The Yale Murder and a look back at Sinedu Tadesse

By now you must have heard about the murder of a Yale university graduate student, the media has been giving it a wall to wall coverage. On Slate.com, Jack Shafer writes, Why the press can’t get enough of Harvard or Yale murders. More than 14 years ago, another high profile murder was committed at Harvard University. Sinedu Tadesse, a then 20-year-old junior from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, stabbed her roommate to death and took her own life by hanging herself in the bathroom. Below is an extensive article written a year later by the New Yorker magazine of the murder. Originally published on June 3, 1996 The New Yorker A REPORTER AT LARGE A year after a young woman at Harvard killed her roommate and then took her own lift, questions remain about why it happened, and whether it had to DIARY OF A MURDER Harvard’s commencement is among the most festive in the land. By the first week of June, new grass has been patched on to the square of lawn between Widener Library and Memorial Church. World eminences are invited to speak, and they come—Mother Teresa, Colin Powell, Vác1av Havel. As the seniors are welcomed to the company of educated men and women, their parents clap and cry. The most touching sight is the immigrant parents: you can see in their faces that everything they journeyed to this country for has been accomplished in a moment. There is talk this year of what should be said about two girls who will not be graduating with their class—Sinedu Tadesse and Trang Ho. It is a year this week since they died, but their deaths still have the quality of hushed taboo they had from the start. On the morning of Sunday, May 28, 1995, Sinedu Tadesse, a junior from Ethiopia, stabbed her roommate of two years, a Vietnamese junior named Trang Ho, forty-five times while Trang lay sleeping in her bed.