The Disappearance of Yingying Zhang | Murdered at First Sight | Forensic Files

[ORCHESTRAL MUSIC] ZHIDONG WANG: Yingying is an intelligent, beautiful, and kind of person.
ANTHONY MANGANARO: Yingying had come to the United States because she wanted to learn more about agriculture.
Her end goal was to go back to China and teach. It was a beautiful aspiration. Yingying was standing on the corner, waiting for the bus
when all of a sudden, a car appeared. She got into that car. He was a total stranger to Yingying.
ANTHONY MANGANARO: This is a very chilling video. This is not a missing person anymore.
You're really thinking this is a kidnapping. It was just one of the most callous crimes you can imagine,
and it happened to just such a sweet and caring person. [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] STEVEN BECKETT: I think as a parent, I would be screaming,
what are you thinking? You definitely should not get in the vehicle of a car of somebody that you do not know.
ZHIDONG WANG: In the morning of the same day, he actually tried to ask another female student
of the university to get into his car. I remember seeing on my left a car pull up on the side of the road.
And the person in the car wound down the window. And he asked me, can you get in the car
so I can ask you some questions? He planned, for a long period of time, to kidnap, rape, and ultimately kill a complete stranger.
There's no question that the community was heartbroken for this family. It was just heart-wrenching.
STEVEN BECKETT: The family and the boyfriend were looking for her. They were never going to find her.
She was gone forever. [TENSE MUSIC] ZHIDONG WANG (VOICEOVER) I got a call from someone in China
saying there was a Chinese student or scholar who went missing in the Champaign area.
And her father and other family members were coming to the US. She was an international student here from China,
and she didn't really know a lot of people. She was also a very responsible graduate student.
STEVEN BECKETT (VOICEOVER) She was here, working within the College of ACES, which is-- the agricultural programs are there.
And she was a type of botanist or a plant pathologist. [TENSE MUSIC] June 9th of 2017 was a beautiful day.
That Friday morning, Yingying went into her lab, where she had been working on her research.
Over the noon hour, she went back to her apartment in Orchard Downs, which is in the southeast part of campus.
She had lunch. Then she had the appointment to look at a new apartment. She didn't arrive at North Lincoln Avenue,
and she didn't arrive back at the lab. ZHIDONG WANG: Yingying was always on time.
So the supervisor, she felt something was wrong, was strange. STEVEN BECKETT: Well, everyone attempted to make phone calls
because they had her cell phone number, but there was no answer. ANTHONY MANGANARO (VOICEOVER): In the late evening of June
the 9th, approximately 9 o'clock at night, Yingying's colleagues had reported her missing to the University of Illinois Police Department.
They had not seen or heard from her in several hours, which was very unusual. They had had dinner plans together,
and she wasn't answering any of the phone calls that they made to her. The University Police Department went to Yingying's apartment.
They went to known locations throughout the campus that students hung out with and congregated.
STEVEN BECKETT: Saturday, June 10th, they were contacting all individuals that they knew
were having contact with her. BRYANNA FOX: Whenever police get a missing persons report,
they'll evaluate it in terms of the level of risk and how urgent it is that they investigate it, in terms
of a worst case scenario. The last time she was seen was around lunchtime. And this was particularly unusual
because, for a young student who doesn't necessarily know a lot of people, have a large circle of friends,
to just vanish during the middle of the day with no reason, it certainly indicated that maybe foul play was at work.
ANTHONY MANGANARO: The police learned that she was traveling to an apartment complex nearby.
She had wanted to sign a new lease, get some roommates, meet some new people, and make some friends.
The police went and talked to that apartment manager, who showed text messages that he had on the phone
where he was going back and forth with Yingying. And she was saying, I will arrive
at approximately this time. I'm on my way. And he was responding to her. A number of hours go by, and he sends a text
message asking where she is. And it goes unanswered. [TENSE MUSIC] MARY SCHENK (VOICEOVER): It was a Saturday afternoon.
I was the sole reporter working in the newsroom. And I received a telephone call from a male friend
of Yingying's telling me that she was missing. I was a little skeptical. So I rang a colleague of mine who
used to work at my newspaper who's now employed for the University of Illinois Police Department.
And I asked him if he had any reservations about us running a story. And he assured me that, yes, the police had checked
out several obvious leads. And they couldn't find her, and they were a bit concerned
and had more investigation to do, and said it would be a good idea to publicize the fact that she was missing.
