IF THE VICTIM OF ACCUSED KILLER RAYMOND CLARK was a black or Latina woman, would her death have received such massive national and international coverage? Or is a pretty Ivy League student of Asian descent now equivalent to a pretty blond co-ed as salacious fodder for the sex-and-death-obsessed media and their consumers? The truth is race is only part of the equation in this perfect storm of grisly crime and public fascination.

First, let’s deal with obvious. No one would give a lab rat’s ass if the crime had taken place at Wayne State. We are riveted because this took place at one of the most prestigious campuses in the world. For outsiders, there is built-in curiosity and envy and schadenfreude about life in the Ivies, but none of the Ivies (with the exception of Harvard) has the cachet of Yale, the whitest of the ivory towers, the Gothic Revival redoubt of privilege and rarefied achievement. As Slate’s Jack Shafer puts it: “Hell, a Stanford murder wouldn’t warrant this sort of coverage!”

Second of all, a Yalie bride doesn’t go missing five days before her ritzy Long Island wedding to another Ivy Leaguer, no matter what he looks like. The mystery of Annie Le’s disappearance from a secure lab building (with a network of video cameras and swipe-card monitoring of movement from room to room) only added to the intrigue. The cameras caught her coming in at 10 a.m. but no one saw the very petite 24-year-old researcher leave the premises. So, where the hell did she go?

As with the disappearance of a child, the disappearance of an attractive young woman has sinister implications, especially as the days dragged on. Although her fiance was ruled out as a suspect, there was a sexual charge to the theories bandied being about, which was perhaps inevitable given the publicized Facebook photos of a vivacious Le in a series of low-cut (but tasteful) cocktail dresses. Was this the work of an obsessed stalker who wanted to prevent this golden girl’s marriage to someone else?

This theory gained some traction once it was revealed that the young man in police custody had previously assaulted a girlfriend and—rather ominously, at least to us—had once belonged to a high school Asian Awareness Club. This involved making “authentic” Asian cuisine and “raising awareness” about “Asian culture.” (It wasn’t even related to a specific ethnic group or country, or a specific cultural aspect like martial arts or origami.) Okay, so it’s not a crime for a dorky white guy to join such a club, but it does point to a possible motive. Maybe Clark had an Asian fetish and had objectified Le to the point of dehumanizing her. To the point of strangling her and stuffing her body into a crawl space in the basement of the animal-research lab where they both worked. This was where the promising diabetes and cancer researcher was discovered on the day she was to be married.

Armchair detectives were on the case. Didn’t Clark’s own fiancee work at the lab too? Maybe she killed Le out of jealousy and Clark was taking the fall? But with Clark’s arrest following a DNA match, details emerged suggesting a decidedly unsexy motive: workplace tensions.

Apparently, Raymond Clark III took his mouse-cage-cleaning duties way too seriously. The purported “control freak” had berated researchers who didn’t wear the proper foot coverings for the labs. On a previous occasion, he had asked Le to keep the cages in better condition and she had promised to do so but apparently this was not enough. “We need to meet,” he texted her on the day she disappeared. No one except Clark knows what happened next and he’s not talking. Maybe Le was distracted by her upcoming wedding and didn’t give Clark the ego-stroking he needed. Maybe he was tired of being dissed by snooty grad students in general and lost it.

As a local columnist writes: Workplace violence is rage. “It’s white-hot anger that bubbles up like bile. It might be anger about a missed promotion, un[der]appreciation, poor health, unrequited love or money troubles. Take your pick. It might be any of these things or anomie, a sense of personal isolation and anxiety, feelings of being socially disconnected.” Who knows? Maybe the emotional cost of euthanizing lab animals on a daily basis had taken its toll on a troubled young man. Maybe it had desensitized him to taking life.

For all these reasons, it’s clear that race alone does not explain the media’s obsession with this case. But race and its evil twin, class, do explain why the deaths of so many other young women don’t get this kind of play. Or as one brutally honest commenter posted on the Christian Science Monitor site: “Sorry, but no one really cares about some minimum wage worker getting axed somewhere, that’s just how it is.”

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