The Murder of Yingying Zhang

The girlfriend of the murderer wore a wire to exonerate him, but it recorded him basking in the details of his killing.

Yingying was running late.

She had been researching all morning before returning to her apartment for lunch. She sent a text to Rontrez Stone, the marketing manager for One North Apartment complex, to slightly push their appointment back to 2:10 PM.

26-year-old Yingying Zhang was a long way from home, China. She arrived in US in April 2017, and she did not have any intentions of staying long. Graduating top of her class from Peking University, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to research crop sciences, focusing on photosynthesis in soybeans and corn. Once finished, she would return to her country to fulfill her dream of being a professor.

On June 9th, Yingying was hoping to sign a lease on an apartment to save rent and maybe, getting a few roommates. Without access to a car, Yingying had to rely on the campus bus, but she found herself on the wrong side of the road during a transfer. She hailed at the bus and even ran after it, but laws dictate that bus drivers are not allowed to stop for passengers on the opposite side of the road to avoid accidents from oncoming traffic.

Yingying ended walking to the next bus stop, where she got into a mysterious black car that stopped for her. 20 minutes later, Yingying’s iPhone location was disabled.

And, that was the last trace of Yingying.

The Investigation

Yingying’s professor and colleagues began to worry when Yingying did not return after long hours. Yingying’s boyfriend, back in China, too, tried contacting her, but she was unreachable. By night, Yingying’s professor decided to report her missing. Campus police traced Yingying’s tracks, learning that she never showed up for her appointment.

The search effort expanded with a large group of student volunteers, and reward money for information increased from $10,000 to $50,000 in a month. Yingying’s father and boyfriend flew from China to US for the first time to join the search for Yingying.

On June 12th, the Telecommunication Officer, Kenny Costa, found a CCTV footage of Yingying getting into a black Saturn Astra after a brief exchange with the driver. They weren’t able to identify the driver or the license plate, but the car model was not widely used, and there were only 18 of them with four-door hatchbacks in Champaign County.

Two days later, Officer James Carter realized that the Saturn Astra in the video had a sunroof and a defect on the hubcap. And that led to one of 18 owners of the car that they had already interviewed, Brendt Christensen.

Brendt Christensen

Born on June 30th, 1989, Brendt Christensen married his wife, Michelle Zortman, in March 2013. By May 2017, Christensen got his master’s degree in physics from the University of Illinois, and his marriage turned into an open marriage. Both Christensen and his wife have a significant other. Christensen was in a consensual BDSM relationship with his girlfriend, Terra Bullis, who he met online.

The Investigation

The Interviews with Christensen

Before the discovery of this new information, FBI had already interviewed Christensen days before. Christensen claimed that he was either sleeping or gaming on that day. He even allowed the FBI to take a look at his car, but nothing stood out.

Once FBI confirmed that it was Christensen’s car in the video footage, they asked Christensen to come in for a second interview. He voluntarily agreed.

Christensen stuck to his original story that he was home all day until he was told that he was caught on camera driving around on June 9th. He then changed his story, saying that he must have mixed up his Friday and Saturday. He admitted to picking up a distressed Asian woman with poor English command, but she panicked and asked to be let out immediately when he took a wrong turn.

He was not sure the exact location he dropped her off, but he could somewhat recall the trail of road that he took that day. He could not say for certain the kind of phone Yingying had or the navigation app that she used.

His Car and Apartment

With a search warrant, FBI seized Christensen’s car. From the first glance, nothing suspicious stood out. However, they later noticed that the front passenger seat door was much cleaner than the other doors as if someone intentionally cleaned that door.

In Christensen’s apartment, crime scene investigators (CSI) found just a few blood stains on the mattress. CSI used Starlight Bloodhound, a substance that would flore up if it comes into contact with biological fluids or cleaning products, on a baseball bat in the room, revealing a stain on it that was not visible to naked eyes.

All of the stains were tested, and all of them matched Yingying’s DNA.

His Search History

He had an odd purchase for a 6-foot duffel bag from Amazon, where he claimed it was for a cat tree that he got for his girlfriend, but she claimed she never got it.

He googled on iPhone tracking even though he was an android user. Yingying though, had an iPhone. It was never found.

The Body Wire

20 days after Yingying went missing, the Chinese Students Association at the UIUC held a vigil for Yingying, where both Christensen and his girlfriend attended. Unknown to Christensen, his girlfriend was wearing a wire.

He openly admitted to how he kidnapped, sexually assaulted, beat her up with a baseball bat, choked, stabbed, and decapitated her. In the audio recording, he was nowhere near remorseful. He said Yingying bore him,

“There was nothing to her.”