BRYANNA FOX: The police need to mobilize and get the word out to the community as fast as possible.
Because the more eyes we have in that community, the more likelihood there is that any leads
or unusual circumstances that could turn into finding that person successfully are actually going to play out.
The longer time goes without any leads, the colder a case can get. ZHIDONG WANG: The search for Yingying started.
It was the local Chinese student organizations, and the local Chinese communities started that.
And then the university got involved as well. There's a lot of people just looking all over the place.
[TENSE MUSIC] ANTHONY MANGANARO: The university police began to expand their search, checking surveillance
footage and bus cameras. They went so far as to get emergency records for her cell
phone to try to figure out if it was hitting a cell phone tower anywhere in the neighborhood anywhere
on campus. STEVEN BECKETT: A shift of officers basically volunteered to come in to work
to look at all of this video. And there are all these cameras all over campus. And they're looking at all these videos,
and it's almost like looking for a needle in a haystack. ANTHONY MANGANARO: They pulled the video footage that
was at the bus terminal right next to her apartment, and that's when the first clue came in.
You see her entering that bus and giving a smile, actually, to the bus driver as she shows her bus pass,
and then goes and sits down in the bus. As they review the bus footage, you see her pull out her phone
and send a text message. And the time stamp on that mirrored the time stamp that was seen on the apartment complex manager's phone
when she was telling him that she was on her way. When she got to central campus,
she got off of that bus. She had to catch another bus that was gonna go north. She missed it.
The police continue to scour the video footage throughout the weekend into Sunday the 11th
to try to track her movements since she was no longer on the bus and wasn't appearing
in that video footage. STEVEN BECKETT: An officer, Sunday night, sees her image at the corner of Clark and Goodwin,
standing at the bus stop. There's a camera on that parking garage that is pointed at where the bus stop was.
Yingying was standing on that corner, waiting for the bus when all of a sudden, a car appeared.
She walks up to the window, and leans in, and has about a 1-minute conversation with whoever was
driving this vehicle, after which she gets into the passenger seat. And the vehicle drives North outside
of the camera view angle. This is, in a lot of ways, a very chilling video, because it's at this moment where all of the investigators
reviewing it-- you know this is not a missing person anymore. STEVEN BECKETT: The clear inference
is, she has been abducted. She has been kidnapped. And when a kidnapping occurs, then
state law enforcement can reach out to federal law enforcement. In this case, the FBI.
[TENSE MUSIC] I arrived at the Detective Bureau at the University Police Department
and learned a little bit about what was going on. We continued to receive more information.
One thing that stood out was another university student had also been approached the morning of June
by an unknown individual driving a black four-door vehicle. EMILY HOGAN (VOICEOVER): It was a sunny day.
It was warm. I was going to the Union on campus. I think I had my phone in my hand, and I had my backpack on.
And I was walking towards the bus stop on Green Street. There were lots of cars parked on the street,
but no one was around. And I remember seeing, on my left, a car pull up on the side of the road.
And the person in the car wound down the window. And I remember, he said something to me.
And I couldn't quite hear him, so I stepped a little further closer to the car. There was a piece of grass in between the pavement
and the road. And I sort of moved halfway through it, but I definitely kept my distance.
He repeated what he said, which was, hi, I'm an undercover cop doing some work in the area.
Could I ask you some questions? And I remember, I said yes. And he held up sort of a--
I can just only describe it as something that you would buy in a Halloween store.
It was like a black plastic kind of thing with a silver five-pointed star on it.
And so he asked me, can you get in the car so I can ask you some these questions?
And I remember, he said no. He seemed a little surprised that I wouldn't. And he said, OK, well, if you see anything
suspicious in the area, please, will you give the police a call? And I said yes.
And he said OK. And he wound up his window, and he continued onwards. And I moved away, back onto the pavement,
and went towards the bus stop. Any type of crime involving a stranger is statistically more rare.
However, when these do occur, they tend to be some of the most severe. The reason being is that stranger offenders pick
a victim for a reason that's often intrinsic, psychological, and often very negatively motivated.
EMILY HOGAN: I called the non-emergency police number. And whoever I spoke to dispatched
me directly to 9-1-1. I explained what happened. And I was on the bus at this point, heading towards campus.
And I wrote a Facebook status. And I said, "If this happens to you, do not get in the car."
[TENSE MUSIC] ZHIDONG WANG: Yingying was very close to her family. Yingying came to the US in April of 2017.
