says he worked until about 8 p.m., at which time he walked a block to the Ingalls Rink to check on the hockey game. With Yale losing in the second period, he decided not to stay, and walked back to his office to lock up. He says he left at 8:10 or 8:15 and drove home, where he changed into UConn shorts and ate leftovers and watched television. When the 11 p.m. news came on with a flash about a woman found stabbed to death in the Edgehill neighborhood, his reaction, he says, was "Wow, that's just down the street." Because there was no name of the victim and no mention of a Yale connection, he didn't think about it again until the morning, when he met a friend to go jogging. They saw a newspaper headline and he wound up riding his bike down to the scene, just, he says, to check it out, "a sick, morbid curiosity" type of thing. He then went to his office to do some more work, and a student e-mailed him about the crime, telling him for the first time who the victim was. Stunned, he went to a meeting at Davenport College, Jovin's residential college, where the college dean and Yale President Richard Levin tried to comfort about 150 people who had gathered.
He would return to work, and later in the evening give a reporter at WVIT a comment about Jovin for their nighttime report. On Sunday, Van de Velde took the train to New York to see a friend and later do some holiday shopping. When he arrived home, he stopped by his office. He noticed something odd: A picture of himself in camouflage gear with a Beretta on his hip, taken while on assignment outside the Sarajevo airport in Bosnia years earlier, was missing from the front of his office door. He'd put it there as a semi-goof to greet students, not exactly the image they'd expect of a Yale professor.
Monday was the seminar's last class for the semester and, Van de Velde says, "it was a terrible, terrible scene." He put a bouquet of flowers on Jovin's seat. Half the people in class were crying, he says, and he talked about the importance of grieving. He told the students there would be no due date for papers, "and then we just sat there for two minutes in silence too stunned to talk." In retrospect, Van de Velde says, he wishes he had taken up an assistant chaplain on her offer to be at his class that morning. "I thought that because I (had been) a residential college dean I could handle it. I wanted students to know I was empathetic and sympathetic."
That afternoon, New Haven police came calling for him at his office.
The true test of a person's physical endurance, Van de Velde says, is running.
It is a challenging, painful exercise, with little enjoyment. Yet here he is, in the final stages of training for a marathon to be held in San Diego in less than two months. It is something he says he always wanted to do by the time he was 40. It became more important, he says, in the wake of what happened to him after Jovin was murdered.
"In the Jovin case, a lot of things are outside my control," he says. "This is something I can do."
What was out of Van de Velde's control was the response of the police, his employer, the public, the media, once he became a suspect.
As soon as he appeared on camera, more media descended upon Yale, and for a week there was a blitz of attention. Van de Velde initially answered some media queries from television reporters. Later, he would stop answering his telephone or his door. He wound up staying with friends at times to escape the crush of attention. Ken Spitzbard, a childhood buddy from Orange, decided to help after seeing Van de Velde's face in the newspaper. Spitzbard said he knew his old friend had to be innocent of the accusation. He called another mutual friend, New Haven attorney David Grudberg, to talk about it. As it turned out, Van de Velde had called Grudberg a day earlier, amid the initial media bombardment, after seeing his dentist. Spitzbard says Grudberg agreed with him that the accusation was ridiculous, and told him he was welcome to help out. But it took Spitzbard a while.
He called Van de Velde's apartment, knocked on his door and even climbed up a fire escape, he says, to no avail. He then drove to Van de Velde's mother's house in Orange, and while there, Van de Velde called. He'd been trying to get some sleep and hiding from the media. Van de Velde took Spitzbard up on his offer to let him use his business office in West Haven, and asked Spitzbard to pick up some examinations from his office for him to grade. Police would not let Spitzbard take anything from the office, however. But having identified himself, and telling the police he was trying to pick up some materials for Van de Velde brought Spitzbard into a world of intrigue, he says. All day, police were stationed outside his office, where they realized Van de Velde was. They followed the two to Grudberg's office later in the day. They followed as Spitzbard drove Van de Velde home. "We were essentially being trailed," Spitzbard says. "It was a very surreal experience."
