March 3, 2021 • 30 mins
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?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, guys, Nancy Grace here, welcome back to Killers amongst Us,
a production of iHeart Media 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 mall,
or you go for a jog or a walk. But
let's just say you're at work. Can you're walking up
(00:25):
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
(00:49):
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 mean, I see Gray, Thanks
for being with us. What an all star panel I
(01:10):
have joining us today. First of all, renowned psychiatrists out
of the Atlanta area, doctor Angela Arnold, who actually has
a master's degree on top of an MD, what and
sell a molecular biology? You know it never ends with
this woman. You can find her at Angela Arnold, MD
dot com veteran trial lawyer, former prosecutor of nothing but
(01:35):
Felonies in intercity Atlanta, now defense attorney at Cohen Cooper
E Stepan Allen. You can find him at CCEA Law
dot com. Daryl Cohen has taken a break from his
trial calendar to join us. Former police lieutenant with Nehaven
Police Department, Senior lecturer, director of the Center for Advanced
(01:56):
Policing at the University of Behavior University there the Forensic
Science Department. Lisa daddy O also with me. Correct reporter
from Newsday, Matthew Chase. But first, take a listen to
our friends at crime online dot com. Annie Ley may
be small in stature, but she is living large. Just
(02:18):
four feet eleven inches halt Lay is voted most likely
to be the next Einstein by her high school class mates.
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, one hundred two scholarship applications
are filled out with approximately one hundred sixty thousand dollars
(02:40):
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 twenty four years old,
voted most likely to be the next Einstein by her
high school classmates. You know, Daryl Cohen, former prosecutor now
(03:04):
defense attorney. They can say a lot about you and
I back in high school, but the nixt Einstein is
not one of the things they threw at us. I
imagine Einstein was something I heard about and read about,
but I couldn't have hair like his, so I never
would have a brain like his. I mean already, I
mean doctor Angie Arnold to be voted, not just it
(03:26):
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 out graduated
with a four point from college and ps. She worked
her whole way through college, got a full on four
year scholarship Charles C. Conway scholarship for college. She majored
(03:51):
in accounting with minors in chemistry in German. Total brainiac
and it's 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, They're not red.
Their auburn eyes. Beautiful kind of a Natalie would look
(04:12):
about her anyway. Listen to this in the middle of
her valedictorian speech. You're gonna love this, Jackie. That was
back when what do you say, where were the people
that would run naked? Yeah, streakers all I can think
of his flasher streaker, a streaker, a girl in her
high school streaked across the stage in the middle of
(04:34):
my beautiful sister's speech, and my sister, ever the cool cucumber,
just looked, paused, and continued with her speech. I mean,
when I think, the reason I'm telling you this, doctor, Angie,
is because when I think of any lay so brilliant
yet so beautiful and vibrant, I think of my sister.
I can't help it. Yeah, And you know, Nancy, to
(04:56):
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. But it's amazing to me.
And you know, let me ask you this. At to
Matthew Chase reporting on news Day, I've said this a
(05:18):
million times and I grappled with it when my fiancee
was smarter. It always seems like the greatest people, 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. What does
it ever Occurdie when you're reporting? Why is it always
(05:40):
great people that these hazards befall? You know, that's a
that's a great question. But I think there's no doubt
that you know, anyway, was someone who teachers and advisors
and classmates recognize with 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 adviser,
(06:02):
you know, would describers 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 um,
you know, very very nice girl from all we've you know,
all we learned, you know, to Lisa Daddy, a porn
police lieutenant in Haven, what do we know about Annie
(06:25):
l just twenty four 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 address
and always wore high heels. Um working in a lab
(06:47):
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. Um from everybody we interviewed,
to speaking with her friends and family, to you know,
learning about her through her high school and the University
(07:09):
of Rochester and obviously Yale University, everybody said the same
thing about her. Just personal, 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
(07:31):
right now and she's just, you know, everybody's dream that
you want your daughter to grow up like card guys
take a list in our friends at crime online dot com.