And we understood that she was not gonna be here for too long, because she was going to go
back to China, and she was going to get married in October of that year. We learned from Yingying's boyfriend
that they actually met in their freshman year in college. They both decided to continue to go to a graduate program
at the same university, Peking University. She had formed a band in her college,
and she was the singer. And also, Yingying had a big heart. She was always friendly, always smiling, and always willing
to help. She was keeping a diary, making entries on a daily basis, happy, at peace,
I'd say, with her experience here in the United States. [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] MARY SCHENK: In the days that followed,
it quickly went from being a University of Illinois Police Department case to a Federal
Bureau of Investigation case. The FBI does not confirm, on the record, that the sun is shining.
So all my sources that I would normally call and say, tell me some more about this, shut down on me and said,
we can't talk about this. So we were just kind of left to wonder what was going on behind the scenes.
ANTHONY MANGANARO: We have a missing student who hasn't been seen in a number of days.
And we have this video footage of her getting into a stranger's car, and it's the last anyone
has seen her or this vehicle. There is a real sense of urgency at this point. [TENSE MUSIC]
STEVEN BECKETT: We can only assume that, just as he did with the graduate student, he told
Yingying that he was a police officer and that he was there to help her. And she may have reacted to that inducement,
and that's why she got into the car. BRYANNA FOX: This was something that was very brazen.
It took a lot of confidence to do, a lot of premeditation. This is somebody who had looked up how to commit this crime,
put a lot of energy into it, and probably was not going to stop until they got whatever they wanted.
What is unfortunate about this video surveillance is that it is not clear enough to picture out a license plate.
But the vehicle was unique enough, and it was identified as a Saturn Astra. MARY SCHENK: The FBI released the video footage
showing Yingying getting into this Saturn Astra on the Monday after she was first reported missing.
And our newspaper ran it immediately. And as we all watched it, you know, you just wanted to scream out, don't get in.
Don't get in. This is not a good idea. And I guess we all hoped that if it were a kidnapping,
that she'd be found. We just kept thinking, where could he have taken her? [TENSE MUSIC]
ANTHONY MANGANARO: At this point, it's all hands on deck. I contacted every other agent within the Champaign resident
agency and a number of the support staff and asked them to meet me at the University Police Department
to help on this. STEVEN BECKETT: They learned there were 26 Saturn Astras in Champaign County.
And of those 26, only 18 had a hatchback, as the video showed. ANTHONY MANGANARO: One of the registered owners of a Saturn
Astra was a couple, the husband of which was Brent Christensen. So two agents went and spoke with him
to get eyes on that vehicle. [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] STEVEN BECKETT: Brent Christensen
was a physics graduate student at the University of Illinois. Classes were over, so he was on summer break.
And he indicated to them that he didn't recall what he had done that day because he didn't have class, he wasn't working,
but he played video games. Brent's wife was actually out of town and was able to show proof of that
through receipts, which left Brent alone. [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] He allowed agents to look at the vehicle, noticed it, you know,
looked fairly clean and that had also had a very large sunroof. At this point, they move on to the next registered Saturn
Astra on the list. STEVEN BECKETT: Back at the UVI Police office, another officer who was looking closely
at the video of Yingying being picked up enlarged it and focused on the left front wheel.
It had a defect in the rim where-- almost as if where you would hit the curb and, you know,
there was a slight marring of the metal of the rim. ANTHONY MANGANARO: Furthermore, when they started
looking at some photos of Saturn Astras and looking at the surveillance camera, you could tell this vehicle has a large sunroof.
Special Agent Smith walks up to me and says, I remember, there was a large sunroof
on Brent Christensen's vehicle. And I look at him and I said, get someone else. Go out there.
Check out that hubcap. Send me a picture. He immediately leaves, and we're able to snap
a photo of this hubcap. And we compare it to the video footage, and it's an exact match.
We also decide to see if we can marry up the prior witness's statement now that we have a name and a face.
[TENSE MUSIC] EMILY HOGAN: It must have been a few days later that I got a call.
At this point, they weren't giving me any information. So they asked me to come in and do a photo lineup
to see if I could identify the person that had approached me on the day. But they did not mention Yingying.
They did not mention that case. I couldn't really ask. I remember sitting there.
And then he said, OK. I want you to turn over the pictures one by one. I don't remember which number it was.
But when I saw-- when I saw that picture, I was so sure that it was him. I felt like it kind of hit me.
It was like a physical feeling. And I was like, oh, wow. I didn't expect that. There he is.
