Yale Killing: Police to Make Arrest Soon

Yale Killing: Police to Make Arrest Soon

Thursday morning police investigating the murder of Annie Le said they expect to make an arrest soon. Now their attention is focused on DNA taken from Yale University animal research technician Raymond Clark.

New Haven police spokesman Joe Avery said an arrest was expected "soon" in the death of Le, who worked in the same lab as Clark. Avery would not elaborate on the time frame, but a news conference has been scheduled for 8:00 a.m.

The New Haven Register and Yale Daily News, citing police sources, reported that a DNA match had implicated Clark. The Register also said that police were in the process of obtaining or had already obtained an arrest warrant.

The Rev. Dennisa Smth, a spokesman for the Le family, said on NBC's "Today" show Thursday that police saying an arrest is expected soon is "wonderful news" to the family and will help give some closure.

"It’s such a terrible thing to have lost Annie as they have and not know who did it. That adds to the grief,” he said, Newsday reports.

In the meantime, police sources said that detectives were investigating a testy e-mail that Clark may have sent to Le over protocols she wasn't following at the Yale Lab.

And ABC News reports that Clark texted Le that they should meet.

"You know, they worked in the same building, they passed in the hallways, anything beyond that I'm not going to talk about."

Clark reportedly stayed at this Super 8 Motel in Cromwell, Connecticut overnight, as police finished up with search warrants at his Middletown apartment.

"The Cromwell Police Department is verifying that we have been assisting the New Haven Police Department with their ongoing surveillance of a person of interest related to their crime in New Haven," NECN reports.

News agencies also report, investigators pored over 700 hours of videotapes from surveillance cameras around the laboratory, interviewed more than 150 people and seized 250 pieces of evidence, much of which has been sent to forensic labs for testing, Lewis said.

Le, who was studying for a doctorate in pharmacology, was from Placerville, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. She graduated from the University of Rochester, in New York, where she met her fiance, Jonathan Widawsky, now a graduate student at Columbia University in New York City, the newspaper said.

The murder was the first at Yale since 1998, when Suzanne Jovin, 21, was stabbed 17 times in the head, neck and back about 2 miles from campus. The case remains unsolved, according to the student newspaper, Bloomberg reports.