“She’s gone”
On that walk, for the first time, Brendt Christensen talked about Yingying Zhang.
He said he had brought her back to his apartment and kept her there against her will. He said she had fought him for her life, harder than anyone else. He called himself a successful serial killer who had “caught the nation’s attention,” and claimed she was his 13th victim, and the only one who had left evidence that led police to him. Investigators never found any sign of other victims, and they doubted the claim.
Then he talked about her family, who had come from China and said they would not leave until she was found.
They would leave empty-handed, he said.
“She’s gone,” he said, according to the recording played to the jury. “They will never find her. I will never tell them.”
Prosecutors later told a court that during the memorial walk itself, he had also described the kind of woman he saw as his ideal victim, and pointed out people in the crowd who fit it.
The next day, June 30, 2017, the FBI arrested Brendt Christensen and charged him with kidnapping. The investigators who had spent three weeks chasing a black car now had the voice of the man who drove it.
The search that never ended
Christensen pleaded not guilty. A federal judge refused to release him on bail, pointing out that Yingying was still missing and he was the last person known to have seen her.
He was indicted on a charge of kidnapping resulting in death, which in federal court can carry the death penalty. Prosecutors announced that they would seek it.
At trial, prosecutors also told the jury about the morning of June 9. Earlier that day, they said, Christensen had stopped next to another graduate student, Emily Hogan, claimed to be an undercover police officer and asked her to get into his car. She refused, and he drove away. She reported it and warned others on social media.
Yingying’s family stayed in Illinois for months, searching. Her mother and younger brother flew over in August. A memorial garden was built at the corner where she had waited for the bus, with a bench and a weeping cherry tree. Because there was no body, a box of her clothes was buried there.
The trial
The trial opened in federal court in Peoria in June 2019, two years after Yingying disappeared.
In his first words to the jury, Christensen’s own lawyer admitted what his client had denied in the FBI interview room. Brendt Christensen killed Yingying Zhang, the lawyer said. The question was whether he should die for it.
The jury watched the bus stop video and the FBI interview. Terra Bullis testified about the recordings. Jurors followed the June 29 conversation on a transcript while the audio played.
On June 24, 2019, after less than two hours, they found him guilty of kidnapping resulting in death and of two counts of lying to the FBI.
The penalty phase took weeks. In the end, the jurors could not all agree on a death sentence. On July 18, 2019, Judge James Shadid sentenced Brendt Christensen to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Where she is
After the trial, prosecutors revealed something Christensen had told them through his lawyers months earlier, in exchange for a promise that it would not be used against him.
He said that the day after he killed Yingying, he had put her remains in garbage bags and left them in the dumpster outside his apartment building. That dumpster had been emptied into a private landfill east of Champaign, where the trash was compacted and buried under thirty feet of garbage. Investigators said recovering her would be extremely difficult.
Yingying’s parents had come to America to bring their daughter home. In 2019, they set up the Yingying Fund at the University of Illinois to help international students and their families in a crisis.
She had missed one bus and walked to another stop. A camera saw her get into a black car. Three weeks later, a hidden microphone heard the man who drove it say that her family would go home empty-handed.