And I told the FBI agent, this one. [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] It's him. And he just stared at me.
STEVEN BECKETT: When the FBI agents went back to Christensen, after identifying the wheel of his car, this was the second time.
And the FBI asked him if he would be willing to come to FBI headquarters. He agreed.
DETECTIVE: You originally told the agents that came to your apartment that you just played
video games all day long. You didn't leave the apartment. Yeah. But it's fair to say that we know that that's not true.
Correct? Why would I lie? I mean, I've got her getting into your car. I need to know why.
Bruce-- Brent, I need to know why she's getting in your car, and I need to know where she went.
If we can help her, we need to know now because we need to move on from this. I think it's a good guess to say that Christensen was
aware of the CCTV footage, or certainly, he had given it some thought. So he's wanting to cover his tracks.
And the best way to do that is to account for the CCTV footage but not incriminate himself.
So how long do you think that she was in your car for? Less than five minutes. Not long at all.
Less than 5 minutes? Not long at all. There's just a few blocks, and I apparently took a wrong turn
compared to what she said. And that was enough to spook her. DETECTIVE: So you said you kicked her out of the car
at a residential neighborhood? She got out of the car. Oh, she got out of the car?
She wanted to get out. Like, that's why I let her out. Oh, because she was freaking out?
- Yeah. - And she started saying-- Because-- --it because she didn't understand.
--because you-- She thought you took a wrong turn? Yeah, and sometimes about-- you know, something like that.
KERRY DAYNES: There's no evidence to suggest that that is a lie. And so as far as the police are concerned,
unless he's going to give them more information, their hands are tied. Were you attracted to her at all?
--reason you want to know? I mean, she's a good-looking girl. So you're telling me you never had sex with her?
I never had sex with her. Are you afraid to tell me if you did? I've shared enough with you that you
know that I know that you didn't drop her off in that neighborhood. Where did you take her, Brent?
We need to find Yingying tonight. [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] STEVEN BECKETT: The FBI had two different lines of thought.
If he stayed in jail, they were at a dead end. But if they released him and kept him under surveillance,
he might lead them to Yingying or to evidence that showed what had happened to Yingying.
ANTHONY MANGANARO: We ultimately come to the conclusion that he's more valuable out on the street
where we can continuously monitor him than in a jail cell. He's released from jail, and we place
him under 24/7 surveillance. [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] [TENSE MUSIC] ZHIDONG WANG: I got a call from someone in China
saying Yingying's father and other family members were coming to the US. The person asked me whether I could provide some legal help.
I said, yeah, of course. And then I was put in touch with Yingying's boyfriend, who was with them applying for a passport and visa to come over.
MARY SCHENK: The family arrived in town about 10 days after she was first reported missing.
They came to our office on the 22nd of June. I was, you know, secretly hoping that the family would have
gotten all this information from the police and that they would share it with us.
They said they're not telling us anything. And that's when my heart just broke for them.
Well, when the interview was over, I was incredibly sad. I think when-- if you read the story
and read her dad's quotes, you know, "Yingying, be strong. Dad is coming for you," how could you not be moved by that?
I felt-- you know, I was trying to be positive for him and tell him I was praying for him and his family.
Yingying's family were not aware that the FBI had a main suspect, Brent Christensen.
His wife gives consent for us to search the apartment and seize a lot of electronics.
As the results of the forensic examination of the seized computers and cell phones start to trickle back,
we found search threads of a graphic sexual nature and, in a lot of ways, a violent sexual nature
both on the computers as well-- with images as well as in forums and in chat groups.
And it really conveyed this other dark sexual side. STEVEN BECKETT: He had a bad relationship with his wife.
That's actually what was going on in his life. He met on a dating-type app a girl in her 20s
who was interested in hooking up with him. This is in April. They began seeing each other.
They developed a close relationship, an intimate relationship, you would say. He was seeing her regularly.
He had said things to her that led her to believe that he had knowledge if, in fact, he was not
engaged in a behavior related to Yingying's disappearance. [TENSE MUSIC] His girlfriend agreed to work with us, and to wear a wire,
and record the conversations that she had with Brent. But we still haven't found Yingying,
and we need to know where she is. We feel that pressure. And then we get an interesting piece of information.
On the 29th, there was going to be a concert and a walk in support of Yingying in support
of efforts to find her. And while we're meeting with Brent's girlfriend, she receives a text message from Brent,
telling her that he wants her to accompany him to this concert and walk. We immediately gave her a recording device
and said, hey, go. See why he's gonna be there. And if he makes any statements, you know what to do.
