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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 (1186)	2/16/2004 12:10:32 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1397

Re: 2/16/04 - Hartford Courant: olice Are Perpetuating Injustice In Jovin, Reilly Cases Police Are Perpetuating Injustice In Jovin, Reilly Cases February 16, 2004 Donald Connery Yale undergraduate Suzanne Jovin, 21, was murdered on a New Haven street on Dec. 4, 1998. Barbara Gibbons, 51, was murdered in her home in Canaan on Sept. 28, 1973. They are the two most notorious unsolved crimes in Connecticut. Forget the quarter-century distance between the two killings, the urban and rural settings, and the 30-year age difference of the victims. Jovin and Gibbons are now forever linked by three common denominators: massive investigative mistakes, the continuing police rejection of assistance in identifying the killers and the shameless police history of slandering innocent suspects. Former Yale instructor James Van de Velde is, according to New Haven Deputy Police Chief Bryan Norwood, the prime suspect in Jovin's slaying. Never mind all the indicators that this was an assault by a violent stranger, not a faculty member known to the victim. Overlook the glaring errors of the investigation. Discard Van de Velde's sterling personal history and the total absence of evidence linking him to the killing. This same cavalier attitude tainted the Gibbons murder case. Barbara Gibbons' 18-year-old son, Peter Reilly (now 48), was convicted of manslaughter back in 1974 and then famously exonerated after national publicity about mistakes and misconduct by police and prosecutors. That debacle, the worst in the 100-year history of the Connecticut State Police, led not to reforms but to a bunker mentality. New police recruits imbibed the legend of Reilly's guilt. Police told reporters, "Our position is that we caught the killer." No serious investigation of known suspects occurred over a quarter-century. In 2000-01, it took a year and a half for Reilly and two of the state's top attorneys, Paul McQuillan and Hugh Keefe, to persuade the department to do DNA testing of crime-scene hair strands. Result: inconclusive. Last summer, I joined the weekly Lakeville Journal in seeking access to the Gibbons file through the Freedom of Information Act. As the historian of the case, I wanted to more fully understand how Connecticut's major law enforcement agency had gone so wrong. The state police refused to show me the file, saying that the crime was still under investigation. At a Jan. 22 Freedom of Information Commission hearing in Hartford, attorneys for the state gave another reason for the police secrecy: "There is no public record." There is nothing for anyone to access and nothing for the Freedom of Information Commission to decide. During the two hours of this hearing, certain things became obvious: The state police, after pondering the request for access, had found it convenient to "erase" the file - keeping it from public scrutiny without necessarily destroying it. This was done under the state's erasure law, which protects the privacy of an exonerated person. "I don't need them to protect my privacy," was Peter Reilly's response. "I want them to find out who killed my mother." The Gibbons file exists. It sits in a room at Troop L in Litchfield, headquarters of the Western District Major Crime Squad. Should a police agency be allowed to remove from public view the entire case file of an unsolved crime because of the exoneration of a person wrongly convicted? If so, criminals get a free pass and crimes that might be solved will remain mysteries. This nasty business almost surely will be argued out in Superior Court. Yet it need not be. There is already a distinguished former Superior Court judge, Arthur Spada, serving as commissioner of public safety. If he is willing to defy the uniformed hierarchy of the state police by opening the files, the whole charade could be brought to a screeching halt. There could be, at last, active cooperation between the department and the array of individuals most knowledgeable about the 1973 slaying. The 1998 Jovin case also cries out for cooperation - or the transfer of the investigation to an agency more competent than the New Haven Police Department. Why is all this so important? Neither Peter Reilly nor James Van de Velde, nor any innocent American, should forever be condemned to live under a cloud of suspicion. Donald S. Connery, who lives in Kent, is the author of "Guilty Until Proven Innocent" (Putnam Pub Group, 1977), on the Peter Reilly case. If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at ctnow.com/archives. ctnow.com