FBI Agents and Connecticut State Police officers clothed in white hazmat suits continue their search of a local trash dump just south of Hartford, Conn and Yale University, pressing forward their investigation concerning formerly missing 24-year-old Yale University graduate student Annie Marie Le. Sunday was to have been Le’s wedding day, but her family had already cancelled the service and caterers when she failed to turn up after first being reported missing this past Tuesday evening. Now a body has been found in a Yale lab building where she was last seen, a body hidden in a basement wall area where utility cables run between floors, and authorities' worst fears have been confirmed, Annie Marie Le is dead.

Most now know that the double MD/PhD major had walked across the Yale campus from her office and entered a University lab building at 10 AM last Tuesday morning. Her university ID card had been used to enter the five-story building and a picture from one of the 70+ surveillance cameras around the building confirmed that she had entered the building. While apparently alone, she was carrying a number of items, not to include her purse or cel phone which she left in her office. The FBI and local and state investigators have interviewed many of the students, faculty and staff members who were in the laboratory building that morning, some of whom evidently had seen Le.

At 12:40 PM a fire alarm was automatically activated in the building when steam set off a sensor, thereby causing an evacuation of the building. Many people who exited the lab were wearing white lab coats similar to a coat available to Le when she conducted experiments in the same building. An exhaustive review of the tape from all of the surveillance cameras around the building has yet to provide a picture of Le exiting the building. Investigators, therefore, now have obviously concluded that she never left the building but somehow met her fate at the hands of someone in that same building.

While searching across campus and town, investigators knew they had to thoroughly search the 120,000 square foot laboratory building for Le, a place where she still could be found. While they denied some media reports a few days ago that they had found a body, they did at that time acknowledge finding items of potential evidence in the then missing person case. Police sources indicated that the evidentiary items were thought to be items of Le’s clothing with blood on them, clothing found hidden above a drop down ceiling in the lab. This report was subsequently corrected to report that the items of believed clothing found with a small amount of blood were not thought to be those known to have been worn by Le the day she disappeared, i.e., a brown skirt, a green t-shirt, and brown shoes. This evidence is undergoing analysis to see if it can be forensically linked to Le, i.e., can blood or other DNA evidence, or hairs or fibers found on the clothing be identified as having come from Le or even from a potential assailant? Unlike CSI programs on TV, such analysis can take more than a few minutes, although FBI standard operating procedure would have already established a known standard for Le’s DNA, and samples of her hair and a chart of her dental records and other identifying information would be available for comparison purposes. Should this evidence provide items for comparison to one or more current persons of interest, including a fellow student who reported failed a polygraph concerning Le's fate, such could help to identify the person responsible for Le's death.

Investigators have already used tracking dogs, to include the necessary cadaver search dogs in and around the Yale laboratory building and across the campus. It is unknown if the cadaver dogs helped to locate the body they now believe to be Annie Le. Another search was being conducted at the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority (CRRA) waste processing facility, i.e., local land fill for evidence of Le’s presence. This search obvious set an ominous tone to the hunt for the missing bride-to-be even before her presumed body was found. While some had speculated, even hoped that Le had simply been overwhelmed by the stress of her studies and impending marriage, perhaps another “runaway bride,” those who knew her best had always refused to accept that she had given in to the pressures of the day. “She was just too much in love with her fiancée and too looking forward to her wedding day to have simply run away,” her friends and family would say. Sadly they were absolutely be correct about her. Le, who this year wrote an article about being safe on the Yale campus, has now become one of the victims about whom she had written.

The search of the land fill was initiated as investigators considered the circumstances of Le's disappearance. By this, she was last seen in the lab building on Tuesday morning but not reported missing until Tuesday evening, and the search for her did not take on significance until Wednesday. While the trash containers in and around the laboratory were searched, evidence related to her initial disappearance and know known death could have been transported to the land fill from somewhere on campus or such evidence could have been deposited in a similar trash container off campus. Either way all such disposal items go to one place, the local CRRA facility for processing.

The grim task for the FBI and the other investigators and cadaver dogs turning over the thousands of pounds trash at the waste processing plant is trying to identify and preserve potential items of evidence. Most landfill operators are able to say exactly when and where certain trash containers were collected and where the contents of such containers were dumped. Hopefully such records are correct as the search in the warm fall temperatures around New Haven continues. While some potential criminal cases require investigators to “follow the money,” in this sad case the FBI and other agencies are, as one FBI Agent said, “following the trash.” As a “green city,” New Haven also uses incinerators to burn trash in its “trash-to-energy” facility, and we just don’t know how quickly the collections from last week were handled in this manner.

Annie Le has now been found, but now investigators need to determine her cause of death and the reason, as if there could be one, that someone would kill her. She was likely the victim of a violent personal attack, one that could relate to someone who knew her, who may have even stalked her, or her death may turn out to be the result of a random act of violence by someone prowling the laboratory halls, or she could have even witnessed a crime, like a robbery or burglary where the criminal attacked her to prevent her from identifying him. Investigators must also consider that Le’s potential assailant could have hidden his or her own clothing above the false ceiling, slipped on an available white lab coat and left the building with the other occupants who walked out at the time of the questionable fire alarm.

Le's research lab, one she loved to work in has now become a homicide crime scene. There is much to be done in this investigation, and while investigators may believe they have identified at least one person of interest, evidence will be needed to confirm their suspicious. The search for the missing bride-to-be may has evolved into a grim body recovery task. And for the local Yale University community; they must now deal with the thought that a woman who had so much to offer the world is dead, and an unidentified killer may be walking on campus.

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