Ivy league killing grips America

It is believed the accused had an altercation with the victim over housekeeping at the campus laboratory where they both worked.

As more details emerge about the man who allegedly strangled a Yale student and stuffed her body in the recesses of a wall, friends and well-wishers are calling for the toughest of sentences . Annie Le, 24, a pharmacology graduate and a doctoral student with the department of medicine, was last seen on the campus on Tuesday last week, five days before her wedding. While there had been initial speculation that she was a runaway bride, a nationwide hunt was soon launched.

The day she was to be married, police found her body stuffed behind a wall of a basement laboratory building, where she was seen entering but never exited. Ms Le vanished after leaving her office and heading to another lab about 10am on September 8. The Connecticut medical examiner's office determined that she had been asphyxiated. Outrage and interest over the crime has gripped the US for the past week as authorities first looked for the missing student, and then briefly detained before setting free a single "person of interest," Raymond Clark III, a lab technician, who was arrested again late on Thursday night.

"But what kind of punishment would fit killing someone and stuffing her in a two-foot hole in a wall?" said Mayfield Kim, posting on a Facebook site dedicated to remembering Ms Le. "Annie was a beautiful lady with a great future ahead of her. It just makes me so ill." If Mr Clark is charged with Ms Le's murder, he may face a life sentence in prison because the state of Connecticut, where Yale is located and where Mr Clark was arrested, does not impose the death penalty.

Mr Clark, 24, has worked at Yale since 2004. His duties included cleaning the cages of lab rodents, which were mostly mice. Mr Clark, his fiancee, Jennifer Hromadka, and his sister and brother-in-law all worked at the same laboratory where Ms Le conducted research on mice for stem cell development. It is believed this brought him in contact with Ms Le, and that there was perhaps an altercation over Le's housekeeping at the lab.

His supervisor reports that nothing in the history of his employment at the university gave an indication that his involvement in such a crime might be possible," said Richard Levin, Yale's president, in a statement to the campus community on September 17. "We must resist the temptation to rush to judgment until a full and fair prosecution of this case brings a just resolution." However, questions linger about the motive behind the crime, even though the New Haven police have called it "workplace violence", suggesting that it was not a pre-medicated murder and denied reports of a romantic relationship between the two.

Medical evidence tells the investigators that Ms Le was hit and then strangled. Although the police chief would not confirm a DNA match, there is overwhelming evidence in DNA samples found from blood spots on Mr Clark's shoes as well his DNA on Le's body, newspapers have reported. He was interviewed several times in the days after Ms Le's disappearance and he reportedly aroused suspicion after he failed lie detector tests, and said the scratch marks on his chest were from his pet cats.

The Hartford Courant reported that records of computerised swipe cards from the laboratory building led police to focus on Mr Clark. The newspaper, citing an unidentified law-enforcement source, said Mr Clark entered a basement laborastory shortly after Ms Le, and that her card was never used again. The swipe card shows Mr Clark spent nearly an hour in the room after Ms Le was killed. He then moved from room to room, before returning to the room and finally heading toward the utilities conduit where the body was later found.

Mr Clark was arrested on Thursday morning at a motel without incident, about 48 kilometres north of the Yale campus. Investigators have collected more than 250 pieces of evidence, according to sources who spoke to ABC News. He sent a text message to Ms Le a few hours before she was reported missing to discuss the cleanliness of the researcher's animal cages, according to ABC News. Mr Clark has also been described as a "control freak" who often clashed with researchers. But his high school friends remembered Mr Clark, a football and baseball player, as a popular boy.

Kelly Godfrey, a high school classmate of Mr Clark, told ABC News that she thought "so highly of Ray ? to think of him something like that is hard to imagine". Ms Le's family, who hail from California, gathered on Tuesday for a private memorial at which a Vietnamese priest officiated. The family of Ms Le's fiance, Jonathan Widawsky, a graduate student of Columbia University, issued a statement on Thursday that thanked people who helped with the preparations for "a wedding that was not to be".

The family suggested that donations in Ms Le's memory be made to the I Have a Dream Foundation, which the couple suggested on their wedding registry. The foundation is aimed at empowering children from low-income communities to achieve higher education, according to its web site. Mr Clark made his first appearance in court on Thursday, but he did not enter a plea at the arraignment, where the judge set bail at US$3 million (Dh11 million). His next court date is October 6.