Sunday
On Saturday, September 12, investigators searching the building found a bloody sock stuffed above a ceiling tile in a hallway. Hidden with it were a stained rubber glove and a pair of work boots with stains that looked like blood. The boots were labeled with a name: “Ray-C.”
They also found a lab coat, size XL, in a recycling bin. It had blood on it.
On Sunday, September 13, 2009, state police dogs led searchers to a locker room in the basement. Behind a toilet, inside a wall, was a mechanical chase, a narrow space for pipes and cables. The insulation inside had been pulled out.
Annie Le was inside.
It was the day she was supposed to get married.
She had been strangled.
The green pen
When investigators moved her body, they found something underneath it. It was a pen. A green ink pen.
The lab rooms in that basement kept sign-in records. On September 8, in the rooms that mattered to the case, someone had signed in again and again that day with a green pen, writing two letters.
RC.
The state police lab tested the pen. There was a stain of Annie’s blood on it. On the inside of the cap, and on part of the barrel, there was DNA. It matched Raymond Clark.
The sock from the ceiling had DNA from both of them on it. The blood on the box of wipes was Annie’s. So was the blood on the lab coat.
Then there were the key-card records.
The logs showed that in the days before Annie disappeared, Clark had been moving between two basement rooms, G13 and G22, more and more often. On September 8, he swiped into those two rooms 55 times.
Annie had swiped into G13 at 10:11 a.m. Clark followed her in at 10:40.
In G13, investigators later found what they described as a spray pattern of blood on a wall that someone had tried to clean. In G22, the only person who went in during the time of the crime was Clark. There they found blood, hair and two beads from what police believed was Annie’s necklace. One more bead had been found next to her body.
In the days after the body was found, police took a DNA sample from Clark under a warrant. On September 17, 2009, they arrested him and charged him with murder.
His fiancee publicly stood by him. He pleaded not guilty.
The plea
He never went to trial.
In March 2011, Raymond Clark pleaded guilty to murdering Annie Le. He also entered a plea on a charge of attempted sexual assault, under a Connecticut rule that let him accept a conviction without admitting the facts. Prosecutors said he had tried to create an alibi, scrub the scene and even reach back into the wall to pull out evidence. They noted the difference in size between them: Annie was 4 feet 9 and 89 pounds. Clark was 5 feet 9 and 190 pounds.
He never explained why he did it.
“I only see my Annie in my dreams”
On June 3, 2011, Annie’s family came to New Haven Superior Court to face him.
“She was about to start her life as a young bride,” her mother, Vivian Le, said. “She told me many times how happy she was to start her family. I will never see her walking down the aisle. I will never hold my grandchildren. I will never see Annie’s dreams come true.”
“I only see my Annie in my dreams,” she said.
Her cousin Ryan remembered the trip home from New Haven in September 2009. His little brother, the ring bearer, played on the plane with the teddy bear Annie had bought him. “On the flight home from New Haven, I remember how empty and painful it was for me to know that my sister’s coffin would be flying home on that very same day.”
Her brother Chris told the court how his life had come apart. The question of why she was killed, he said, had “tortured my soul.”
Then Clark spoke in public for the first time.
“Annie was and will always be a wonderful person, by far a better person that I will ever be in my life,” he said. “I’m sorry I lied. I’m sorry I ruined lives and I’m sorry for taking Annie Le’s life.”
Judge Roland Fasano told him he had snuffed out the life of a promising young woman and virtually destroyed two families. He sentenced Raymond Clark to 44 years in prison.
A pen and a key card
Annie Le was killed inside one of the most watched buildings at one of the most famous universities in the world. Her killer worked in the same basement. He hid her in a wall, he cleaned, he lied to police and he waited.
It was not enough. The cameras showed she never left. The key card showed where he went. And under her body lay the pen he had used to sign in all day.
A green pen.
