Murder of Suzanne Jovin

Suzanne Nahuela Jovin (January 26, 1977 – December 4, 1998) was a senior at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, when she was brutally stabbed to death off campus.

[2] Suzanne Jovin was born in Göttingen, West Germany to parents who had been hired to run the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.

[4] On Friday December 4, 1998, after dropping off the penultimate draft of her senior essay on the Islamic militant leader Osama bin Laden, Suzanne Jovin began preparations for a pizza-making party she had organized at the Trinity Lutheran Church on 292 Orange Street for the local chapter of Best Buddies, an international organization that brings together students and mentally disabled adults.

"[6] Stein also said Jovin was not wearing a backpack, was holding one or more sheets of white 8 ½ x 11 inch paper in her right hand, that she was walking at a "normal" pace and did not look nervous or excited, and that their encounter lasted only two to three minutes.

[8][citation needed] Many items and observations have been reported by the police and media as possible evidence over the thirteen plus years of the investigation, much of which has either been discredited, deemed hearsay or unreliable, or been explained.

He would also determine that the murder weapon was a four to five inch nonserrated, carbon steel knife, when he discovered the tip of the blade lodged in the left side of her skull.

"[8] Though there have been no reports of anyone witnessing Jovin enter or exit any vehicle, it is generally assumed that Jovin had either forcibly or voluntarily entered one, as it was virtually impossible for her to have reached the intersection of Edgehill and East Rock Roads by foot in the short span of time that elapsed between when she was last seen alive and when she was found bleeding by witnesses nearly two miles away.

Although members of the Yale faculty had reported the police were asking privately about the van at the inception of the investigation, no explanation has ever been given why it took more than two years to release the information to the public.

And although the New Haven Register reported on November 8, 2001, that the NHPD had impounded a brown van as part of the Jovin investigation, no link has ever been confirmed.

At the end of June 2008, the Jovin Task Force revealed that only days after the crime: "A female motorist told police at the time that she was driving in the area of Whitney Avenue and Huntington Street at about 10 p.m. when she saw a white male sprint past her and disappear into the church property.

Four days after the murder, the name of Jovin's thesis advisor, James Van de Velde, was leaked to the New Haven Register as the prime suspect in the case.

Fifteen months later, criminologist John Pleckaitis, then a sergeant at the New Haven Police Department, admitted to Hartford Courant reporter Les Gura: "From a physical evidence point of view, we had nothing to tie him to the case ...

[21] Based on subsequent questioning of the Yale community, and on Van de Velde's name being released prior to the completion of his police interrogation, it became apparent the NHPD had for undisclosed reasons become convinced that Van de Velde and Jovin must have been having an illicit or unrequited affair – a notion that friends of Jovin, including her boyfriend, considered wholly unlikely.

In 2000, Van de Velde and colleagues strongly and eventually publicly encouraged Yale to hire their own private investigators to study the case.

[26] When the Chief State's Attorney refused, Van de Velde began pressing the police to undertake additional state-of-the-art forensic tests on the evidence.

On November 29, 2007, Assistant State's Attorney James Clark admitted that the case had been secretly reassigned back to New Haven in June of that year, this time under the auspices of a handpicked team of four retired detectives.

[32] In November 2016, two members of a television documentary team also petitioned the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission for access to related law enforcement records.

Sadly, we’ll never know how many such sources in the Jovin case never came forward.”[35] On December 27, 2019, in an attempt to force the State of Connecticut to finally make good on their decades old promise to DNA test the evidence using modern technology, and to shed more light on the "running man" person of interest, aka "Billy", blogger Jeffrey Mitchell released The Green Jacket Killer, a documentary on the crime.

[41] Van de Velde asked Chatigny to reconsider in May 2006, resulting in the judge reinstating both the state and federal claims on December 11, 2007.

State's Attorney Michael Dearington admitted publicly for the first time that Van de Velde is no longer a suspect in the murder.