I see that police in New Haven, Conn., have lost little time tracking down a lab technician whose bloody clothing was found hidden in the building where that poor bride-to-be was murdered. The missing Yale graduate student, Annie Le, whose wedding to James Widawsky was to have been Sunday, was seen on the security video entering the building a week ago, but no cameras caught her leaving, leading detectives to refer to blueprints of Yale's state-of-the-art medical structure at 10 Amistad St. to discover where her body was hidden.

Get the new
PD toolbar!

The 24-year-old suspect has been identified (though as of this writing not arrested), but since nobody came or left the Amistad Street building without key card security, it can't have been too hard for the police to narrow the list (he failed a polygraph, too). If he is indeed the culprit, it would seem he may have been OK at his day job (several members of his family also work at the Yale facility), but as a criminal mastermind, he was missing a few essential elements. It turns out people who commit violent crimes, though all too chillingly effective at the violence, are not typically very good at the cover up. Yet many horrible, messy and tragic deaths are unsolved and unpunished. Eleven years ago, Suzanne Jovin, another Yale co-ed, was murdered close to campus and the killer has never been caught.

Despite the nearly perfect record of the Manhattan police department and district attorney's office to achieve justice over two decades of Law & Order on TV, according to the blog group The Restless Sleep, more than 9,000 unsolved murders were committed in New York City over nearly the same period.

The clever criminalists in the CSI franchise in Las Vegas, New York and Miami have state-of-the-art equipment, but just this spring, the real-life city of Miami needed $400,000 in federal money to replace " antiquated film technology" and to digitize the photo lab.

The fictional Jeffersonian of Fox TV's Bones employs forensic anthropologists to solve crimes, some of them from years earlier, and Warner Bros. Cold Case detectives keep clearing the boxes of evidence in storage, but most police department detectives get by using overwhelmed and under-trained officers who are limited by small municipal budgets and more urgent priorities.

The violent death of Annie Le ended a promising career in medicine, shattered the joy of two families who would see their son and daughter create a new polyethnic American household (delayed only by academic ambitions) and destroyed the peace of mind of friends, colleagues and fellow students for the foreseeable future. At least this time it looks like the killer won't get away with it.


Follow PoliticsDaily On Facebook and Twitter,
and download the new Politics Daily toolbar!