Cops: Annie Le's body believed found

Investigators found a body hidden in a wall Sunday in the Yale University building where a missing graduate student was last seen.

Police believe the victim is Annie Le, 24, reported missing Tuesday night, assistant police chief Peter Reichard said at a hastily called news conference Sunday night.

PHOTOS: Yale student disappears before LI wedding

He said the body was found about 5 p.m. Sunday in a chase -- a vertical space used for ducts, pipes or wires -- in the basement of the building at 10 Amistad St. in New Haven. It was discovered on the same day Le was to be wed in Syosset.

Assuming it is Le
"We are assuming that it is her," said Reichard, who said the investigation into Le's disappearance has now become a homicide case. "We have been in contact with family members of Annie Le and our sympathy goes out to the family."

Yale president Richard C. Levin said afterward, "Our hearts go out to the family of Annie Le, to her fiance, to her friends."

They "now must suffer the additional ordeal of waiting for the body to be positively identified," he said.

Le, a doctoral student in pharmacology from Placerville, Calif., was to marry Jonathan Widawsky, also 24, a Columbia University graduate student from Huntington, at Syosset's North Ritz Club Sunday. The nuptials were canceled Friday.

Earlier Sunday, the FBI and Connecticut State Police had been searching trash at a Hartford incinerator for Le's remains.

FBI agent Bill Reiner had said investigators were "following the trash" that left the university laboratory, but declined to comment further on the search at the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority's trash-to-energy plant in Hartford.

Paul Nonnemacher, spokesman for the Recovery Authority, said agents wearing hazmat suits had been searching by hand and using small Bobcat tractors late Saturday night and continued through the day Sunday.

The garbage being searched at the Hartford facility, Nonnemacher said, was not medical or specialized waste, but rather typical residential trash. 

Trash facility searched
Nonnemacher said authorities had not asked the facility to halt its incineration, which typically stops on the weekend but would resume Monday.

No one was home Sunday at the Widawsky family's home in Huntington. Police have been saying Widawsky is not a suspect in the case and is cooperating.

Outside the North Ritz Club Sunday, security guards in suits and sunglasses said they had been hired for the day by the club, and added that no one related to the wedding had shown up.

The New Haven Register reported Sunday that bloody clothing  found in a ceiling of the lab where Le was last seen Tuesday were not the clothes she was wearing the morning she disappeared.

Le used her student ID to enter a lab where she worked Tuesday morning but 70 surveillance cameras did not record her leaving. Le's ID, credit cards and purse were found in her office in another nearby building.

In New Haven Sunday, one of the five women with whom Le shared a three-story house in the city's historic district said the last time she saw Le was Tuesday between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. as the bride-to-be was walking to a campus shuttle bus stop with two of their housemates. 

Housemate wished her luck
"I said, 'If I don't see you before Sunday, congratulations and good luck,' " said the housemate, who asked not to be identified because Yale officials have insisted students, faculty and staff not speak to the press about the case. "I do know how very excited she was about the wedding."

The housemate said Le was wearing the green top and brown skirt seen in surveillance video taken around 10 a.m. at the Amistad Street research lab where she worked.

The housemate described Annie as always very well dressed, recalling how she would always hear "the click-clack of her heels as she walked around.

"She looked very polished and put together," the housemate said. "She is bubbly and cheerful. She always had a big smile on her face."

The housemate said Le was fretting about a package she expected for the wedding from a Kentucky retailer. The package arrived Thursday.

With Jennifer Barrios, Jennifer Maloney and AP

PHOTOS: Yale student disappears before LI wedding

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