Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Have you ever wondered why women are so obsessed with true crime? It's dark and twisty and creepy. And we're totally here for it. And we know you are too.
This is Paige. And I'm Natalie. We're the hosts of the Murder Diaries podcast. Take a dive with us into a new true crime story every Thursday. We cover murders like Shanda Sher, who was burned alive by her BFFs, and the mysterious death of Kanika Jenkins. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, better safe than dead.
In June 2017, a young Chinese scholar was abducted in broad daylight while she waited at a bus stop near the University of Illinois campus. The entire encounter was caught on surveillance cameras at the bus stop and at nearby parking structures.
Family and friends of Ying Ying were desperate to find the high-performing student with ambitions of becoming a professor herself someday. With no body, could forensic science and just good old-fashioned detective work put a wannabe serial killer behind bars? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 37, The Kidnapping of Ying Ying Jung. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case. Some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases remain unsolved.
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Now, let's talk about the kidnapping and murder of Yingying Zhang. Hey, Forensic Tales listeners. The case we're covering on the show this week involves a high-performing scholar from China who went missing in June 2017 near a bus stop in Urbana, Illinois. It's another sad case and certainly a crime that should have never happened.
It's completely senseless and can hardly be put into words what exactly happened to this young woman. Now, before I get into the details of the case that begins in June of 2017, I want to talk about the victim and provide a little bit of background about who this incredibly smart young woman was.
Before I even talk about her, I just want to say that I am going to do my very best to pronounce the names the best that I can. I apologize sincerely in advance if I'm incorrect on pronouncing any of these names. Her name was Yingying Zheng. She was born on December 21, 1990 in China.
Her parents are Zheng Gaozhang and Lei Fengye, and she had a younger brother. Yingying's family is from one of the poorest regions of China. The part of China that she was from, the biggest profit comes from a local business that farms tea. Her father was a delivery truck driver, and her mother didn't know how to read or write.
It goes without saying here that her parents really struggled. Life wasn't simple or easy for this family. From a very young age, Yingying showed a lot of potential. She was very ambitious, she was extremely intelligent, and she always performed incredibly well in school. She really became a source of hope for the family.
That she was going to grow up, become very successful, and be the light that this family needed. As a kid, Yingying had aspirations of becoming a college professor when she grew up. This part of her story really strikes a chord with me.
As I've mentioned in previous episodes of the show, I finished my master's degree in forensic psychology at Arizona State University last year. And right now, in this very moment, I'm currently in the process of looking at PhD and JD programs. So I also share aspirations of wanting to become a professor, just like Yingying.
That's one of the biggest reasons I wanted to cover her story and her case right here on my show. In 2013, Yingying graduated from college in China at the very top of her class. A few years later in 2016, she graduated from Peking University with a master's degree in agricultural sciences.
After graduation, she decided to go to the United States to begin her research on photosynthesis and crop productivity. This is really where her passion and her expertise was. She came to the U.S. as a visiting scholar in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At the time, Yingying was engaged to a man by the name of Xiaoling Ha.
The two had been dating for years and they actually had plans to get married later that year in October 2017. So the date in question and where the story really begins is on June 9th, 2017. At the time, Yingying was in the process of moving out of one apartment and into another.
She was looking to save a little bit of money on her rent. I think we've all been there before. On June 9th, 2017, Yingying had plans to meet with the property manager and she was going to sign the lease to her new apartment. Around 12.30pm that afternoon, she left work in order to go sign the lease.
But she wasn't going to be gone all day. She told her boss, hey, I have to go sign a lease real quick, but I'll return to work as soon as I'm done. A couple hours go by and Yingying hasn't returned to work like she said she was. Her boss checks the clock. Three o'clock becomes four o'clock becomes five o'clock. Still no sign of Yingying.
which was completely out of character for her. Her boss knew that if something changed in her plans, she would have at least called work and told them what was going on. It wasn't like her to just not do what she said she was going to do. A little before 9.30 p.m. that evening, at 9.24 p.m.,
One of Ying Ying's professors reported her missing to the University of Illinois Police Department. There was no way she could have just gone off for this long and not tell anyone her plans. It wouldn't have taken this long for her to meet with the apartment property manager and sign her lease.
So even though it had only been about seven and a half hours since she was last seen, police took this report very seriously. Once Yingying was reported missing by one of her professors, the state police, FBI, and the university police all got involved in the case.
