Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 1:39 in the afternoon on Friday, June 9, 2017, Yingying Zhang sent a text to a leasing agent in Urbana, Illinois. She was running late, she wrote. She would be there at about 2:10.
She never arrived.
Yingying was 26. She had come from China two months earlier as a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois, and that afternoon she was on her way across town to sign the lease on a new apartment.
The missed bus
She rode one city bus, got off at 1:52 p.m. and tried to catch another. But she was standing on the wrong side of the street, and the second bus drove past without stopping. The bus company’s rule is not to stop for people waving from the wrong side, so that they don’t run into traffic.
So Yingying walked a few blocks to another stop, at the corner of North Goodwin Avenue and West Clark Street, right in front of the university’s public radio and TV station.
A camera on the building was pointed at the stop.
At 2:00 p.m., it filmed a black Saturn Astra hatchback drive slowly past her. The car went around the block. At 2:03 p.m., it pulled up at the stop where she was waiting.
Yingying leaned toward the passenger window and spoke to the driver for about a minute. Then she opened the door and got in.
At 2:38 p.m., the leasing agent texted her again. There was no answer. As the evening went on, her friends grew more and more worried. At 9:24 p.m., a professor she worked with called the police.
Eighteen cars
University police, Urbana police and the FBI took over the search. Chinese students on campus handed out flyers. Her father, her aunt and her boyfriend, Xiaolin Hou, flew in from China. Yingying and Xiaolin had planned to get married that October.
The camera at the bus stop had caught the car, but not its license plate. So investigators looked at registrations. There were 18 four-door Saturn Astras registered in Champaign County. One of them belonged to Brendt Christensen.
He was a married man in his late twenties who had just finished a master’s degree in physics at the university and had left its PhD program. He had no criminal record.
On June 12, agents knocked on his door. He let them look at his car. Asked where he had been on the afternoon of June 9, he said he couldn’t remember. Maybe he had been asleep. Maybe he had been home playing video games.
Then investigators went back to the video. The car at the bus stop had a sunroof, like his. One of its hubcaps was cracked. They checked Christensen’s car again. It had a cracked hubcap too.
“I did pick a girl up”
On June 15, the FBI brought Christensen in again, this time to an interview room at the bureau’s office in Champaign. A camera in the corner of the room recorded the whole thing.
At first, the agents were friendly. They told him they were just checking all the Saturn Astras in the area. It was, they said, a pretty rare car.
Then they stopped being friendly.
“You originally told the agents that came to your apartment that you just played video games all day long,” one of them said. “I’ve got her getting into your car.”
They pushed him on where he had taken her. Christensen’s story changed.
“I did pick a girl up,” he said. “I don’t remember where.”
He said he had seen an Asian woman at the bus stop who seemed lost and was having trouble with English. He offered her a ride. “I apparently took a wrong turn compared to what she said,” he told them, and she got scared. She tried to open the door, but it was locked, because his car locked automatically. So he let her out, he said, a few blocks away in a residential neighborhood.
While he was being interviewed, agents at his apartment got written permission from another person who lived there to search it, and took his phone and computers. On his phone they found visits to a fetish website, including a forum called “Abduction 101.” In his car, the passenger door looked like it had been cleaned much more carefully than the other doors.
They did not arrest him that day. They had no body and no crime scene, only a man who admitted giving a stranger a ride. From June 16, agents kept him under surveillance around the clock. He knew they were watching.
The girlfriend
Christensen and his wife had an open marriage, and he had a girlfriend named Terra Bullis. The FBI went to her.
She agreed to wear a hidden recording device. She later said that she hoped it would show he had nothing to do with it. Over the following days, she made nine recordings for the FBI.
On June 29, 2017, twenty days after Yingying disappeared, hundreds of people gathered on campus for a memorial walk and concert to bring her home. Yingying’s family was there. So was Christensen. He had pushed his girlfriend to go with him.
Video from the march shows him in a black T-shirt, smiling, holding her hand among the students carrying Yingying’s picture. Bullis later testified that he seemed happy that day.
After the concert, he had been drinking. The two of them walked off together to find a sandwich. He was trying to talk her into letting him sleep at her family’s home.
The wire was still recording.
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