Annie Lay's focus of study is cell developmental biology, with
a minor in medical anthropology. After graduation, she has then
accepted into a graduate program at Yale. This line of
(07:53):
study would lead to a doctorate in pharmacology. Her research
centers on the treatment of diabetes and certain forms of answer.
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 and applied physics and mathematics
at Columbia University. A wedding is eminent. Wow, wedding eminent,
(08:16):
Seeming like her whole world is unfolding in a beautiful,
wonderful way before her. Take a list of Sharon al
fanse ABC, smart, pretty, and conscientious. That's how friends describe
Annie Lee. A lot of good friends, a wonderful fiancee.
She's going to marry on Sunday. We all love her
a lot. Photos of the twenty four year old Yale
(08:38):
medical student on Facebook show the bride to be smiling,
posing in her wedding dress and with her fiancee, who
she describes as her best friend. On Facebook. They have
her smiling. You see her wedding address set to Mary
on Sunday. Let's trace that day for Annie Lay to
(09:02):
Matthew Chase, uh investigative reporter with Newsday. Matthew, what was
her day like that day? September eight? You know that weekendancy,
she was planning to go to New York to Love
Island to be married. And uh, you know, in the morning,
her roommates actually hear the quick clack of her heels
(09:22):
as she walks around. You know, she's she's waiting for
a package from Kentucky from a place called Rue La
La for the for the wedding um. 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 um and she's going to go, you know,
(09:43):
probably about three miles to her office on Yale's campus,
and she was planning to go you know later that
later that week to New York for her for her wedding.
That was going to be absolutely beautiful to you, Lisa, Daddy,
I'd joining us retire police lieutenant. You have a police
(10:05):
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 in a hold all.
Let me go to Daryl Collen 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
(10:27):
my friend Al Dixon and Eleanor own them. They would
always say they could hear me coming the same 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 we had. Oh, don't even mention
(10:47):
that copier. I'd fight with it every Friday night till midnight,
trying to get discovery out ten days before trial. Oh yes,
we were staying in the ancient, not state of the art.
I was just thinking about any lake. You know, her
roommates hearing those heels, you know. Clicking back to Lisa
Daddio joining US former police lieutenant Behaven. So her friends
(11:11):
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 any the
day that she was last seeing We knew that she
was heading to her office in the Yale Stirling form
(11:33):
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
(11:54):
that weekend. So this was kind of the last day
that she was going to be on campus until after
her wedding. I'll tell you 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
(12:15):
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
(12:36):
well over one hundred thousand dollars school in 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
(13:01):
grants and the money that's afforded for her to do
a 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 then something you really see,
you know, when you're at that level, Daryl Coh. I mean,
(13:22):
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 PhD and math right now, and it's so
far beyond anything I ever studied. The other one went
(13:45):
and got his NBA at Chicago. I'm bragging, and the
hard work it takes for that. I'm just imagining any latest, beautiful,
petite girl as brilliant as she is, getting this degree
and doing all this researches. It must have been very
intensive while she's there in the lab. I bet she
(14:07):
didn't notice anything going on around her. Yeah, 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, and nothing too far away,
just directly in front of her. Because of focus, I'm
imagining her in those hills and her dress and that
white lab come. She's very, very petite, sitting on a stool,
(14:32):
like a bar stool, looking through a microscope. That's how
I imagine Annie lay to doctor Angela Arnold, psychiatrist shot
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 asking 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.
