Liars and Saints

Final thoughts, I promise. Years ago, the National Review ran a piece about Dean Brodhead's role in the Jovin investigation. In the early nineties, a Yale undergrad had been shot and killed. The killing was at the hands of a townie. This looked terrible, of course: Affluent families all over the world were asking if their children were really safe at Yale, in New Haven. Admissions numbers dropped. In this context, it must have been especially helpful to put the Jovin blame on a professor. Administrators can think: A professor-killer is something we can recover from. What really hurts is the perception that townies are wandering the streets with guns, waiting to murder our undergrads. If American families believe some unhinged professor randomly slaughtered Jovin, that is not going to contribute substantially to New Haven's image as an unsafe place. Better the professor than some nameless, drug-addled stranger on the street. The problem is that Van de Velde seems not to be...

The tremendously gifted Michelle McNamara, author of "I'll Be Gone in the Dark," turned her attention to Suzanne Jovin in 2009. McNamara wrote a great Jovin piece--"Yale Murders," available on her blog, True Crime Diary . McNamara more or less agrees with the "Trace Evidence" podcaster. Both MM and TE argue that the killer was likely the person holding onto the GRE books. McNamara wrote *before* all the buzz about the architecture guy, "Billy," but I'd wager that MM would have shared TE's skepticism about the "Billy" theory. Why? -It seems Jovin and Billy did not know each other. No one believes that Jovin would have entered the car of a man she did not know. -Billy was already in grad school, and thus would not have needed to study for the GRE. -Billy was maybe spotted running wildly after the killing. Wouldn't the assailant have returned to his vehicle? (And what happened to that vehicle?) Anyway, McNamara...

All right, folks! Let's solve this case. *Here is what bugs me now. "Trace Evidence" seems dismissive of people who believe the professor was involved in the murder. I'm willing to say this guy is likely innocent. (He was generous with police, took a polygraph, etc.) But, also: The professor didn't really have an alibi for the night of the murder, and his house was quite close to the killing spot. So, interest in the professor does not seem off-base to me. *Jovin complained to others about the professor's lack of scholarly interest in her work, but the professor himself says she always seemed pleased when they met. Which makes me wonder: Was Jovin maybe slightly duplicitous? (Though how many of us would have the chutzpah to stand up to a Yale professor?) If Jovin was slightly dishonest in this area of her life, was she also hiding other things from other people? Was she having an affair? Was the guy who borrowed the GRE book also the object of Jovin's ...

There's a really excellent podcast, "Trace Evidence," which devotes an hour to Suzanne Jovin. The focus lands on Jovin's GRE prep books. In an email, Jovin indicated that she had to pick up her books from "someone," to whom she had made a loan. People tend to believe the use of "someone" suggests Jovin didn't know this other person well. But Trace Evidence sensibly asks: How often do you loan items of value to people you don't know? The big, glaring issue with the GRE books is this: Whoever borrowed the books from Jovin has never, never come forward. Never, in twenty years. If you had received items from someone who later turned up dead, wouldn't you speak up? (Trace Evidence asks this, as well.) Wouldn't you want to be as helpful as possible--and also, if you were innocent, wouldn't you want to be sure that you established your innocence as quickly as possible? Other people online have a divergent theory: "If I had t...

Why spend time wondering about the sordid details of Suzanne Jovin's death? Because those details are fascinating. So: Why not? *THE METHOD. People say a knifing is usually a sign of close knowledge between assailant and victim. You're likely not to knife someone if that someone is a stranger. (But, then, did the Manson group really know Roman Polanski's wife? And yet: Stabbing was used there.) Classic case of the knife as a statement of intimate feelings? OJ opting to stab--rather than shoot--Nicole to death. With the knife, the killer seems to inscribe private thoughts onto the victim's body. Far more personal than a shooting. (Think of "Scream." The murderer knows his victim--knows her very well--in "Scream." And death will occur by knifing.) *THE TANTALIZING DETAILS. In any great true crime mystery, heads will explode regarding tiny, tiny things. My favorite example is "Serial": So much ink is spilled just over the question of wheth...

"You look like a white captive," Shelby said to Maud. Maud saw herself in a mirror on the bathroom door, winter pale, wrapped in a Salish blanket. She pulled the blanket tighter around her thighs and shoulders. Her skin was very fair but rosy after her shower. "You think?" "Totally," her roommate said. Maud huddled beside a bay window of her suite, shivering deliciously in the drafts of ice-edged wind that filtered through the plaster and old stone of the building. Cheerless dawn lit the pinnacles and tracery of the Gothic towers across the Common. One by one, southeast by northwest, the trunks of the elms along the walks lightened to gray. All at once, the street lamps died together..... This is the opening of Robert Stone's "Death of the Black-Haired Girl." It's a novel very clearly about Yale, where Stone taught. In 1998, a student had been murdered there. The student was Suzanne Jovin, and she had just finished a dissert...

I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experincing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a...