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Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Hayden Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. And I'm the husband. I can't see you. I know, it's weird, right? I just realized that. How am I gonna... Well, if you are watching on YouTube, you might see something different going on here. And if you are listening on audio, we will explain it. Garrett and I went to Pumpkin City Christmas Trees. And we were
And we found this really super mini Charlie Brown tree and flocked it black just for the set. - Black, it is a full on black Christmas tree.
Real tree. I know what you're thinking. Well, is that the Christmas spirit? Yes, it is. It is the Christmas spirit and it looks amazing. And we decorated it. But one of my favorite things is a couple years ago, a listener actually sent us a Christmas ornament. And so we have it here on the tree. It's our little people. And on the back, it says I love it and I hate it. But we just thought this year, you know, we might as well get into the Christmas spirit with a black tree. Hold
- Hold on, don't skip this because you're gonna wanna hear it. When Garrett and I started this podcast, we had no idea what it would become. And honestly, it's just a train that has run away from us and we cannot even believe how big this community has grown. With that being said, it gives us a lot of cool opportunities. And one thing that we really wanna do this year was have MWMH help out some families. I know holidays can be hard and we really want everyone to just have a good time this year.
So we thought that we could maybe help out some families this year around the holidays. We know it can be hard and we just want everyone to have a peaceful holiday season. And so that being said, we are going to, like I said, help some families out.
And what we are going to do is there's going to be a Google form. Whether you're listening on YouTube or on audio, there will be a link down below that has that form. You can click it. You can suggest any families that you may know, any individuals that you may know that need help around the holidays. And please only suggest it if you know that these families need help because we want to make sure that we are able to go through the list that we hopefully get from you guys.
And I know it's going to be hard, but choose a few of those who need help around this holiday season. And like Garrett said, please only submit people who you really think could use it. We really want it to matter. And it can be a person. It can be a family. We'll have a little section for you to tell us a little bit about why you think this person could use the help. And we are going to go through every single submission and really make sure that this gift goes to those who need it. Yeah.
And we aren't going to be able to help everybody. Like Peyton said, we're only going to be able to do a few people, whether it's money, Christmas gifts. We don't know what that looks like yet. Peyton and I are still figuring that out. But again, we're really excited. And because of you guys listening and because of those who pay to listen to our extra episodes on Apple and Patreon, we're able to do this. So we are really excited. I mean, essentially, this is coming from all of us, not just us. So 100 percent. OK.
That being said, Garrett, I think we are ready for your 10 seconds. Update on the marathon training. I'm still running. I'm still hanging in there. My body hurts everywhere, but that's okay. I'm pushing through it. I got some recovery tools, and I think I'm going to be okay. Like, the more I run, it's hard, but I'm feeling more and more comfortable, and I know 26.2 miles is a lot, but I'm getting there, and I'm slowly convincing Peyton to do it with me. Right, babe? Nope. Nope.
slowly convincing Peyton to do it with me. It's kind of all I've got for an update on the 10 seconds besides this black Christmas tree I have next to me. Thanks to everyone who's sending me tips and recommendations for the marathon. I feel like I'm going to start it and all I'm going to think about is I have to finish this or all of our listeners are going to be so disappointed in me. Hopefully that motivates me to finish it. Otherwise, I'm just going to be a huge disappointment. Anyways, we love you all and let's get into today's episode. Our
Our sources for this episode are Murder at Yale by Stella Sands, NewYorkTimes.com, ABC News, The Crime Wire, Oxygen, Yale Daily News, NBC News, Medium.com, New York Post, Fox News, Middletown Press, The Guardian, and CNN.com. So many of us are familiar with that pre-COVID work environment. In the days before work from home, the norm was to trudge into an office five days a week from 9 to 5 while we mingled with people that were, for all intents and purposes, strangers.
Sure, you might spend the occasional evening sharing a beer or two over happy hour, but a lot of the time we don't really know what goes on with our co-workers after hours. What they go home and complain to their partner or roommate about, what they do with their spare time, what plagues them as they lie awake in bed at night. We like to think that we can trust our employer, that they've done their due diligence and hired people that play nice with others. But how can you ever be sure? A
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2020 alone, there were close to 400 workplace homicides in the U.S., which means someone is out there right now sharing a workspace with a dangerous individual. And like today's victim, they probably have no ID.
