Re: 4/1/01 - Hartford Courant: Are You Wrong About James Van de Velde? (Part 3 of 4)
More than two years after Suzanne Jovin was killed, not much more is known about who might have done it than in the days just after the crime. A family lost a brilliant daughter. A man's life has dramatically changed because of an accusation. Where does this case stand?
So much is theoretical. Police have built a case based on their belief of what happened. Van de Velde defends himself by sending e-mail after e-mail to me and encouraging his friends to do the same, saying, in essence, he could not have done it.
Yet there are some indisputable facts. And some critical pieces missing.
John Pleckaitis is a criminalist who now works for the state police forensics laboratory. On Dec. 4, 1998, he was a sergeant in the New Haven Police Department whose specialty was processing crime scenes. He was in charge of forensics on the Jovin case.
Speaking out for the first time on this issue, he said Jovin's body was found on the sidewalk and moved by the first person to spot her, a civilian who happened to be a physician and attempted to revive her. He said Jovin had most of her wounds in the upper portion of her body and fell with her head going uphill. Because of that, he said, blood would tend to drain toward the lower parts of her body, which accounts for a lack of blood at the scene. Pleckaitis, who did not get to the crime scene until several hours after the stabbing, said he didn't see much of a blood trail. He said there was not enough evidence to indicate the body may have been pushed out of a car onto the sidewalk. In an outdoor crime scene, Pleckaitis says, investigators are limited to what is found on the victim; there is less of a chance that critical evidence - fingerprints, hairs, fibers - may be transferred from suspect to victim.
The police made mistakes investigating this crime, Pleckaitis says. As an example, he says, there was no reason to disclose the exact number of stab wounds Jovin suffered. An estimate of multiple stab wounds would have sufficed, and left investigators with more ammunition to trap a suspect. Nor did Pleckaitis like that police were leaking information. When asked whom he blames, he is succinct. "The media is always going to ask the questions ... you blame whoever gave them the answer. I think it hampered the investigation all around."
On the question of Van de Velde, Pleckaitis says he can only speak from a forensic point of view, not investigative. He says the night Van de Velde was questioned, four days after the murder, his Jeep was examined for the victim's fingerprints, hairs, fibers, blood, any trace evidence. "From a physical evidence point of view, we had nothing to tie him to the case ... I had nothing to link him to the crime."
One big advantage to crime scene investigation in Connecticut is access to one of the world's most renowned criminologists, Henry Lee, who at the time was the state's public safety commissioner. Lee, however, did very little work on the Jovin case, nor, he says, was he invited to do much more by the New Haven police. He says he spent Christmas Day in 1998 studying some of Jovin's clothing at the request of the department. But New Haven police, who Lee says turned down his offer to go to the crime scene the day after the murder, did not give him anything else to work on in the case. At one point, the police publicly revealed they were going to ask Lee to reconstruct the crime scene, a classic technique for a criminologist. "To reconstruct, I need all the information. All the investigative reports. All the labor. Results. All the file. Everything. Reconstruction is like putting pieces of a puzzle together. The more pieces you give to me, the more I can reconstruct," Lee says. "So far, I don't have anything." To date, he has only received the clothing and some crime scene photographs, for which he gave his "limited interpretation."
"Basically, this case already evolving is pretty limited," says Lee, who today remains a consultant for the state forensics laboratory. "As you know, solving cases, you need important evidence. You need a good crime scene, you need pieces of viable physical evidence. You need a little bit of luck." In killings such as this, Lee says, detectives must figure out why she was in the section of New Haven where she was found and determine if it was a robbery-homicide or an emotionally motivated case. "You have to look at the blood drippings, how far (she was found) from the curb ... your guess is as good as mine."
Experts in crime scene investigation, particularly outdoor crimes, say there are crucial steps involved. John Caputo, a retired state police lieutenant with 27 years of service, says the first responders to a crime, usually just one or two officers, besides trying to see if they can revive a victim, have another critical job - preserve the scene so it is isolated and disturbed as little as possible. Even in helping a victim, he says, "you need to do that in such a way so you don't go tracking evidence all over the place." He also says detectives must try to determine whether a crime happened at the scene or whether a body was transported and dumped out of a car. That can be determined through analysis, blood spatterings, traces of dirt on the victim. "You just don't take anything for granted and you don't make any conclusions until you've had a chance to evaluate all the different scenarios," Caputo says.
