Missing Persons

Police discovered Sunday what they believe is the body of Yale University graduate student Annie Le, hidden in a wall of a campus research lab where she was last seen five days ago. Sunday was to have been her wedding day, with 160 guests including relatives from her hometown of Placerville, Calif. The body was found in an area of the lab building where utility cables run between floors. Peter Reichard, New Haven's assistant police chief, told reporters four hours later: "We are assuming that it is her."

Mitrice Richardson is afraid of the dark and always has been, says her mother, Latice Sutton, who remembers that quirk when she thinks about her daughter's release from a jail cell at a Los Angeles County sheriff's substation in Calabasas in the predawn hours of Sept. 17. Wearing jeans and a dark T-shirt, Richardson, 24, had no car, no cellphone and no purse as she left the station about 1:25 a.m. The nearest Starbucks and fast-food restaurants are about a mile away in a shopping area.

Gilda Ghanipour has spent the last nine years on the run. Abandoned by her Muslim family for converting to Christianity, she has shuttled from one address to the next, terrified of being deported to her native Iran, where apostasy can be punished by death. Last year, Ghanipour stumbled upon a retired immigration judge and his Pepperdine University Law School students, who championed her quest for asylum. Ghanipour won the case. But she doesn't know it. The devoutly religious woman vanished shortly before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services delivered on her dream at the end of August.

A convicted rapist who fled before police arrived to arrest him on new rape charges was arrested Saturday in his neighborhood after police found six decomposing bodies at his home. Police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho said that Anthony Sowell was walking down the street on the east side of Cleveland when authorities spotted him and took him into custody. Sowell initially denied that he was the man authorities were looking for, but admitted his identity as officers began fingerprinting him, Stacho said.

Three missing North Dakota college softball players were found dead Tuesday in a Jeep pulled from a pond, and police said they thought the women were in the vehicle when they made two desperate calls for help. Dickinson Police Lt. Rod Banyai said officers were investigating the cause of the deaths and autopsies were planned. He said he thought the women were in the white 1997 Jeep Cherokee when they called for help, but he didn't know whether it was already underwater or how it got into the pond.

Federal authorities are investigating the disappearance of an elderly couple aboard a Carnival cruise ship that returned to port in Long Beach on Friday. A Carnival spokeswoman said the couple, described as a 90-year-old man and a 79-year-old woman from Southern California, were "presumed to have gone overboard." The names of the missing passengers were not released by authorities. "Their cabin door was double-locked from the inside with a 'do not disturb' sign on the handle and the door leading from the cabin to the balcony was unlocked.

A Los Angeles County grand jury is examining evidence in the 1985 disappearance of a couple who rented a guest house to a man now considered a person of interest in the case, according to two handwriting experts who have received subpoenas. The man, whose real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, was arrested last summer in Boston under the name Clark Rockefeller for allegedly kidnapping his daughter. He has become the focus of a probe into the disappearance of Jonathan and Linda Sohus.

The U.S. Coast Guard has called off the search for a boater who went missing near Santa Catalina Island, authorities said Tuesday. Lawrence Nash of Redondo Beach was last seen early Sunday morning leaving a bait barge near Cabrillo Beach Marina. He called an emergency tow service from a mobile phone about 3:30 a.m. Monday and said he was aboard a 12-foot skiff that was disabled and adrift half a mile north of the island, said a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard. -- Alexandra Zavis

A decomposed body was found Monday in the Castaic area near Interstate 5, and investigators are trying to determine whether it is that of a Newhall woman who has been missing for two weeks, authorities said. The body, believed to be that of a white woman about 18 years old, was found shortly after 1 p.m. behind a strip mall being built near the junction of the 5 and 126 freeways, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Brigett Kennemore, an 18-year-old Valencia High School student, was last seen in the area Oct. 26 after she got off a bus. But a spokeswoman for the Sheriff's Department, Deputy Lilian Peck, said investigators had not yet identified the body.