The police initially offered up a $50,000 reward and the FBI joined in and offered an additional $10,000 for any information into her disappearance, which is really good to hear. We hear so many times about how police don't take these types of cases seriously.
She's in her 20s. She's a grown adult. If she wants to go somewhere and not talk to anyone, she's completely allowed to do that. It's such a breath of fresh air to see that the authorities really took this one seriously. That this was completely out of character for Ying Ying and something might be really wrong.
Very quickly into the investigation, authorities got their hands on their first solid piece of evidence and it pretty much fell right into their laps. And that was a surveillance camera that caught footage of Ying Ying on the very afternoon of her disappearance, June 9th. It didn't take police long to figure out how they could get their hands on the tape.
Authorities knew that when she went to go sign that lease that afternoon, she didn't have a car. So they knew that she would have to take a bus to the apartment complex. Of course, in today's world, cameras are everywhere, including in and around public transportation.
Just in case you needed a reminder, if you think nobody's watching, right now in the United States, you're likely to be caught on surveillance cameras up to 75 times each and every single day. So if you think that nobody's watching, you're probably wrong.
Yingying is captured getting on a bus at 1.35 p.m. at the corner of South Orchard Street and West George Huff Drive. She's then seen again at 1.52 p.m. getting off that bus at the corner of West Springfield Avenue and North Matthews Avenue. Now, it's at this second bus stop where she misses her connecting bus and
the bus she needs to get on in order to get to the apartment building. She tried to flag down the bus, but she was on the opposite side of the street, so the bus ends up leaving without her. Even though she was technically at the stop, she was on the opposite side of the street.
where it's against the Champaign-Urbana mass transit district policy to stop for pedestrians on the wrong side of the street. So it's not like the bus driver was just being some sort of jerk here. Even though he sees Ying Ying try to flag him down, they really want to discourage people from basically running into the street and being faced with oncoming traffic.
So she sits down at the bus stop and it appears as though she's sitting and waiting for the next bus to come by in order to get her to the apartment complex. It's then that you see a small black car drive past Ying Ying. The car is seen driving past the bus station. The car turns left and then heads right back around towards her.
This is all captured on camera from a surveillance camera located in a parking structure right across the street from the bus stop. The driver in the black car pulled right up next to Ying Ying and you see her get up from the bus stop and go to the car passenger side door. She appears to be talking to the driver for just a few minutes. Then you see her get inside the car.
The car then drives off heading northbound and that is it. That's all you see for the rest of the tape. The car just drives off.
Even though the police couldn't make out a license plate on the vehicle, they were able to determine that the vehicle that approached Ying Ying was an older model black Saturn Astra, which turns out isn't a very popular car. In fact, there were only 18 registered four-door Saturn Astras throughout the entire county of Champaign, Illinois.
narrowing their search for the driver of this vehicle to just over a dozen people. So let's all thank our lucky stars here that they didn't have to search for a black Honda Civic or something like that. While the police waited for the list of the 18 registered drivers throughout Champaign County, they decided to release part of the surveillance video to the public.
to try and see if anyone would come forward with any information on the driver. Family and friends of Yingying also approached the media to try and get the word out about her disappearance. They wanted as many people as they could out there searching for her.
A forensic search was done on Yingying's cell phone, which is another great investigative tool, especially this early on into a missing person case. And the forensic search revealed that at 1.39 p.m. on the afternoon of June 9th, 2017, Yingying texted the property manager to let him know that she was running late to come sign the lease.
Which makes sense because we know from the surveillance footage that she missed her connecting bus. The very bus she needed to get on in order to get to the apartment complex. At 1.39 p.m., she texted the property manager and said she was going to be about 10 minutes late, but she would still be there.
The property manager texted Ying Ying back, but he never got a response back from her. Even more disturbing was that the forensic search of her cell phone revealed that after this final text message, just within a few minutes after she got inside the black Saturn Astra, her cell phone went completely dead.
There were no text messages, no phone calls. Her cell phone was turned off. This forensic search of the cell phone is really important for the investigation because between the cell phone records and the timestamp on the surveillance video at the bus stop, we know that Yingying was alive and well at 1.30 p.m.,
But within just minutes after that, at 2.30 p.m., her cell phone goes completely dead. It stops communicating, which means that between 1.30 p.m. and 2.30 p.m., something terrible has probably happened to her. Police received a list of registered drivers right there within Champaign County who drove a four-door Saturn Astra.