Though Pleckaitis says the Jovin crime scene was well preserved when he arrived hours later, police broke at least one rule - limiting the number of people with access. La-Jeune Oxley, whose home is across the street from where Jovin's body was found, was escorted to the scene to check the victim when police knocked at her door just past 10 p.m. Oxley feared it could be her 27-year-old daughter, who had left the house minutes earlier to walk the dog. Oxley immediately saw from the victim's clothes that it wasn't her daughter. She said there were eight to nine people milling around the body, including officers and ambulance workers, even though it was apparent the victim was dead.
The night of the homicide, and in the days after, police combed the neighborhood and spoke with dozens of people. One of the people whose story intrigued police, at least for some time, was James Van Pelt, who lives in the area and was on his way home from a trip to Arizona with his wife the night Jovin died. He says he was traveling south on Prospect Street, toward downtown New Haven, preparing to make a right turn onto Goodrich Street just about 10 p.m., when a vehicle cut him off. What he and his wife saw, he says, they will never forget. There was only one person in the vehicle, and he was wearing "an extreme mask of rage; a mask of insane rage. It was not like, `You son of a bitch you cut me off.' It was in a whole different realm. It was freaky that night; we came home and were very shaken. We talked about it for half an hour. And it may be a complete coincidence. But the timing was precise."
They told this story to police the next week, after Van de Velde had emerged as a police suspect. Van Pelt says the police came to him and were excited when he described the person who had cut him off as driving a red car. But when police asked if it might be a red Jeep, pushing him for a recollection, he told them no. It was a small sedan, dull red in color. What's more, the person he described behind the wheel was a young man, slightly older than college age, with dark features. When the police later returned to his home with about a dozen mugshots, the only picture he knew it could not have been was the one of Van de Velde, who is pale and blond.
The sedan that cut him off, Van Pelt says, drove fast and straight, as far as the eye could see down Goodrich, which dead-ends at Dixwell Avenue, a major thoroughfare, about half a mile away. Van Pelt says he had hoped after talking with police they would have "interviewed everyone at Yale that matched the description that I gave them that had a red car, because I knew of one individual who fit the description who had that car. It wasn't done." Nor was a description of such a person or car ever disseminated publicly. Nor is there any evidence that police interviewed people along Goodrich Street who might have been outside on a warm night for December and seen a small red car go barreling down about 10 p.m. Though the location is a couple of blocks from where Jovin's body was found, there is a logical reason to expect the person who killed Jovin would have gone that way. If the suspect's vehicle was on East Rock Road, after committing the crime he would need only to continue one block further west on East Rock, make a right turn onto Prospect and the first left onto Goodrich to escape through the gritty Newhallville section of New Haven. Other escape routes would have taken the suspect either into the Yale-downtown community or through more residential sections with slower access to major roads or highways.
Are there other possibilities or investigative threads the police overlooked? One thing that's apparent is inconsistency in interviewing. Without physical or forensic evidence, if the police wanted to build a case against Van de Velde, it would appear important to talk to everyone in his circle that fall. At least one group was overlooked by the police: Few, if any, at Quinnipiac - not his classmates, not the graduate director - were interviewed by police. People affiliated with the Best Buddies program, both clients and administrators, also indicated police interviewing was spotty.
The New Haven Police Department has come under severe scrutiny in recent years. The weekly alternative newspaper, The Advocate, keeps an archive about the scandal-plagued department under the heading: "Cops in Chaos." Of particular note was the grand jury indictment late last year of Capt. Brian Sullivan on charges of failing to turn over evidence in a North Haven murder to that community's police. Sgt. Ed Kendall escaped prosecution in the case after testifying before the grand jury. Both wound up taking early retirement, Sullivan just prior to a hearing that could have led to his termination. Sullivan and Kendall were the two top cops in charge of the Jovin case. In another incident, The Advocate reported that two New Haven detectives tried to help a witness pick out a suspect in a multiple shooting by supplying eight mugshots, one of which had been shaded yellow.
