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 woman 11 years ago. Though the Yale lecturer was never charged and the case is still unsolved, the attention ruin ed his reputation, he says, and got him fired.
He says there is a reason investigators have been so tightlipped about the killing of Annie Le: They’re afraid of making the same mistake twice.
“We don’t want to destroy people’s reputations,” Police Chief James Lewis said 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. Thursday, police arrested co-worker Raymond Clark but said little about motive or 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 response to questions e-mailed by The Associated Press.
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 have ever been made.
A second casualty of that case was the good name 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 him as a suspect.
In 2000, at the insistence of Van de Velde and the Jovin family, Yale hired outsiders to review the case.
Private investigators pressed police to test fingernail scrapings taken from Jovin’s hand. They also sought fingerprint testing for a Fresca bottle found near her body. Neither results matched Van de Velde.