STEVEN BECKETT: The family and Xiaolin, Yingying's betrothed, they pleaded emotionally to the crowd for every effort,
all of the energy that could be put together by the community to help them find Yingying, because they
believed her to be alive. They believed that she was waiting for them, and they just needed to reach out and find her.
The fact that Brent Christensen wanted to attend the March in concert and felt this need to see seemingly his work, his impact
on the community, really speaks to his grandiosity, and narcissism, and lack of remorse.
He almost felt like he had this godlike complex, that he could impact all of these people
through his actions. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] I remember listening to that recording. He describes hitting her in the head with a baseball bat.
And I'm thinking, we have that bat. And I'm thinking, we need to get back into that apartment.
We need to search other areas for evidence. But overwhelmingly, what was there was a sense of,
we've got him. We can make this arrest. And that immediately triggered this push to get everything
lined up to get a good, solid arrest and hopefully a second interview, where we could get him to tell
us what he's done with her. [TENSE MUSIC] STEVEN BECKETT: Christensen refused to confess,
refused to answer questions about what he had done. MARY SCHENK: None of us were aware that the police
had honed in on any suspects. So we were all as surprised as anyone when the arrest was announced.
I don't think we ever said in print, oh, we think she's dead, because that wasn't
part of the criminal complaint. But you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that something bad had happened to this woman.
So our attention turned to, who is Brent Christensen? We were able to put together, in a pretty short amount of time,
just some background on him. ANTHONY MANGANARO: Throughout all of this, we still didn't know where Yingying's body was,
and we were still searching for that. STEVEN BECKETT: When I first meet with the family,
it's an awkward situation. I personally believe from the information that's been filed in court that Yingying is
dead, that she's been killed. She's been murdered. The family wants her to be alive,
and they continue with the hope that she's alive. ANTHONY MANGANARO: In November of that year,
the DNA that came back confirmed, really, what we already knew, that Yingying had been in Brent's
apartment, that she had been violently assaulted, and that he had murdered her there.
STEVEN BECKETT: In the fall of 2017, it goes from a kidnapping to a kidnapping resulting in death.
So the family has to come to grips with the notion that they're not looking anymore for Yingying alive.
EMILY HOGAN: I think I heard the name probably not long after he had been arrested, because it
will have been in the news. I learnt that I was related in November, and that was with the release of the "Chicago Tribune"
newspaper article. And that day, I had a friend who messaged me just saying, oh,
my God. Are you OK? And I was like, what are you talking about? So that was really when it hit home.
I had probably guessed at that point that I was involved. But I'd never-- it had never been confirmed
until that point, and that was a shock to kind of-- finally, after you've been telling yourself for a few months,
you're not involved, you know, you're not gonna help. You're not doing anything to finally be told,
you know, actually you did do quite a lot. It was shocking, and it was emotional.
[TENSE MUSIC] ANTHONY MANGANARO: The entire trial lasted a number of weeks, and there was an immense amount of preparation.
This was a federal death penalty case. It was unusual because there was no body.
But we were all very focused on giving Yingying a voice. We wanted the jury to know as much as possible.
In fact, our evidence was so good that during the defense's opening statements, they admitted that he had killed her.
MARY SCHENK: The information that he had posed a police officer came out at the trial.
We were all learning the depravity. I mean, a lot of it had been sugarcoated in what
had been previously released. And it was just horrible to hear the detail. And I think we were hearing it at the same time
her family members were hearing it in the courthouse. [TENSE MUSIC] STEVEN BECKETT: In a death penalty case,
the jury is entitled to consider the impact of the death on the family of the victim.
And they do that by calling witnesses to testify to those things, but they also do it by video recording.
And so they went to China, and they went to all of the important places in Yingying's life,
where she grew up, where she went to school, her relationship with her boyfriend or her relationship
with friends. Christensen, throughout the trial, was stone cold, emotionless. No expression of remorse.
There were a couple of occasions where I saw him smile. We learned that there were records showing
that Christensen had gone to student counseling at the University of Illinois and that he had
portrayed himself as homicidal. KERRY DAYNES: Christensen is very different in terms
of offender and offending in terms of, we don't usually see somebody go from naught to 60
in such a short period of time. He is somebody who is really spiraling but spiraling very fast.
And he's clearly got conflict about this. It's not true that offenders like him have no remorse.