He bragged about how good he was and put himself next to the infamous Ted Bundy. He claimed Yingying was his 13th victim, and only she produced evidence leading to him.

Justice

Even though Brendt Christensen pleaded not guilty to kidnapping resulting in death, his attorney admitted that Christensen did murder Yingying in his opening statement. The question was whether Christensen should be sentenced to life in prison or the death penalty.

The Prosecution

The prosecutor believed that Christensen did not act on a whim. He had been planning for this for months now.

In a counseling session for Christensen’s alcohol abuse, he ended up talking about harming himself and others. Ted Bundy fascinated him, and he thought about kidnapping and killing someone himself. His search history included him roaming on sites that involved “an abduction fantasy involving kidnapping and rape with a woman online.” On his personal laptop, he had downloaded pictures of bound and gagged women.

In a text exchange with his girlfriend, he said,

“I don’t care how I will be remembered, just that I am: good, bad, revered, infamous; I don’t care.”

On June 6th, his second duffel bag from Amazon arrived. When his wife left for the weekend with her boyfriend, he carried out his plan. Early in the morning of June 9th, he bought a bottle of alcohol and drove around on campus, searching for a victim. He first found Emily Hogan, a graduate student in UIUC. He posed as undercover police with a fake badge to lure her into getting into his car.

Emily gave him a hard no. She quickly reported to the police and posted a warning post on her Facebook. But, his failed attempt did scare him off.

Later that afternoon, he lured Yingying into his car and kidnapped her to his apartment, where he brutally assaulted, murdered, and decapacitated her. He dismembered her body into 3 separate garbage bags (only revealed after the trial).

Despite the brutality of the murder, he was thorough with his cleaning to the point that his wife came home and suspected nothing. He even called the maintenance to treat the “peeling” grout and mold in his bathroom. When the maintenance guy came over, the grout looked normal, but there was a slight mold, which he treated with fungicide.

The Defense

Christensen did not have any criminal prior before this. He was a good student with excellent grades until his 3rd semester in his doctoral program.

Everything went into a downward spiral from thereon. His drinking got out of hand. It was affecting his grades and triggering his depression. In 2016, he had to drop out of his doctoral degree and switched to a master’s degree. A year later, his wife could no longer tolerate his alcoholic consumption and wanted a divorce, leaving loner Christensen alone with no support system.

Christensen tried to get help from the campus counselors. He repeated his struggles with alcohol, self-harming, harming another to a doctoral intern and two professional counselors in separate sessions. That eventually led to the counselor recommending him to get treatment from a local addiction treatment center.

On the day of the murder, Christensen’s wife left with her boyfriend to the same resort she shared her honeymoon with Christensen 5 years ago. When Christensen attempted to reach out to Bullis, she was busy with another man.

In the recorded conversation with Bullis, Christensen was drunk and slurring in his speech. He said that there were another 12 victims before Yingying. His attorney stated that his client was lying as the FBI searched for the 12 victims but came out with nothing. That also meant Christensen could have been overplaying the brutality of Yingying’s murder to impress his submissive girlfriend.

The Verdict

It took less than 2 hours for the jurors to come to a guilty verdict. Brendt Christensen was found guilty to 1 count of kidnapping resulting in death and 2 counts of making false statements to agents of FBI. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole as the 12 jurors were not able to agree to a death penalty unanimously.

Aftermath

Christensen’s father, Mike Christensen, believed that his son is guilty, but he believed that this entire tragedy could have been avoided if his son received proper help from the counselors.

Christensen wanted to get into a plea bargain by revealing the whereabouts of Yingying’s body, but the prosecutors would only agree to it if Yingying’s body can be successfully returned. The plea bargain failed.

As part of his immunity deal, Christensen’s attorney only revealed after the trial concluded that Yingying’s body was dismembered, disposed of in 3 garbage bags outside of Christensen’s apartment dumpster. By then, Yingying’s remains were compacted and scattered into a landfill.

Yingying’s family was deeply saddened by their tragic loss to the point that Yingying’s mother, Lifeng Ye, could not continue her statement in response to the guilty verdict and her attorney had to take over. She said,

“How am I supposed to carry on living? I really don’t know how to carry on.”

Yingying’s boyfriend, Xiaolin Hou, also expressed his disappointment regarding the death penalty. He was going to marry Yingying that year in October.

Yingying never got a funeral since her body was never retrieved. UUIC held a memorial service and built a memorial garden with a dedication stone for Yingying with both her English and Chinese names. It engraved,

“In Memory of Yingying Zhang, A Chinese Visiting Scholar Who Went Missing On June 9th, 2017.”

Thank you for reading! Here are more of the author’s work: