Original subtitles

- My supervisor called me and let me know that

the Yale Police Department had asked for our assistance

because one of their graduate students,

a woman named Annie Le, had gone missing.

She was due to get married in the coming weekend.

She was seen on the external CCTV video

going into the Amistad building.

- And that's the last time we see her.

- No one saw Annie coming out of the building.

- They didn't know if she was a runaway bride,

if her family had kidnapped her.

- We don't know what happened to her

and the pressure is starting to build.

We started to focus on the CCTV.

- And then we started finding evidence that had blood on it.

- That someone had attempted to clean up.

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze! - FBI.

- FBI! - Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

This is "FBI True."

- Hey. There she is.

- Hey. - Hello.

- How are you? - What's happening?

- Lisa Dadio served as a lieutenant

for the New Haven PD,

commanding the major crimes unit,

which focused on criminal and crime scene investigations.

- How are you? Great to see you.

- Jim Wines spent 25 years with the FBI,

specializing in violent crime, organized crime,

and gang investigations.

- Let's go inside.

Lisa, when did you first get involved in this case?

- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked gangs, crimes against children,

as well as human and drug trafficking.

- I was actually driving into work.

I was in charge of the major crimes division

for the New Haven Police Department.

And a sergeant in the Yale University Detective Division

had reached out to me on my way in to say that

they needed resources.

They had a missing person.

- Jim, when do you get involved with this case?

And what is your role?

- At the time, I was working as an agent

in the New Haven division.

And my supervisor called me and let me know that

the Yale Police Department had asked

for our assistance because one of their graduate students,

a woman named Annie Le, had gone missing.

She was reported missing by one of her roommates

who was concerned that she hadn't come home because

it wasn't normal behavior for her and she was due to get

married in the coming weekend.

- Annie was a doctoral student

with the Yale School of Medicine

and she was brilliant.

She had been awarded a multimillion dollar grant

from the NSF to conduct research pertaining

to metabolic disease.

She graduated from the University of Rochester

very high in her class, which is where

she met her fiancé, Jonathan.

- And so what's the information you have?

- Annie, the day that she goes missing

was the last day that she was going to be on campus

until after her wedding.

Her office was in the Sterling Hall of Medicine,

which is about a block, two blocks

away from her research room.

Yale University Police Department went to her office,

and they actually found her cell phone there

and, like, her wallet and some other personal belongings.

- All we knew was that she had left her house,

come over to her office at the medical school,

then gone and went into the lab.

The last time she was seen was on the external CCTV video

going into the Amistad building at about 10:00 in the morning.

- And that's the last time we see her.

- Yes.

- On the CCTV image that we had,

she was wearing a green short-sleeve shirt,

a brown skirt, and she had dark-colored shoes on.

- We had good video footage and also the ID cards.

Building where the lab is located,

there was a very extensive ID card system,

so you had to basically card into the building.

You had to card into the lab.

So we were able to determine that she did

card into the building that morning and that she did card

into her lab, and then there was no additional

card swipe information.

But all the video coverage in that building is all external.

There is-- - That's right.

- No CCTV in any of the labs or in any of the indoor space.

- No hallways, no elevators, no--

so it's only exit-entryways.

Once you got into the building, no matter who you are,

we couldn't tell where you went--

- Right. - Unless you had a key card.

So even outside contractors that were coming in

to work on the heating and air conditioning,

everybody had a key card to get in.

- So Yale takes the initial police report

and they see that she went into the building,

so I'm sure they're feeling perplexed at this point.

- Yeah, there were multiple theories at the time.

The first one we had was just she--

she had just kind of dropped off the grid

and didn't want to be found for a couple of days.

- The sergeant from Yale University

had said that they didn't know if she was a runaway bride,

if her family had kidnapped her

because she was marrying outside of her culture.

Annie is a Vietnamese American from California,

and her fiancé was Jewish from Long Island.

We had to really look at everything

as to why she never came home.

So in speaking to Jonathan,

he obviously becomes a person of interest, right?

- He has to. - He has to, right?

- He has to.

- Sometimes you just don't know

what's going on between two people.

- Thursday morning, we had a coordination meeting,

and we put together interview teams to go out

and interview people who had contact with Annie

right before she had gone missing to try

to figure out what happened.

As we started to do the interviews,

what we learned is on the day that she went missing,

there had been a fire alarm at the Amistad building,

so everyone had to exit the building.

We pulled the CCTV video from Yale

to see if we could see Annie coming out of the building

during the fire alarm.

And we reviewed hours of CCTV video.

- You have all these people exiting the building.

You have tons of footage to go through,

frame by frame, just to make sure you don't miss her.

And at the same time, you have masses of people walking out.

- And no one saw Annie coming out of the building

for the fire alarm.

But during the interviews,

we also learned that there were a couple of people

that were in the vicinity of the lab room

that Annie was in close in time to when she swiped into--

into the room.

The first person was Ray Clark.

He had been the person who had most frequently been

in that room that Annie was conducting her research in.

Ray Clark is basically a member of the staff.

- He was an animal technician.

- Animal technician who worked for Yale University

and his responsibilities were essentially to maintain

the mouse colonies, to make sure that the mice

stayed healthy and that the cages were clean

and things of that nature.

And there were a couple of things that stood out

to us during that interview.

The first one was he was the last person to see her.

And then during the interview,

I noticed that he had kind of significant bruising

on the insides of both biceps.

And I asked him about that

and he told me he had been wrestling with his cat.

- Oh, wow. - That's a big kitty.

- And the first thing I thought was, yeah,

what do you have at home, a bobcat?

- Yeah, yeah, right.

- We photographed his injuries that

were consistent with something other than a cat.

- But the other thing that he told us during that interview

is that there was an individual who was working the day

Annie went missing named Larry, who was a HVAC technician.

And he had access to all the rooms in the building.

And he was there to service the building

to make sure the HVAC was working correctly.

- And he was in Annie's room shortly after she went in.

- And subsequent interviews I did with other lab staff,

they all also mentioned Larry.

They described him as kind of-- kind of an odd or weird guy.

After our first round of interviews,

even though we developed some additional leads,

we still don't know where Annie is,

and we still don't know what happened to her.

And the national media is starting

to become aware of the case.

- The FBI continues to head up the investigation,

numbering some 100 law enforcement authorities

from Yale, the city of New Haven,

and the state of Connecticut

in an all-out effort to find Annie Le.

- And the pressure is starting to build.

But that quickly started to change once we learned

of some of the blood evidence.

- There was a box of white balls

that was in Annie's lab room

that had what appeared to be blood on the box.

And it wasn't just a little bit of blood.

It was a decent amount.

Then what started happening in the search for other things

is we started finding more evidence that had blood on it.

And then in a ceiling, a drop ceiling of the lab,

they find, actually, like a white ankle sock

that had blood on it.

- She had a favorite beaded necklace,

and we found beads that were consistent

with that type of necklace

in several places in the lab complex,

including up in an HVAC vent.

In addition to the biological evidence that

was found by the state police in the lab room itself,

there was a lab coat with blood smears on it.

It was found in kind of in a biohazard trash container

that was due to be sent out.

The state police started to do the crime scene investigation.

They determined that there was a significant amount

of blood evidence and other biological evidence

in that room that someone had attempted to clean up.

- It looks like we have a murder on our hands.

- On Saturday morning, at that point,

enough information had been developed

to point the investigation towards more

of a homicide investigation.

- Her fiancé, Jonathan, was interviewed,

asked to give everything about his day,

his whereabouts, who can put him where he was,

anything to back up what he had stated.

And pretty quickly we were able to rule

him out as being involved in Annie's disappearance.

- That's always a relief. - It was huge.

- Did you start thinking of Larry again?

- Yes.

- We found the beads in the HVAC vent,

and we knew Larry had been in Annie's lab.

- The keycard swipe showed that he

had been in Annie's laboratory that day when

he was servicing the HVAC.

We made contact with him.

He was staying at a really fleabag motel

a couple towns over.

So my partner and I went over there and interviewed Larry.

When I walked into the room, the first thing I saw

was a big bottle of bourbon and a big bottle of Coke.

We told him we were trying to find out some information

about a graduate student who worked in the lab building

where he had been working who had gone missing.

- So what is his reaction?

- He told us he really didn't know anything about it.

He didn't pay a lot of attention

to the people who were working in the building.

He was just there to service the HVAC.

He let us search the room. He let us search his van.

We went through all his equipment

that he had been using the day before in the lab,

and we just told him that we would want

to maintain contact with him and to not leave the area

without letting us know.

- So we have Larry swiped into the room when Annie was there.

- Yeah, he had swiped into the room

after she had swiped into the room.

- Do we have any other of those type of swipes

where other individuals swiped after?

- Yes. Well, Ray Clark had swiped into that room

several times on that day.

After the interview with Ray Clark,

because of some of his answers had not made a lot of sense

to us, such as the wrestling with the cat,

- the bruising on the arms... - Yeah.

- We started to focus on his movements

on the CCTV for that day.

- On the morning of Tuesday, September 8th,

prior to 10:00 a.m., Ray Clark can be seen

leaving the Amistad building with several coworkers.

- And as he's coming back into the Amistad building,

he's very jovial.

He's joking around with his coworkers.

He's very upbeat.

In the afternoon when the fire alarm goes off,

we observe him coming out of the building.

And he goes and sits on some steps across the street

from the Amistad building.

And he's just by himself

and he's just got his head in his hands.

- We definitely saw a shift in his emotions.

But it could be anything. Did he just get bad news?

Did something happen?

Did he--you know, did he just get in trouble

at work or whichever?

But when we go back at looking at all the CCTV footage,

when he comes back in,

we notice he's wearing different scrubs.

We noticed that when he went for coffee,

he had on blue scrubs with a red string

you can see it on the CCTV.

And then the fire alarm, when he goes out...

And comes back in,

you see the string on his scrubs are a different color.

So we're like, he changed his scrubs.

- The next really big thing that

happened is on Sunday evening, the state police

was still actively processing the crime scene

and started to be the smell of decomposition

down in the Amistad lab complex.

- So we smell it.

But it's a research building. There's animals everywhere.