One of the registered owners was a man by the name of Brent Allen Christensen. Brent, born on June 30, 1989, was also a student at the University of Illinois. He had graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013 with a bachelor's degree in both math and physics. And in 2017, he obtained a master's degree in physics.
Later that same year, in 2017, Brent started his PhD program at the University of Illinois. So I don't think I need to really point out here that Brent was an insanely smart guy. When police showed up to Brent's apartment for questioning, they found a black 2008 Saturn Astra sitting right there in the driveway.
They also noticed that there was some sort of chip, some sort of dent on the car's front hubcap. Now, something that I didn't mention earlier is that the car seen on the surveillance video, the car Ying Ying got in, also had what appeared to be some sort of chip or damage to the car's hubcap.
Now, here police are, right at Brent's apartment, and before they even get to the front door, he's already looking like the exact person they want to speak to. Besides being a PhD student at the University of Illinois, police also learned that Brent was married to a woman by the name of Michelle, but his marriage to Michelle wasn't going very well.
And it wasn't just his marriage that wasn't going so well in his life. Brent was described as a heavy, heavy drinker. His grades weren't so hot in his PhD program. And he had a girlfriend on the side by the name of Tara, a girl that he had met online.
Now, I say that he had a girlfriend on the side, but his wife Michelle knew all about this girlfriend. And by this point in time, the two of them were already planning on getting a divorce. On June 12, 2017, just three days after Ying Ying's disappearance, police questioned Brent for the first time, as well as a short inspection of his car.
At first, Brent said that he never left his house on the day Ying Ying disappeared. He said he stayed inside his apartment the entire day, he played video games, and that he never left. He even let police search his Saturn Astra, making them believe that he thought he had absolutely nothing to hide. But the police didn't find anything, at least initially inside of the car.
But they were pretty certain that because Brent's car had that cracked hubcap, just like the car seen in the video, that the car in the footage most likely belonged to Brent. Inside of the apartment, police spotted what they believed was blood in a number of different places throughout the apartment. They thought they saw blood on some of the apartment walls. They saw some on his mattresses.
And when authorities asked him about it, he said, yeah, it was blood, but the blood belonged to his girlfriend, Tara, that the blood got there by some sort of accident that had happened several weeks ago. So without any solid forensic evidence, police ended their questioning of Brent and decided they needed to get a search warrant in order to complete a full forensic search of the Astra.
And police secured that search warrant, and they returned back to Brent's apartment just a couple days later on June 15th. By the 15th, Yingying had been missing for six days. She hadn't been heard or seen since June 9th. There had been zero activity on her bank accounts, and her cell phone had been turned off right there since 2.30 p.m. on the 9th.
On June 15th, police and FBI executed a search warrant on Brent's black 2008 Saturn Astra. The car was initially towed to the Champaign Police Department with plans that just a few days later would be transported to the FBI Springfield Division main office for the forensic search to be done. When the vehicle was towed to the police department,
pretty obvious to the police and FBI agents who were there that one of the car's doors had been extensively cleaned. Now, I say it was obvious because the door was completely wiped clean while the rest of the car was dirty. It was filthy. This is now the second time police interviewed Brent.
This time around, he admitted to police that he did, in fact, quote, give an Asian girl with broken English a ride that day, which already is a very different story than he had told the first time that he was questioned by police when he said that he never left his apartment that day.
He said that he didn't remember her name. He said she got inside of his car, started to freak out. So he dropped her off a few blocks down the road. So police asked Brent, well, where did you drop her off at? He said he couldn't remember. So police offered to drive Brent around. Maybe if they drive him around, he could show them exactly where he dropped her off.
But he said he still wouldn't be able to remember where. During this interview, Brent even told investigators that he didn't even remember what day he picked up this quote Asian girl and said that maybe he picked her up on Saturday, June 10th, which again does not match up with what we already know and what we've already seen on videotape.
Brent said that when the girl got inside of his car, she told him that she was running late for an appointment. And as we already know, Yingying was late to her appointment with the property manager to sign her lease. Police even showed Brent the videotape, to which he immediately got defensive.
He told them that there's no way you can prove that it's actually him on the video. You can't see the person behind the wheel and that there's no proof that it's him driving. You can't see his face on the video. You can't tell exactly who the driver is. The police feel pretty confident with where their investigation is going, even if Brent had changed his story at least twice already.
