This is the house at 305 St. Ronan St. where James Van de Velde lived on the night of the murder. The following info was culled from an article in the Journal of the New Haven Colony Historical Society (Spring 2002)
East Rock: Facts, Artifacts, and Memories by
Peter Dobkin Hall.
One of the real mysteries of East Rock is the remarkable coincidence in the lives of the lead suspects in the most notorious unsolved New Haven murders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: both of whom lived at the same St. Ronan Street address. The elegant brick Tudor Revival mansion at 305 St. Ronan was built in 1915 for Walter E. Malley, chairman of the board of the Edward Malley Company, New Haven's leading department store. A quarter century before moving to the neighborhood, he and his cousin, Jimmy Malley, had stood trial for the murder of the beautiful young daughter of a Grand Avenue cigar maker.
By amazing coincidence, 305 St. Ronan, by then housing the offices of Bethesda Lutheran Church and half a dozen small apartments, would be the residence of James van de Veld, the lead suspect in the unsolved murder of Yale senior Suzanne Jovin.
On an unseasonably warm winter evening early in December 1998, police found the body of a young woman at the intersection of Edgehill and East Rock roads (Johnson 1998a). She had been stabbed seventeen times. Police could find no clues to the identity of the perpetrator, not even a murder weapon. Police searched for physical evidence, interrogated possible witnesses, and attempted to reconstruct her last hours.From the force and number of stab wounds, they assumed it to be a crime of passion. By the following week, although there were no strong leads to her killer, police announced that they had narrowed the range of the investigation to males living within three blocks of where her body was found (Johnson 1998b).Just as pressure from New Haven's ethnic communities led the police to hasty conclusions based on circumstantial evidence in the Cramer case in 1881, so pressure from the Jovin family and the university fueled a rush to judgment. 1998 had not been a good year for Yale. The arrest of a senior professor and college master as a child molester and pornographer and continuing battles with the preservation community and community activists concerned about the university's continuing expansion and destruction of historic properties had battered its reputation. Under the circumstances, particularly because it was in the midst of a major fundraising effort, the last thing Yale wanted was the widely publicized murder of an undergraduate to remain unsolved. A quick resolution of the matter, even if the perpetrator turned out to be a member of the university community, would be preferable to protracted speculation.13 Within days of the crime, investigators and the university were leaking information to the press about a suspect, Jovin's senior thesis advisor, James van de Velde, who lived at 305 St. Ronan Street, three blocks from the crime scene (Francescani & Neumann 1998 ; "Yale Prof Quizzed" 1998; Johnson 1998b). Rumors ran rampant. The suspect allowed police to search his apartment and his car and offered to take a liedetector test. The searches turned up nothing suspicious. But because van de Velde had no alibi witnesses to vouch for his whereabouts at the time of the murder, nothing he could do or say could stem the flow of misinformation. Yale added to the atmosphere of suspicion by cancelling van de Velde's courses. In ensuing months, federal authorities lent their expertise to the investigation, as did the celebrated forensic scientist Henry Lee who, on the anniversary of the crime, staged a highly publicized reenactment (Beach 1999 Through the two years following the crime, the "prime suspect" courageously defended his reputation. He continued to live on St. Ronan Street and go about his life. But he eventually gave up and left town. At least Walter and Jimmy Malley had the satisfaction of a trial and vindication. Despite the $150,000 reward offered for information leading to the arrest of a perpetrator, no evident sufficient to present to a
grand jury has come to light and van de Velde continues to live under the shadow unfounded accusation.
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Suzanne Jovin Murder Scene, New Haven CT Part 2by crocostimpy5,419 views
i live a block from there
raynecuttie65 1 year ago
there are to many posibilitys that could have happened, like if nobody saw or herd a car that night before the morning they found the body, you could assume that the culprit was on foot but parked some where close bye because she wasent killed on that spot, thats just where they found the body. i think the culprit invited the victum into there home sence there is a good chance the victium might know the murderer.
HaseoTakiX 1 year ago
That is the Yale Divinity school behind the wrought iron fence, Mr.Van Der welde lives one fifth of a mile from the murder site/dumping, there still is a chance that it was done there,with the argument being mentioned, not far from the Yale Agricultural center and loads of Yale properties on Prospect street, some affililiates are still on some sort of witch hunt
Yes ,a difficult case but never a cold one
a red hot case constantly cooled in a suspicious fashion,
joeysn7hvn 3 years ago
Jovin wasn't murdered "on the way home," exactly; she lived downtown, and her body was found a considerable distance from her apartment, in a part of town where undergrads hardly ever go (because it's a residential part of town, home to countless profs., local bigwigs, etc.). It is a complicated case, and one I hope gets solved.
EdwardMalley 3 years ago
She was a Yale Student murdered one night on the way home from a gathering If I remember correctly. They never found the murderer even though one of the professor's was a suspect.
BDOUG23 3 years ago
who was suzanne jovin??
godfatherson69 4 years ago