The Power of Non-Verbal Communication

The murder of Yale graduate student, Annie Le is causing a buzz in the news recently. Her body was found stuffed inside the wall of a laboratory in the Yale University Medical School last Sunday, the day where she was supposed to get married to her fiancé. So far, the police had brought in a suspect for questioning, an animal laboratory technician named Raymond Clark. He was reported to have scratches on his chest as if he was involved in some sort of a struggle. More recently, the police believed Raymond Clark could possibly be the killer of Annie Le because of the discovery of strong evidence against him. (Read more in The Straits Times, Saturday, 19th September 2009, Page A24)

Based on the evidence collected by the police thus far, I could conclude that Raymond Clark engaged in a lot of non-verbal communication which fortunately, led the police to him. Without realizing, he was sending messages to the police non- verbally through his body language and actions. Firstly, Clark was known to use a green pen to sign in for work because he wanted to be different. However, the green pen was found at the crime scene, leaving a piece of crucial evidence behind. Secondly, his swipe card records and body language told all. According to his swipe card records, he was caught moving from room to room as if trying to find a place to hide a body. At the end, it showed him going to the laboratory where coincidentally the place Annie Le’s body was found. Thirdly, he failed the lie detector test which is a huge indicator that he might know something about Annie Le’s case. It was reported that the machine went off the chart when he was asked whether he knew anything about Annie Le’s whereabouts.

Police said that Clark was remaining silent. From the pragmatic perspective, silence is part of communication. In fact, silence is a paralinguistics which is a study of vocal nonverbal cues. Although he was not engaging in verbal communication with the police, the three non-verbal evidences stated above were pointing to him.

Therefore, in a police investigation, non-verbal communication is more important than verbal communication. Police looked out for non-verbal cues rather than verbal cues as the latter may be inaccurate due to the suspect telling lies. At this point of time, police perceives Raymond Clark to be the murderer of Annie Le. Let’s see if the police’s perception is right; only time will tell. Rest in peace, Annie Le.