So after this second interview, police secured additional search warrants to seize both of Brent's computers as well as his cell phone. They also obtained a federal search warrant to execute a forensic search of the cell phone. Even after this second police interview, police and FBI still don't have enough to make an arrest in the case.
There isn't any solid forensic evidence, and we still don't know where Ying Ying is. Police decided to speak to Michelle, Brent's soon-to-be ex-wife. And Michelle, well, she doesn't even try to cover for Brent. Maybe it's because Brent's her husband and he's got a girlfriend on the side. I don't know. But she certainly doesn't do Brent any favors here.
Because Michelle told police that Brent was just a straight up strange guy. That his favorite book of all time was American Psycho. Which I haven't read the book. I've only seen the movie. And if you've watched or read the story, American Psycho is an interesting choice.
So my fiance Tony has asked a couple times to watch American Psycho, and even I, a true crime obsessed person, I'm a little freaked out by the character that Christian Bale portrays in that movie. So police also questioned another person in Brent's life, his girlfriend Tara.
Tara told investigators that the two of them met on an online dating website and that she got him into the BDSM lifestyle and introduced him to FetLife. Which, full disclosure here, I had absolutely no idea what FetLife was, but thanks to Google...
Apparently, FetLife is a pretty large online network for adults who are into BDSM and who are into different types of sexual fetishes. Now, I just want to be clear, though. This certainly doesn't mean that just because Brent and his girlfriend Tara are into this type of lifestyle or because they had profiles on FetLife that
means that they had anything to do with Ying Ying's disappearance. The FetLife and BDSM community, at heart, has nothing to do with murder, with kidnapping, with anything like that. But Brent's girlfriend Tara is also pretty quick to tell police that she's willing to wear a wire, that she can tape her conversations with Brent if it will help them find anything out about the case.
She basically agrees to wear a wire because, first and foremost, she believes Brent is innocent. And if wearing a wire and recording their conversations will ultimately prove his innocence or help find this missing girl, then she's down to do it. Just like everyone else in the community, Tara wants to find out what exactly happened to Ying Ying.
So by June 16th, 2017, police are now surveilling Brent and they're watching his moves 24-7 around the clock. A few days later, Yingying's father, aunt, and fiance arrived in the United States from China to try and help find her.
The same day that Ying Ying's family and fiance arrive in Illinois, Brent is again talking to police and FBI. He tells them the same story as he did during this second police interview, that he picked up a female Asian student, that he couldn't understand much of what she was saying. He figured she just needed a ride somewhere.
And then a few minutes into the car ride, she started to freak out. She became upset. So he decides to drop her off on the sidewalk, doesn't remember where, and that's all he recalls from that afternoon. Over the next several days, Tara records her conversations with Brent. She records their conversations over the phone, conversations they're having in person. She was able to record a lot of
During one of these conversations, Brent admitted to Tara something that changed everything. Brent admitted to Tara that when police were at his apartment the first time and questioned him where the blood they found on the wall and on the mattress came from, he told police that it was Tara's blood, which she knew was completely false.
So Tara is now wondering, why would her boyfriend tell police the blood inside their apartment was hers when both her and him know that it's not true? In another conversation, Brent told Tara that he considers himself to be a serial killer, that he's been killing since he was 19 years old.
And during this conversation, while Brent and Tara are simply out walking together, Brent names Ying Ying as one of his victims. On June 29, 2017, Brent and Tara attended a memorial walk that was organized to bring awareness to Ying Ying's disappearance.
Hundreds of people from the community, from the University of Illinois, even Ying Ying's family came out to the memorial. And while at the memorial, Tara recorded their conversation with Brent that he admitted that he brought Ying Ying back to his apartment that day and that he held her there against her will.
Keep in mind, you guys, Brent and Tara are having this conversation while they're both at a memorial for Ying Ying. Brent tells Tara that Ying Ying was his 13th victim and bragged that even Ted Bundy himself had nothing on him. I get this part starts to explain why his favorite book of all time was American Psycho.
Everything Brent tells Tara is completely different than what he told the police. He knows Ying Ying. He knows her name. He knows why he decided to pick her up that day. And he knows exactly what happened to her. Not only is this a confession, Brent provides details that only the suspect would know.
Remember, by this point, Ying Ying's body hasn't even been discovered yet. And in reality, no one even knows if she's dead, except for Brent. Later that same night, Brent full-on admits to Tara that he picked up Ying Ying that day and that he murdered her.