(14:52):
I don't even notice them. I noticed. I felt like
I'm watching a test match. I'd watch the witness, the jury,
the witness, the jury, that's it, and nothing else existed. Well,
and you have to 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 bothered you. And that apparently what made her
(15:16):
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. Nay, if I could just interrupt her, clear, sure,
jump in, Sure, Annie had actually written an article when
(15:39):
she was in New Haven where she talked about campus
safety and security and new Haven, you know, and 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 this issue was, you know, in the back of
her mind to some degree. Yeah, that's kind of foreboding. Actually, guys,
(16:02):
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
(16:23):
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
brain back to the classroom, and all the students obviously
(16:46):
enjoy something like that. Wow, now you know I met
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 physician. I would get
very queasy at blood. But you know, you talk about
(17:07):
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. They're just unfolding
before her. And I'm curious about this area Yale where
she was studying, Yale University, newhan Connecticut, and I've been
(17:31):
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,
(17:52):
but actually one in four people at a recent study
were described as living in poverty and Yale and the
crime is is off the charts. What about that, Matthew Chase,
reporter with New's Day. You know, there's definitely a dichotomy
to some degree with between the Gothic storied buildings of
(18:15):
Yale and you know this this city in which it's situated,
you know, and there are there are some there's some
tension between town and gown to some degree. As you said, Um,
a lot of folks there live in poverty, and there's
a stark contrast in some ways between what you think
(18:35):
of when you think of Yale and what you know
the reality of this city in which it's in which
it's located. You guys, take a listen to Annie's pretty
earlier her from AP. Take a listen to Annie's friend
Jennifer Simpson speaking with CBS as Maggie Rodriguez. Annie has
been planning this wedding for over a year with John,
(18:56):
and she was very excited. She's been 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
(19:17):
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
(19:38):
weather patterns for that day to Matthew Chase, reporter with
News Day, tell me about her wedding plants. What do
we know? You know, anthy, she actually blogged quite a
bit about this. She wrote on Facebook. You know, she
wrote that it was going to be in this kind
of gorgeous outdoor area. She writes about, you know, the trouble,
the difficulty of choosing a wedding dress. You know, she
(20:00):
narrows its dead, she narrows it down to two different ones.
She goes shopping with family around Christmas time, and you know,
she writes about having found um a favorite dress. You know,
she describes it as as being a having a mermaid cut.
It's white, it's strapless, it has a small flower applicat um.
(20:22):
You know, with regard to the wedding ring, she writes
about having gazed down in it and being how 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. Um. The wedding bands are chosen
to compliment the watches that she and her fiance I have.
(20:43):
You know, she's writing all about the ceremony. You know,
she's excited about the pigs and the blanket that they're
going to have at the cocktail hour. She's writing about
the plans to go to Greece for for their honeymoons,
so you know she was thinking about this wedding. She
was very excited about. Okay, you can laugh, but doctor
(21:04):
Angela Arnold, my husband and I decided to get married
on Tuesday. We got married on Saturday. Well, 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
(21:25):
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 do the same thing when
Matthew Chase her Neuesday 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.
(21:48):
You really want to have if you can 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 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.
(22:12):
I really said, yeah, you're right. Hey, we didn't take
Matt in law school pipe down. So I'm just thinking
imagining her planning all the food and the dress and
the dress and gazing down at her wedding man 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.
(22:33):
This is Any's former roommate. I think he was perfect
for her, Like um, 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. Tom. You know, they had to separate. They
(22:57):
were together at Rochester and they she went to a year,
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 they're talking on a cellphone for hours. But let's
go to that day. That day, September eight. Listen to
(23:19):
our forensic crime online dot com. September eighth, Annie Lay
leaves her apartment and using Yale Transit, heads off to
the Sterling Hall of Medicine on the Yale campus. Around
ten am, Lay walks from Sterling Hall to another campus
building at ten am, the Scott Street. This is where
her research laboratory is located. Her purse, cell phone, credit
cards in cash are all left in her office at
(23:40):
Sterling Hall. Ley is seen on security footage entering the building,
but is not seen leaving. At approximately nine pm that night,
Lay has not returned home. One of her five housemates
calls police to purport her missing. Okay, so the day
goes as normal. We see her around ten o'clock walking
from Strolling Hall to another building. And what's interesting and
(24:05):
it's very helpful when this is true to form a
police Lieutenant Nehaan Police Department, now senior Lecturer and Director
of the Center for Advanced Policing at University in Haven,
Lisa Daddio. When people or locations, apartment complexes, work locations,
(24:26):
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 attracts your movements.
