The death of Annie Le

A security camera recorded Le entering the building at 10 Amistad Street on the day she was killed. View full image

Julie Brown

On September 14, a day after Le's body was found, more than 2,000 people attended a candlelight vigil on Cross Campus in her memory. View full image

Annie Le remembered

At just under 5 feet tall, Annie Le ’13PhD was “a tiny young lady,” in the words of her thesis adviser, Anton Bennett, “but she gave the impression she was larger than her physical self.” Born in California to Vietnamese American parents, she was valedictorian at Union Mine High School in El Dorado, California. She won scholarships to study bioscience at the University of Rochester, where she met Jonathan Widawsky. She and Widawsky were to be married on September 13, the day her body was found at 10 Amistad.

After her graduation from Rochester in 2007, Le was admitted to the PhD program in pharmacology at Yale. She worked in Bennett's laboratory studying enzymes called phosphatases and their role in human metabolic diseases and won a grant from the National Science Foundation last year to support her research. Bennett remembers her “as a diligent and incredibly hard-working student who showed a passion for science and the desire to make a difference in people's lives.”

But Le was also known in and out of the lab for a caring attitude toward her friends, a sunny personality, and a sense of style. At an October 12 memorial service for Le at Battell Chapel, fellow graduate student Tara Bancroft ’14PhD eulogized her friend as someone who could “wear five-inch heels while doing laborious mouse surgeries, eat fried chicken and not gain a pound, and use smiley faces in her presentations and not lose anyone's respect.”

At that same memorial service, Yale president Richard C. Levin ’74PhD described Le as “a model student for the Yale of the twenty-first century: a child of immigrants, raised in America, bright and accomplished, ambitious and disciplined, yet caring, loving, and spontaneous.”

The testimony of those who knew Le suggests that this was a person more remarkable than the circumstances of her death. In Bennett's words, she was “a bright light of enormous potential prematurely extinguished.”

—Mark Alden Branch ’86 

Fears and sorrow

The hand-lettered sign, which graduate students put up outside 10 Amistad Street after the news came that Annie Le was missing, is heartbreaking today. “We hope you are okay,” they wrote -- not knowing that she was already dead.

The unfolding of this tragedy never permitted a simple, straightforward outpouring of grief. Emotions on campus rollercoastered with every new piece of information. With the first information on the disappearance, anxiety and hope competed, and people who hadn't known Le speculated optimistically about her impending marriage: maybe she had merely gotten cold feet. Hope dwindled and fear mounted as bad news came in: bloody clothing found in a ceiling, police searches at a trash incinerator in Hartford.

People talked about the case compulsively -- “in classrooms, dorm rooms, around dining halls, and even in late-night pool games in butteries,” wrote Endre Hudy ’11 in the Yale Daily News on September 23 -- seeking to absorb it and resolve it, since they couldn't solve it. As Le's death became a global news event, the glare of the TV news cameras added pressures of its own. Hudy wrote, “My parents told me they were 'extremely worried' about me after hearing on TV about Le's murder -- as the first item of the afternoon news.”

On September 15, when police finally confirmed the identity of the “person of interest” whose name had already been mentioned in newspapers and on blogs, it served to heighten the effect Daily News editor Thomas Kaplan ’10 described. “Only Yalies had access to that basement, and that seems to point to someone in our community being involved in this,” he told CNN on September 13. “That's what is so frightening.”

“The community was stunned, shocked, grieving,” says Yale president Richard C. Levin ’74PhD. “The family came first -- the family and the fiance's family. It was their tragedy above all. But there were a lot of people affected -- the students, the pharmacology department, employees in the medical school, people who worked in the Amistad building. It was a frightening and difficult situation for all of them.”

One cardiovascular researcher at the building, Rong Ju, told the New Haven Register, “It makes you lose your trust in people.”

As with all griefs and fears, people struggled to cope with it, and some avoided it. The murder that was generating news coverage all over the country was never mentioned at a September 15 orientation for new Yale employees, except by one speaker who referred to “the unfortunate circumstances with the student here at the university.”

The feeling of the campus was most strongly delivered by the September 14 candlelight vigil on Cross Campus. By the Yale Daily News estimate, more than 2,000 members of the Yale community were present, to mourn, sing “Amazing Grace,” and hear President Levin express hope that “despite this horrendous trauma . . . our commitment, truth, openness, trust, and collaboration . . . will endure.” Le's friend Natalie Powers ’13PhD eulogized her: “as good a human being as you'd ever hope to meet.” At the end of the vigil, Jake Keyes ’10 reported on the Yale Alumni Magazinenews blog, “Even after the speakers had thanked the audience and offered their parting prayers, the crowd remained for several minutes, singing quietly, lighting candles, or closing their eyes in prayer.”