He tells Tara that he used some sort of fake badge to trick her into thinking that he was a cop or some sort of security guard. And he offered to give her a ride to the apartment leasing office where she needed to be. He says he took her back to his apartment when he raped her, beat her, and then strangled her to death.
He admitted to Tara that after killing her, he took her body into the bathroom, into the bathtub, where he decapitated her, making sure to drain all the blood out of her body, sending her blood down the drain.
Once authorities listen to this full-on confession to the murder, Brent is quickly arrested the following afternoon on June 30, 2017, and he's charged with kidnapping and murder. Now, under Illinois state law, if a kidnapping results in the death of another person, the crime is eligible for either life imprisonment
or prosecutors can decide to pursue the death penalty. In the months leading up to trial, authorities get back the results of the forensic search that was done on Brent's cell phone and computers, and the search revealed even more incriminating evidence against him. The digital forensic search found that not only did Brent have a profile on FetLife's website,
But he had made several searches on the site for forums such as Abduction 101. He was actively searching for ways to kidnap someone. And not just once. He made these searches over and over again. What was probably the most puzzling to authorities and the prosecutors was that Brent Christensen had no criminal record,
He had no history of abuse or anything like that. And he had some pretty major ties to the community. He was an extremely accomplished student. He was studying towards his PhD. No one could really understand how someone like Brent could become the prime suspect in not only Ying Ying's disappearance, but according to him, there were possibly 12 more victims out there.
During these taped conversations between Brent and his girlfriend Tara, Brent claimed that Yingying was his 13th victim, that he regards himself as one of the most notorious serial killers our country has ever seen.
During the course of the investigation, however, police and authorities found absolutely no evidence to suggest that there were any other victims and nothing to prove his claims. Now, it's really hard to understand exactly why he would confess to 12 other murders or at least claim he's killed 13 people.
when there's no evidence to suggest that there are any other victims. The only explanation here is that he wanted to be a serial killer. He wanted to go down in history as a killer, this murderer. He idolized characters like what we see in American Psycho, his favorite book.
He even referred to himself as better than Ted Bundy, which of course is one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. He wanted to be just like these monsters. After Brent was arrested and charged with kidnapping and murder, the judge denied bail in his case on July 5th.
The decision to deny bail was largely based on the fact that Yingying's body had not been recovered yet and that this was a huge aggravating factor against Brent. And we know that he was the last person that saw her alive that day. So on July 12, 2017, a federal grand jury formally indicted Brent Christensen for kidnapping Yingying.
The federal indictment read, quote,
End quote.
In shorter terms, this is a federal case because he used both a cell phone and a car to kidnap Ying Ying. A few days later, on July 20, 2017, Brent pled not guilty to all charges. The kidnapping resulting in death charge and two counts of lying to federal agents.
His trial was set to begin in September 2017, but was delayed until June 2019. Before the trial, Michelle divorced him, and his girlfriend Tara broke up with him. In fact, Tara was so disturbed by what happened to Ying Ying and what Brent told her that he did, she was reported to suffer from severe PTSD and anxiety.
She's truly horrified by what Brent did and how she could have been in a relationship with someone like him. The death penalty was completely on the table here because the prosecution alleged Brent kidnapped Ying Ying and the kidnapping led to her death. So he was eligible for the death penalty in Illinois.
We hear cases all the time where defendants in criminal trials will plead guilty to capital cases in order to avoid the death penalty.
We just saw this happen a few weeks ago with Joseph James D'Angelo, the Golden State Killer, where he pled guilty to 13 or 14 murders in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table in his case. So in Brent Christensen's case, the prosecution certainly used the death penalty to basically hang over his head,
Now, not everyone agrees with the death penalty, but in this case, Ying Ying's family, her mom and dad, came out numerous times saying that they wanted Brent to be sentenced to death for what he did to Ying Ying. The family wanted the prosecution to seek the death penalty, even if it meant that they were going to have to sit through a trial, but
In the family's eyes, the death penalty in this case meant a small piece of justice. But Brent refused to enter a guilty plea in the case, and the trial began in June 2019. But when the trial started, Brent and his defense team took a completely different approach. Right at the start of trial, Brent's defense attorney, a man by the name of George Tassif,
admitted during his opening statements that Brent did in fact kill Ying Ying. He told the jury that Brent was on trial for his life because he was still facing the death penalty because the prosecution refused to take it off the table. At trial, the prosecution presented evidence that Brent abducted Ying Ying at the bus stop while he pretended to be a cop.