There's a multimillion-dollar ventilation system.

So where is she?

The decision was made to bring in a cadaver dog.

While the dog is trained to smell and alert

to where a body possibly is, he had difficulty at first because

of the state-of-the-art HVAC system

that is throwing his scent off. - Mm-hmm.

- Ultimately, the smell of decomposition

led them to an area in the men's bathroom

behind a pipe chase, like a stainless steel access panel.

- So like this. - It's a small plate.

So we're like, there's no way.

There was no evidence that the wall was retaped

or painted or anything.

- So the doggie's alert and he's like, it's right here.

- No doubt.

As soon as you remove that first screw, and--

- The wave. - The wave.

- It's horrible.

- Annie's body was found. - Oh, no.

- And you know, Annie was found on the day

that she was supposed to get married.

- So whoever did this was able to squeeze her

into this basically like 1x1 foot square,

maybe less, and just, like, force her in there.

- Her body was pushed down

from where the access vent was.

- After an autopsy,

the medical examiner found she was strangled.

And in addition to being strangled,

she had suffered a broken collarbone, a broken jaw bone,

and had sustained some pretty significant

physical injuries as well.

- One of the other things that was found back

in the kind of crevice where Annie was

found was a-- was a green pen.

And one of the things we had learned in the investigation

is Ray Clark would make all his notations in green pen

right up until the time that Annie Le went missing,

and then his notations were made in a different color pen.

And the bruising on Ray Clark's arms

was consistent with someone reaching in there

to push the body down and then bruising his arms

on the rim of the panel.

So the evidence was really starting to narrow

the focus on Ray Clark.

So we went to arrest them at a hotel in Cromwell, Connecticut.

Someone had leaked the fact that we were going

to go arrest him to the media.

There was just lines and lines of media vans and cameramen.

And if you see the video footage,

you see the conga line of cars coming in.

Well, he was up in the hotel room with his father.

He stood up, turned around, let us handcuff him,

and we walked him out.

Then Ray Clark was taken over to the state police complex

and DNA samples were taken from him.

And they were actually--

where the state police complex was,

it's right across the parking lot from the forensic lab.

So these samples were literally

run over to the forensic lab

to be processed

as quickly as possible.

Ray Clark's DNA was on Annie.

And then we also found the DNA of a second male individual.

- Wait a minute. So we've got Ray Clark locked in.

You got his DNA on her body, and now there's

another DNA of another male.

- Yes, and that caused a lot of alarm

because there was a lot of noise being made about it

by Ray Clark's attorneys. - Sure.

- Trying to claim that there was a second individual

and he was the one who actually

was responsible for killing Annie.

- Well, it definitely opens the door for that.

- But we found that the person whose DNA it was

had died over a year prior to Annie's body being found

and that he had been working as a carpenter's apprentice

at the Amistad building when it was being constructed.

He was rubbing up against the framing and the pipes,

leaving his DNA behind.

And because the lab was a completely climate-controlled,

DNA was able to stay pristine for almost two years...

- Wow.

- Before it was transferred onto Annie's clothing.

But once we were able to fully explain it,

it put a lot of the conspiracy theories to bed.

- And about a year or so later, Ray pled guilty.

- And what did he plead guilty to?

- Homicide and attempted sexual assault.

- Yep.

- Standing in court, the man accused

of killing Yale graduate student

Annie Le said very little.

- Mr. Clark, I read you your rights downstairs earlier

in the presence of your attorneys,

and you understood those rights.

- Yes.

- Did we ever get a motive?

- So motive, that's the million-dollar question.

No. Ray never spoke to us.

- But in addition to the blood evidence,

there were also traces of Ray Clark's semen

recovered from some of the clothing Annie was wearing

when her body was recovered.

That was what led to the attempted

sexual assault charge.

We were unable to determine whether it happened

post mortem or ante mortem.

But there was some sort of sexual component to it,

and that is a possibility for motive.

And a matter of fact,

the only thing that Ray Clark ever said,

he made a statement the day of the guilty plea.

And I could read it for you if you'd like.

- Yeah, sure. Love it.

- "I take full responsibility for my actions.

I alone am responsible for the death of Annie Le

and causing tremendous pain to all who love

and cared about Annie.

I am truly sorry I took Annie away

from her friends, her family, and, most of all, her fiancé.

I blame only myself and there are no excuses

for what I have done.

Annie was and will always be a wonderful person,

by far a better person than I will ever be in my life.

I'm sorry I lied.

I'm sorry I ruined lives.

And I'm sorry for taking Annie Le's life.

- Clark, now 26 years old, was sentenced immediately

after his statement to 44 years in prison.

He won't get out until 2053.

- What does this case mean to you?

- It rattled me to the core.

The magnitude of the case, the nonstop investigation,

the finding of Annie's body

on the day she was to get married,

I mean, literally, just within the past couple of years,

I was able to talk about the case

without getting choked up about it.

But we made an arrest in the case.

We truly were one team.

There were no egos and we got the job done

to a very successful resolution

with Ray confessing in court and getting a conviction.

- You guys did an amazing job.

Cheers to Annie.

- Cheers to Annie. - Annie.