So we knew approximately what time Annie had key carded
(24:48):
into her lab, and we knew what time you know,
she was seen walking into ten homicide 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, Jerald Cohen, a foreign
prosecutor now defense attorney. It's really hard to argue with
(25:11):
keycard info unless you a defense attorney or investigator. What's
some of the arguments someone had the individual's key card
and was using it, or or in the alternative, they
were being forced to use their own when someone else
had them in custody of sorts, you know la Arnold
wait Japan during I just wanted to add that through
(25:34):
that day, the fire alarm goes off and uh, you know,
Annie is not seen leaving the building. The last time
she's seen leaving that building is when she's going in um,
you know, in that brown skirt, green short sleeved t
shirt and brown shoes. She's not seen coming out when
(25:56):
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,
and we spent hours and hours and hours combing that
because it's not just one video. There are multiple cameras
that we had to look at, and so we had
analysts that were reviewing everything and slowing it down to
(26:19):
make sure and triple check that she's not seen. So
that for us investigatively was huge. Another well, I'm on
that topic. We were just covering in depth the case
of Vanessa Gean, the young woman in the military who
goes missing and left behind was her ID. And you know,
(26:43):
when you work in that scenario, you always have, like
what 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.
(27:05):
I could let anything happen to it. I guarantee 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 Daddy, O. Yeah, she definitely wasn't home. I mean
(27:26):
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 into and 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 fiance. But her key
card is the only thing that would have gotten her
(27:48):
into her lab. So you just don't forget it because
no other way are you going to be able to
get in because of the research that's going on in
there here. My question is how good is the coverage
of the cameras? Are we talking fifty eight? How good
(28:11):
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, we're on the lower level where Annie's research
lab was, So we didn't have any of that footage
(28:34):
at all because it doesn't exist or it didn't exist.
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 ten o'clock,
I mean repeatedly seeing if she ever last, not even
just the day she went missing, but even the day's following.
(28:58):
Leaves 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. You may it's a
(29:19):
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.
Twenty four year old Annie Lee was working on a
(29:40):
PhD 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 ten o'clock or
surveillance camera captured her entering the building just afternoon. There
was a fire drill, but Lee wasn't seen. When she
did not come home Tuesday night, her roommate became concerned
(30:01):
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, amoxt Us signing off
goodbye friend.
Hi, guys, Nancy Grace here, welcome back to Killers amongst Us,
a production of iHeart Media 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 mall,
or you go for a jog or a walk. But
let's just say you're at work. Can you're walking up
(00:25):
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
(00:49):
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 mean, I see Gray, Thanks
for being with us. What an all star panel I
(01:10):
have joining us today. First of all, renowned psychiatrists out
of the Atlanta area, doctor Angela Arnold, who actually has
a master's degree on top of an MD, what and
sell a molecular biology? You know it never ends with
this woman. You can find her at Angela Arnold, MD
dot com veteran trial lawyer, former prosecutor of nothing but
(01:35):
Felonies in intercity Atlanta, now defense attorney at Cohen Cooper
E Stepan Allen. You can find him at CCEA Law
dot com. Daryl Cohen has taken a break from his
trial calendar to join us. Former police lieutenant with Nehaven
Police Department, Senior lecturer, director of the Center for Advanced
(01:56):
Policing at the University of Behavior University there the Forensic
Science Department. Lisa daddy O also with me. Correct reporter
from Newsday, Matthew Chase. But first, take a listen to
our friends at crime online dot com. Annie Ley may
be small in stature, but she is living large. Just
(02:18):
four feet eleven inches halt Lay is voted most likely
to be the next Einstein by her high school class mates.
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, one hundred two scholarship applications
are filled out with approximately one hundred sixty thousand dollars
(02:40):
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 twenty four years old,
voted most likely to be the next Einstein by her
high school classmates. You know, Daryl Cohen, former prosecutor now
(03:04):
defense attorney. They can say a lot about you and
I back in high school, but the nixt Einstein is
not one of the things they threw at us. I
imagine Einstein was something I heard about and read about,
but I couldn't have hair like his, so I never
would have a brain like his. I mean already, I
mean doctor Angie Arnold to be voted, not just it
(03:26):
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 out graduated
with a four point from college and ps. She worked
her whole way through college, got a full on four
year scholarship Charles C. Conway scholarship for college. She majored
(03:51):
in accounting with minors in chemistry in German. Total brainiac
and it's 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, They're not red.
