2017

Hours turn into days and no one is even one step closer to solving this case. But then, a campus police officer finds a piece of evidence that ends up solving this case. 

SGT James Carter spends hours looking over the footage of the car. But on June 14th, five days after she climbed into that car, he saw something no one had noticed yet. He was looking at the wheels on the car & noticed on the passenger side hub cap there was a black spot near the edge. The spot was not on any of the other hub caps & assumes it was an oddity with this specific car. It looked like almost a piece of the hub cap was broken off. This sets the car aside from the other 57 cars in the state. There were 18 cars & people that they originally suspected but cleared, but with this additional evidence, they decided to reinvestigate them. 

The first car they double-check fits the description of the car exactly. The owner of this car is named Brendt (pronounced Brent) Christensen. Brendt was a 27-year-old student at the school. They knock on his door this time with a warrant. He seems extremely calm though and invites them in. Brendt has a wife who is half-naked on the couch & they tell her to go put clothes on because she didn’t do it upon seeing the police. They immediately see mirrored sunglasses sitting on a table. 

They asked Brendt to come to the & he cooperated. The two interrogators play good cop bad cop with him but he sticks with his alibi of playing video games. He also insisted that it wasn’t him even though he had the same car. Once they can convince him that they know it was him he goes silent for a couple of minutes. He says he did pick up an Asian girl but he thought it was on Saturday so he didn’t say anything. He also said he didn’t recognize her photo which is also why he didn’t say anything. He says he saw a girl on the side of the road looking distressed & pulled over & asked if she was okay. He told her he would give her a ride so he got in. According to him she randomly freaked out & he pulled over to let her out & that’s the last time he saw her. Throughout this explanation, Brendt was stuttering a lot & very fidgety but beforehand he was very calm & confident almost as if he knew they were onto him. But eventually, he asks for a lawyer. 

They arrest him for lying to the FBI & although 100% certain that they have their guy, they still don’t have their victim. They can hold Brendt for 24 hours before having to decide to prosecute & they decide not to as they don’t have enough evidence.

Brendt & his wife & recently started an open marriage as their last hope before getting a divorce. His wife was on a trip with her boyfriend at the time of the disappearance & Brendt had a girlfriend named Terra. Terra genuinely seemed to believe he could have done it & the FBI asked her to try & get information from Brendt, They wanted her to “wear a wire”. She agrees but when she asks him he still sticks with his story about her freaking out & getting out. But no new information was found.

There is a memorial walk being held near campus & Brendt invites Terra to go. She is really confused as to why he would want to go when he is the main suspect in this case. But she still goes, once again as a spy. Once she gets there Brendt is drinking & she thinks she actually will get a drunk confession out of him. Yingyings brother performs a song at the vigil & Brendt didn’t get up or clap for it when it was over. Towards the end, he was so egotistical about being there & thought everyone was “there because of him”. Eventually, he does brag to Terra about it & says “no one here knows what happened, I am the only one.”

He goes on to say “ The family will leave empty-handed because no one will ever find her.”

Terra obviously knows what this means but doesn’t make a big deal about it yet because she wants to see what else he will admit to. He goes on to talk about how hard Yingying fought back & was basically boasting about it.

Terra goes home now with evidence & immediately calls the police to tell them about the recording. She is told to go down to the station to get interviewed & to give them the evidence & when she gets there she is visibly shaken & sobbing when telling them what happened. The next day Brendt is arrested. Brendt calls his mom from prison & tells her that he didn’t do it & that they only have circumstantial evidence. At this point Brendt does not know about the recording or that Terra was against him.

They ended up finding more evidence against him after he had already been arrested. A counselor at UofI came forward after his arrest & turned over footage of a session she had done with Brendt back in March. Since she was an intern at the time she had to record it. He admits to alcohol & drug abuse. He also admits to wanting to harm others & that he had been fantasizing about it. He had even purchased stuff to do it. But he said that he didn’t want to anymore.

After confiscating his phone & laptop they find out he was in a group chat called “Abduction 101”. It was a place for people to fantasize about abduction. At this point, the evidence is as large as a mountain. 

In June of 2019, two years later, opening statements start for the trial as a death penalty case. At this point, Brendt still has not told anyone where Yingying’s body is. It comes out at trial that he ended up cutting her head off after failing to kill her in other ways. He also lets out a suppressed laugh while saying this. It also comes out that Yingying was his 13th victim & he had been killing since he was 19.

It was obvious that being here boosted his ego & felt like he was almost famous & kept referring to himself as a better & newer Ted Bundy. You could hear how proud he was of himself, almost seeping out of his voice. 

His story about having killed 12 other people wasn’t holding up though because there hadn’t been any cases that could have been him. His defense used that by saying well if he didn’t kill 12 other people then how do you know it can’t be the same with Yingying even though the evidence was astounding. 

It took eight hours but the jury still couldn’t unanimously decide so by default Brendt was sentenced to life in prison without the ability of parole. This was a huge disappointment to Yingying’s family as one could imagine because Brendt hadn’t shown any signs of remorse & they didn’t get any justice out of it. They also felt as though his counselor visit weeks prior could have prevented all of this from happening if someone just tried helping/stopping him.

