【ZZ from NY Times】Police Say Suspect in Yale Murder Hid Bloody Tissues

Police Say Suspect in Yale Murder Hid Bloody Tissues

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By JAMES BARRON and ALISON LEIGH COWAN
Published: November 13, 2009

The New Haven police said the laboratory technician they arrested in the killing of a Yale graduate student in September tried to conceal blood-splattered tissues from university detectives investigating the student’s disappearance, according to a police affidavit released Friday.

The affidavit also said that the technician, Raymond Clark III, aroused investigators’ suspicions by scrubbing the floor under a sink in the room where the graduate student, Annie Le, was killed. The detectives were surprised that Mr. Clark took out steel wool and a cleaning solution, because the floor appeared to be clean.

An autopsy showed that Ms. Le, 24, was strangled on Sept. 8. But her body was not discovered until five days later, on the day on which she was to have been married.

The police said her body had been stuffed behind a wall in the high-tech lab where she and Mr. Clark had worked, she as an ambitious graduate student doing complicated medical experiments, and he as a technician cleaning out lab animals’ cages and attending to custodial chores.

The affidavit said Mr. Clark had impeded investigators’ efforts to gather evidence in the last room she entered. Access to that room was controlled by identification cards, and the police said the records showed that Ms. Le had gone in at 10:09 a.m. on Sept. 8.

Two days later, after Ms. Le had been reported missing and the Yale police were working their way through the lab inch by inch, Mr. Clark went in and out of the room several times, the affidavit said. The document describes a moment when he went over to a cart, apparently trying to block an officer’s view. The affidavit said he moved a box of wipes “so that the blood spatter was facing to the right-hand side of the cart, away from plain sight.”

“He then leaned up against the cart and made small talk” with the officer, the affidavit said.

The affidavit said Mr. Clark went out of the room, G-13 in the building at 10 Amistad Street in New Haven, only to return a short time later and scrub the floor with steel wool and a cleaning solution. “Officer Wood thought it was unusual that Clark was scrubbing the drain because it did not appear to need cleaning,” the document said.

The affidavit also said the police had taken, from a recycling box, a lab coat with red stains. They sent it sent to state forensics lab for DNA testing, the affidavit said, and the stains matched samples of Ms. Le’s blood taken from her apartment and the blood on the box of wipes.

After Ms. Le’s body was discovered — deep inside a building where anyone going in is supposed to swipe an identification card — the New Haven police said the killing did not “appear to be a random act.”

Mr. Clark, who lived in Middletown, Conn., with his girlfriend, came under suspicion because he had scratches on his chest and bruises on his arms. He was arrested nine days after Ms. Le died. The police took him into custody at a Super 8 Motel in Cromwell, Conn., where he had been staying with his father.

The authorities had interviewed him a couple of days earlier and had kept him under surveillance.

They said they had interviewed 150 people and watched 700 hours of surveillance video from cameras in and around the lab building as they narrowed the investigation. Mr. Clark, they said, was the only person from whom they had taken DNA samples. He was also the only one whose car they hauled away and searched.

Officials said Mr. Clark’s DNA matched crime scene evidence. But with Mr. Clark in custody — and refusing to answer investigators’ questions — Chief James Lewis of the New Haven police said detectives might never be able to piece together the story behind the slaying or explain the motive, a gap that physical evidence alone could not fill in.

Ms. Le was part of a research team led by a faculty adviser, Anton Bennett. According to its Web site, his laboratory was doing enzyme research that could bear on cancer, diabetes and muscular dystrophy.

Her absence was noticed on the day officials later said she was killed, when someone saw her purse — with her identification, her cellphone and some money—in her office.

Investigators said that video from the cameras around the lab building showed someone who fit her description walking in. They said the cameras never recorded her walking out.

Her disappearance soon preoccupied the Yale community, on its storied Gothic campus and in modernistic research buildings in the gritty neighborhood near Yale-New Haven Hospital, a short walk away. Within 48 hours, Yale officials said that more than 100 people from a number of law enforcement agencies had joined the search.

For some at Yale, it brought back memories of a haunting case from 11 years ago: the death of Suzanne Jovin, a Yale senior whose body was found in a neighborhood not far from the campus. She had been stabbed. The case remains unsolved.

By the end of the week after Miss Le was reported missing, the police had found bloody clothes above ceiling tiles in the lab building, though the police would not say whether they knew whose clothes they were. And then, on the Sunday when she was to have been married, investigators working with blueprints discovered her body in a recess for utility pipes and cables behind a wall.

Mr. Clark was arraigned in Superior Court in New Haven on Sept. 17. He said only two words during the five-minute proceeding. The two words, in response to a question from Judge Jon C. Blue, who wanted to know if he had been told of his constitutional rights, were, “Yes, sir.”

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