Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
Just after 10 o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, September 8, 2009, a security camera outside a Yale research building in New Haven, Connecticut, recorded a small young woman walking in through the door.
She wore a green top and a dark skirt. She was carrying papers and a box.
Her name was Annie Le. She was 24. In five days, she was getting married.
The camera never recorded her walking out.
Annie
Annie Marie Thu Le was born on July 3, 1985. She grew up in Placerville, California, in a big, close family. Her cousin Ryan, who grew up in the same household, called her his sister. She called the younger kids “little buddies” and sent them packages of treats.
She was brilliant and she was small: 4 feet 9 inches tall, and about 89 pounds. At Yale she was a doctoral student in pharmacology. She worked on a research team that experimented on mice, studying enzymes that might one day help treat cancer, diabetes and muscular dystrophy. At her memorial, her friends would remember her ambition, her sense of humor and her love of shoe shopping.
She was engaged to Jonathan Widawsky, a graduate student at Columbia University. The wedding was set for Sunday, September 13, 2009, in Syosset, New York. Her little cousin Sean was going to be the ring bearer. She had bought him a teddy bear to keep.
Tuesday
That Tuesday morning, Annie took the Yale shuttle to her office in the Sterling Hall of Medicine. She left her purse, her phone, her credit cards and her cash there.
Around 10 a.m., she walked a few blocks to 10 Amistad Street, the building that held her lab.
It was not an ordinary building. It had about 75 security cameras. The doors to the secure areas only opened with a Yale ID card, and every swipe was logged. Annie swiped into a basement lab room, G13, at 10:11 a.m.
She never swiped out.
That night, around 9 p.m., a housemate reported her missing.
No way out
Police pulled the footage from every camera in the building. They watched Annie go in. They did not see her come out, at any exit, at any time.
That left two possibilities. She had left in some way the cameras had missed. Or she was still inside.
Police closed the building. Yale police, New Haven police, Connecticut state police and the FBI started searching it, floor by floor and room by room. They even searched the trash at a landfill in Hartford, where Yale’s garbage went to be burned.
The news went national: a Yale student, days from her wedding, gone inside a locked building.
On Thursday, September 10, a graduate student who worked with Annie walked up to a Yale police officer, Sabrina Wood, outside room G13, the last room Annie had logged into. She pointed to a box of Wipe-All paper wipes on a steel cart. It had what looked like blood spattered on it.
Officer Wood called the FBI and stood guard over the cart.
While she waited, a lab technician kept going in and out of the room. His name was Raymond Clark III. He was 24. He took care of the lab’s research mice.
According to the police affidavit, Clark walked over to the cart and looked at the box. Then he stood between the officer and the cart, turned to face her, and moved the box to the far corner, turning it so the blood was facing away from her. He leaned against the cart and made small talk.
Later he came back with steel wool pads and cleaning solution and started scrubbing a floor drain. To the officer, the drain did not look like it needed cleaning.
His story
Clark had also gone out of his way to talk to another Yale officer, Jennifer Garcia. He told her he knew Annie.
He told her he had left the building at 12:45 that afternoon, before a fire alarm went off at 1:55. And he said Annie had left even earlier, at 12:30.
The cameras said she had not left at all.
Detectives started to look very closely at Raymond Clark.
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