Their auburn eyes. Beautiful kind of a Natalie would look
(04:12):
about her anyway. Listen to this in the middle of
her valedictorian speech. You're gonna love this, Jackie. That was
back when what do you say, where were the people
that would run naked? Yeah, streakers all I can think
of his flasher streaker, a streaker, a girl in her
high school streaked across the stage in the middle of
(04:34):
my beautiful sister's speech, and my sister, ever the cool cucumber,
just looked, paused, and continued with her speech. I mean,
when I think, the reason I'm telling you this, doctor, Angie,
is because when I think of any lay so brilliant
yet so beautiful and vibrant, I think of my sister.
I can't help it. Yeah, And you know, Nancy, to
(04:56):
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. But it's amazing to me.
And you know, let me ask you this. At to
Matthew Chase reporting on news Day, I've said this a
(05:18):
million times and I grappled with it when my fiancee
was smarter. It always seems like the greatest people, 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. What does
it ever Occurdie when you're reporting? Why is it always
(05:40):
great people that these hazards befall? You know, that's a
that's a great question. But I think there's no doubt
that you know, anyway, was someone who teachers and advisors
and classmates recognize with 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 adviser,
(06:02):
you know, would describers 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 um,
you know, very very nice girl from all we've you know,
all we learned, you know, to Lisa Daddy, a porn
police lieutenant in Haven, what do we know about Annie
(06:25):
l just twenty four 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 address
and always wore high heels. Um working in a lab
(06:47):
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. Um from everybody we interviewed,
to speaking with her friends and family, to you know,
learning about her through her high school and the University
(07:09):
of Rochester and obviously Yale University, everybody said the same
thing about her. Just personal, 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
(07:31):
right now and she's just, you know, everybody's dream that
you want your daughter to grow up like card guys
take a list in our friends at crime online dot com.
Annie Lay's focus of study is cell developmental biology, with
a minor in medical anthropology. After graduation, she has then
accepted into a graduate program at Yale. This line of
(07:53):
study would lead to a doctorate in pharmacology. Her research
centers on the treatment of diabetes and certain forms of answer.
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 and applied physics and mathematics
at Columbia University. A wedding is eminent. Wow, wedding eminent,
(08:16):
Seeming like her whole world is unfolding in a beautiful,
wonderful way before her. Take a list of Sharon al
fanse ABC, smart, pretty, and conscientious. That's how friends describe
Annie Lee. A lot of good friends, a wonderful fiancee.
She's going to marry on Sunday. We all love her
a lot. Photos of the twenty four year old Yale
(08:38):
medical student on Facebook show the bride to be smiling,
posing in her wedding dress and with her fiancee, who
she describes as her best friend. On Facebook. They have
her smiling. You see her wedding address set to Mary
on Sunday. Let's trace that day for Annie Lay to
(09:02):
Matthew Chase, uh investigative reporter with Newsday. Matthew, what was
her day like that day? September eight? You know that weekendancy,
she was planning to go to New York to Love
Island to be married. And uh, you know, in the morning,
her roommates actually hear the quick clack of her heels
(09:22):
as she walks around. You know, she's she's waiting for
a package from Kentucky from a place called Rue La
La for the for the wedding um. 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 um and she's going to go, you know,
(09:43):
probably about three miles to her office on Yale's campus,
and she was planning to go you know later that
later that week to New York for her for her wedding.
That was going to be absolutely beautiful to you, Lisa, Daddy,
I'd joining us retire police lieutenant. You have a police
(10:05):
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 in a hold all.
Let me go to Daryl Collen 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
(10:27):
my friend Al Dixon and Eleanor own them. They would
always say they could hear me coming the same 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 we had. Oh, don't even mention
(10:47):
that copier. I'd fight with it every Friday night till midnight,
trying to get discovery out ten days before trial. Oh yes,
we were staying in the ancient, not state of the art.