So to kick off today's case, I want to introduce you to a young woman named Annie Lay. Born on July 3rd in 1985, Annie grew up in a small Northern California town called Placerville in a tight-knit family of first-generation Vietnamese Americans.
Raised mostly by her aunt and uncle, Annie and her brother Chris, along with their three cousins, all shared a modest ranch-style home nestled in a quiet wooded neighborhood. But from a young age, Annie was eager to stand out, to make her family proud of her accomplishments. They'd worked so hard to give her the opportunities that she had, she wanted to give a little something back.
So in high school, Annie worked hard enough to become a member of the National Honor Society, which eventually turned into valedictorian. But Annie wasn't just wildly intelligent. She was also quite popular, winning superlatives like best of the best and most likely to be the next Einstein in the yearbook. During her graduation speech, the 4'11", 90-pound Annie stood before her classmates with the confidence of a towering CEO.
She wore her heart on her sleeve, laying out her hopes and dreams for the future. With a passion for cellular biology, Annie told her classmates she was planning to become a laboratory pathologist and was prepared to spend the next decade getting her MD. Can you imagine in high school being like, yeah. I was just going to say that. Gosh, the last thing I was thinking, I wasn't good at school, first of all, but the last thing I was thinking in high school was,
What am I going to do? I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to go get my freaking M. Like that's insane. I know. A laboratory pathologist. I wouldn't even have known that that was a career choice. But you know what? That's what I'm talking about. We need people like that.
So the problem was, despite Annie's incredible academic record, she didn't have an easy time receiving the scholarships that she needed to make the future she wanted a reality. It's expensive. 102 applications later, Annie had cobbled together enough money to finally get herself into college. Okay. How long did that take to fill out 102 applications for scholarships? I don't even want to know.
Her first choice was Princeton University because of its unprecedented science program. But when Annie sent through her application in the spring of 2003, she was met with a rejection letter. And I also have to mention here, so she gets rejected from Princeton, right? And something funny, and I'm including this because I want you to get a picture of Annie's personality.
After getting rejected, she goes and applies to a couple backup colleges. And then she also sends a picture of her butt to the dean of admissions at Princeton. This was just the kind of quirky. Yes. She was like, screw you. Screw you. Like just, just.
Just her butt? Yes. I don't even know. Okay. This was just the kind of quirky, upbeat character Annie always was. According to a fellow student of hers, she was the kind of girl who would, quote, wear five-inch heels while doing mouse surgeries, eat fried chicken and not gain a pound, and use smiley faces in her presentations and not lose respect because of it.
You think that sending a picture of her butt would get her in the school? I know. You know what I'm saying? It'd be the opposite. She should have done it before she submitted her application. I don't know.
I mean, if I'm going to say that it probably was a picture that looked more like on Greece when they moon them. Yeah. More mooning than it was like a sexy picture. Yes. For sure. So Annie knew she had a bright future ahead of her wherever she ended up, which at least for undergrad became the University of Rochester located in Western New York State right along Lake Ontario. So
So Annie packed her bags, said goodbye to California, and traveled 2,600 miles east to New York State, prepared to brave the harsh East Coast winters while beginning her degree in cell development biology. So what Annie maybe didn't expect to find at the University of Rochester was the love of her life.
After forming a close friendship with fellow student Jonathan Wadowski, the two slowly fell madly in love with one another. But come 2007, Annie had finished her undergrad degree and was searching for the perfect school to continue her graduate studies.
Jonathan had been accepted to Columbia in New York City to pursue a master's in applied physics and mathematics. But Annie had her sights set on a different program. She wanted to go to Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, where she could get her doctorate in pharmacology. The two knew the next several years wouldn't be easy on their relationship, but they also knew that they wanted to stay together.
So they agreed to go their separate ways academically, but vowed to stay together by keeping in touch daily and visiting one another whenever their studies allowed, which wasn't that difficult. A trip between their two schools wouldn't be more than two hours one way. So in September 2007, Annie begrudgingly said her goodbyes to Jonathan and began her journey on the Ivy League campus.
So founded back in 1701, Yale is somewhat of a time capsule in the town of New Haven. With around 260 historic buildings, gorgeous wrought iron gates, and tree-lined paths, the campus is a picturesque, if not a distracting, place to study. Today, its enrollment count is about 14,000 students. Whoa, that's small.