But Le's dean, Jon Butler of the Graduate School, put the communal fears and sorrow in perspective in an e-mail to the magazine. “As you meet the families, you get a small glimpse of how horrible this is. Any reaction we might have can't even begin to capture what they are enduring and will for their lifetimes. What I do know is that it's terrible beyond our capacity to grasp.”  

—Christopher Arnott

First came an alert to campus and local media: a 24-year-old graduate student was missing, and Yale police wanted help in finding her.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 8, a security camera captured Annie Le ’13PhD entering a laboratory building at the School of Medicine—but none of the 70-odd cameras surrounding the building and attached garage showed her leaving, that day or the next. Speculation abounded. A doctoral student in pharmacology, Le was about to marry her college sweetheart. Could she have gotten cold feet? Suffered an emotional breakdown? Sneaked past the cameras during the fire alarm that afternoon?

Days passed. Students, faculty, and staff grew increasingly worried that the 4-foot-11-inch, 90-pound Le—described as smart, fun-loving, and endlessly energetic—had come to disastrous harm. Yale offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to Le's whereabouts. Her fiance came in from New York, and her family from California. The young woman's disappearance became a top story on the national news, with dozens of reporters and TV trucks swarming the medical campus, the street outside Le's apartment, and every move the police made. More than 100 law enforcement officers joined the search, focusing on the lab building at 10 Amistad Street—where, on Saturday, investigators discovered bloody clothing hidden above a ceiling tile—but grimly expanding to include, among other places, a trash incinerator 40 miles away.

Finally, five days after Annie Le disappeared, police discovered her body hidden behind a utility panel in the basement of the laboratory building. She had been strangled. It was Sunday, September 13. It was supposed to have been her wedding day.

Then came the next shock: New Haven police charged Raymond Clark III, a 24-year-old animal technician who worked at 10 Amistad, with Le's murder. “One colleague murdered, and another accused—it's the talk of the medical school,” says Laura Smith, president of Local 34, the union that represents clerical and technical workers, including Clark. “Nobody could talk about anything else.”

At press time, Clark was being held on a $3 million bond; his lawyer told reporters that he expected to plead not guilty. Police had not publicly laid out a case against him or discussed his alleged motive—except to say what it was not.

“This was not a street crime,” Police Chief James Lewis said in announcing Clark's arrest. “It was not a domestic crime. . . . It was a workplace crime.”

Added Yale president Richard C. Levin ’74PhD in a written statement: “This incident could have happened in any city, in any university, or in any workplace. It says more about the dark side of the human soul than it does about the extent of security measures.”

Security measures certainly come to mind, however, when an employee allegedly murders a student on campus.

“I'm in my 30th year now at Yale, and I can count on one hand incidents that even rise to the level of workplace violence,” union president Smith says. “But there are holes to be plugged, and something like this brings those to the fore.”

“Even though this was not a consequence of a security lapse,” says Levin, “there is no question that it touched off sensitivities of a community and brought to the surface anxieties about security in various parts of the campus, in particular the medical school.” Yale is undertaking a review in response to employees' concerns. But even in hindsight, it's unclear what, if anything, might have prevented Le's murder. (For more from Levin on campus security, see “After a Murder, Reviewing Security.”)

The morning of her disappearance, she left her office at the Sterling Hall of Medicine and went a few blocks to 10 Amistad Street, a two-year-old lab building where she did research. Like much of the medical campus, the building has tight security because of the sensitive work done inside, says Martha Highsmith, the deputy university secretary, who oversees campus safety.

In the case of 10 Amistad, that sensitivity arises at least in part from the presence of lab animals, which have attracted protest—peaceful at Yale, occasionally violent at other universities—from animal-rights activists. Entering the building requires an electronic ID card coded for “people who have a reason to be in that facility,” Highsmith says. Getting into the basement, where Le's body was found, requires another level of access. Certain parts of the basement, including places where Clark regularly worked, are restricted to yet a third subgroup. Citing law enforcement sources, the Hartford Courant reported that card-swipe records indicate Le entered one such restricted basement lab area; Clark swiped in soon after, and Le was never seen alive again.

If tighter security would not necessarily have helped, what about closer pre-employment screening? Yale now does routine criminal background checks on new employees; Clark, who was hired before that policy was put in place, had no prior criminal record.

But his high school girlfriend told Good Morning America that she had to call the police when she broke up with him. “I wanted out” of the relationship, because “he would get very angry often,” she said. “He would frighten me. He would get physical.” After the breakup, “for about two weeks I was escorted from the school to my car.” According to the online New Haven Independent, which obtained a copy of the 2003 police report on that incident, the girlfriend also told police that Clark had forced her to have sex with him. She declined to press charges, the Independent reported.

Others who know Clark have offered conflicting descriptions of his behavior: some former coworkers and neighbors told reporters he was controlling and volatile, while others described him as pleasant and friendly. Levin says that, to his knowledge, Clark's personnel record at Yale contained no disciplinary action or other indication of anything out of the ordinary.