I was just thinking about any lake. You know, her
roommates hearing those heels, you know. Clicking back to Lisa
Daddio joining US former police lieutenant Behaven. So her friends
(11:11):
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 any the
day that she was last seeing We knew that she
was heading to her office in the Yale Stirling form
(11:33):
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
(11:54):
that weekend. So this was kind of the last day
that she was going to be on campus until after
her wedding. I'll tell you 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
(12:15):
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
(12:36):
well over one hundred thousand dollars school in 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
(13:01):
grants and the money that's afforded for her to do
a 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 then something you really see,
you know, when you're at that level, Daryl Coh. I mean,
(13:22):
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 PhD and math right now, and it's so
far beyond anything I ever studied. The other one went
(13:45):
and got his NBA at Chicago. I'm bragging, and the
hard work it takes for that. I'm just imagining any latest, beautiful,
petite girl as brilliant as she is, getting this degree
and doing all this researches. It must have been very
intensive while she's there in the lab. I bet she
(14:07):
didn't notice anything going on around her. Yeah, 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, and nothing too far away,
just directly in front of her. Because of focus, I'm
imagining her in those hills and her dress and that
white lab come. She's very, very petite, sitting on a stool,
(14:32):
like a bar stool, looking through a microscope. That's how
I imagine Annie lay to doctor Angela Arnold, psychiatrist shot
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 asking 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.
(14:52):
I don't even notice them. I noticed. I felt like
I'm watching a test match. I'd watch the witness, the jury,
the witness, the jury, that's it, and nothing else existed. Well,
and you have to 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 bothered you. And that apparently what made her
(15:16):
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. Nay, if I could just interrupt her, clear, sure,
jump in, Sure, Annie had actually written an article when
(15:39):
she was in New Haven where she talked about campus
safety and security and new Haven, you know, and 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 this issue was, you know, in the back of
her mind to some degree. Yeah, that's kind of foreboding. Actually, guys,
(16:02):
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
(16:23):
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
brain back to the classroom, and all the students obviously
(16:46):
enjoy something like that. Wow, now you know I met
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 physician. I would get
very queasy at blood. But you know, you talk about
(17:07):
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. They're just unfolding
before her. And I'm curious about this area Yale where
she was studying, Yale University, newhan Connecticut, and I've been
(17:31):
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,
(17:52):
but actually one in four people at a recent study
were described as living in poverty and Yale and the
crime is is off the charts. What about that, Matthew Chase,
reporter with New's Day. You know, there's definitely a dichotomy
to some degree with between the Gothic storied buildings of
(18:15):
Yale and you know this this city in which it's situated,
you know, and there are there are some there's some
tension between town and gown to some degree. As you said, Um,
a lot of folks there live in poverty, and there's
a stark contrast in some ways between what you think
(18:35):
of when you think of Yale and what you know
the reality of this city in which it's in which
it's located. You guys, take a listen to Annie's pretty
earlier her from AP. Take a listen to Annie's friend
Jennifer Simpson speaking with CBS as Maggie Rodriguez. Annie has
been planning this wedding for over a year with John,
(18:56):
and she was very excited. She's been 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
(19:17):
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
(19:38):
weather patterns for that day to Matthew Chase, reporter with
News Day, tell me about her wedding plants. What do
we know? You know, anthy, she actually blogged quite a
bit about this. She wrote on Facebook. You know, she
wrote that it was going to be in this kind
of gorgeous outdoor area. She writes about, you know, the trouble,
the difficulty of choosing a wedding dress. You know, she
(20:00):
narrows its dead, she narrows it down to two different ones.
She goes shopping with family around Christmas time, and you know,
she writes about having found um a favorite dress. You know,
she describes it as as being a having a mermaid cut.
It's white, it's strapless, it has a small flower applicat um.
(20:22):
You know, with regard to the wedding ring, she writes
about having gazed down in it and being how 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. Um. The wedding bands are chosen
to compliment the watches that she and her fiance I have.
