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She Missed One Bus: The Yingying Zhang Case · Crime Incident

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the afternoon of June 9th, 2017, a 26-year-old visiting
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: scholar named Yinying Zhang missed a bus in Urbana, Illinois,
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: because she was standing on the wrong side of the street.
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  Speaker 1: Nine minutes later, surveillance cameras recorded a black Saturn Astra
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  Speaker 1: circling the block, stopping beside her, and driving away with
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: her inside. She was never seen alive again, and the
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: case that followed would be decided not by a body,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: not by a weapon, but by a hidden microphone worn
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: to a candlelight vigil held in her honor. I want
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  Speaker 1: to hold that last image for a second because it
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  Speaker 1: is the strangest single scene I know of in modern
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  Speaker 1: American crime. A community gathered to walk and sing for
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: a missing woman. And somewhere in that crowd, the man
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: who took her narrating his own crime to a girlfriend
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  Speaker 1: who was wired for sound by the FBI. Everything in
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: this story runs through that recording. There is the case
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: before it existed when investigators had a car on video
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: and nothing else. And there is the case after when
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: the government had the killer's own voice. Keep that dividing
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: line in your mind as we go, because it is
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: the spine of everything you are about to hear. But
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  Speaker 1: before the microphone, the person. Because if this case reached
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: you at all, it probably reached you as a headline
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: about a Chinese student and an American kidnapper, and that
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: framing gets the emphasis exactly backwards. You should know Yingying.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Yingying Zhang was born December 21, 1990, in Nanping, a
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  Speaker 1: city in China's Fujian Province. tucked among mountain ranges and forests.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Her father Ronggaozhang drove for a living. Her mother Laifeng
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Ye struggled with her health. Neither of them spoke English.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: They had hardly ever left Nanping, let alone the country.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: And their daughter was, by every account, the family's entire
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: upward trajectory. She graduated at the top of her class
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: from Sun Yat-sen University in 2013, then earned a master's
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: degree in environmental engineering from Peking University, the school her
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: family's friends called the Harvard of China. She worked as
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and even
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: then she kept sending money home. She set aside part
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: of her research income to buy her parents' devices to
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: make their lives easier. Her father put it simply, since
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: she was very young, she was very kind, and she
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: cared what happened to the people around her. And she
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: was not only a scientist, she played guitar. In college,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: she was the lead singer of a band called Cute Horse.
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  Speaker 1: Her friends described her as serious-minded but fun, bright and studious, outgoing,
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: someone colleagues would remember for an infectious smile. She was
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: engaged to her boyfriend of eight years, Hu Shaolin, a
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: fellow scientist in a nearly identical field. The wedding was
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: set for October 2017. She kept diaries, and years later
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: a documentary about her would be built from those diaries
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: rather than from her killer, because the people who loved
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: her understood something the coverage often missed. She was the story.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: In April 2017, she arrived at the University of Illinois
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: at Urbana-Champaign, as a visiting scholar, researching photosynthesis and crop
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: productivity in the College of Agriculture. She had turned down
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  Speaker 1: other options because Illinois had a towering reputation in her field.
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  Speaker 1: She was thinking about staying for a doctorate. The dream,
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  Speaker 1: the one that organized everything else, was a professorship someday,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: and the ability to take care of her parents in Nanping.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: She had been on American soil for six weeks. Now,
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: the day. And notice how small every piece of it is,
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: because the smallness is the point. Friday, June 9, 2017,
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  Speaker 1: was an errand. Yingying had moved into a one-bedroom apartment
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: at the university's Orchard Downs complex, but it was more
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  Speaker 1: than she wanted to pay and lonelier than she wanted
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  Speaker 1: to live, so she found a cheaper place where she
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  Speaker 1: could share expenses with friends. That afternoon, she rode a
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  Speaker 1: Champaign-Urbana transit bus toward the leasing office to sign the
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  Speaker 1: new lease. She was running late. At 1.39 p.m., she
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  Speaker 1: texted the leasing agent to say she would arrive around 2.10.
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  Speaker 1: At 1.39 p.m., she texted the leasing agent to say
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  Speaker 1: she was standing on the wrong side of the street.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: She was standing on the wrong side of the street.
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  Speaker 1: She flagged the bus. It did not stop, and the
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  Speaker 1: transit authority would later explain that drivers are forbidden to
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  Speaker 1: stop for people on the wrong side because stopping teaches
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  Speaker 1: pedestrians to run into traffic, a defensible policy, a rational rule,
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  Speaker 1: and it left her stranded on a sunny June afternoon.
