(Updated: 10:35 p.m.) Police found what they believe is the body of missing Yale med student Annie Le on the day she was to be married, ending a five-day manhunt that transfixed the nation.
New Haven police made the announcement at a press conference at 1 Union Ave. at 9 p.m. Sunday.
State police found human remains shortly after 5 p.m. Sunday inside a wall in the basement of 10 Amistad St., the Yale medical building where Le was last seen, according to Assistant Police Chief Pete Reichard and Yale President Richard Levin. Police have not yet identified the body, but they believe it is Annie Le (pictured).
“We are assuming that it’s her,” Reichard said. (Click on the play arrow to watch part of his statement.)
Police have ruled her case a homicide.
Le, a 24 year-old third-year Yale pharmacology graduate student, went missing on Tuesday. Video cameras captured her entering 10 Amistad St., but she was never seen coming out. More than 100 law enforcement agents descended on the city to try to solve the mystery. They watched hours of video surveillance tape taken from over 70 cameras. They combed through the 120,000-square-foot building day and night.
Sunday, they finally made a breakthrough in the case.
Shortly after 5 p.m., they found the remains of a female human body secreted inside a wall in the building.
The body was found in the basement, said Yale President Levin in an email to the Yale community Sunday night. Levin said Yale is not jumping to conclusions about the body’s identity yet.
“Our hearts go out to Annie Le’s family, fiancé and friends, who must suffer the additional ordeal of waiting for the body to be identified,” Levin wrote. He said he has spoken to Le’s family and her fiancé, Columbia grad student Jonathan Widawsky, and “conveyed to them the deeply felt support of the Yale community.”
Levin spoke to the national press corps at about 9:45 p.m. on the steps outside his office at Yale’s Beinecke Plaza.
“Unfortunately, now is not the time for questions … Now is instead a time for compassion, for condolences, for coming together as a community,” he said in a one and a half-minute speech. (Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch.) He said the reason he wouldn’t take questions is to let the investigation continue full speed ahead. The Amistad Building where the body was found remains an active crime scene.
Now that the case has been classified a homicide, it has been transferred to the jurisdiction of the New Haven police. Reichard presided at the police headquarters press conference in the absence of Chief James Lewis, who has been in Wisconsin for the weekend but has kept up with developments by the half hour. Officials from the FBI and state police also appeared at the press conference.
New Haven police will work alongside the FBI, state’s attorney and state police to crack the case. They did not release further details Sunday, citing a pending investigation. The state medical examiner will identify the body and perform an autopsy.
From the start, the case has been a mystery with an ominous air.
Did she drop out of sight to avoid her upcoming wedding, which was planned for Sunday?
At first that was a working theory. It dissolved as the week went by — as her fiancé, friends, and family reported her excitement about the wedding; as security camera tapes revealed no trace of Le leaving the building she had entered at 10 a.m. Tuesday; as bloody clothing was found in a ceiling at the building at 10 Amistad St.
FBI and Yale officials still said at a Saturday press conference that they weren’t sure yet whether they had a missing persons case or a grisly crime on their hands. But all signs were pointing to the latter.
By Sunday, the search for clues led to an incinerator in Hartford. That was a routine search, Reichard said.
Le herself was apprehensive about crime in New Haven. She wrote an article this past February for a medical campus magazine in which she interviewed Yale Police Chief Jim Perrotti about ways students could keep safe and avoid becoming another “unnamed victim.”
A victim she became, but not unnamed.
What happened to the professor who mysteriously cancelled class that day?