Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Killers Amongst Us: Petite genius disappears before Sunday wedding. What happened to Annie Le?

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

Researcher Annie Le leaves her apartment, headed to her office on the Yale campus. Around 10 a.m, she walks from Sterling Hall to another campus building at 10 Amistad Street, That's where her research laboratory is located. She is caught on video entering the building. She never leaves. What happened to Annie Le? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Hi guys, Nancy Grace here. Welcome back to Killers Amongst Us, a production of iHeartMedia and Crime Online. Every day we get up and go to work, right? Or you go to the grocery store, or you go to the grocery store or you go to the mall or you go for a jog or a walk. But let's just say you're at work and you're walking up and down the hallways in and out of your office to the break room, the bathroom, out to the parking lot. Who are you passing in the halls? Do you really know them? I mean, if you look at the stats, there is a huge percentage of violent parolees

and people on probation walking around us in our universe, circling us every single day. We have no idea who they are, what they look like, what are their names, but they're there. Killers amongst us. I'm Nancy Grace. Thanks for being with us. What an all-star panel I have joining us today. First of all, renowned psychiatrist out of the Atlanta area, Dr. Angela Arnold, who actually has a master's degree on top of an MD, what? In cell and molecular biology. You know, it never ends with this woman. You can find her at AngelaArnoldMD.com. Veteran trial lawyer, former prosecutor of nothing but felonies in inner city Atlanta,

now defense attorney at Cohen Cooper East Eppin Allen. You can find him at ccealaw.com. Daryl Cohen is taking a break from his trial calendar to join us. Former police lieutenant with New Haven Police Department, senior lecturer, director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven University. There in the forensic science department, Lisa Daddio. Also with me, crack reporter from Newsday, Matthew Chase.

But first, take a listen to our friends at CrimeOnline.com. Annie Lay may be small in stature, but she is living large. Just 4 feet 11 inches tall, Lay is voted most likely to be the next Einstein by her high school classmates. That's not surprising considering Lay is valedictorian of her graduating class at Union Mine High School in El Dorado, California with her eye on college. 102 scholarship applications are filled out. With approximately $160,000 in scholarship money fueling her dreams, she attends and graduates from the University of Rochester in New York. Wow. They always say dynamite comes in small packages, but I guess Annie Lay is no exception. Just 24 years old, voted most likely to be the next Einstein by her high school classmates.

You know, Daryl Cohen, former prosecutor, now defense attorney, they can say a lot about you and I back in high school, but the next Einstein is not one of the things they threw at us, I imagine. Nancy, Einstein was something I heard about and read about, but I couldn't have hair like his. I never would have a brain like his. I mean, already, I mean, Dr. Angie Arnold, to be voted, not just it was bandied about,

to be voted most likely the next Einstein, even in high school. You know, did I ever tell you my sister was valedictorian in high school? Oh, wow. Graduated with a 4.0 from college. And P.S., she worked her whole way through college. Got a full-on four-year scholarship, a Charles C. Conway scholarship for college.

She majored in accounting with minors in chemistry and German. Whoa. Yes. She's a total brainiac. And to just tell you this part about her, she's also beautiful, long auburn hair, big eyes that I can only describe as auburn. They're not brown and they're not red. They're auburn eyes. Beautiful.

Kind of a Natalie Wood look about her. Anyway, listen to this. In the middle of her valedictorian speech, you're going to love this, Jackie. That was back when um what do you say who were the people that would run naked not yeah streakers all i could think of was flasher streaker a streaker a girl in her high school streaked across the stage in the middle of my beautiful sister's speech and my sister ever, ever the cool cucumber, just looked, paused, and continued with her speech.

I mean, the reason I'm telling you this, Dr. Angie, is because when I think of Annie Lay, so brilliant, yet so beautiful and vibrant, I think of my sister. I can't help it. Yeah. And, you know, Nancy, to be recognized at such an early age, to have stood out so much in high school, you know, once your kids get to high school, you see that, don't you? Certain kids just rise to the top and they are going to be the cream of the crop for the rest of their lives.