Or it seems small, huh? It does seem small, but I mean, it's yellow. That's true. Okay.
But as former Yale president Richard C. Levin once said, the campus was, quote, large enough to be interesting, yet small enough to be friendly. Which was why Annie Lay felt right at home, nestled comfortably in her new living quarters. And like many Yale students, Annie didn't venture far off of campus too often. The neighborhoods surrounding Yale had their fair share of crime, drugs, gangs, the occasional shootings.
Although there were many people in the New Haven area who came to the campus to find employment at the university. Even today, Yale is New Haven's biggest employer.
But as might be the case with any college town, the locals had their issues with the constantly expanding campus and the wealth and privilege that these students brought to their middle class town. You know, things like increased traffic, gentrification, drunken college kids partying into the night, that kind of stuff.
There was sort of an unspoken rift between the university and those that lived in New Haven full time. Interesting. One that Annie was seemingly aware of because campus safety was always an issue at the forefront of Annie Lay's mind. In fact, she had written an article for the student magazine offering tips on how to avoid becoming a victim of a dangerous crime.
In the article, Annie acknowledged that on-campus thefts were on the rise, some of which included violent confrontations, and it was important to be aware of your surroundings. After including interviews with the Yale Police Department's chief of police, Annie concluded her article with one foreboding statement. It read, New Haven is a city, and all cities have their perils, but with little street smarts, one can avoid becoming another statistic.
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Over the next year, Annie buckled down and focused on her studies, as well as maintaining her long-distance relationship with her boyfriend Jonathan. In fact, during one visit in 2008, he got down on one knee and asked Annie if she would spend the rest of her life with him. And she was over the moon, eager to start planning their wedding immediately. The couple set a date and a location, Sunday, September 13, 2009, in a gazebo overlooking a pond in New York.
But Annie didn't let the wedding planning get in the way of her research projects. By her second year, she had already begun working on her dissertation topic, the effects certain proteins have on metabolic diseases, such as diabetes or cancer, which meant that Annie spent a lot of her free time in Yale's state-of-the-art medical building at 10 Amistad Street, about a 20-minute walk just outside of campus.
Most of her time in that lab was spent monitoring and testing the effects of different medicines on mice and rats.
But the way Annie saw it, it was all for a good cause. Her ultimate goal was to find new ways to cure any of these debilitating conditions. So basically, Annie's doing the work that I can't do. So come September 8th, 2009, Annie was less than a week away from walking down the aisle. With all of the final details in place, Annie calmed her nerves by distracting herself with her research.
That morning, the first chill of fall was already descending upon the campus. As the leaves were preparing to change their colors, Annie Lay was packing her books and hopping aboard the campus shuttle for her office at Sterling Hall just a few blocks down from 10 Amistad. Annie put her books down on her desk and finished a bit of homework, and afterwards, she grabbed her magnetic ID card to go check on the status of her mice over at Amistad.
Like she'd done several times before, Annie left her purse, wallet, and cell phone in her office and locked the door. She planned to be back in less than an hour or two.
It was around 9 a.m. when video surveillance captured Annie entering the Amstead building. Okay. A building with one of the most intense security systems on Yale property. There were more than 70 different cameras focused on the complex. This is what I'm talking about. This is my type of case. And the only way to get in and around the inside of the building was by using one of those magnetic ID cards. Yeah.
This was mainly due to the neighborhood and the fact that the medical research building had been targeted before by animal rights activists looking to free the lab subjects. So after entering the building, Annie's ID card swiped into her Professor Bennett's lab. It's room G13. She put on her white lab coat, checked on the mice in their cages and began writing up that day's observation report.
But around 12.40 p.m., a fire alarm went off in the 10 Amistad building and hundreds were forced to evacuate, waiting a safe distance outside for the all-clear to go back in. And many presumed Annie was among them. But come 5 p.m., Annie's housemates, who'd been awaiting her return...
Interesting. Oh, okay.
Once 10 p.m. came with no sign of Annie, her roommates decided it was time to alert campus police. The roommates mentioned that not only had no one heard from her all day, she'd also missed her late afternoon class, which was highly unlike her.
What was even more alarming was the fact that Annie was just a few days away from getting married. Like I said, she wouldn't just up and disappear like that. When campus police hear this, they think, yeah, maybe. I mean, it's not completely unheard of for someone to get cold feet. I feel like it's so hard because it's probably just the stories that we do, obviously, because we're a true crime podcast.