Within a short time, Van de Velde, who had stayed with Spitzbard or other friends for a few days, realized he could go back to his apartment. Attention began to wane with the holiday approaching. But as 1999 began, events would occur to lock in Van de Velde as "the" suspect in the Jovin slaying. Yale officials, whose police force was working closely with New Haven detectives on the investigation, were anxiously awaiting the outcome of the investigation. The Jovin murder had come just a month after Yale Professor Antonio Lasaga resigned as master of Saybrook College amid an investigation that would later result in federal charges that he had downloaded child pornography from the Internet and state charges of sexual assault against a 13-year-old boy. Van de Velde was scheduled to teach two more seminars in the second semester, "International Drug Trafficking" and "Intelligence Collection and Analysis."
On Sunday, Jan. 10, Van de Velde arrived home at 8 p.m. after a day out to find two messages on his answering machine from Richard Brodhead, dean of Yale College, asking him to an urgent meeting and advising him he was not to show up in class the next day, the first of the new semester. He went to the dean's office, and found Yale Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer also in attendance. Brodhead handed him a letter and said the university's decision was not open for discussion; Van de Velde was told he would not be allowed to teach because he was in a "pool of suspects" in the Jovin slaying. Though the university said it recognized the presumption of innocence, it expressed concern that Van de Velde's presence would be a "major distraction" for students. Van de Velde was assigned to research duties. He says Brodhead also offered him "the option to resign." As he took the letter, Van de Velde says, a "horrible wave of despair" overcame him. He says he asked Brodhead and Lorimer if students knew of the decision and whether a press statement had been prepared. "I said, `Have you thought this through ... the signal it will send?' He (Brodhead) looked at me like he had no idea what I was talking about. They had no clue whatsoever the hysteria they were going to create by their action." Brodhead in 1999 told The New York Times that presumption of innocence is "not a trivial thing," but Yale "had to focus on whether students would learn."
Van de Velde declined the option to resign. But he was correct about the hysteria Yale's action created. By suspending Van de Velde from teaching, the university reignited media scrutiny. The New Haven police had, until the time of Yale's statement, which was publicly released the next day, never officially confirmed that Van de Velde was a suspect. In fact, in the days after the original story about Van de Velde broke, the police publicly denied they had any suspects. Their stance had made it appear, as would be logical, that Van de Velde was being questioned. Yale's statement said that police considered Van de Velde to be in a "pool of suspects," a fact confirmed by Melvin Wearing, the New Haven police chief. What appears to have happened, some students and Yale community members say, is obvious. Yale, concerned about its reputation and worried about having a murder suspect teaching its students, persuaded the police to support the "pool of suspects" comment, thereby justifying the university's decision to keep Van de Velde out of the classroom.
Yale denies that accusation. But James Thomas, associate dean of admissions at Yale Law School, says he believes Van de Velde has been wronged. "They (Yale) jumped to something before they had a basis for doing something, it seems to me." The Rev. Carleton Jones, a Yale alumni and head of St. Mary's Church, Yale's neighbor on Hillhouse Avenue, counseled Van de Velde's mother and eventually Van de Velde in the wake of the accusation. "It seems to me the self-protection of the university here, the willingness to let Jim take the whole weight of suspicion without mitigating it in any way ... has been most dishonorable. I think Yale is to blame more than anybody else."
For this story, Yale officials would not be interviewed in person, but Lorimer, through university spokesman Thomas Conroy, answered some questions submitted by e-mail. She declined to address questions related to the investigation, and on questions about Van de Velde not being allowed to teach, referred to the university's January 1999 statement about his being a distraction in the classroom. To the question, however, of how Yale treated presumption of innocence and of how the media acted after that, came the response: "Yale believes it made the proper decision. Others can evaluate the actions of the media."