In the Jovin case, the leaking of Van de Velde's name as a suspect was another questionable tactic. Although some law enforcement authorities support the concept as a way to put pressure on a suspect and get him to crack, the majority of officers and other authorities say it is a mistake to leak the name of anyone being questioned in a crime. First of all, doing so can smear an innocent person, à la Richard Jewell. It took a federal judge's unsealing a search warrant three months after Jewell's name was leaked for him to be cleared; the judge declared he was no longer a suspect. Secondly, once a name is leaked, the person typically gets a lawyer. Detective Sgt. Patrick Nagle of the Cambridge, Mass., Police Department is in charge of the department's cold cases. One of them is the 1991 slaying of Harvard University Professor Mary Joe Frug, who was stabbed to death by someone wielding a military-style knife with a 7-inch-long blade. The stabbing has never been solved. Nagle said the idea of leaking the name of a suspect is anathema. "When I'm doing a homicide, I'm not speaking to the media," he says. In such a high-profile case, "people come up with theories and pass them off as gospel." The police, he says, must refrain from the public discourse.
The New Haven police, in addition to letting Van de Velde's name leak out, brought media attention to two other colorful episodes, but avoided following up publicly with the outcomes, both of which were negative. In April 1999, a treasure-hunting club was brought in on a Sunday to help scour the area stretching from Edgehill to St. Ronan Street. A police spokesman confirmed that "forensic" evidence was found in the area and sent for analysis, 100 feet from Van de Velde's apartment. It turned out days later the evidence was simply the manual to Van de Velde's Jeep, which had been tossed out when his car had been burgled in October 1998. Likewise, a March 1999 publicity blitz proclaimed that animal hairs found on Jovin might help solve the crime; again Van de Velde was mentioned as the only named suspect. This time, it would be months before a reporter went so far as to talk with a scientist who analyzed the hairs to get an answer. It turned out the hairs contained no useful information to scientists. Officials at Marrakech, which put together Best Buddies clients with the Yale students, said the animal hairs apparently came from the pet of one of their clients at the Dec. 4 party Jovin had organized. Van de Velde, coincidentally, had no pets. Nor was there ever any indication police had collected DNA or other forensic data at the crime scene other than what came from the victim. Thus, there seems to be no data for comparison.
Greg Marsh, a classmate of Jovin's in the Strategy and Policy seminar, says he was interviewed by police along with most of the students in both of Van de Velde's courses. Students, faculty members and friends typically were asked whether Van de Velde had ever shown more than normal classroom interest in students, whether he ever brought a knife or knives to class or was known to handle or carry knives, whether Jovin appeared upset with him. Van de Velde emphatically says he never has carried a knife of any type; he suspects the photo of him in camouflage with a Beretta on his hip was taken by police. He notes the weapon, for which he has received training twice in his 12 years of service, was required of all U.S. personnel assigned to Bosnia.
Alison Cole, a student in Van de Velde's Art of Diplomacy seminar that fall, says she was twice quizzed by police - the second time while they drove her aimlessly around New Haven in a cruiser - and pressed to acknowledge she might have had more than a teacher-student relationship with him. She had invited Van de Velde earlier that fall to speak to a group of students at an evening event. "They were just looking for me to say something that could incriminate him. But I didn't know him that well. It was very apparent in my speaking with them that I felt like they wanted him to be guilty." In addition, a couple of months later, she says, her roommate happened to mention to officers who stopped by her job that Cole was her roommate. Cole says the officers told the roommate that they "thought there was a relationship" between Van de Velde and Cole, and that she shouldn't be hiding it. In other words, police believe that a student might be willing for months to cover up a romantic relationship with a professor rather than help solve a horrible murder of a fellow student. Cole says she finds the whole police approach "kind of ridiculous."
