Yingying Zhang

Case background and investigation

Yingying Zhang came to the United States from China in April 2017 as a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she worked in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. According to CNN, relatives said she hoped to become a university professor, and she kept in regular contact with her parents by video call.

On the afternoon of June 9, 2017, Zhang, 26, was on her way to sign an apartment lease. CNN, citing court documents, reported that she was last seen getting into a car at a bus stop. Wikipedia's account of the investigation says that security cameras recorded her entering a black Saturn Astra in Urbana shortly after 2 p.m., having missed a bus, and that investigators traced the car through registration records to Brendt Christensen, a Champaign resident who had recently left the university's physics graduate program.

Her disappearance drew wide attention in China and among Chinese students in the United States. Her family travelled to Illinois and, CNN reported, offered a reward of up to 40,000 dollars. The FBI arrested Christensen on June 30, 2017, according to Wikipedia, and a federal grand jury indicted him on a charge of kidnapping resulting in death, along with counts of making false statements to investigators.

The trial was held in federal court in June 2019. In his opening statement Christensen's own attorney told jurors that his client had killed Zhang, so the central question became the penalty. The jury found him guilty that month. Jurors could not agree unanimously on a death sentence, and on July 18, 2019, the judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of release. At sentencing Zhang's father asked Christensen to say where his daughter was.

The answer became public on August 7, 2019. According to WTTW and CBS Chicago, Christensen's lawyers had given prosecutors his account in November 2018 under an agreement that it would not be used at trial. By that account, he put her remains in garbage bags in a dumpster outside his Champaign apartment the day after the killing; the contents were collected days later and taken to a private landfill near Danville, in Vermilion County, where they were compacted and have since been buried under more than 30 feet of refuse.

The family's attorney said any attempt at recovery would be complicated and costly, with no certainty of success, and Zhang's father acknowledged that finding her might be impossible. In August 2019 the family and the university announced Yingying's Fund, an endowment to help international students and their families in crisis, Illinois Public Media reported.