Police Seek DNA From Yale Worker in Death of Student

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (CNN) -- Police said Tuesday night they have a Yale University employee in custody in connection with the killing of Yale student Annie Le.

A judge has issued a search warrant and a body warrant on Raymond Clark, 24, of Middletown, police said.

The body warrant allows police to collect DNA from Clark, who will be arrested if he does not comply but will be released if he does, police said.

Le's body was found Sunday in a wall of an off-campus medical research building, police said.

Clark is a lab technician at Yale, police said at a news conference Tuesday night.

Earlier Tuesday, a senior police official told CNN that investigators have interviewed more than 200 people in the case.

The official also disputed Yale University President Richard Levin, who had indicated that the suspect pool would be a "limited number" of people who had been in the basement the day Le disappeared.

"We know everyone that was in the basement ... and we passed that on to police," Levin said. "There is an abundance of evidence."

But the police official, whom CNN is not naming because of the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation, said investigators believe dozens of people could have had access to that area of the building.

Le, 24, disappeared September 8. She was last seen on surveillance video as she entered the four-story lab at 10 Amistad Street, about 10 blocks from the main campus. After going over hours of tapes, authorities said they had not found images of her leaving the building.

The police official said that investigators were unlikely to make any arrest until DNA evidence is returned from analysis and that the probe could take days.

Police have not released information on what DNA evidence may have been found, although investigators said earlier that bloody clothing was found hidden above tiles in a drop ceiling in another part of the building.

Authorities have not described the clothes that were found, nor said to whom they might have belonged. Teams of investigators at a Connecticut State Police lab worked through the weekend processing and examining the bloodstained clothes.

But Thomas Kaplan, editor in chief of the Yale Daily News, said a Yale police official told the paper that the clothes were not what Le was wearing when she entered the building.

On Sunday, New Haven Police spokesman Joe Avery said that Le's killing was not a random act but would not elaborate.

Meanwhile, a home in Middletown, Connecticut -- believed to be the home of a Yale technician -- was the scene of a large police presence Tuesday. Police, however, would not say whether their presence at the home was related to their investigation of Le's death.

Le, a graduate student in Yale's pharmacology program, was to have been married Sunday on New York's Long Island to Jonathan Widawsky, a graduate student at Columbia University.

Her friend Vanessa Flores said Le was overjoyed about getting married.

"She was just so excited about this wedding and everything from, you know, her flowers to her wedding dress and just certain details about it," Flores told HLN's Nancy Grace. "We talked about this back in 2008. She was already thinking about the weather, whether June, July was going to be too hot, August, so September, would it be nice?"

Le was from Placerville, California, and seemed to have been well aware of the risks of crime in a university town. In February, she compared crime and safety at Yale with other Ivy League schools for a piece for B magazine, published by the medical school.

Among the tips she offered: Keep a minimum amount on your person. When she walked over to the research building on September 8, she left her purse, credit cards and cell phone in her office.