It seems like every time we do a case like this, the police or campus police say the same thing. You know, it's just this pattern of, oh, they probably ran away. They're probably just decompressing, blah, blah, blah. But, I mean, I know there's plenty of opposite times where people report it and they go and help. It just...
Again, you know what I'm saying? Well, I will say in this case, the theory falls to the wayside pretty quickly. Okay. When the police check on Annie's office over at the Sterling building, because there they find that her cell phone purse and wallet are still there. Okay, good. Knowing that Annie was planning to head over to Amistad, they spent that night and into the following day closely examining footage from the outside of the building. So they're like, this was her kind of whereabouts. So we're going to look. Thank goodness there's footage.
Well, come the next day, news of Annie's disappearance was already catching on while police were combing the footage.
On Wednesday, September 9th, Annie's faculty advisor reported that she hadn't shown up for work at the lab that morning. Plus, she'd failed to notify the eight other students in her group of her absence, which was the usual protocol. And when Annie missed more classes that afternoon, the whole campus kind of started to whisper. Had Annie run off with someone else? Was she kidnapped or was
Was the truth even worse? They need to hire me to start combing through footage. I'll get that done in like two hours. Later that day, after the police had completed combing through footage of the exterior of Amistad, they discovered a grainy shot of Annie. She was entering the building in the same clothes that she left the house in the morning she went missing, carrying some sort of boxy looking object. Problem was, they never found another image of Annie leaving the building.
So was it possible the four foot 11 brunette had been lost somewhere in the crowd during that fire drill and never made it back inside? Because if you remember, everyone exited the building at one point and they couldn't find her exiting it. But I mean, that was a lot of people leaving.
For now, police found it important to zero in on Amstad since as of now, it was the last place she was seen. So they searched through the parking lots, sifted through trash cans and dumpsters, but nothing turned up. By 7.30 p.m. that evening, with still no sign from the 24-year-old Annie, campus police officially declared her a missing person. By Friday afternoon, September 11th, Annie should have been getting a manicure preparing for her weekend wedding.
Instead, the entire town of New Haven was on high alert searching for the missing bride. A local news outlet offered a $10,000 reward for any information pertaining to Annie's case. Jonathan had come up from New York to help assist in the search for his soon-to-be wife, and a full-on manhunt had begun in earnest. And it had to have been planned because what are the chances there's a fire alarm that goes off, there's enough commotion so she goes, the cameras can't see her.
You know if there's that many. You know what I'm saying. Like it had to. I mean obviously you know it. But it had to have been planned. He had to have targeted her. He or she. Because there's no way with that many cameras. You can get away with this so easily. Carrot series.
My theories. By Saturday, campus police were joined by Connecticut State Police combing every inch of 10 Amstad for signs of the missing Annie. Every door, locker, bathroom, and lab were scanned when one small detail caught an investigator's eye. A ceiling tile that looked askew. No freaking way. Almost as if it had been tampered with.
When one detective removed the tile and reached into the space above it, they found a white sock with what appeared to be bloodstains and a single rubber glove. I mean, this is out of a movie. Yes. After bagging and tagging the items as evidence, police uncovered even more disturbing signs that they might be honing in on Annie Lay's fate.
including a pair of work boots in the locker room that appeared to be blood stains and missing a shoelace. They also discovered a pair of scrubs with blood on the shirt pocket. In one room, they found what appeared to be aspirated blood stains on a wall. And in Annie's lab, another sign of blood splatter that someone had tried to clean up. But here's the thing. This is a lab, right? And there's a lot of animal testing going on. So detectives have to ask themselves, is this a lab?
Is this blood they're finding even human? Oh, 100%. Well, that's what DNA testing is for, but unfortunately, that's a bit of a waiting game. Yeah. So come Sunday, September 13th, Annie should have been slipping into her wedding dress and putting the final touches on her vows. That's horrible. Her family should have been preparing to walk her down the aisle as she and Jonathan dance the afternoon away.
Instead, police were back in the halls of Amstead, this time with a K-9 unit to search for any new clues about the missing bride's whereabouts. And unfortunately, that day, they found the biggest clue of them all. At around 4.30 p.m., officers entered a locker room on the lower level of the facility and were met with a disturbing odor.
