Police are zeroing in on a lab tech as a possible suspect in the murder of graduate student Annie Le, according to two people familiar with the probe.
Contrary to national media reports, the suspect is not a student. The suspect is not in custody.
Le, who’s 24, went missing on Tuesday. On Sunday, state cops found a body inside a wall at the Yale medical school lab building where she was last seen, at 10 Amistad St. The state medical examiner Monday afternoon positively identified the body as Annie Le, and ruled her death a homicide.
Police officials definitively denied Monday afternoon that they’ve centered suspicion on a Yale student in the probe — or that any student is “involved” in the case.
However, a source familiar with the investigation said the probe has zeroed in on a single “serious” suspect.
Another law enforcement source familiar with the probe identified the suspect as a lab technician who works with animal testing at Yale. That technician’s campus phone number was disconnected Monday afternoon and he couldn’t be reached for comment. The technician allegedly had an unrequited romantic interest in Annie Le, according to that source. That suggestion couldn’t be independently verified Monday afternoon. [Update: Police Chief James Lewis and others definitively ruled out that potential motive. The rumor never gained any credibility.]
The New Haven Register‘s Bill Kaempffer reported that the suspect failed a polygraph test, and requested a lawyer.
Annie Le Probe “Won’t Destroy Reputations”
As of Monday afternoon, police had no suspects in custody in the investigation of graduate student Annie Le’s grisly death, Chief James Lewis said.
He told the Independent that his cops have been busy interviewing “and reinterviewing” “lots of people.” The department will not reveal the names of interviewees or “persons of interest,” according to Lewis.
“We don’t want to destroy people’s reputations,” Lewis said.
The last time a Yale student death attracted a national media frenzy — the 1998 murder of undergraduate Suzanne Jovin — cops publicly floated the name of a professor as a “person of interest.” He was never tied to the murder. He said his career suffered greatly as a result of the exposure.
State cops Sunday discovered human remains believed to be those of Annie Le, a third-year doctoral pharmacological student at the medical school, inside a basement wall at a medical school building on Amistad Street. The New Haven police took over the investigation of the case at that point from the FBI and Yale police.
About 30 cops are now working on the case, Lewis said Monday afternoon. About half are New Haven cops; the rest work for Yale’s force and the FBI.
Assistant Chief Peter Reichard and Lt. Lisa Dadio, head of the investigative services unit, are overseeing the investigation.
Chief Lewis said he expects it’ll take 48 hours for much of the important evidence to come back from testing labs. Police expected preliminary results Monday afternoon from the chief medical examiner’s autopsy.
Lewis was asked why it took much of the week to locate Le’s apparent body.
“If people are familiar with the way this building is laid out, I don’t think they’d be surprised,” Lewis said. “People were in the building for a solid four days testing it.”
He was also asked why Yale waited until now to shut down the medical lab building at 10 Amistad St. where Le was last seen and where her apparent remains were found. He pointed out that that the case wasn’t officially a homicide investigation until Sunday. “For the first couple of days it was a missing person” case, he noted. “We have missing persons all over the country all the time. You can’t shut down a building for that.”
Paul, I admire your restraint in not naming the Yale professor whose reputation was damaged in the Jovin case, even though his identity is widely known. Good call. BTW, his reputation seems to have rebounded -- it only took 11 years!