This time, the suspect wasn’t called a suspect until he was arrested. But the last time a Yale student was killed near campus, James Van de Velde wasn’t so fortunate.
From the start, he was the favorite candidate of Connecticut’s New Haven police for the frenzied stabbing death of a young German woman 11 years ago. Though the Yale lecturer was never charged and the case is still unsolved, the attention ruined his reputation, he says, and got him fired.
There’s a reason investigators have been tight-lipped about the killing of Annie Le, he said: They’re afraid of making the same mistake twice.
“We don’t want to destroy people’s reputations,” Police Chief James Lewis said earlier this week.
Lewis, who was hired last year and not involved in the 1998 case, was explaining why officers had put a lid on the murder investigation of Le, a 24-year-old doctoral student in pharmacology.
On Thursday, police arrested co-worker Raymond Clark, but said little about the evidence.
“Clearly, the chief was admitting that calling me and only me a suspect in the 1998 crime was a terrible mistake,” Van de Velde wrote this week in an e-mail.
In 1998, Suzanne Jovin, a 21-year-old political science major from Germany, died after being attacked in a prosperous neighborhood north of the campus. No arrests were ever made.
A second casualty in that case was the reputation of Van de Velde, then an unmarried, 38-year-old former naval intelligence officer who, besides teaching, also served as Jovin’s thesis adviser.
Early on, authorities identified Van de Velde as a suspect, though they never said what evidence, if any, fueled that belief.
He was hounded by the media. He had no alibi. He told police he had been home alone when Jovin was stabbed 17 times in the back and neck on a cold December night and left slumped on the curb of a residential street, less than 1km from her home.
“I wasn’t a boyfriend, ex-husband, a work colleague. I had no argument with her,” Van de Velde said. “My DNA was not at the scene. I was not seen at the scene.”
Calls to Yale President Richard Levin and the campus public affairs office were not returned. Lewis said on Friday that he had no knowledge of the previous investigation because he’s only been on the job for a year.
Van de Velde has been fighting to redeem his reputation for years. What angers him most is that police apparently did not conduct DNA tests on evidence found on Jovin’s body during the initial investigation.
Police never commented on why they may have waited nearly three years to conduct DNA tests.
Famed criminologist Dr. Henry Lee (李昌鈺), at the time a Connecticut commissioner of public safety, immediately volunteered to send state forensics experts. The department declined his offer.
In 2000, at the insistence of Van de Velde and the Jovin family, Yale hired outsiders to review the case.
Private investigators pressed local police to test fingernail scrapings taken from Jovin’s left hand. They also sought fingerprint testing for a Fresca bottle found near her body, which contained her fingerprint and a partial palm print from an unknown person. Neither results matched Van de Velde.
A match for the DNA under her nails has not been found.
After the probe, investigator Patrick Harnett, former commanding officer of the New York Police Department’s major crime squad, called Van de Velde “Richard Jewell with a Ph.D.”
He was referring to the Georgia man whose life was scarred by police publicity incorrectly linking him to the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta.
Yale has not commented on its private investigation.
The only public mention of DNA analysis in the Jovin case came in 2001, when police asked friends and acquaintances to submit genetic samples for comparison against the unmatched DNA found in Jovin’s nail scrapings.
Jovin’s case was reopened in 2007. No new evidence or leads have been reported. Assistant State’s Attorney James Clark said neither he nor his investigators would comment.
A month after Jovin’s murder, Van de Velde says Yale fired him — canceling his classes, refusing to renew his contract and telling him to stay away from students.
Angry and demoralized, he left town and went to Washington, where he worked for three years as an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He now works for a private firm, analyzing counterterrorism data.
“I was destroyed,” Van de Velde said. “Naming someone Jovin knew served the interests of Yale, which wanted to dissuade the public that [she] was perhaps killed by a random act of violence,” which would have raised questions about security on campus.
He has filed a civil suit against the university and New Haven police, alleging his civil rights were violated.
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