You know, it's amazing to me. And, you know, let me ask you this. Out to Matthew Chase, reporter with Newsday, I've said this a million times, and I grappled with it when my fiance was murdered. It always seems like the greatest people, you know, the bright stars, sweet, kind, loving people, the ones that reach out to that homeless person to try to give them a hand and end up getting stabbed. Why does it ever occur to you when you're reporting? Why is it always great people that these hazards befall? You know, that's a great question, but I think there's no doubt that, you know, Annie Lay was someone whose teachers and advisors and classmates recognized

was special. You know, her science teacher said that she was the best student that she ever had. You know, the kind of student you dream of. Her advisor, you know, would describe her as bubbly. You know, she wasn't your kind of stereotypical science student. She was into fashion. She was bubbly. She was not, you know, nerdy. So, you know, very, very nice girl from all we've, you know, all we learned. You know, to Lisa Daddio, former police lieutenant in New Haven, what do we know about Annie Lay, just 24 years old? What kind of person is she? So Annie was a personable, energetic, brilliant person.

She loved fashion. She always wore a skirt or a dress and always wore high heels. Working in a lab and standing over her research and standing at the bench, wearing a lab coat, she always, you know, fashion was a big thing to her. From everybody we interviewed to speaking with her friends and family to, you know, learning about her through her high school and the University of Rochester and obviously Yale University, everybody said the same thing about her, just personable, brilliant. University of Rochester said, you know, she was above where postgrads are and

just her energy and her intelligence. So she definitely was going to be the next Einstein. I'm looking at Annie Lay right now and she's just, you know, everybody's dream that you want your daughter to grow up like her. Guys, take a listen to our friends at CrimeOnline.com. Annie Lay's focus of study is cell developmental biology with a minor in medical anthropology. After graduation, she is then accepted into a graduate program at Yale. This line of study would lead to a doctorate in pharmacology. Her research centers on the treatment of diabetes and certain forms of cancer. Annie Lay's personal life is just as ambitious. She finds the love of her life in another serious

minded academic. Jonathan Wadowski, a graduate student in applied physics and mathematics at Columbia University. A wedding is imminent. Wow. Wedding imminent, seeming like her whole world is unfolding in a beautiful, wonderful way before her. Take a listen to Sharon Alfonsi, ABC. Smart, pretty, and conscientious. That's how friends describe Annie Lee. A lot of good friends, a wonderful fiancé. She's going to marry on Sunday.

We all love her a lot. Photos of the 24-year-old Yale medical student on Facebook show the bride to be smiling, posing in her wedding dress and with her fiance, who she describes as her best friend. On Facebook, they have her smiling. You see her wedding dress set to marry on Sunday. Let's trace that day for Annie Lay. To Matthew Chase, investigative reporter with Newsday. Matthew, what was her day like that day, September 8th? You know, that weekend, Nancy, she was planning to go to New York to Love Island to be married. And, you know, in the morning, her roommates actually hear the

click clack of her heels as she walks around. You know, she's waiting for a package from Kentucky from a place called Rue La La for the wedding. And one of her roommates told us that, you know, she was walking to a campus bus stop with two of the housemates of hers. And she's going to go, you know, probably about three miles to her office on Yale's campus. And she was planning to go, you know, later that week to New York for her wedding. I bet that was going to be absolutely beautiful. To you, Lisa Daddio joining us, retired police lieutenant, New Haven Police Department and senior lecturer. What more do we know about her day? Because that kind of reminds me, my friends, my colleagues at the DA's office, you know, hold on.

Let me go to Daryl Cohen on this. When you worked in the DA's office, that was before we had carpet. Remember? And the floors were tile. And I remember everybody, especially my friend Al Dixon and Eleanor Odom, they would always say they could hear me coming. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, coming down that tile with the heels on. Which points out that you could have never been a good criminal because you could have never snuck up on anyone. We didn't have, we had one copier. Oh, don't even mention that copier. I'd fight with it every Friday night till midnight trying to get discovery out 10 days before trial.

Yes, we were state of the ancient, not state of the art. I was just thinking about Annie Lake, I mean, you know, her roommates hearing those heels, you know, clicking. Back to Lisa Daddio joining us, former police lieutenant, New Haven. So her friends hear her that morning, that Sunday it's planned for her wedding. What more do we know about her trek to work that morning? You know, what we knew about Annie the day that she was last seen, we knew that she was heading to her office in the Yale Sterling School of Medicine. And then from there, she was going to go to her research laboratory to do a bunch of work with her experiment, her research and working on mice. Because she was going to be leaving later that evening or the next morning to go down to New York to see her fiance as they prepared for the wedding that weekend.