Now the seasoned detectives knew this wasn't just some old socks and gym shorts. They were definitely smelling a decomposing body. All right, I just have to stop because there has to be, and I'm hoping we get to the point where there has to be cameras that catch someone lugging all this stuff around. It just seems impossible that this can all be done with this many cameras.
And the person's not caught or seen. So I hope we get to that point. So one of the dogs followed the scent to a toilet and began barking towards the wall behind it. There was a panel about the size of a computer screen, which detectives removed to find an eight inch space used to hide the piping. Only on that piping and insulation was a bunch of blood stains. And how does this person know all these crevices and spaces? Right.
And as they moved in deeper, they found the source, the dead body of a young woman still wearing surgical gloves with a stained lab coat and one white sock. Her body had been so contorted, so mangled to fit into this tiny space that she was hardly recognizable. But there was no denying this was the missing Annie Lay.
And I just want you to think about how horrifying. Her missing sock is up in the ceiling. Her body is contorted into this tiny space. There's blood everywhere.
After Annie's body was analyzed by the state medical examiner, they found that her cause of death was traumatic asphyxiation by neck compression. So in other words, Annie had likely been choked to death. Yeah. They also discovered that her jaw and her collarbone had been broken, which they believed happened before Annie had died. Her bra had been pushed up and her underwear was around her ankles, and it appeared as if her attacker had left his DNA behind, which meant...
they had a pretty good chance of figuring out who killed Annie Lay, especially thanks to the location where Annie was discovered. Because remember, the Amstead building requires a badge to each room. So not only was it likely this person had a badge and worked inside of the building, maybe another student, a professor, even a janitor. It was also likely that the key card system recorded when they entered each room.
But here's the thing. Police didn't seal off Amstad until after they found Annie Lay's body. So people were moving in and out of the building before this. So for six full days while she was missing, people were coming and going, literally contaminating a crime scene. Although, to be fair, police claimed that they weren't aware that they were dealing with a homicide at the time. It was just a missing persons case.
The other complication was while the security system outside of Amistad was seemingly very tight, there were no surveillance cameras inside the building. You know, no one learns.
No one ever learns. What year is this again? 2009. Okay, so, I mean, we're in an age where, yeah, there's a lot of cameras, but it's also not 2023 where there is cameras everywhere. But it does seem odd that they have so many cameras outside the building to protect and then nothing inside. Gosh. Plus, most of the rooms were soundproof, which meant anyone screaming for help probably wouldn't have been heard.
But there was one witness who came forward on September 9th, four days before Annie was found, to say he saw something that might be useful to the investigation. So we're kind of jumping back in time a little bit. So let's back up to that Wednesday morning before police found Annie Lay's body. That day, they're still combing every inch of Amistad looking for evidence when one of the lab techs approaches Officer Jennifer Garcia with the Yale Police Department.
He says he has some information about Annie. The day before, the last day she was seen, he saw Annie leaving the building at around 1230 p.m. right before the fire alarm went off.
She was carrying a notebook and two bags of mouse food, but he didn't speak to her or ask her where she was going. So Detective Garcia takes note of this and she figures at least now they have a window of time frame where they can recheck those cameras. Maybe see if they spot Annie leaving. Now the following day, Garcia returns to Amstead with Officer Sabrina Wood and a team of others. And this time something even more alarming is brought to their attention.
That day, a different co-worker of Annie's goes up to Wood to say, hey, there's something I think you need to check out. She leads Wood over to a box of wipes on a steel push cart and says, doesn't that look like blood to you? And it absolutely does. So Wood pages the other members of her team to come take samples. But as she waits for them to arrive, this lab tech comes over and starts chatting them up.
Meanwhile, he's leaning on the steel cart, trying to move that box of wipes out of their line of sight. And then strangely, he starts mopping the area around the cart. Now, I have no idea why this tech was even allowed in a potential crime scene while they were investigating. The whole thing just reads very strange to me and very unprofessional because I'm just screaming.
While researching, like, stop him? Yeah. Like, what's going on? But on the other hand, it ends up leading them to their first real suspect once they find her body, right? Because, surprise, surprise, this tech is the same one who told Garcia the day before that he saw Annie leave the building before the fire alarm. Oh, big, big, big red flags. His name was Raymond Clark.