Glenn Hurowitz, who was in the Art of Diplomacy seminar and who is now living in Israel, says he had a friend with information about someone who had had an interaction with Jovin that he wanted to report. The friend had a difficult time getting anyone, either at Yale or the police department, to speak with him, Hurowitz says. It was apparent, Hurowitz says, "they had convinced themselves early on that Jim Van de Velde was the perpetrator and they didn't put resources into pursuing other avenues as they should have." Another student in the Strategy and Policy seminar, Peter Dziedzic Jr., says police "are trying to find a person to pin this on. This looks bad for them. By casting doubt on Van de Velde, they get the chance to try him in the court of public opinion and eventually get a conviction. The police department shouldn't be playing this game."
Though most say Van de Velde was clearly the object of police focus, others encountered confusion. Greg Marsh says he was quizzed by a police sergeant who asked him if he knew of "anything you have, anything you can think of" with regard to who might have wanted to kill Jovin. The last thing the sergeant told him, he says, was that police were "completely puzzled." Marsh, now a graduate student at Georgetown University, says he thought the sergeant's comments odd, considering Van de Velde's name had been public as a suspect for two weeks.
If any group merits close attention, it would be students familiar with both Jovin and Van de Velde. Students interviewed for this story said they believe Van de Velde is being scapegoated. Marsh, for example, says "uniformly, we feel as if, if you were in the class, you know he didn't do it. Of the professors I had there at Yale, he was one of the people who just constantly ... impressed me as being a person of extreme personal integrity. It all kind of ties in to what he was teaching in the class. We thought about thorny ethical issues, when is it just to go into war. (He was) informed by strong ethical principles and let careful principles guide everything he did."
Students also question the motives police came up with, which they surmised while being interviewed.
Bailey Hand, now living in Russia on a Fulbright scholarship, says the idea of a romantic entanglement between Jovin and Van de Velde was far-fetched, and she doesn't recall Jovin being particularly upset over the tardiness in handing back her senior essay. "The only thing I remember is him handing back a bunch of papers that week. At the bottom of the stack was her corrected senior essay." She said people who believe in the essay frustration theory may just be so emotionally tied to the victim that they need someone to blame.
The handwritten cover letter Jovin included to Van de Velde with the second copy of her senior essay draft, submitted the day she died, belies no tension. Addressed to "Prof. Van de Velde," it begins with two paragraphs outlining changes she made to the first draft. It ends: "Thank you very much. Feel free to e-mail me over the weekend if you have questions or run into any major problems." It is signed "Suzanne." Earlier in the semester, in mid-October, Van de Velde had, at Jovin's request, written her a letter of recommendation for a grant application for graduate school. In it, he calls Jovin an excellent student who will "no doubt be one of the top five students in my class." The glowing, five-paragraph letter praises her as a person with a future in policy-making.
One person who can speak with at least some authority on the level of Jovin's emotions with regard to the senior essay is Susan Hauser, the retired career services director for whom Jovin worked. Although Jovin's friend, David Bach, and her family said she was in a tearful rage about her treatment by Van de Velde, Hauser says that wasn't the case when Jovin came to see her about it. Hauser says she offered to speak with someone to put some pressure on Van de Velde to get back the draft, but Jovin turned her down, saying she would handle it herself. As much as Hauser says she loved Jovin and misses her, she offers a candid assessment about her state of mind. "She was certainly not sufficiently upset to alarm me," Hauser says.
Christina James, a classmate of Jovin's in the Strategy and Policy seminar, says the senior-essay-becomes-motive-for-murder idea is far-fetched. "Frankly, not getting a response from your senior thesis advisor is really common. Mine wouldn't even look at a draft." Likewise, David Cameron, the political science professor who hired Van de Velde as a lecturer - "Without exception he had received universally rave reviews. Standard comment was `This is the best course I've had' at Yale" - says the senior essay problem has been overstated. "He didn't read the essay over the Thanksgiving break and hadn't read it by Nov. 30. He hadn't read it in time for their appointment on that Tuesday, and he acknowledged he hadn't done that and he should have. But how do you get from that to an explanation of a murder? There's no way you can get from that point to an explanation of a murder." Admonished student Bailey Hand: "Don't find a motive and then try to fit everything into that. It's sort of a bass ackwards way to go about it."
