raymond clark

It started when she was seen going into the lab, but wasn’t seen going out. Yale graduate student Annie Le (MED '13) entered Yale’s 10 Amistad Street medical building after leaving her keys, purse and phone in her office at the Sterling Hall of Medicine. For a few days, this beautiful, sexy, “sweet, spunky and smart,” 24-year-old, 4’11”, 90-lb pharmacology doctoral candidate whose parents had immigrated to California from Vietnam, was considered “missing.” Then, on Sunday, the day she was supposed to wed her college sweetheart, Le’s lifeless, strangled body was discovered stuffed behind a wall in the basement of the lab in which she worked.

The murder of Annie Le is fascinating, horrifying and perplexing people around the world. Maybe because I was once a young Yalie myself running around campus at odd hours, I feel a personal connection to this rare tragedy; the first killing of a Yale student since 1998. My heart goes out to Le’s family, friends and her young fiancé Jonathan Widawsky. The world has lost so much untapped potential in Le whose work at Yale involved experiments on mice that were part of research into enzymes that could have implications for the treatment of cancer, diabetes and muscular dystrophy.