The Girlfriends of Raymond Clark

Photograph of Ray Clark by Douglas Healey/Getty Images..

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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 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, 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 been reporting 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 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” in the murder. Media watchdog Dan Kennedy called our decision “futile,” sparking a debate 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.