Murder of Suzanne Jovin

On December 2, 2018, just prior to the 20th anniversary of the murder, Yale's former head investigator, Andy Rosenzweig, finally broke his silence on the botched police investigation: “When people are fed a steady stream of reports that the police already know who committed the crime and will be making an arrest soon, they tend to think of their information as unimportant and probably wrong. Sadly, we’ll never know how many such sources in the Jovin case never came forward.” 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.

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. The matter was heard on April 17, 2017, and a decision rendered on September 1, 2017, denying the request. The Commission cited testimony of Assistant State's Attorney Marcia Pillsbury that "disclosure of the records would prejudice a prospective prosecution of Jovin's killer", finding that "a prospective law enforcement action is a reasonable possibility". In reporting on the decision, the Hartford Courant further elaborated that Jovin's clothing would undergo touch DNA testing, the FBI was re-involved, both new and prior witnesses were being interviewed, and a hypnotist was being hired to "interview a key witness who may have seen Jovin walking only minutes before she was murdered".

A true crime series about the crime, Edgehill, was in development at the cable channel Esquire Network in 2017, but never commenced any planning or filming as the network shut down several months later.

On December 8, 2012, a group of area residents presented the Jovin Task Force with potential evidence that Jovin's killer might have been a former Yale graduate student who, after telling friends he was convinced he would be imminently arrested for the murder, committed suicide. The Task Force declined to pursue the lead. These residents then filed a Freedom of Information request against New Haven and Yale; the scheduled May 31, 2013 hearing was then postponed at the request of the city.

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." As for why this testimony was withheld from the public for nearly a decade: "Sources said the police at the time showed her a photo of Yale Professor James Van de Velde — Jovin's thesis adviser, whom police had publicly identified as a suspect — to determine if he was the man she saw. They also took her in an unmarked van to Van de Velde's office so she could look at him in person. She told them Van de Velde was not the man she saw running, and investigators didn't contact her again, sources said." Subsequently, the Jovin Task Force began hanging a sketch of this person around the neighborhood in which he was spotted.

On July 16, 2008, the Jovin Task Force provided further details of Jovin's final email, written in German to a female friend, about GRE test study materials Jovin would leave for her to pick up. "Jovin wrote that she would retrieve the books and leave them in the foyer of her apartment for the classmate to pick up, giving her classmate the code to her apartment in case Jovin was not in the building." The materials were never returned, nor has anyone ever come forward as the borrower, leading many to speculate the borrower may have possibly been involved in her killing. Furthermore, Jovin's specific use of the word "someone" when referring to the borrower implies to many she did not know this borrower very well.

On September 1, 2006, nearly eight years after the murder, the Jovin investigation was officially classified a cold case and moved to Connecticut's Cold Case Unit. However, the case was never added to the Cold Case Unit web site nor was there any mention of the reward being offered—prompting Van de Velde once again to write letters of complaint. 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. According to Clark: "no person is a suspect in the crime, and everyone is a suspect in the crime." Once again the case is said to be in the hands of Connecticut's Cold Case Unit, though once again there is no mention of it on their web site.

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. The existence of the tan/brown van was not made public by the New Haven Police Department (NHPD) until March 27, 2001. 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.

The existence of the Fresca bottle came to light on April 1, 2001, by Hartford Courant reporter Les Gura. The only store in the vicinity of campus that sold Fresca that was still open at the hour Jovin was last seen alive was Krauszer's Market on York Street near Elm Street – precisely one block south of Jovin's apartment. Although Krauszer's maintained a video recording of its customers for security purposes, the police never asked to view their tape and have never reported seeking assistance from store employees or customers about whether they had seen anything unusual that night. The foreign palmprint has yet to be identified and public calls for DNA evidence to be extracted from it and other potential sources have gone unheeded.

The first mention of the existence of the fingernail DNA was on October 26, 2001, following a solicitation by the New Haven police for colleagues, friends and acquaintances of Jovin to come forward and give DNA samples voluntarily. No explanation has ever been given as to why it took nearly three years for the fingernail scrapings to be tested for DNA. On September 14, 2009, Jovin's parents wrote to Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell that "potential forensic investigations, made possible by significant advances in technology in the intervening decade, are not being carried out due to shortcomings in the Connecticut Forensic Science Laboratory." Rell's office admitted that the lab also had a backlog of 12,000 DNA samples that needed to be tested. The DNA results from material collected under a fingernail of Jovin's left hand remained unmatched until November 2009. It was determined at that time that the DNA matched that of a trace evidence technician in the Connecticut State Police Forensics Laboratory, and was the result of accidental evidence contamination at the lab.

On January 12, 2001, Van de Velde sued Quinnipiac University for wrongfully dismissing him from a graduate program he was enrolled in there. Van de Velde agreed to drop the lawsuit on January 26, 2004, in exchange for $80,000.

On December 7, 2001, Van de Velde sued the NHPD in federal court in Connecticut claiming they violated his civil rights by naming only him publicly as a suspect while claiming that other suspects existed as well. Van de Velde added Yale as a defendant on April 15, 2003. U.S. District Judge Robert N. Chatigny dismissed the federal claims with prejudice and the state law claims without prejudice on March 15, 2004. 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. On June 3, 2013, New Haven and Yale agreed to a monetary settlement with Van de Velde. State's Attorney Michael Dearington admitted publicly for the first time that Van de Velde is no longer a suspect in the murder.

The only speculation about the murder weapon came on the March 1, 2000 broadcast of ABC's 20/20. According to host John Miller's voiceover: "The medical examiner would later identify only one of the 17 stab wounds as fatal. 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." The New Haven police have never revealed whether any tests have ever been done to determine a precise make and model of the knife.

In 2000, Van de Velde and colleagues strongly and eventually publicly encouraged Yale to hire their own private investigators to study the case. In December, 2000, under additional pressure from the Jovin family, Yale relented and hired the team of Andrew Rosenzweig, former chief investigator with the New York district attorney's office, and Patrick Harnett, a former commanding officer of the New York Police Department's major crime squad. It was at their insistence that the NHPD allowed the state forensics lab to analyze Jovin's fingernail scrapings for DNA. Neither the resulting DNA nor the Fresca bottle fingerprint were a match to Van de Velde, prompting Harnett to label Van de Velde "Richard Jewell with a Ph.D.," a reference to an innocent man whose life was ruined by police publicity in 1996. Yale has not made its investigation public, nor explained its secrecy.

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. Nevertheless, though not revealing any physical evidence or a motive, the NHPD continued to maintain that their naming of Van de Velde was not presumptuous. Yale, under the guidance of Dean Richard H. Brodhead, then chose to cancel Van de Velde's spring 1999 classes citing his presence as a "major distraction" for students, damaging his reputation and academic career.

After dropping off the penultimate draft of her senior essay on the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, at approximately 4:15 pm on Friday December 4, 1998, 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. By 8:30 pm, after staying late to help clean up, she was driving another volunteer home in a borrowed university station wagon. Around 8:45, she returned the car to the Yale-owned lot on the corner of Edgewood Avenue and Howe Street, and proceeded to walk two blocks to her second-floor apartment at 258 Park Street, upstairs from a Yale police substation.

Suzanne Nahuela Jovin (January 26, 1977 – December 4, 1998) was a German senior at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, when she was brutally stabbed to death off campus. The city of New Haven and Yale University have offered a combined $150,000 for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of Jovin's killer. The crime remains unsolved. At Yale, Jovin volunteered as a tutor through the Yale Tutoring in Elementary Schools program, sang in both the Freshman Chorus and the Bach Society Orchestra, co-founded the German Club, and worked for three years in the Davenport dining hall.