Public relations have been an issue for Yale since Jovin's death. The "20/20" broadcast brought a wave of negative publicity. The Jovin family was angry with Yale administrators after the university's public relations spokesman was quoted on "20/20" off camera saying Yale wanted to put the case behind it. The university denied it ever made such a statement, but the Jovins wrote to the Yale Daily News expressing anger because they had asked the university to get involved in the "20/20" report. When asked about that, Lorimer replied via e-mail that the Jovin case has "reinforced a long understood lesson that incidents at Yale garner substantial media attention relative to smaller institutions and that we must always work hard to convey our position both to our campus community and the larger public."
The decision to suspend Van de Velde from teaching brought an avalanche of media, this time from national publications as well as local. The Courant that week printed several stories, including a front-page piece headlined "From Pillar to Pariah," about Van de Velde and the Jovin slaying. Van de Velde recently sued The Courant over the story, which included a passage in which unidentified police sources said two women, whose names were not disclosed, had filed police complaints against him. Van de Velde says neither he nor his lawyer was offered the opportunity to respond to those allegations.
The Courant last month printed a correction acknowledging that Pinto told the fan story to New Haven police while being interviewed after the Jovin slaying but had not filed a formal complaint. The correction also acknowledged the Sava complaint was made in Branford, that it had to do with hang-up telephone calls, that she was mentioning Van de Velde's name without any evidence, and that she asked that the police not contact him.
Van de Velde declined to comment about the correction. The lawsuit is still pending.
From mid-January 1999 on, from The New York Times to "NBC Nightly News," Van de Velde found himself at the center of attention in the wake of Yale's decision to cancel his classes. Time and again, his picture was played alongside that of Jovin, helping cement the image of the two as inextricably linked. One of the facts that made headlines in this period was that Quinnipiac College had expelled Van de Velde from its master's program in mass communications. Van de Velde recently sued Quinnipiac over the matter.
The media feeding frenzy came just two years after Richard Jewell's name was leaked, wrongly as it turns out, by the FBI as a suspect in the 1996 Olympic bombing in Atlanta. Yet here again, newspaper, television and magazine reporters were going after every scrap. It was like they were let loose in a jewelry store, but didn't take the time to distinguish between cubic zirconia and real diamonds. Some people learned a lesson from it. Winnie Yeung, a 19-year-old college student in Hong Kong, read about the case in Vanity Fair, and then did a project and put it on the Internet to help present a less-biased view. "I'm not for the suspect," Yeung e-mailed. "I just think that it's simply unfair to judge someone, who's not accused of anything legally, yet, to be put in front of the public, and they did all kinds of judgments in the media. That doesn't seem to be the right thing for the media to do."
With all the attention, Van de Velde says he went through his last semester at Yale "in a sort of shell, a bunker mentality. I had no idea the case was never going to be solved. I thought I'd get most of my life back once the crime is solved." He says he hunkered down with lawyers for much of the next few months, traveling to New York every other week to meet with specialists in civil rights and libel. He would go to his office about once a week. One of the low points, he says, came in March, when he asked Brodhead, since it appeared Yale wasn't willing to keep him (the university has not been responding to job applications he continues to file to this day), if he would at least write him a letter of recommendation for other jobs. Van de Velde says he figured his strong teaching reputation, combined with a letter from Brodhead, might at least allow him a chance to continue his career. Brodhead wrote him back that he would be glad to write such a letter but would have to mention the Jovin case and Van de Velde's role in it. Van de Velde bitterly shakes his head at the recollection.
At the end of two days of interviewing, I warn Van de Velde that as much as he wants me to clear him, I might just as easily find evidence that points toward him as a legitimate suspect. Van de Velde holds up both arms at the elbow, palms out, head tilted. It is a "Hey, that's fine, go for it, find something" expression. "You won't, though," he says, quietly.
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