So who was Raymond Clark? Raymond was a 24-year-old handsome former athlete, a star pitcher and quarterback for his high school teams. What the freak? The kind of guy people described as a bit shy but also extremely personable with a great sense of humor. Despite graduating from high school with honors, Raymond decided he wasn't interested in pursuing a college degree. He wanted to stay in town, be close to his family, and get a job nearby.
In fact, he figured maybe he could get some work at one of Yale's medical labs, where his sister and brother-in-law were already employed. After all, the tech jobs paid fairly well if you could stomach much of that work. So most of Raymond's day was spent scraping dirty animal cages, lifting heavy bags of food and bedding, and euthanizing the animals when asked.
Lab techs like Raymond bore a lot of the responsibility of watching over the test subjects, making sure everything was ethically up to code. And oftentimes, if something went wrong, they were also the ones the professors and students blamed. Because of this, there was somewhat of a divide between the scientists and the techs, much like the divide I explained before between the students and the locals in New Haven.
So when it came to Raymond Clark, most of the students and professors working in Amstead said he just kept his head down. That he liked working at the lab because he not only got to work with his sister and brother-in-law, but also his new fiance. The couple had gotten their own apartment and a dog with plans to tie the knot in December of 2011. All right. So where is the motive to kill someone? Well,
There were others who said that underneath that people-pleasing jokester, there was another side of Raymond Clark. Apparently, he was quite a stickler for the rules, a control freak who would berate you if you didn't do something like wear shoe covers into the lab.
Even Raymond's high school girlfriend had some choice words about her ex. She said he became extremely controlling as their relationship went on, telling her what to wear, who she could socialize with. And on more than one occasion, he got physical with her during an altercation. When she tried to break up with Raymond, actually, she received menacing threats in her locker and eventually filed a police report for both stalking and sexual assault.
but she never followed through on pressing charges. Even Raymond's new neighbors said that they had a few uncomfortable and threatening confrontations with the 24-year-old lab tech.
So knowing all this, police start to zero in on Raymond Clark. And here's what they unravel. On September 8th, the day Annie disappeared, Raymond's key card swiped into Professor Bennett's lab, room G13, five different times. Now, if you remember, this is the same room where Annie's key card swiped.
Usually, he only went in there once a day, but on this day, he goes in five times. He also swiped in several times after working hours, which was uncharacteristic of him, including a few times in the locker room where Annie's body was later found. But the last time Annie had used her key card was around 10, 11 a.m. that morning. It was to enter G13. And after that, her key card was never used again.
Raymond was brought in for questioning shortly after trying to cover up the blood splatter in that room right around September 10th, so a few days before more evidence in Annie's body was found. But things just got even worse for him when he sat across from the police. For starters, they realized he had these deep scratches all over his face, which he claimed, and we've heard this before, was actually from his cat. A
Allegedly, he also failed a polygraph test, so Raymond Clark was not making things easy on himself. Then, Saturday, September 12th rolled around and police found those bloody work boots and the blue hospital scrubs.
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When police analyzed the tape taken from the morning of the 8th, Raymond was pictured entering the building in scrubs just like them. And when he was seen leaving later, Raymond was in a completely different outfit. All right. So it's all caught on camera, basically, and all the key card information as well. It's also funny because if he didn't say anything to police the first time originally, he
I mean, I believe that they would have eventually solved it, but it would have been a lot harder. There might not have been as many details available. So it's kind of interesting that he tried to cover himself and that's what ended up screwing him. Yeah. But it wasn't until after they found Annie's body on the 13th that police could finally get a warrant for his arrest. So you and the audience didn't really know that they kind of already had this suspect by the time they found her body. Okay.
Particularly after they confirmed the DNA found on Annie Lay's body did in fact belong to Raymond Clark. So this is open and shut. Yeah, game over. So on September 17th, they moved in on Raymond, arresting him at a Super 8 motel. Knowing there was no turning back, he walked away peacefully in handcuffs.
But even with Raymond behind bars, now officially charged with murder, there were still so many lingering questions. Questions I'm sure, Garrett, you have and listeners. Of course. Like what happened between the two of them that led to Annie's death? Yeah, why? Wait, so he didn't say any of this? Not yet. Oh, okay. And what caused Raymond Clark to commit such a twisted crime?