So this was kind of the last day that she was going to be on campus until after her wedding. Now tell me about her research. What was her research, Matthew Chase? She did research. She was a pharmacology student, as you guys had said, and she was doing research relating to ailments like diabetes. She did research with animals, with lab mice, you know, and trying to find cures or more about, you know, those sorts of diseases. Nancy? Japan. You know, Annie was a brilliant researcher. She had won and been selected to, on top of receiving well over $100,000 to go to the University of Rochester, she was also a recipient with the National Institute of Health and the National Science

Foundation both incredibly prestigious scholarships and awards for research that she got both at the undergraduate level at the University of Rochester and then at the graduate level at Yale University, those research grants and the money that's afforded for her to do her research are so competitive and prestigious. And yet she gets them at both her undergraduate university and her graduate school, which is just incredible, honestly, and something you rarely see. You know, when you're at that level, Daryl Cohen, I mean, law school was hard enough. And I went on to get a master's in constitutional criminal law at NYU. That was hard enough. But that's nothing in my mind compared to this kind of research. One of my nephews is getting his Ph.D. in math right now.

And it's so far beyond anything I ever studied. The other one went and got his MBA at Chicago. I'm bragging. And the hard work it takes for that. I'm just imagining Annie Lay, this beautiful petite girl, as brilliant as she is, getting this degree and doing all this research. It must have been very intensive while she's there in the lab. I bet she didn't notice anything going on around her. My guess would be that she was completely focused and that her whole world was directly in front of her.

Nothing to the left, nothing to the right, nothing too far away, just directly in front of her because of focus. I'm imagining her in those heels and her dress and that white lab coat. She's very, very petite, sitting on a stool, like a bar stool, looking through a microscope. That's how I imagine Annie lay. To Dr. Angela Arnold, psychiatrist joining me out of Atlanta, I remember when I would try cases, I would be completely unaware of people coming in and out of the courtroom. Somebody asked me once, doesn't it bother you when people come in the courtroom in the middle of an opening statement? I'm like, no, it doesn't. I don't even notice them.

I notice. Yeah. I feel like I'm watching a tennis match. I'd watch the witness, the jury, the witness, the jury. That's it, and nothing else existed. Well, and you have to have that kind of laser focus when you're doing the kind of research that she was doing also. You can't let anything around you bother you, and that's apparently what made her so good at what she was doing, because you are dealing with such minute amounts of information and detail and specimen that you really do have to be laser focused on what you're doing. And if I could just interrupt for a quick.

Sure. Annie had actually written an article when she was in New Haven where she talked about campus safety and security in New Haven. You know, I remember there was a line in there that said something like, you know, all places like New Haven have their perils. But if you're street smart, you can avoid becoming another statistic. So the issue was, you know, in the back of her mind to some degree. You know, that's kind of foreboding, actually. Guys, we're talking about a beautiful, gorgeous, brilliant grad student. Take a listen to our friend Tony DeVille, principal at Union Mine High School. Just a wonderful person, a great student, driven, vibrant, energetic, well-respected by her teachers and by her peers. One of the best students who has ever attended this high school. She was really involved with

math and science. And during her high school time, did an internship at Marshall Hospital and brought a lot of those materials and experiences back to share with her science teachers. One of the things I think she did is she bought a replica of a brain back to the classroom, and all the students obviously enjoyed something like that. Wow. Now, you know, I bet when you did show and tell, Daryl Cohen, you didn't bring a replica of a brain. Trust me. A brain is something we have.

I don't want to look at it. I could never have been a brain. Trust me, a brain is something we have. I don't want to look at it. I could never have been a physician. I would get very queasy at blood. But, you know, you talk about she was good at statistics. It's always good to read statistics and not be a statistic. You know, we're talking about Annie Lay and her whole world just unfolding before her. And I'm curious about this area, Yale, where she was studying. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. And I've been researching it just recently because of another murder of a Yale grad student there. And I learned that it's not a very big town. It's a college town.