As for the crime itself, the logistics raise questions. Could police believe Van de Velde and Jovin made a secret appointment to meet? The police, about two weeks after the crime, put up fliers seeking possible witnesses on College Street north to Brewster Hall, the political science building where Van de Velde worked, as well as at the crime scene and on St. Ronan Street where he lived. Yet Jovin told no one of such an appointment, and there was the witness who said she saw Van de Velde on College Street behind Jovin. (Vanity Fair said after she initially reported spotting Jovin that night, she later called police back after seeing Van de Velde's face on a television news report.)
The problem with the "stalking/following" theory - a possibility if police believe the witness and not the appointment idea - is that Jovin took a completely random pattern from the time she left the Best Buddies party. She drove a friend home, dropped the car off, returned to her apartment, went back through the old campus, dropped off keys, then headed out north on College Street. How would anyone have been able to follow her without being noticed on a warm Friday night? How would the stalker, if it was Van de Velde, have known where to park his car to catch up with her? If he did eventually approach her, and persuade her to come with him, wouldn't that have meant he took an awful risk of being spotted?
Another twist is the plastic bottle of soda that had Jovin's fingerprints on it. The bottle was found in the bushes near her body. Since the last people to see her did not report her holding a bottle, it is possible she bought it after the last witness saw her. The only place nearby to sell the brand of soda in question was a convenience store on York Street. To get there, Jovin would have had to turn left on Elm - which puts her right on the way back to her apartment and matches the intent she communicated to Peter Stein, the other witness who saw her just inside Phelps Gate.
If Jovin were headed back home and got as far as York Street, it severely cuts down the area from which she could have either been abducted or met someone. If police suspect Van de Velde and believe a witness saw him behind Jovin on College Street, that means they must believe he parked his car near Jovin's apartment, stalked her through Old Campus, trailed her on College and Elm as she walked back home and got the soda, and eventually persuaded her to come with him in the Jeep as she got close to her apartment. That's a long way to go with no witnesses.
And why, for that matter, would New Haven police, if they believe the soda was purchased at the store on York Street, not publicize that fact in hopes of coaxing people who might have seen Jovin to come forward? The police are not talking about specifics of the case, which leaves the conclusion that this detail was one they wanted to "trap" a potential suspect into revealing. But that strategy didn't work, so why not seek witnesses from the area? And why did police not pepper Elm, York and Park streets with fliers the way they did College and Prospect streets?
Another obvious question is, if not Van de Velde, who? There is a chance that Jovin was simply overwhelmed on the street by someone with a knife or a gun and forced into a car. (In an incident at Yale this January, a student was robbed after a person who did not show a weapon forced the victim into their own car.) Possibly, it was a robbery gone awry when the suspect realized Jovin didn't have a wallet on her. Oxley, the neighbor across the street from where Jovin was found, says she doesn't believe the crime was committed right there on the street; she feels it occurred in a vehicle and the body was dumped. She says her Cairn terrier, Sebastian, would have gone into a barking frenzy if there had been the kind of arguing, fighting and stabbing that occurred. The dog never uttered a peep that night until a police officer approached her door, she says.
Still, to accept the New Haven police opinion that the killing occurred on the street - from what they could tell, there were no blood drippings to indicate otherwise - it makes it more likely that Jovin knew her attacker and got into a vehicle, for reasons unknown. It had to have been soon after she was last seen for them to have made it to the Edgehill neighborhood and to have gotten into an escalating argument that quickly. But does this necessarily mean the attacker had been stalking Jovin? The suspect may simply have been parked on either College, York, Elm or Park streets, waiting for someone he knew to come by that night. Remember, no one could have predicted that Jovin would be leaving the campus through Phelps Gate, unless she had made secret plans in advance.
