NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Police today arrested a Yale lab technician for the grisly murder of a PhD student there last week.
Raymond Clark III was charged in the murder of Annie Le, whose body was found stuffed in a basement wall just three days before she was to be married.
Clark did not enter a plea at his arraignment, and was held on $3 million bond. He was then transported to a prison.
Police are looking to see if Clark’s work attitude led to the confrontation. People interviewed by police have painted Clark as a controlling man who viewed the laboratory as his territory.
Authorities are investigating whether that led to the killing, but the official says that’s just a theory.
Police took Raymond Clark III into custody at the Super 8 motel in Cromwell, about 25 miles from Yale’s campus.
At 8:24 a.m., two plainclothes state detectives — who arrived with a convoy of cop cars with sirens blaring — knocked on the door of Clark’s second floor room, where he was staying with his father.
Police and FBI cars pulled into the motel parking lot and a large group of officers entered the room and told Clark he was under arrest, police sources told The Post.
About six minutes later, Clark was escorted from the room, down a long hallway and in handcuffs. Clark appeared calm and showed no emotion as he was put in a black Mercury as onlookers, who had gathered to see what all the commotion was about, broke out in applause.
At a news conference in New Haven, Police Chief James Lewis said, “There were no issues with the arrest. It went smoothly.”
Lewis refused to say whether there was a DNA match that linked Clark to Le.
ABC News reported on its Web site this morning that Clark has wounds on his chest, arms and back, suggesting a violent struggle.
A bead from Le’s necklace was found on the floor of the basement lab where Le’s body and blood spots were found splattered on a laundry cart, sources told ABC News.
Sources told the Hartford Courant that Clark’s Yale swipe card indicated he was the last person to see Le alive. The electronic trail left by his ID card indicated he had entered the lab where Le was last seen.
Clark also reportedly swiped his ID card at least 10 times in the hours surrounding Le’s disappearance, the newspaper reported.
The deep scratches on Clark’s body came to light as the Connecticut medical examiner released Le’s cause of death as strangulation, or as it was officially described, “traumatic asphyxia due to neck compression.”
Police also found a pair of bloody surgical gloves.
ABC News also reported that Clark sent a text message to Le on Sept. 8 requesting a meeting to discuss the cleanliness of the cages of the research mice.
Clark, his fiancee, his sister and his brother-in-law all work for Yale as animal lab technicians.
Police are not commenting on a possible motive.
Clark’s bond was set at $3 million. He arrived in court just after 10 a.m. in leg shackles. Clark, who looked stunned, said nothing during his brief court appearance.
Clark is due back in court in two weeks.
The Rev. Dennis Smith, a Le family spokesman, said on NBC’s “Today” show that an arrest is “wonderful news” to the family and will help give some closure.
“It’s such a terrible thing to have lost Annie,” he said.
Clark had been staying at the hotel since he was released from custody Wednesday morning. He’d been taken into custody to undergo DNA testing. His father stays at the hotel regularly, according to people who also stay there.
Police planned to arrest Clark at midnight last night, but the paperwork was not in order. Instead, police kept a stakeout at the hotel through the night, monitoring the stairwell and parking lot.
Police executed two search warrants — for DNA from Clark and for items in his apartment — late Tuesday. They served two more Wednesday morning for more items from the apartment and for Clark’s Ford Mustang, police said.
Clark’s job as an animal-services technician at Yale put him in contact with Le, who worked for a Yale laboratory that conducted experiments on mice. She was part of a research team headed by her faculty adviser Anton Bennett that focused on enzyme research that could have implications in cancer, diabetes and muscular dystrophy. Members of the team have declined to comment on the case or their work.
As a technician at Yale, Clark helped clean the cages of research animals used by labs around the Ivy League campus and had other janitorial duties, police said. The technicians help tend to rodents, mostly mice, used in experiments and can help with paperwork.
Since researchers generally try not to move animals from their housing for testing, students and faculty conducting experiments often visit the building where Le was found dead, school officials said.
Yale President Richard C. Levin said in a statement this morning that “it is frightening that a member of our own community might have committed this terrible crime.”
He added, “But we must not let this incident shatter our trust in one another. We must reaffirm our deepest values as an institution – our commitment to the search for truth, undertaken in a spirit of openness, tolerance and civility.”