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Pastimes : Murder Mystery: Who Killed Yale Student Suzanne Jovin? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeffrey S. Mitchell who wrote (968)	9/27/2001 10:00:31 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1397

Re: 9/27/01 - NH Advocate: Bin Laden, crop dusters - and the last work of Suzanne Jovin The Bin Laden Connection Bin Laden, crop dusters - and the last work of Suzanne Jovin By Paul Bass Published 09/27/01 A Yale student researches the worldwide terrorist conspiracies of Osama bin Laden. She writes her undergraduate thesis on it. Her professor, a U.S. intelligence officer, has his class figure out how terrorists might attack U.S. citizens. They come up with a scenario that will resonate three years later in a real-life national panic: The terrorists will plan to use a crop duster to spread chemical weapons through a crowded area. Soon after the student completes her thesis, she's found murdered in New Haven. The student was Suzanne Jovin. The murder took place the evening of Dec. 4, 1998. It remains one of the state's great unsolved mysteries, the subject of exposés and in-depth features in the national media. Jovin's choice of thesis subject is one of many leads that have intrigued investigators who continue poring through evidence to this day. It led to renewed inquiry the past two weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, in which the Bush administration consider bin Laden a prime suspect. And this week the federal government grounded crop dusters amid reports that terrorists (allegedly bin Laden-connected) considered using the planes to spread chemical or biological weapons over American cities. All of which makes for easy conspiracy theorizing. But, say those close to the case, it's more a coincidence that adds yet another storybook twist to the Jovin saga. "We exchanged some comments about it," David Rosen, attorney for Jovin's parents, said Monday. "I don't think anybody has any sense that it's any more than a horrific coincidence." New Haven police have considered Jovin's thesis while pursuing all possible angles of the murder investigation. They also apparently received a letter (similar to one published in The New York Times magazine) urging them to consider a possible connection between her thesis and the murder. But there's no evidence that the police found a connection. Chief Melvin Wearing said he can't discuss any part of the investigation because the case remains open. "We're looking at all aspects," he said. One man would stand to gain from suggestions that Jovin's death bore a relationship to her terrorism thesis: Jovin's instructor, James Van de Velde, who lost his Yale job and his reputation after police identified him as a suspect in the murder. He has fought in the press and in the courts to clear his name. But even Van de Velde, a career intelligence officer who now works at the Pentagon in a job with high security clearance, debunks the conspiracy theory as "fanciful." "Suzanne's [1998] paper was indeed on [Osama bin Laden] and correctly noted with alarm the worldwide war he called for against Americans everywhere," Van de Velde wrote to the Advocate Monday in an e-mail responding to questions. "Her paper noted (although it was hardly new news) that OBL issued a fatwah calling for the death of all Americans everywhere, not just U.S. soldiers abroad." Van de Velde reported that Jovin never mentioned having conducted interviews for the thesis. "I would suspect she would have footnoted it to impress me that she conducted primary research and did an interview or two. The paper I got on the day of her death, the penultimate draft, a weekend and two days before it was due in final, had no such reference." Still, Van de Velde, too, used the word "ironic" to describe Jovin's work and the terrorist crisis. "I challenged my class to a class project to think like a terrorist group in an optional out of class exercise and consider how might terrorists attack the U.S. and American citizens. The class came up with buying a crop duster to attack Americans at a large and notable public event with chemical weapons ... [T]he OBL network considered precisely this scenario. newmassmedia.com