James Clark, the assistant state's attorney in New Haven now assigned to the Jovin case, declined to answer questions about the investigation. But attorneys and others familiar with the case say prosecutors were never confident enough of any information to obtain search warrants or arrest warrants pertaining to Van de Velde. The legal standard to obtain a search warrant or an arrest warrant is "probable cause." For arrest warrants, that is defined in legal dictionaries as "a reasonable belief that a person has committed a crime." To obtain a search warrant, the authorities must have probable cause to believe that criminal activity is occurring or about to occur. Tara Knight, a New Haven defense attorney unconnected with the Jovin case, says that "probable cause" is the bottom standard in the legal system. "If you can't get a prosecutor who has an interest in arresting people and discovering crime to review a search warrant and at least submit it to a judge, it shows you that, not only is the evidence thin, tenuous, it's nonexistent."
In the same period when Van de Velde was being forced to be a researcher, the winter and spring of `99, the U.S. Department of Defense was checking up on him. It was time for Van de Velde's five-year security clearance review. If he were to be renewed for his top-secret clearance, he would have to pass muster with investigators from the Defense Security Service, a DOD agency that does background checks. Caryl Clubb, public affairs officer for the Defense Security Service, says an accusation such as that made against Van de Velde would certainly come up on a review, and, in fact, the service person would be obligated to report it himself. She says accusations and crimes are thoroughly checked out before decisions are made. Van de Velde says the accusation initially resulted in the Navy's removing him from his classified assignment and putting him into an education program.
But Van de Velde eventually received his security clearance renewal, and after several months, found temporary work in Washington with the government, first on a Y2K project, and then on his current document declassification project. Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Pope is his current boss, and he is emphatic about his belief in Van de Velde's innocence. "The thing that clinched it for me, other than the fact that I worked with the guy for months, is you don't tell, or you don't offer any law enforcement officer to search your premises, your vehicle, everything, if you're guilty." Pope, a licensed private investigator in New Hampshire who also at one time did criminal investigative services for the Navy, is animated in talking about the case that has ensnared his employee. "I looked at this thing and I said to myself two words - Jon Benet. Things were done that shouldn't have been done and they have bloody well no clue who did it. So they latch onto the fact that this woman had been in an emotional time on a senior thesis. Hell, I went to college. I remember people getting all bent out of shape. I said, `Get over it.' They don't have any smoking gun or bloody knife in this case, and so they're just grabbing at straws."
Pope says if there is any doubt about Van de Velde's role in the homicide, the security clearance renewal is a clear sign of his innocence. "How did Jim get a top-secret security clearance with this in the background if (investigators) didn't dig deep to get a final answer? In other words, they did. They dug and found out that `Hey, this murder allegation ... it must be bogus.' You can't have that Sword of Damocles hanging over your head and get a security clearance. It just doesn't happen, even if you know somebody, and it doesn't look to me like Jim knows many people."
Robert K. Ressler, a former FBI agent and a national expert in psychological profiling, says cases such as the Jovin slaying cause problems because police always struggle to solve crimes that don't get beyond circumstantial evidence. "What it sounds like to me is there is very little real evidence. It's all speculative."
"Let's admit it, the guy could have done it, but behaviorally, with his history and his background, he doesn't fit into the mold," Ressler says, having been told Van de Velde has no criminal background. The best predictor of violent behavior is past behavior, says Ressler, who worked for Richard Jewell as an expert in profiling to combat media mistakes. Even if Van de Velde had some sort of problem with television newswomen, Ressler says, stories such as the flowers sent to Anna Sava only indicate "a desperate attempt to start a relationship. It's kind of a weak, introverted way, certainly not the type of behavior that would constitute violent behavior afterward."
Even more indicative of guilt or innocence, Ressler says, is a suspect's behavior after a crime. Like Pope, Ressler says the fact that Van de Velde has publicly and loudly been pursuing the right to have his name cleared speaks volumes. "This guy, if he's trying to get back to Yale, he'd have to be a real stone psychopath to be able to withstand all of that scrutiny and still try to clear himself. Most people who beat (a murder charge) would be more than glad to get the hell out of there and stay out."
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