Runaway Bride or Crime Victim? Annie Le Goes Missing From Yale Campus

Sept. 11, 2009— -- Yale University has announced Friday that the school is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of missing student Annie Le.

Le, a 24-year-old pharmacology graduate student, is supposed to be married in two days.

Worried friends and family have gone from helping prepare for the wedding to searching for the missing Yale grad student.

She was last seen walking into a research laboratory around 10 a.m. Tuesday. But she later disappeared, leaving her purse and other belongings behind.

"She left her pocketbook, her cell phone, everything, in the lab," Le's co-worker Debbie Apuzzo said.

Now New Haven, Conn., police -- who have been joined by the FBI -- are trying to determine whether Le was the victim or a crime or if she simply got cold feet.

Her friends describe the petite woman as smart, pretty and conscientious. Le is a 4-foot-11-inch Asian female with shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes. She weighs 90 pounds.

Le's friend Tara Bancroft said Le had "a lot of good friends, a wonderful fiance she's going to marry on Sunday. We all love her a lot."

Le's Facebook page shows the 24-year-old student posing in wedding dresses and smiling with fiance Jonathan Widawsky, a Columbia University graduate student in physics whom she described as her best friend.

"He's an amazing kid, just a wonderful, wonderful boy and he must be heartbroken," Widawsky's friend Linda Matychack said. "I just can't imagine."

Investigators have combed the lab and sorted through Dumpsters looking for clues. Le's face now graces an electronic billboard along Connecticut's Interstate 91.

ABC's Connecticut affiliate WTNH reported that FBI agents searched Le's apartment earlier Tuesday but would not answer any questions about the investigation.

"Law enforcement officers are continuing to undertake detailed searches of the surrounding area, and security officials are reviewing images from closed-circuit cameras in the area," Yale Chief of Police James Perrotti said in a statement.

Annie Le' Co-Worker: 'We're Not Going to Look at the Worst Here'

Her co-workers have said they don't understand how she disappeared in the middle of the day.

"How could that happen? She's a tiny little thing but still I mean, it's amazing. It really is. It's pretty scary," Apuzzo said. "We're just praying that she's just going to pop up somewhere and everything's OK, we're not going to look at the worst here."

Le herself wrote an article about crime in New Haven for the University Magazine earlier this year, nothing that the campus is "still plagued with thefts, some involving frightening confrontations" and that "New Haven is a city and all cities have their perils, but with a little street smarts, one can avoid becoming another statistic."

Le is a pharmacology student and attended the University of Rochester for her undergraduate degree, according to WTNH.

If Le did flee to avoid her nuptials, she would join ranks with Jennifer Wilbanks, the infamous runaway bride who, in 2006, fled her Georgia home. Though a massive manhunt was launched, Wilbanks was found in Albuquerque days later after claiming to have been kidnapped.

After being charged with making false statements, her wide-eyed mug shot was later used as fodder for late-night television comics.