In the latest update into the case of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student whose body was discovered in the basement of Yale Medical School, officials have confirmed that Le was strangled to death:

According to a spokeswoman for Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner, Wayne Carver, Ms. Le died from 'traumatic asphyxia,' caused by 'neck compression.'

This is a reversal from the statement issued yesterday by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which instead of releasing the cause of Le's death, stated

it would withhold that information indefinitely at the request of prosecutors. At the press conference, Lewis declined to comment on a report in The Hartford Courant that said Le died of asphyxiation.

This admission seems to suggest that the case is proceeding quickly, and is closer to identifying the perpetrator.

Police have recently identified 24-year-old Raymond Clark as a suspect in the Anne Le murder at Yale. Cops arrived at his apartment in Middletown, Connecticut but did not arrest him, claiming to only have a "person of interest." A lab technician at the lab where Le worked, Clark displayed visible chest marks and also failed a polygraph test. But according to a source close to Clark and his family:

Of course, he had scratches on his arm--from his cat. I know he didn’t do it, but I can’t understand how anybody would do that in the first place and put her in the wall like that. And they would have had to do it at night because certainly nobody could have done it during the day when everybody was looking.

Clark hadn't been seen since last Thursday following the Tuesday disappearance of Le. Le's body was found this weekend in a chute in the basement of the pharmacology research facility on 10 Amistad Street. Yale has since increased security in the surrounding area following the murder. Le's fiancé Jonathan Widawsky, who had been cleared of being a suspect, has been assisting police with their investigation.

Late this afternoon a woman's body was found in the basement of 10 Amistad Street at Yale Medical School. Based on the wording of Yale President Richard Levin's email to the community, the body is presumably Annie Le, the graduate student and bride-to-be who went missing last Wednesday. Today was to have been her wedding day.

Our hearts go out to Annie Le’s family, fiancé and friends, who must suffer the additional ordeal of waiting for the body to be identified.  I have met again with her family and conveyed to them the deeply felt support of the Yale community.

The body—which was hidden inside of the walls of the same building where Le was last seen—has yet to be officially identified by the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Yesterday, investigators discovered a set of bloody clothes hidden in the ceiling of the Amistad building. Though the clothes did not match the outfit Le had been wearing when entering the building Wednesday morning, police began searching local landfills and an abandoned industrial area in Hartford for evidence.

Le's wedding has been canceled and her fiancé, a student at Columbia, is not a suspect.

Read President Levin's email in full after the jump.

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Annie Le, a graduate student at the Yale School of Medicine, has been missing since Tuesday. Surveillance cameras last spotted Le entering the Amistad Street facility at the medical school where she was a research assistant for associate professor Anton Bennett. Le is supposed to be married on Sunday.

The Yale Daily News describes the 24 year-old student as such:

Le, a 4-foot-11-inch Asian female who has shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes, was last seen wearing a knee-length brown skirt, a bright green short-sleeved T-shirt, brown shoes and a brown necklace.

Curiously, Le had left her purse, cell phone, and other belongings in her lab before leaving. She's carrying only her Yale ID card and does not have access to a car.

Anyone with information about Le's whereabouts should contact the Yale Police Department at (203) 432-4400. We will make any necessary jokes upon her safe return.

Apparently it's still 1934. Harvard cannot stand to have a poor, black, female student from Brooklyn wearing a cap and gown, let alone on its campus. That's according to Chanequa Campbell, whose lawyer claims Harvard prevented her from walking after tying her to the alleged murder that occurred in Kirkland house last May. She pulled a Kanye West to our collective Mike Myers a fortnight ago when she told the New York Post, "Harvard is doing this to me because I'm black, I'm poor and I'm from Brooklyn."

Okay. Right, it could be that Harvard might be more hesitant to pillory a student of a wealthy donor. It too seems possible she believes that because she is black the university is presuming her guilty whereas they might give white students the benefit of doubt. It appears she is not enjoying as much solidarity from the Harvard black community as she might like, though.

But what does Brooklyn have to do with anything? Everyone knows Harvard dislikes Staten Island much, much more. And Brooklyn is hot right now. There are plenty of rich kids living on daddy's money in Williamsburg who attend or attended Harvard.

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Before the sound of the TV news 'copters faded after the shooting at Harvard today, another student got almost stabbed outside of the Crimson building. The victim of the shooting was not a Harvard student, it turns out, but the knifepoint mugging victim definitely was. Already a day full of violence and irony, the story broke not on the Crimson's website but on the Quincy Open list:

yeah I was there I missed it by about 3 minutes on my walk back up plympton. i asked a cop. it was a mugging at knife point. they think they got the guy (yes he is arrested leaning against the wall on the street sitting on the ground) but I believe they don't have his knife so they're searching up and down the streets for it. there were cops all over the place. I counted between 7 and 10 cops on foot alone, not counting the 2 police vans, and 4 or 5 police cruisers.

Now, we can really abuse the word "irony." Ok, kids who are scared of walking around in the dark even through the well-lit, well-trafficked Harvard Square. You're validated. Alright, Harvard. Maybe the MBTA Police Academy is not the best place to recruit men to protect the future leaders of the world.

If Harvard kids keep getting taken down at this rate, we'll have to educate our next president at Dartmouth, where the crime is more hilarious than horrifying. Because everyone knows New Haven is in a state of perpetual gang warfare.

After the jump, read the full Quincy Open thread and the Kirkland House letter sent out by the house masters just a few minutes after the shooting earlier.

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An unidentified "college-aged" male was shot at Harvard's Kirkland House, an undergraduate residential college, around 5PM today, reports the Harvard Crimson. The victim was conscious but bleeding at the time of the Crimson's report, and students were notified by email later that night.

This was students' second safety-related email of the day, because 5 minutes before the shooting, Dean Evelynn Hammonds sent an email announcing cuts to nighttime shuttle service (a security measure for soothing the nerves of students who don't like to walk around in the dark) as part of "cost-cutting measures."

Both emails after the jump.

UPDATE 1: According to Harvard's Emergency Communication page, normal activity at Eliot-Kirkland has resumed.

UPDATE 2: The identity and circumstances of the shooting are now known. Allegedly, the deceased was a drug dealer.

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Today, we belatedly return to the story of Mohammad Usman, the former Dartmouth student who pled guilty two weeks ago to defrauding the College of over $18,000. Usman’s fabrication of aid and grants carries a maximum of fifteen years in jail. (He’ll serve much less, if any).

We bring him up now for two reasons. First, what’s the deal?? Who is this budding con artist? Dish, y’all. Second, a tipster pointed out, well, who he is: no stranger to publicity, Usman spent his sophomore fall as the only boy at Wellesley. A Dartmouth administrator told him his plan to transfer to the all-female institution for a semester was “impossible,” but already Usman was no man to be held back by mere rules.

I believe the word is chutzpah. The Boston Globe wondered, why go snorkeling in estrogen? To live the liberal-arts ideal of “experiencing a wide variety of things.” Well, if you insist, he’ll cop to being “very attracted to intelligent women.” All that, and some MASSIVE foreshadowing: “It's important to me to get the most of my 50 Gs.”

(Note that when he spoke to the Globe, Usman entered Breastchester single. Interviewed later by Cornell’s Kitsch, his story flipped---a pre-existing “relationship ended while he was still at Wellesley.” Human; all too human.)

The Wellesley coup made Usman a “folk hero” among his friends, and that was before he tried to scam Dartmouth.  You have to be impressed by the pair on this kid, if nothing else. As Nietzsche said, “One is punished most for one’s virtues.” Tell us more about this Icarus of thinking outside all the wrong boxes (well...). You have to hope the bilking wasn’t motivated by the recession, which obviously isn’t real.

Wife-killer and cross-dresser Richard Sharpe made one final round of headlines this morning after hanging himself in his Norfolk, Mass. jail cell. The former Harvard Medical School professor and millionaire was nearly eight years into his life sentence for killing his wife Karen in 2000. To be more specific, Sharpe shot the mother of his three children in the chest with a hunting rifle in the foyer of their home while her family watched.

But wait—there's more.  Not only did Sharpe enjoy the occasional stroll in fishnets and heels, he also stole his wife's birth control pills in an attempt to grow bigger breasts. The cross-dressing seems innocent compared to the brutal murder, but Sharpe lost all sense of humanity after allegedly plotting to kill the district attorney who convicted him in 2001. (The nutty professor was acquitted of these charges in 2007 after a jury decided that Sharpe's rapist cellmate wasn't the most trustworthy witness.)

The case is old news now having run the true-crime gamut from a Court TV special to a pulpy paperback entitled Twisted. Each detail—from Sharpe's abusive father to Harvard's knack for psychopaths—reveals the story to be both frightening and tragic. It's only a matter of time until Lifetime options the book for their library of can't-stop-watching movies.

On Friday, Penn alum and petty criminal Edward Anderton was sentenced to four years of prison and ordered to repay $100,000 in restitution for a spree of identity-theft crimes he committed with Jocelyn Kirsch, his former girlfriend and partner-in-crime. Although the duo dabbled in scams in equal measure, Anderton received a lighter sentence than Kirsch - four years to her five - because, as his lawyer successfully argued, he showed greater remorse.

There are many ways to show remorse: a tearful apology, self-flagellation, etc., but, as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words. Indeed,

Since posting bail, Anderton has worked at a manual labor job and his salary goes toward a bank account specifically for restitution. This salary, in addition to his liquefied 401K and other legally obtained money in a bank account, amounts to about one third of the total restitution he will have to pay.

A manual labor job, really? We know that Wall Street is in the toilet, and that many Whartonites are being terminated from their jobs en masse, but one would think that all Wharton alums - especially those who are criminals - would be far too proud to accept such work. So Anderton's sentence is probably well-deserved.