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  Speaker 1: So she walked a few blocks to another stop at
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  Speaker 1: the corner of North Goodwin Avenue and West Clark Street,
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  Speaker 1: in front of the university's public radio and television station.
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  Speaker 1: Think about how safe that corner is. A campus street.
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  Speaker 1: A public media building. Broad daylight on a Friday afternoon.
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  Speaker 1: If you have ever told someone you love to just
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  Speaker 1: be careful, this is the corner you imagine them being
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  Speaker 1: careful on. At 2 p.m., a camera recorded a black
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  Speaker 1: Saturn Astra passing her. It did not keep going. It
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  Speaker 1: circled the block. At 2.03, it stopped where she stood.
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  Speaker 1: She spoke with the driver through the window for about
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  Speaker 1: one minute. Then she got in. That is the last
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  Speaker 1: confirmed sighting of Yingying Zhang alive. At 2.38, the leasing
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: agent texted her and got no reply. By evening, her friends,
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  Speaker 1: who knew exactly where she was supposed to be and
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  Speaker 1: how unlike her it was to vanish, were frightened. At 9.24 p.m.,
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  Speaker 1: an associate professor called the police. What did investigators actually have?
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  Speaker 1: Grainy footage of a hatchback. No plate they could read.
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  Speaker 1: A missing woman with no enemies. No debts. No reason
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  Speaker 1: on earth to disappear herself two weeks after a happy
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  Speaker 1: phone call home. This is the before, and I want
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  Speaker 1: you to feel how thin it is. A car, a corner,
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  Speaker 1: a clock. And feel, too, the size of the alarm
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  Speaker 1: that thin file set off. This was not a local
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  Speaker 1: story for long. By 2017, some 329,000 Chinese students were
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: studying in the United States, a population that had more
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: than tripled in a decade, and every one of their
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  Speaker 1: families was suddenly watching Urbana-Illinois. The Chinese Students and Scholars
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  Speaker 1: Association organized a walk of concern. The reward for information
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  Speaker 1: started at $ 10, 000 on June 12, jumped to $ 40, 000 by
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  Speaker 1: June 19, and reached $ 50, 000 by mid-July, the largest in
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: the local Crimestoppers' 31-year history. Her father, her aunt, and
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  Speaker 1: her boyfriend flew in from China within days and stood
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: before American cameras with a translator, pleading with the public.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: An entire ecosystem of hope assembled itself around a three-minute
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: gap in the surveillance record. But the car turned out
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: to be enough. because the car was rare. Investigators established
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: that only 18 four-door Saturn Astras were registered in all
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: of Champaign County. 18. They worked the list, and one
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  Speaker 1: of them belonged to a 28-year-old former physics doctoral student
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  Speaker 1: named Brent Christensen. The footage showed a sunroof and a
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: cracked hubcap. His car had both. And when agents got
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: close to that car, they noticed something a jury would
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: later hear about. The front passenger door had been cleaned
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: far more diligently than the other three. Not the whole
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: car detailed. One door, scrubbed. Investigators read that the way
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: you are probably reading it right now. On June 16th,
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  Speaker 1: one week after the abduction, the FBI put Christensen under
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  Speaker 1: continuous surveillance. Then the interviews began, and he started doing
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  Speaker 1: the thing that undoes so many people in these cases.
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  Speaker 1: He talked. First he claimed he could not remember what
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  Speaker 1: he had done that afternoon. Then he revised. Yes, he
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: had given a ride to an Asian woman, but he
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: dropped her off a few blocks later. Those two statements
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  Speaker 1: would eventually become federal charges of their own because both
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: were lies, and the government could prove it. And the
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: deeper investigators dug, the darker the picture got. A forensic
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: examination of his phone showed that back in April, the
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: same month Yingying arrived in the country, he had been
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: reading a fetish website's forum called Abduction 101, including threads
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  Speaker 1: on planning a kidnapping. Not fantasy consumed idly, prosecutors would argue,
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  Speaker 1: but homework. and there was a witness who made the
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  Speaker 1: pattern undeniable. Earlier that same day, June 9, Christensen had
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  Speaker 1: approached another young woman on campus, a graduate student named
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  Speaker 1: Emily Hogan. He posed as an undercover police officer and
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: asked her to get into his car. She refused. She
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  Speaker 1: reported it. She warned others on social media. At trial,
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  Speaker 1: her testimony would establish something that changes how you have
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  Speaker 1: to see that bus stop. He was not passing by
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  Speaker 1: when he saw Yingying Zhang. He was hunting, and she
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  Speaker 1: was simply the person the day put in front of him.