And you would think an Ivy League school such as Yale would be in the middle of some elite and posh area. But actually, one in four people at a recent study were described as living in poverty in Yale, and the crime rate is off the charts. What about that, Matthew Chase, reporter with Newsday? You know, there's definitely a dichotomy to some degree between the Gothic storied buildings of Yale and, you know, this city in which it's situated, you know, and there are some tension between town and gown to some degree. As you said, a lot of folks there live in poverty and there's a stark contrast in some ways between what you think of when you think of Yale and what, you know, the reality of

this city in which it's located. Guys, take a listen to Annie's for you earlier from AP. Take a listen to Annie's friend, Jennifer Simpson, speaking with CBS's Maggie Rodriguez. Annie has been planning this wedding for over a year with John, and she was very excited. She's been doing a countdown to her wedding day and she was doing weather patterns to make sure that the weather would be perfect on her wedding day. And she just wanted everything to be perfect, everything down to table napkins, to flowers, and just, Annie was very, very excited about this day. And the relationship with her fiance, do you know him? John is a wonderful person. He is very mild-mannered, very soft and

well-spoken, but very fun. And both of them were very much in love with each other. Even searching the weather patterns for that day. To Matthew Chase, reporter with Newsday, tell me about her wedding plans. What do we know? You know, Nancy, she actually blogged quite a bit about this. She wrote on Facebook, you know, she wrote that it was going to be in this, you know, kind of gorgeous outdoor area. She writes about, you know, the trouble, the difficulty of choosing a wedding dress. You know, she narrows it down to two different ones. She goes shopping with family around Christmas time.

And, you know, she writes about having found a favorite dress. You know, she describes it as being a mermaid cut. It's white. It's strapless. It has a small flower applique. You know, with regard to the wedding ring, she writes about having gazed down in it and being and recalling how happy she was. You know, she's looking at it when she's in the lab, when she's bored and she's waiting for incubations. The wedding bands are chosen to compliment the watches that she and her fiance have. You know, and she's waiting for incubations. The wedding bands are chosen to complement the watches that she and her fiancé have.

You know, and she's writing all about the ceremony. You know, she's excited about the pigs in the blanket that they're going to have at the cocktail hour. She's writing about the plans to go to Greece for their honeymoon. So, you know, she was thinking about this wedding. She was very excited about it. Okay, you can laugh, but Dr. Angela Arnold, my husband and I decided to get married on Tuesday. We got married on Saturday. Wow. But trust me, it was not a whirlwind courtship. I met David shortly after Keith was murdered, my fiance, and he really stuck by me through the years, through thick and thin. And our big focus is what are we going to have to eat?

What are we going to feed the guests? Because we had to throw it together in a hurry. And that was the big focus. So it made, I saw Jackie smile and I did the same thing when Matthew Chase from Newsday said she was excited about the pigs in a blanket. I get it because you want to really, as we say down south, put on the dog. You really want to have, if you can, as best as I could in a few short days, throw a great party for your guests if you can. Right. Because you're so excited about that day, Nancy, and it indicates your future. I mean, I'm quite sure, Nancy, that even though you put together that wedding in six days,

you remember every detail of it, don't you? I really do. I really do. Yeah, you're right. Hey, we didn't take math in law school. Pipe down. So I'm just thinking, imagining her planning all the food and the dress and gazing down at her wedding band as she was working. And I'm going to just continue with my image of her in my mind, sitting on that stool, looking through a microscope.

Take a listen to Vanessa Flores. This is Annie's former roommate. I think he was perfect for her like John was so or is I mean he's he was just so wonderful to her John was so supportive of her of her dreams of following her research goals to you know they had separate. They were together at Rochester and she went to Yale, he went to Columbia, and he supported her through this. And they would talk on the cell phone for hours and they would just be so connected. I can just imagine them talking on the cell phone for hours. But let's go to that day, that day, September 8th.

Listen to our friends at CrimeOnline.com. September 8th, Annie Lay leaves her apartment and using Yale Transit heads off to the Sterling Hall of Medicine on the Yale campus. Around 10 a.m., Lay walks from Sterling Hall to another campus building at 10 Amistad Street. This is where her research laboratory is located. Her purse, cell phone, credit cards, and cash are all left in her office at Sterling Hall. Lay is seen on security footage entering the building, but is not seen leaving. At approximately 9 p.m. that night, Lay has not returned home. One of her five housemates calls police to report her missing.