So again, let's cut back once more to September 8th, 2009, the last day Annie Lay was seen alive.
That morning, she supposedly received a text message from Raymond asking her to come in early. He wanted to discuss how Annie kept her workspace, or more specifically, the cleanliness of her mice cages. Apparently, the two had discussions about it before, and some thought Raymond might have been at his wits end with her. It's believed that once Annie entered G13, Raymond came in and confronted her about the issue. This would be a little after 10 a.m.,
During that point, things must have escalated. Raymond likely got violent with Annie, maybe shoving her or knocking her unconscious, which would explain some of the blood spatter on the walls of that room. Trying to cover up the crime, whether intentional or accidental, Raymond likely placed Annie in a metal cart, much like the one he was trying to conceal around detectives,
He then moved her body to a more discreet location. And in order to do so, he pulled the fire alarm to get everyone out of the building first. So Garrett, you were onto something thinking that the fire alarm had something to do with the case. As people were filing out of the building, he seemingly moved Annie to the next room where he might've realized that
was still conscious. That's when he began choking her, which could explain the aspirated blood police found on the wall of a different room.
After Raymond went around the building with Annie, covered in the pushcart, looking for the perfect place to hide her body, he eventually came to the locker room. And that's where he found the perfect spot to stuff the 4'11", 90-pound Annie into the wall. I'm confused. How do you just kill someone over mice? Like, over the cleanliness? Like, he was that...
obsessed with being clean like what's happening i don't know and that's the things about these crimes sometimes like they just don't logically the motive just doesn't and obviously raymond didn't want to talk about it no because i'm sure there was a reason but he probably was just like yeah whatever i'm going to jail i don't care but i'm gonna believe that the reason probably wouldn't satisfy any of our curiosities yeah yeah so
After this, he found the time to file out of the building with the last stragglers in order to secure himself an alibi. So he hides the body and then immediately bolts out trying to act like he also left. At least this is the theory that prosecutors laid out during Raymond Clark's trial. But there was still one outstanding detail. What motivated Raymond to commit this crime? Was he really just that annoyed by Annie's mess that it would cause him to kill her?
Well, according to a workplace violence prevention specialist named Hector Alvarez, workplace-related anger does have the potential to be the sole motive here. He claims that some people will quietly stew, quote, allowing their emotions to escalate until they reach a breaking point. So weird. But a psychiatrist named Dr. Michael Wellner says that the most common cause of workplace violence is usually triggered by romantic rejection.
Which would make sense considering that Raymond's DNA was found on Annie's body.
Perhaps with Annie's wedding getting closer, he felt he'd be losing her forever. And if he couldn't have her, nobody could. But he also had a fiance. Others say that Annie's race could have played a role. Those who knew Raymond back in high school said that as a white man, they found it unusual he chose to be a part of the Asian Awareness Club, which aimed to celebrate the variety of Asian cultures amongst students. Okay, that's a little interesting, actually. Which is why some wondered if Annie might have checked some sort of
sexual preference for raymond leading to a deadly obsession regardless of what was going on in raymond's head he stood before a court in january of 2010 and pleaded not guilty but in march 2011 he changed that plea to guilty to reduce his sentencing he was also found guilty of attempted sexual assault raymond clark will be serving 44 years in prison where he will remain until 2053
But what was really going on in Raymond's head when he woke up the morning of September 8th might forever remain a mystery. And that is the case of Annie Lay. It's so weird. 44 years. Like he won't be in there for life. He'll get out and hold 70-ish, whatever, give or take. Like why? Why is he even getting out of jail?
If he makes it that long. Probably because he pled guilty. And that's crazy to me. He kills someone in a workplace. No workplace is going to want to hire him. But he probably will get hired somewhere. And that's scary. I just think...
It's horrible. I mean, you do hear about the drama at work and the hatred between people at work. But like they said at the end, most of that is romance related, like affairs. And I don't think they were having any sort of romantic anything. And so it sounds like he just snapped. Yeah. And that's...
She had such a bright future ahead of her as well. So like the week before her wedding. Oh my gosh. I know the fiance too. That's horrible. All right, you guys, that is our case for this week and we will see you next time. Remember if you have someone in mind to submit for our holiday help, please do so. And we will see you next time. I love it. I hate it. Goodbye. Shopify has already taken the cash register online, helping millions sell billions around the world.
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