Cops last night stormed the home of handsome Yale lab technician Raymond Clark and hauled him off in cuffs as part of their probe into the slaying of brilliant university grad student Annie Le.
Appearing bleary-eyed, disheveled and shaken, Clark, 24, was to undergo DNA testing – including mouth-swabbing and scraping under his fingernails – as part of a body-evidence warrant, cops said. Cops also landed a search warrant for the apartment Clark shares with his fiance in Middletown, Conn., 20 miles from the university’s New Haven campus.
Authorities said that if Clark, whom they have now officially called a “person of interest,” cooperates, he could be released within hours. But even if that happens, it would likely take until the end of the week before authorities determine whether they’re certain he was involved in the murder, cops said.
Last night’s development came as details surfaced about Le’s autopsy, showing she was asphyxiated before her body was crammed down a 2- foot-long, cable-wire shaft, sources told The Hartford Courant.
The tragic grad student’s body was found in the clothes she was last seen wearing as she entered the university research building a week ago yesterday – a brown skirt and green top, the sources said.
Le, 24, was apparently killed in one room in the basement lab – where tiny drops of blood were found – and then moved to another room where the shaft is, sources told the paper.
A source close to Clark’s family confirmed to The Post that the technician – who was working with rats in the lab the morning that Le was last seen there – flunked a lie-detector test. The source added that Clark had scratches on his body.
“He did not pass the polygraph test . . . But of course, they don’t always run true anyway, especially when you’re nerved up asking so many questions,” the sympathetic source insisted.
As for Clark’s fresh wounds, “He had scratches on his arm from his cat,” the person said.
The source said Clark, whom the family calls “Ray Ray,” works at the lab along with his fiance, sister and her husband.
“But he didn’t really know [Le],” the source said. “She left the area before he left that morning. He’d seen her and said, ‘Hi’ and kept on going.”
Le’s body was discovered in the duct Sunday- – the same day she was to marry a Columbia University grad student on Long Island.
A neighbor of Clark and his fiance, Jennifer Hromadka, said the couple left their apartment in a hurry that day. “They were really rushed,” the woman said, adding that they were lugging suitcases and hopped into a silver Ford Taurus with an elderly couple, leaving Clark’s red Mustang behind. Hromadka’s dad, Bud, called Clark “a quality man, a wonderful guy.”
“The cops are pressuring the wrong guy,” he told The Post, noting that Clark had been tailed by about 15 FBI agents while at a local fair over the weekend.
Additional reporting by Rebecca Rosenberg in Middletown, Conn., Austin Fenner in New Haven, Conn., Dan Mangan in NY and AP