The Girlfriends of Raymond Clark

With the click of a mouse, I tapped into the inner world of a woman who had just found out that her ex-boyfriend had become the suspect in the murder of Yale grad student Annie Le.

"I can't believe this is true," the woman wrote on Facebook. She said she was "in total utter shock."

Her high school ex, Raymond Clark III, would be arrested two days [2] later in Le’s killing. Police say he strangled Le and stashed her body in a basement wall.

I discovered the Facebook page in reporting on the murder for the New Haven Independent [3], an online local news site. Clark’s ex-girlfriend dated him when they were high school students in Branford, a quiet town on Connecticut's shoreline. I was led to her page by another discovery: We found a 2003 police report in which she told cops that Clark had forced her to have sex with him, though she never pressed charges.

We learned the girlfriend’s identity, as well as the names of Clark and his current fiancee, before their identities were public. This was in the days after Le had disappeared but before her body was found, when slews of national reporters had descended on our city to find clues to the killing. As we chased the story, I wanted to break news—that’s my job. But I also wanted to shield the women caught up in the case from an onslaught of judgment and national attention that would make things harder for them.

At first, I saw Annie Le as a Yale story rather than the local news that’s our focus at the Independent, where, at 27, I’m the managing editor. I’ve [4] been [5] reporting [6] for the site almost from its beginning, when veteran New Haven journalist Paul Bass founded it four years ago. On the day Annie Le disappeared, we had seven hot aldermanic primaries coming up. I didn't see why a missing person case should take center stage, just because the person went to an Ivy League [7] school.

But by Sept. 11, when 100 law enforcement officials had converged on the case, the story's magnitude sank in and we decided to go after it. Police found Le's body on Sept. 13. In the next two days, our server crashed because so many readers came to our site.

We had scoops the national media didn’t, and we had to make quick decisions about how much personal information to publish. We learned Clark’s name a day before the national media. We had no intention of publishing it, because our policy is not to name suspects who haven't been charged with a crime. We didn’t join the rest of the media in naming Clark last Tuesday, when New Haven police at a press conference called him a “person of interest [8]” in the murder. Media watchdog Dan Kennedy called our decision [9] “futile,” sparking a debate [10] on his site. We finally named Clark when he was arrested last Thursday. When he walked into the courtroom, our choice to wait felt right—this was the moment when he had to come out in public, to answer to the mounting evidence against him.

But knowing Clark’s name before everyone else gave us a head start on probing his background. I searched in some public databases, which led to an address in Branford. Within hours, our Branford reporter had the 2003 police report with the allegations by Clark’s ex-girlfriend. At the time, they were students at Branford High School and were in a long-term relationship.

She reported that Clark forced her to have sex with him, confronted her when she tried to break up with him, and wrote an unwanted message on her locker. Police told Clark to stay away from her, according to the report. She didn’t press charges. So police never checked out her allegations.

A friend of mine who's a public defender cringed when she heard we were going to publish the report. "Very prejudicial," she said.

But from a reporter's perspective, the police report was gold. Clark was quickly emerging as the prime suspect in murdering Le just days before she was to be married. He had no criminal record. But this report, if true, revealed that he had a disturbing history with women.

His ex-girlfriend's Facebook comments helped fill out the picture. "I feel like im 16 all over again," she wrote on Facebook on Sept. 15, the day that news outlets first named Clark as the suspect in the killing. "Its jsut [sic] bringing back everything."

Finding this intimate note was new terrain for me. It wasn't a traditional interview with clear-cut rules. I had sent Clark’s ex-girlfriend a friend request, which she accepted. When I sent her a message through Facebook identifying myself as a reporter, she declined to be interviewed. But she kept me in her network of more than 350 friends, which enabled me to see her otherwise private posts.

We held off on publishing our story about the ex-girlfriend’s police report [11] until after the New Haven police named Clark a "person of interest" in Le’s killing. Our story hit the front page [12] of the New York Post, which used huge block letters and a picture of Clark as the devil to trumpet the "sex shocker." Because no one else had the police report, other news outlets turned to us. We never gave out the report, or the ex-girlfriend’s name. We got calls from Larry King Live and Geraldo. And the high school incident became a key link in a national probe into Clark's character. Pundits psychoanalyzed him [13] as a "control freak” who needed to be in control with women to overcome deep insecurities.

I felt comfortable including the ex-girlfriend’s Facebook posts in my story, largely because I was confident her identity would not be made public. At first, I was right: Her identity was not revealed. On Wednesday, however, she spoke publicly [14] for the first time, in an interview on Good Morning America. So now I can say it: Her name is Jessica Del Rocco. She described Clark as an emotionally abusive boyfriend: “He would get very angry often. He would frighten me. He would get physical,” she said.

At the time I came across Del Rocco’s Facebook page, however, she wasn’t ready to talk. And I’m glad I didn’t press her.

We also tried to protect Clark’s fiancee. At one point, I came across her MySpace page. She lived with him in Middletown at the time of the murder. A photo showed her embracing Clark. She wrote on a blog that she felt "giddy" about her engagement. At that point, she was still under the radar: No one had reported that Clark was engaged.

We didn't want to publish her name or photo. I’d already deleted plenty of nasty anonymous comments sent in to our site, several wishing violence on Clark. I didn’t want to expose his fiancee to guilt by association by splashing her name and image across the Web. But we saw a newsworthy parallel in the fact that the suspect and the victim were both engaged. That was a hot scoop. So we ran a few quotes [15] from Clark's fiancee 's blog before she yanked that part from public view. I felt that was fair, because her blog was public and we took the extra step to protect her—at least for the time being—by not using her name or photo.

Jessica Del Rocco took me off her Facebook friend network after we ran the story about her. But in my brief visit into that inner world, I found her in a place I would hope she’d be—supported by consoling friends. “It’s been a rough few days,” she wrote. A friend replied, “LOVE YOU :) baby if you need ANYTHING do NOT hesitate to call me.” On Good Morning America, Del Rocco used her TV moment to try to help other women. “If any girl feels uncomfortable in a relationship that they're in, I know how hard it is, they need to dig deep,” she told ABC. “Take a stand and realize you don't deserve to be treated like that. You deserve to be treated better."