They do. They wrestle with themselves. And he's gone through a process of wrestling with himself
about, should I do this? Can I do this? What does this mean for me? But ultimately, he's chosen to do this.
He's become a very callous character. [TENSE MUSIC] ZHIDONG WANG: In the penalty phase,
the jury could not reach an agreement for death penalty. And at that moment, Christensen and his attorneys
were celebrating. So the final result was Christensen would be sentenced to life in jail
without parole, without any possibility of getting out of the federal prison system.
[TENSE MUSIC] [camera shutter clicks] The Zhang family was somehow informed that Christensen
related to his attorneys that he put Yingying's remains in three separate garbage bags and then dumped
those into a garbage dumpster. MARY SCHENK: You couldn't help but be just terribly moved by the pain they must have been feeling.
Steve Beckett held a news conference. And I was sitting very close to her dad, and I just--
I just patted my-- I just patted my heart and said I'm-- I just mouthed "I'm sorry," you know,
because we were at this news conference where they were talking about the fact that it would be impossible to find
her remains in this landfill. [TENSE MUSIC] In terms of his willingness to take risks
and to do things that are absolutely unthinkable for most of the people, he did it with a level of confidence of somebody
who thought he was going to get away with it. So if he thought he was gonna get away with that,
imagine what else he thinks he may be able to do and get away with. STEVEN BECKETT: This is a spot where Yingying
was standing when the car stopped and she interacted with that car. The memorial garden is here, and you can see it's beautifully
landscaped, and that there are fresh flowers, , photographs and a bench where you can sit
and reflect about the meaning of Yingying and what happened to her. [GENTLE MUSIC]
I think that, you know, obviously, it wasn't my fault. But it's like a butterfly effect.
You make a decision to do or not do something. And because of a decision that you made,
something happens to someone else. For a very long time, I didn't want to do any interviews
because I was grieving, and angry, and didn't want to draw attention to myself when,
you know, Yingying's family were going through something so terrible. But it is important that people hear this story,
that people can-- can learn from this. So I hope that-- [SNIFFS] I hope that this never happens to anyone again.
ZHIDONG WANG: Yingying is an intelligent, beautiful, and kind person. But it's too sad that she left us too
early and in such a tragic way. I think representing Yingying's family is the best
decision I have ever made. And I'm proud that I got to know Yingying. ANTHONY MANGANARO: You can't help
but get a little personally involved in a case like this. And I learned a lot about Yingying.
I think about holding her journal and reading on the last page of this beautifully penmanshipped
journal the line, you know, "Life is too short to be ordinary," and just that statement, and what
I imagine it meant to her. When everything was done, getting permission to have that journal returned to her mom,
I was very honored to be able to do that. EMILY HOGAN: I would say I do feel a connection to her in that--
it's difficult, you, know because I didn't know her. It's a tricky thing to describe, but I think of her a lot.
Yingying's family, that's a really hard one. [SOBS] I'm just so desperately sorry,
and I so desperately wish that there's something more I could have done. I can't imagine the pain and the hurt
that they must have gone through, and I'm just-- I'm so sorry that happened to them.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

EPISODE 2 – YINGYING ZHANG

In June 2017, college student Yingying Zhang misses a bus to an appointment in Champaign, Illinois. Yingying is last seen getting into the car of a local resident, Brendt Christensen, on the University of Illinois campus. After that, she disappears without a trace and is never seen alive again. Were you familiar with Yingying’s story before this episode? Comment below and be sure to like and subscribe for more episodes of Murdered At First Sight. Murdered At First Sight is a true crime documentary series that tells the first-hand stories of the most complex and hard-to-solve homicide cases: murders committed by strangers.

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Brief Summary

Yingying Zhang, a Chinese student, was kidnapped in 2017; Brent Christensen was arrested and sentenced to life in prison for her murder.

Key points

Yingying's Beautiful Aspiration. Yingying came to the U.S. to learn about agriculture and teach back in China.
The Chilling Moment. Yingying is seen getting into a stranger's car, marking a turning point in the case.
The Search Begins. The community and police mobilize to find Yingying after she goes missing.
A Disturbing Encounter. Another student recalls being approached by a stranger in a similar vehicle.
The Family's Heartbreak. Yingying's family arrives in the U.S. to find their daughter missing.
The Dark Side of Brent Christensen. Forensic examination reveals disturbing evidence of Brent's violent tendencies.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This is not a missing person anymore.

Indicating the shift in the case's seriousness.

0:50WatchNov 10, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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