Annie Le was so focused on academics that, even though she was the valedictorian of her high school class and her classmates voted her “most likely to be the next Einstein,” she filled out 102 applications for scholarships.
“My tongue is sore from licking envelopes, my wrist hurts from typing and stapling, and the post office clerk knows me on a first name basis,” she wrote in a one-page primer she left in the files of the school in El Dorado, Calif., “but other than that, there is nothing I can complain about; It was not difficult at all!”
Her work paid off, literally: She received $160,000 in scholarship offers, said Tony DeVille, who became principal three years ago, three years after she graduated.
The money took her to the University of Rochester as an undergraduate. She went on to Yale, where, as a 24-year-old graduate student, she was studying pharmacology and planning her wedding to another serious-minded student from her days in Rochester. It was to have taken place on Sunday.
Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut 
A graduate student attending Yale University who went missing five days before her planned wedding was found dead on Sunday, police said.

Annie Le, an American doctoral student seeking a degree in medicine, went missing on September 8, five days before her planned wedding. Investigators reviewed footage from the security cameras of 10 Amistad, the building where Le last entered, and found no evidence that she had left. Police scouring the building found a body, later identified as Le's, hidden in a wall. Earlier, police had found bloody clothes in the ceiling, which they think belonged to the killer.

According to the medical examiner, Le had been strangled.

Le was set to marry Jonathan Widawsky, a graduate student studying physics at Columbia University.

Police believe that there was a motive, and that the slaying was not random. A lab technician, who was labeled a "person of interest" by police, had failed a polygraph and had defensive wounds on his chest, was detained and later released. However, no arrests have been made in connections with the homicide, according to a police spokesman.

In December 1998, Suzanne Jovin was found murdered on the Yale campus.