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

To: paul ross who wrote (1153)	12/21/2003 10:43:34 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1397

Paul, according to the 1996 Bureau of Justice Statistics (the latest such reference on the subject we could find when we did research on this matter), in the female age group 18-24, 53 percent of knife homicides of women involved individuals who were at least acquainted with the victim, whereas 45 percent were committed by a stranger. However, the overwhelming majority of these homicides were committed at or in the woman's home. Only a scant 2.9 percent of such homicides were committed on the street. In other words, with acquaintance murders, the man goes to the woman's home and kills her; he does not invite her for a ride in his car and drive to his neighborhood. Further still, passion killings, which the NHPD assumed, are usually attacks face to face. Jovin was attacked from behind. Although we found no specific statistic to combine the two variables, it is statistically logical that homicides involving a knife involving a woman away from her home and from the rear are overwhelmingly committed by strangers. Of course statistics don't prove anything. They, should, however, provide guidance-- based on available evidence. In the Jovin murder, the police not only rushed to a statistically unsupported conclusion that the victim must have know her killer, they used that faulty assumption as a means to justify a rush to judgment about a prime suspect even before they analyzed the evidence. In fact, they leaked the suspect's name to the press even before they had finished interviewing him! You might recall a similarly horrific knife killing of two Dartmouth professors in their home a few years back. As it turns out, they were killed by complete strangers. Here's part of a CNN interview of the authors of a book on the murder: ZAHN: Let's talk a little bit about how this murder story was in the headlines before anybody knew that two teenagers were involved in them. What was it that captured the nation's attention? MITCHELL ZUCKOFF, CO-AUTHOR, "JUDGMENT RIDGE": It was such a brutal crime and the most unlikely victims you can imagine, these wonderful Dartmouth professors, incredibly helpful, good people, suddenly butchered in their home, with no apparent motive, no idea of who the suspects were. So it was a murder without a motive and a great mystery. ZAHN: What did you find motivated these two young men? DICK LEHR, CO-AUTHOR, "JUDGMENT RIDGE": Well, after looking into it for about a year and a half and peeling away their lives in Chelsea, Vermont, which we found to be a beautiful little village in Vermont, we concluded that Robert Tulloch, the older of the two boys, is a budding psychopath. He was a serial killer in training. And his motive behind all this was trying to get a few kills under his belt. ZAHN: What evidence is there that he was a serial killer in training, that he was a psychopath? ZUCKOFF: Well, some of his own writings, his own statements to people in prison after he was caught. And we tracked his movements for almost two years before the crime. And, slowly, it pieced together somebody who was intent on satisfying a blood thirst, a blood lust. cnn.com This is also not to say Jovin was killed by wannabe serial killers. It just shows that in this modern day and age, just like an episode of CSI, it behooves one to first go where the evidence takes you and only then start delving into very specific statistics if needed. - Jeff