Okay, so the day goes as normal. We see her around 10 o'clock walking from Sterling Hall to another building. And what's interesting, and it's very helpful when this is true, to former police lieutenant, New Haven Police Department, now senior lecturer and director of the Center for Advanced Policing at University of New Haven. Lisa Daddio, when people or locations, apartment complexes, work locations, universities use key cards. I love that. Explain. So it was a huge break in this case as we got through it and started looking at it

when we weren't treating it as a missing person case because it tracks your movements. So we knew approximately what time Annie had keycarded into her lab and we knew what time, you know, she was seen walking into 10 Amistad because she's actually caught on videotape there. So it really became a huge piece of evidence, if you would, digital evidence for us in this case. Yeah. You know, Daryl Cohen, former prosecutor, now defense attorney, it's really hard to argue with key card info unless you, a defense attorney or an investigator wants to make the argument someone had the individual's key card and was using it. Or in the alternative, they were being forced to use their own when someone else had them

in custody of sorts. You know, Dr. Angela Arnold, wait, jump in. I just wanted to add that that day, the fire alarm goes off and, you know, Annie is not seen leaving the building. The last time she's seen leaving that building is when she's going in, you know, in that brown skirt, green short-sleeved T-shirt and brown shoes. She's not seen coming out when that smoke alarm goes off. And as I understand, Lisa can probably speak to this, of course, more. The investigators reviewed that video and did not see her coming out. We spent hours and hours and hours combing that because it's not just one video. There were multiple cameras that we had to look at.

And so we had analysts that were reviewing everything and slowing it down to make sure and triple check that she's not seen. So that for us, investigatively, was huge. You know, another thing while I'm on that topic, we were just covering in depth the case of Vanessa Guillen, the young woman in the military who goes missing and left behind was her ID. And, you know, when you work in that scenario, you always have like, at the district attorney's office, I always had somewhere on me, usually in my bra, the key to my office, because with evidence and files and hours and hours of research, I normally shut my

door when I would leave, even in the DA's office. It was just too critical. I couldn't let anything happen to it. I guarantee you she would keep that key card with her. She had very valuable and intricate research going on. She did not want that disturbed. So I doubt very seriously she would have given up her key card for anything. What about it, Lisa Daddio? Yeah, she definitely wouldn't have. I mean, she left her cell phone in her office because she's like, oh, I don't need it. I'm going to go check on my mice. And then, you know, once she was done checking on all her research and doing what she needed to do, she actually was going to be going home.

That was the original plan based upon information we had from her roommates and even her fiancé. But her key card is the only thing that would have gotten her into her lab. So you just don't forget it. No other way are you going to be able to get in because of the research that's going on in there. Lisa, I have a question. Jump in. get in because of the research that's going on in there. My question is, how good is the coverage

of the cameras? Are we talking 50%, 80%, 100%? How good are those cameras and are they strategically placed so that everyone coming in or going out should be on camera. So the cameras that are showing your entrances and exits are all there. Where there were not cameras, believe it or not, were on the lower level where Annie's research lab was. So we didn't have any of that footage at all because it doesn't exist, or it didn't exist, I'll leave it at that. But all the entrances and exits to that building are covered. So we were able to go through each one of those cameras over from 10

o'clock, I mean, repeatedly, seeing if she ever left, not even just the day she went missing, but even the days following. Lisa, one other question. Are there windows that are large enough that can be opened and someone can enter or exit? No, there are not. Guys, what you're hearing right now is exactly the way we at the District Attorney's Office would sit around talking about various cases. It's a winding road. Sometimes it goes afield and then it comes back. As you explore and try to figure out like a Rubik's Cube

that you turn over and over in your mind, what happened? Take a listen to Randall Pinkston, CBS. 24-year-old Annie Lee was working on a Ph.D. in pharmacology at the Yale School of Medicine. Tuesday morning, she left her office and walked four blocks to her lab near the School of Nursing. Around 10 o'clock, a surveillance camera captured her entering the building. Just after noon, there was a fire drill, but Lee wasn't seen. When she did not come home Tuesday night, her roommate became concerned and notified authorities. Right now, we are turning the evidence over and over and over in our minds.

What happened to Annie Lay? Nancy Grace, Killers Amongst Us, signing off. Goodbye, friend.