YALE LAB RAT COPS TO GRAD STUDENT SEX SLAYING

A YALE lab tech has pleaded guilty to the shocking sex slaying of a promising grad student. Raymond Clark III, 26, will have to spend 44 years in prison in the 2009 murder of Annie Le. Le had been strangled to death and suffered a broken jaw and collarbone. Clark's DNA was "all over" the crime scene including the tragic young woman's underwear. Her body was discovered inside the wall of a lab building four days after an intense FBI-led manhunt.

"This is not the Ray we know," Clark's father, also named Raymond, said outside court. "I
want you to know Ray has expressed remorse from the beginning. It's difficult to imagine your child did the unthinkable. My family and I send deepest sympathy to the Le family."

Clark pleaded guilty under the Alford doctrine, which allows a defendant to assert that he is innocent but plead guilty when he "intelligently concludes that his interests require a guilty plea and the record strongly evidences guilt." Clark had pleaded not guilty in January 2010.
Le was pursuing a doctorate in pharmacology at Yale when she went missing September 8, 2009.
She had planned to marry Columbia graduate student Jonathan Widawsky on the day her body was found.