To this day Yingying’s body has yet to be found as Brendt disposed of her in 3 separate garbage bags, put them in a dumpster, which then got brought to a landfill.

Our case begins at The University of Illinois. It was the spring semester & 26-year-old Yingying Zhang decided to leave home & study abroad. She was a graduate of one of the top universities in China & people described it as the Harvard of China. Yingying’s decision to move across the globe was not surprising to those who knew her as she was very brave & adventurous. She was extremely smart & excelled in her studies. Days before leaving she celebrated her birthday & turned it into a farewell party, a temporary goodbye to her friends & family as she embarked on this experience. She picked The UofI because of the field she was studying which was environmental sciences. She also wanted to begin a Ph.D. program by the fall.

As she moved to a brand new country the move was as hard as you would expect. She had all summer to meet people & finalize plans before the fall semester started. She kept a journal during this time & also purchased a guitar to play in her free time. She jumped into working at the school & tried to stay busy.

On Friday, June 9th, 2017, a normal summer day, Yingying went to Turner hall that morning where she worked in a lab with some other students in her field. She told her coworker that she had an appointment that day at around 1:30 to maybe sign a new lease. She was currently living on the south campus in married housing which was not her situation. So she wanted to move more north which was less expensive &  less married couples. Over the lunch hour, she was going to tour another apartment complex & told her coworker she would be gone for roughly two hours but would be back after. 

As one o’clock rolls around Yingying leaves Turner hall & goes to her appointment. Around 1:30 she texts the manager & tells him she will be late & will get there around 2:10. But then 2:35 rolls around & she still hadn’t shown up. The manager texts her & asks if she is still coming & gets no response. Therefore, missing her appointment that Friday afternoon. 

Around 3:30-4 o’clock, her co-worker back in Turner hall gets worried since she still hasn’t returned. The time dragged on & attempted to call her but was left with no response. 

That night & still no sign of Yingying, her coworker goes to Yingying’s current apartment building to look for her but after knocking on the door several times with no response, her coworker becomes more & more concerned. Her coworker & friends decide to make their way to the university police office & report Yingying as missing.

The police department struggled to take this report too seriously as Yingying was a full-grown adult, it was the summer, & it wasn’t like she was gone for too long, it was only a few hours. But her friends & co-workers knew something was wrong but since the police wouldn’t listen they went to camp out in the parking lot of Yingying’s apartment complex hoping she would show up & it would all be a misunderstanding.

The next morning, June 10th, 2017, Yingying was still missing. No one had seen or heard from her since she messaged the manager the day before. One of her friends calls a news station reporter & tells her that their friend was missing & if there was any way they could mention it on today’s news since no one else was taking them seriously. The news reporter hears the panic in the friend’s voice & thinks running a story on the missing student couldn’t hurt. 

With the release of the article & the persistence of Yingyings friends, police finally make their way to Yingyings apartment to look around. When they arrived they said the apartment was in normal condition. It didn’t look like she was planning on moving or had moved. Since Yingying didn’t have a car & only used buses for transportation which is supposedly how she would have been getting to her appointment, police look at bus surveillance footage to see if she was ever on the bus & if so when she got off. There were about 2000 bus cameras at the time of her disappearance meaning lots of time & manpower to go through all of that footage. Luckily since they knew she would be coming from the lab & going to the appointment, also around what time, they were able to narrow down the footage a bit. 

On June 12th, 2017, They end up finding footage of Yingying boarding the bus at 1:30 pm. She is seen walking towards the back of the bus & sitting down. This bus stop was right outside of her current apartment building so they assume that before she went to the bus stop, she went to her house first which is why she was going to be late. The weird thing about the bus was that it was headed East but she was supposed to be touring North apartments. They keep watching & see she gets off in the middle of campus & then is seen chasing after another bus trying to flag it down. They assume she accidentally boarded the wrong bus, got off, & tried getting on the right one. She did end up missing the bus she was chasing so she ended up having to wait for another one, pushing back her time even more. They immediately get a hold of parking garage footage next to the bus stop since of course after the buses drove away there was no more footage coming from them. You can see her waiting for the bus but before the next bus can arrive, a black sedan passes her, goes off-camera of course, but less than a minute later drives back up to Yingying & pulls over. You can see her going up to the passenger side window, talking with the driver for about a minute, & then hopping in & driving away. This missing person case had just possibly turned into a kidnapping case.

Police try to continue tracking the car with other cameras but eventually, the car would drive out of view of any surrounding cameras. Also, all of the footage was too grainy to make out what the license plate was. This is when the police knew they needed to get the FBI involved. It had only been three days but for all, we know Yingying could be in desperate need of time-sensitive help.

An FBI agent who gets put on the case identifies the car as a Saturn Astra. The cars were very unique. They were only produced for a short period of time & had to be imported into the US once you bought them. If it had been a Honda, Toyota, etc, the model would have been useless. But luckily this car was so rare there were only 58 in the whole state.

Posters began appearing around campus & news reports started to be released for anyone who could help. Luckily word was spread to the right person who had also almost been abducted by him. She identified the car & told her side of the story.

The man had disguised himself as an undercover police officer & told her to get in his car because he needed to ask her a few questions about the neighborhood. She saw this as a major red flag & didn’t cooperate. But she said he was wearing mirrored sunglasses so she wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup of people.