NEW HAVEN -- Authorities investigating the slaying of Yale University undergraduate Suzanne Jovin, which occurred 14 years ago this month, have recently looked into tips from several New Haven-area residents that a mentally disturbed Yale graduate student might have been the killer.
But even if this man were the one police have long sought, he could never be arrested nor put on trial: he died earlier this year in a bizarre way on Interstate 95 in what could have been a suicide. <snip> We will simply call him "Billy." <snip> But the men who provided investigators with the tip and related documents about Billy are concerned that not enough has been done to check out the information. <snip>
Carter, a documentary filmmaker, lives on a corner of Edgehill Avenue, just one block away from where Jovin was slain. He recalled the day in October 2011 when Billy, whom Carter knew and had tried to help for years, showed up at his front door in a "hyper-agitated state." <snip> Carter recalled, "He turned to me and said: 'There is something I have to tell you, I am obsessed with the murder of Suzanne Jovin.'" Carter said Billy then recalled that shortly after the slaying, his roommate at their Chapel Street apartment was watching a TV news report on the case. And Billy remembered saying to his roommate: "They'll never catch me." <snip>
Carter said when he and Rosner attended Billy's funeral, they started discussing all the troubling behavior they had observed. According to Carter, that's when they realized police needed to check out Billy as a suspect in Jovin's death.
Shortly after the funeral, Carter called Billy's mother to discuss his concerns. According to Carter, she said she was deleting Billy's emails and disabling his computer's hard drive "for closure."
"I asked her not to do that because he could be linked to a crime," he recalled. "She said, 'Oh! Jovin!' So she knew he had this obsession."
<snip>
Within the next week, Carter and Rosner met with the Jovin Task Force and showed them some of their documents. These included a March 2, 2012, email from Billy in which he said: "I believe I was under investigation for the Jovin murder, which I had nothing to do with, and ironically, became paranoid about 13 years ago."
<snip>
In their 11-page summation, Carter and the others compare Billy's college yearbook photo with a police sketch the task force released based on the description provided by a female motorist the night of Jovin's slaying. She said she saw a man running wildly on Whitney Avenue after coming down from Huntington Street, close to the crime scene.
Carter and his associates pointed out the resemblance between Billy and the running man. They also note he was an avid runner. Moreover, the witness said the runner was wearing a "loose fitting, greenish jacket"; Billy often wore such a jacket.
Their summation also notes architectural students tend to carry X-Acto knives with them and that at least one of Jovin's wounds could be consistent with that type of blade.