(20:43):
You know, she's writing all about the ceremony. You know,
she's excited about the pigs and the blanket that they're
going to have at the cocktail hour. She's writing about
the plans to go to Greece for for their honeymoons,
so you know she was thinking about this wedding. She
was very excited about. Okay, you can laugh, but doctor
(21:04):
Angela Arnold, my husband and I decided to get married
on Tuesday. We got married on Saturday. Well, 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
(21:25):
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 do the same thing when
Matthew Chase her Neuesday 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.
(21:48):
You really want to have if you can 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 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.
(22:12):
I really said, yeah, you're right. Hey, we didn't take
Matt in law school pipe down. So I'm just thinking
imagining her planning all the food and the dress and
the dress and gazing down at her wedding man 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.
(22:33):
This is Any's former roommate. I think he was perfect
for her, Like um, 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. Tom. You know, they had to separate. They
(22:57):
were together at Rochester and they she went to a year,
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 they're talking on a cellphone for hours. But let's
go to that day. That day, September eight. Listen to
(23:19):
our forensic crime online dot com. September eighth, Annie Lay
leaves her apartment and using Yale Transit, heads off to
the Sterling Hall of Medicine on the Yale campus. Around
ten am, Lay walks from Sterling Hall to another campus
building at ten am, the Scott Street. This is where
her research laboratory is located. Her purse, cell phone, credit
cards in cash are all left in her office at
(23:40):
Sterling Hall. Ley is seen on security footage entering the building,
but is not seen leaving. At approximately nine pm that night,
Lay has not returned home. One of her five housemates
calls police to purport her missing. Okay, so the day
goes as normal. We see her around ten o'clock walking
from Strolling Hall to another building. And what's interesting and
(24:05):
it's very helpful when this is true to form a
police Lieutenant Nehaan Police Department, now senior Lecturer and Director
of the Center for Advanced Policing at University in Haven,
Lisa Daddio. When people or locations, apartment complexes, work locations,
(24:26):
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 attracts your movements.
So we knew approximately what time Annie had key carded
(24:48):
into her lab, and we knew what time you know,
she was seen walking into ten homicide 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, Jerald Cohen, a foreign
prosecutor now defense attorney. It's really hard to argue with
(25:11):
keycard info unless you a defense attorney or investigator. What's
some of the arguments someone had the individual's key card
and was using it, or or in the alternative, they
were being forced to use their own when someone else
had them in custody of sorts, you know la Arnold
wait Japan during I just wanted to add that through
(25:34):
that day, the fire alarm goes off and uh, you know,
Annie is not seen leaving the building. The last time
she's seen leaving that building is when she's going in um,
you know, in that brown skirt, green short sleeved t
shirt and brown shoes. She's not seen coming out when
(25:56):
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,
and we spent hours and hours and hours combing that
because it's not just one video. There are multiple cameras
that we had to look at, and so we had
analysts that were reviewing everything and slowing it down to
(26:19):
make sure and triple check that she's not seen. So
that for us investigatively was huge. Another well, I'm on
that topic. We were just covering in depth the case
of Vanessa Gean, the young woman in the military who
goes missing and left behind was her ID. And you know,
(26:43):
when you work in that scenario, you always have, like
what 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.
(27:05):
I could let anything happen to it. I guarantee 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 Daddy, O. Yeah, she definitely wasn't home. I mean
(27:26):
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 into and 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 fiance. But her key
card is the only thing that would have gotten her
(27:48):
into her lab. So you just don't forget it because
no other way are you going to be able to
get in because of the research that's going on in
there here. My question is how good is the coverage
of the cameras? Are we talking fifty eight? How good
(28:11):
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, we're on the lower level where Annie's research
lab was, So we didn't have any of that footage
(28:34):
at all because it doesn't exist or it didn't exist.
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 ten o'clock,
I mean repeatedly seeing if she ever last, not even
just the day she went missing, but even the day's following.
(28:58):
Leaves 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. You may it's a
(29:19):
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.
Twenty four year old Annie Lee was working on a
(29:40):
PhD 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 ten o'clock or
surveillance camera captured her entering the building just afternoon. There
was a fire drill, but Lee wasn't seen. When she
did not come home Tuesday night, her roommate became concerned
(30:01):
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, amoxt Us signing off
goodbye friend.
Host
Nancy Grace
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