Prosecutors even told the story that Yingying wasn't Brent's first victim that day. Because earlier that afternoon, Brent stopped and approached another University of Illinois student, Emily Hogan. He asked Emily to get inside of his car, also pretending to be an undercover cop.
But Emily refused. She didn't get inside the car. And in fact, she reported the incident to the police. She was so bothered by what Brent tried to do, she created this pretty large social media campaign that urged students not to get inside cars with people that they didn't know.
If Emily had not listened to her instincts that were telling her, hey, something just isn't right here, don't get into this guy's car, she just might have been a victim herself, just like Ying Ying. The prosecution also argued that Brent was obsessed with serial killers, that he wanted to become one.
The forensic search of his cell phone and his computers revealed hundreds and hundreds of searches on how to kidnap someone and how to murder someone. He was conducting research on how to become a serial killer.
Even though the prosecution had no body, which is often a major problem in murder cases, because without a body, there's no forensics that could tie him to the body or to the murder. But they still felt confident that they had a really strong case here. They had dozens of taped conversations between Brent and his ex-girlfriend Tara,
where on a number of the tapes, he admitted to murdering Ying Ying. They had his internet and cell phone searches of rape and kidnapping, and probably most important, they had DNA. Investigators recovered Ying Ying's DNA, which they got from her toothbrush, that matched the DNA found on the walls, the mattress,
and on a baseball bat right there inside Brent's apartment. It was revealed at trial that before the murder, Brent had made an appointment with a counselor on the campus of the University of Illinois. And before Brent met with the counselor, he was required to fill out a questionnaire as anyone would when they make an appointment.
And one of the questions on that questionnaire asked if he ever had feelings of wanting to hurt himself or hurt somebody else. Brent checked the box, yes. Now, this was never investigated. Nobody at the university or inside of the university's counseling department ever asked him about this or even followed up with him. Now, Yingying's family...
Her family had to sit through the entire trial and they had to listen to how Brent kidnapped and brutally murdered their daughter. They listened to how he choked her, raped her, stabbed her, beat her with a baseball bat, and finally how he decapitated her.
They also listened to how she fought so hard and for so long for her life. She fought so hard that it took Brent over 10 minutes to choke her to death, finally ending her life.
After less than two hours of deliberation, on June 24, 2019, the 12-member jury came back and found Brent Christensen guilty of all counts. He was found guilty of one count of kidnapping resulting in death and two counts of making false statements to federal agents.
But when it came time to sentencing, the jury couldn't decide on a sentence. They were completely torn between the death penalty and life in prison without parole. So on July 18, 2019, Brent was spared the death penalty, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Following the conclusion of the criminal trial, Brent's attorneys released what Brent did with Yingying's body. The day after she was killed, Brent dismembered her body and placed the pieces in three separate trash bags. He then took the trash bags and discarded them in the dumpster right behind his apartment complex. He disposed of Yingying like she was a piece of trash.
According to Brent, over the next few days, he disposed of her belongings in different dumpsters all throughout town. Since the confession and admission of where Ying Ying's body was disposed of, police have had a nearly impossible time locating any of her remains. And that's because the dumpster that Brent disposed of her body inside of the trash bags
was emptied out three days after the murder, and the trash was taken to a private landfill in a whole other county. Since then, the trash containing her remains has been compacted on two separate occasions, at least from what we know, and that it's been spread out over an area of at least 50 yards.
Subsequently, the trash has been buried under 30 feet of garbage. The hope of finding any of Yingying's remains so that her family can properly bury their girl are almost impossible. Yingying was the symbol of hope for her and her family. She was the first person in her family to ever go to college to pursue a master's degree.
and make an attempt at a PhD. She was the source of hope that she could bring her family out of one of the poorest regions of China. She was supposed to marry the love of her life in October, the same year her life was tragically cut short. Her kidnapping, rape, and murder was a senseless act of violence that
committed by a wannabe serial killer. Forensic science was able to link her DNA to blood found inside Brent's apartment and on a baseball bat. It was also able to uncover valuable digital evidence that proved the murder was premeditated. Forensic science was also able to take another cold-blooded killer off our streets.
Thank you.
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