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  Speaker 1: There is one more piece of the before, and it
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  Speaker 1: is the one that should haunt institutions. Months earlier, Christensen
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  Speaker 1: had walked into the University of Illinois Counseling Center and
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: told social workers he was having homicidal thoughts. He said
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  Speaker 1: it out loud, to professionals, inside the university where he
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  Speaker 1: would later kill. Yingying's family would eventually sue two of
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  Speaker 1: those social workers, accusing them of deliberate indifference to the
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  Speaker 1: warning signs. The lawsuits were dismissed, once in 2019 and
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  Speaker 1: again in 2020. The courts found no liability, but the
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  Speaker 1: question the lawsuits asked does not dismiss so easily. What
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  Speaker 1: does a university owe the people on its campus when
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  Speaker 1: a student says that sentence aloud? So by late June,
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  Speaker 1: the FBI had a rare car, a scrubbed door, a
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  Speaker 1: search history, a near-miss witness, and a suspect who had
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  Speaker 1: lied twice on the record. What they did not have
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  Speaker 1: was yinging, or any physical proof of what happened after 2.04 p.m.
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  Speaker 1: A defense lawyer can do a great deal with that gap.
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  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the microphone. and the moment this
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  Speaker 1: case splits in two. Christensen had a girlfriend. In those
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  Speaker 1: last days of June, she made a decision that I
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  Speaker 1: want you to sit with, because whatever else is true
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  Speaker 1: of this story, her choice is why it hasn't ending
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  Speaker 1: at all. She agreed to cooperate with the FBI, and
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  Speaker 1: she agreed to wear a concealed recording device around a
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  Speaker 1: man she now had reason to believe was a killer.
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  Speaker 1: Not once, in a controlled room with agents outside the door,
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  Speaker 1: but repeatedly, in his ordinary company, listening to him say
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  Speaker 1: things no person should ever have to hear from someone
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  Speaker 1: they know. On June 29, 20 days after the abduction,
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  Speaker 1: the campus community held a vigil and memorial walk for
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  Speaker 1: Yingying Zhang. Her friends were there. Members of the Chinese
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  Speaker 1: student community were there. Hundreds of people holding light against
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  Speaker 1: the dark for a woman most of them had never met.
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  Speaker 1: And Brent Christensen went too. He walked into a crowd
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  Speaker 1: assembled to grieve the woman he had taken, with his
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  Speaker 1: girlfriend beside him, and he treated it as a gallery.
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  Speaker 1: On the recording, he described his idea of an ideal victim.
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  Speaker 1: He pointed out women in the crowd as he said it.
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  Speaker 1: And he admitted in his own voice that he had
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  Speaker 1: brought Yingying Zhang to his apartment and held her there
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  Speaker 1: against her will. Stop and consider what that recording is.
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  Speaker 1: Investigators build cases out of inference. The clean door implies concealment.
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  Speaker 1: The forum implies planning. The lie implies guilt. Every one
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  Speaker 1: of those bricks can be argued with. A confession recorded
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  Speaker 1: live at the victim's own vigil while the confessor points
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  Speaker 1: at potential future victims cannot. The before was a case
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  Speaker 1: of circumstances. the after was a case with a narrator.
