Co-Ed Murder 25 Years Ago Led to National Campus Safety Laws

Connie Clery recalls a conversation she had with her daughter Jeanne with the clarity that comes from revisiting memories of someone you love when you can’t make new ones.

They were on their way to one of Jeanne’s many tennis tournaments and Mrs. Clery asked her teenage daughter what she wanted to be when she grew up.

“Happy,” Jeanne replied simply.

And for 19 years she was – up until the morning she was brutally raped and murdered in her dorm by a fellow student at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. April 5, 2011 marked the 25th anniversary of her death, a tragedy that ultimately altered the culture of security on campuses and led to nationwide changes in the way campus crime is reported. It spurred Connie Clery and her husband Howard to lobby state legislatures and Congress to pass more than 35 laws on campus safety, including the federal Jeanne Clery Act, which requires reporting of crimes and security policies. 

Before Jeanne’s death, there were no uniform laws mandating that colleges report crimes on campus to students, employees, potential students or their parents. The Clerys found that out afterwards when they learned there had been 38 violent crimes on Lehigh’s campus in the three years before Jeanne’s murder.

“While it happened at Lehigh, what the Clerys quickly discovered was it could have happened at pretty much any university in the country,” said S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for the Clerys’ non-profit advocacy group, Security On Campus. “This is not something where Lehigh was out of the norm.”

Ironically, the Clerys had chosen to send Jeanne to Lehigh after deciding that Tulane University in New Orleans – where Jeanne’s brothers Benjamin and Howard III had gone – was too dangerous. They heard of the murder of a Tulane student off campus and began looking for a college in a safer setting. Jeanne chose Lehigh. 
 
“I loved it because it was a very beautiful campus, and it was one hour and 20 minutes from home,” said Mrs. Clery, who divides her time between her home in Bryn Mawr and Florida. “Jeanne loved Lehigh, you know. She grew in maturity.”

On April 5, 1986, a few days after returning from spring break her freshman year, Jeanne was asleep in her Stoughton Hall dorm about 6 a.m. when a student she didn’t know, Josoph M. Henry, entered the room intending to rob it. To get there, Henry had gone through three doors with automatic locks that had been propped open with boxes by students. Henry, who had been drinking all night, raped and strangled Jeanne after she woke up during his thieving.  He was convicted of murder in April 1987 and sentenced to death.

After the initial shock of Jeanne’s murder, the Clerys began to speak out about the need for heightened security and reporting of campus crime. They sued Lehigh University for $25 million and settled out of court for an undisclosed amount and a pledge from the university to strengthen its security system.

The family used the settlement to launch their advocacy and education group, Security on Campus. When Mrs. Clery’s first efforts to lobby Congress for legislation went nowhere, she  enlisted the voices of other campus crime victims and their families to drive home the extent of the problem. “I pounded the halls of Congress,” she recalls.

In 1988, Pennsylvania enacted the first law requiring state colleges and universities to annually make public three years of crime statistics. Other laws followed, including the passage of the federal Campus Security Act that took effect on Aug. 1, 1991.

Later renamed the Jeanne Clery Act, the amended law requires all colleges and universities to publish an annual report detailing their  security policies and three years of campus crime statistics for certain offenses. Institutions with police or security agencies must keep a public crime log and also give students and employees timely warnings of crimes that pose an ongoing threat. The U.S. Department of Education is required to collect and disseminate the crime statistics. The act affords sexual assault victims certain basic rights.

It’s tough to prove definitively that the Act has reduced crime on campuses because no accurate statistics are available to show what college crime was like before the law, Carter said.

But a U.S. Department of Justice study found that between 1994 and 2004, violent crime on campuses dropped by 9 percent and property crime decreased by 30 percent. Crime rates nationally also declined during that time.

One of the big improvements has been that campus security has become more professional – a career track rather than just something municipal police did when they retired. “It’s really changed the culture of campus public safety,” Carter said. “Almost 90 percent of all large institutions have sworn police officers who carry firearms.”

According to stats provided by the West Chester University Department of Public Safety there were 17 rapes on campus between 2007 and 2009.

The university also had 144 buglaries in the same time period.

However, most crimes on campus are by far drug and alcohol related.

Between 2007 and 2009, campus police made over 1,500 alcohol related arrests and 250 drug related arrests.

A look at crime statistics from eight area campuses shows a predominance of alcohol and drug arrests. On some campuses, the most reported crime was burglary. Burglaries are often cases of students leaving their dorm rooms unlocked and another student walking off with a laptop or other property.

Part of the difficulty in reducing crime is making students realize that they aren’t invincible, that it CAN happen to them. “The students have got to do their part, and the kids have got to be aware, so they can take preventative measures,” Mrs. Clery said.

Josoph Henry, Jeanne’s murderer, was on death row for about 14 years, filing numerous appeals before agreeing to drop all appeals in exchange for life imprisonment without parole. 

Three years ago, Howard Clery died, and this year Connie Clery decided to step back from the day-to-day operation of Security On Campus. A quarter century of activism to make campuses safer has saved lives, Mrs. Clery said, so her daughter didn’t die in vain.

“All the colleges that I know of have improved security on campus tremendously,” she said. And, inadvertently, all those years of working passionately for a cause might have saved one more life: hers. “I don’t know if I could have survived if I hadn’t done this,” she said.

Jeanne would be 44 this year. She packed a lot of happiness for herself and others in her short, sweet life, Mrs. Clery said. “She was joy. Jeanne loved life, absolutely loved life and lived it to the fullest. To me, she’s always 19.”

The full report of West Chester University crime statistics can be found here.