This morning, New Haven police arrested Raymond Clark for the murder of Yale graduate student Annie Le. Clark, 24, an animal lab technician in the Yale facility where Le did research, was taken from the Motel 8 in Cromwell, Connecticut where he had been staying since yesterday. Sources say his DNA matches evidence from the crime scene while there were apparently text messages between him and Le about meeting at the lab on Tuesday, September 8—the last day Le was found. Her asphyxiated body was found in a crawl space in the research building's basement on Sunday, September 13, the day she was to be married.
Clark was charged with murder and is now being held on $3 million bail. New Haven Police Chief James Lewis said that Le, whose hard work brought her $160,000 in scholarships for her college education at University of Rochester and then to Yale as a doctoral student in pharmacology, "was a young woman with unlimited potential." He characterized the killing, "This is not about urban crime, university crime, or campus crime. It's about workplace violence, a growing concern across the country."
Some of the other evidence found: Clark's "Yale swipe card indicated he was the last person to see Le alive. The electronic trail left by his card indicated he had entered the same lab where Le was last seen. Clark also reportedly swiped his identification card at least 10 times in the hours surrounding Le's disappearance, the paper reported. The deep scratches on Clark's body came to light as the Connecticut medical examiner released Le's cause of death as strangulation, or as it was officially described, 'traumatic asphyxia due to neck compression.' Police also found a pair of bloody surgical gloves."
The NY Times' article on Clark begins, "As a high school student in the shoreline town of Branford, Conn., Raymond Clark III joined the Asian Awareness Club, which made spring rolls for a faculty lunch and organized a trip to Chinatown for the Chinese New Year. He joined the Interact Club, which focused on community problems like homelessness. And he played football and baseball, throwing long bombs as a quarterback and knuckleballs as a pitcher." But the Post paints a slightly different picture of Clark back in high school—he is "accused in a 2003 police report of forcing his high-school girlfriend to have sex with him — and vandalizing her locker when she dumped him, it was revealed yesterday."