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  Speaker 1: I keep returning to the geometry of that night. Candles
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  Speaker 1: at the very corner where the astra circled. Friends singing
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  Speaker 1: for a woman they believed might still be found. And
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  Speaker 1: threaded through the crowd, a predator conducting a tour of
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  Speaker 1: his own appetite, unaware that the one person he trusted
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: was carrying his word straight to the government. If the
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  Speaker 1: vigil was the community's answer to the abduction, the wire
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  Speaker 1: was the investigation's answer to his arrogance. He believed he
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  Speaker 1: was invisible. He was, in that moment, the most closely
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  Speaker 1: listened to man in Illinois. The FBI arrested him the
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  Speaker 1: next day, June 30, 2017. 21 days from the corner
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  Speaker 1: of Goodwin and Clark to a federal kidnapping charge. And
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: the word federal matters more here than in almost any
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: case I can tell you about. Illinois had abolished the
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: death penalty. The state could never have put execution on
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  Speaker 1: the table. Federal prosecutors could. And that is precisely why
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: the case was charged under federal kidnapping law. to make
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: a capital case possible in a state that had chosen
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: not to have them. Whatever you think of that choice,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: and serious people criticized it as an end run around
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  Speaker 1: Illinois law, it set up the trial to come. On
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: the recordings, Christensen also made a claim you may have
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: seen repeated, and I need to handle it carefully, because
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: it is exactly the kind of detail that metastasizes online.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: He boasted that Yingying was his 13th victim, that he
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: aspired to be a serial killer, The FBI investigated and
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: found no evidence, none, of any other victim. Prosecutors treated
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: the claim as fantasy, the self-mythology of a man performing
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: menace for an audience of one. I am repeating it
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: only to tell you it has never been substantiated. There
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: is no known victim of Brent Christensen other than Yingying Zhang,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: and inflating him into something grander is a gift he
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: does not deserve. The trial opened in Peoria in June 2019,
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: two years after the abduction. and it began with a
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: move that tells you everything about the strength of the
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: government's evidence. In opening arguments, Christensen's own defense attorneys conceded
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: that he killed her. They were not contesting guilt. They
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: were playing for his life, trying to reach the penalty
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: phase with some shred of credibility intact. The prosecution played
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: the recordings anyway, into the silence of a federal courtroom
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: with her family present. According to the evidence presented at trial,
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: drawn from Christensen's own recorded statements, He drove Yingying to
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: his champagne apartment and held her there. And what he
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: described doing to her in that apartment, I will give
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: you only in its legal weight. The jury heard it,
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: and the jury needed less than two hours to convict
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: him of kidnapping resulting in death and of the two
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: counts of lying to the FBI. 90 minutes of deliberation
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: after two years of proceedings. Some verdicts are close calls.
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  Speaker 1: This was not. Then came the only genuinely uncertain question left.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Whether he would die for it. The same jury moved
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: into a separate penalty phase. life without parole against execution.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: The defense had planned a mental health case and then
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: abandoned it, unwilling to expose Christensen to examination by the
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: government's experts, so the court barred any argument that mental
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: illness drove the crime. Instead, his lawyers presented 49 mitigating factors.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: His mother's alcoholism and depression during his childhood, his own
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: psychiatric history, the fact that he had told counselors about
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: his homicidal thoughts before the murder, his parents pleading for
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: their son's life, The jurors deliberated across multiple days, and
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: they deadlocked. No unanimous vote for death. Under federal law,
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: that deadlock has one automatic consequence. And on July 18, 2019,
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: Judge James Shoddard imposed it. Life in prison without the
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: possibility of release. Christensen was sent to a high-security federal
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: penitentiary in Kentucky, where he remains. There is no parole
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: from a federal life sentence. There is no scheduled anything,
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: ever again. The family's attorney said they were devastated. and
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: you might assume that was about the jury sparing him.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: It was not, or not mostly. To understand their devastation,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: you need the part of this story that has no verdict,
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: and here I owe you maximum precision about what is known,
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: what is claimed, and who is doing the claiming. Yingjing
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Zhang's remains have never been found. What the world has
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: instead is an account, and the account comes from exactly
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: one source, Brent Christensen himself. In November 2018, before trial,
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: His attorneys relayed a narrative under a limited immunity agreement.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Information exchanged so it could not be used to expand
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: the case against him. In that account, he said that
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: the day after the murder he put her remains into
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: three garbage bags and left them in the dumpster at
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: his own apartment complex, then scattered her belongings across other
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: dumpsters around Champaign-Urbana over the following days. The trash was
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: collected and taken to a private landfill in Vermillion County,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: where by the time the account surfaced, The contents had
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: been compacted at least twice and lay buried beneath an
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: estimated 30 feet of garbage. The family was told that
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: recovery might be impossible. Despite extensive searching by the FBI
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: and police, and despite having his account in hand, no
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: trace of her was ever located. I need you to
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: hear the caveat as clearly as the claim. None of
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: this has ever been physically verified. It rests entirely on
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: the word of a man whose recorded hobby was deceiving
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: everyone around him. It may well be true, investigators found
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: it credible enough to relay to the family. But when
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: you see this case summarized as her remains are in
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: a landfill, understand that the sentence should really begin with
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: four other words, according to her killer. Her father had
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: flown across the world within days of her disappearance, and
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: he came with a vow that the whole community heard,
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: to bring Yingying home. In those first desperate weeks, he
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: had spoken directly to whoever had taken her. We will
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: forgive you, he said, but please, let Yingying go. Her
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: parents do not speak English. They had barely ever left Nanping.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: They sat through an American federal death penalty trial through interpreters,
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: listening to recordings of their daughter's killer, and at the
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: end of it, the one thing they came for was
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: the one thing no court could order into existence. After
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: the sentencing, her father thanked the jury, the investigators, the prosecutors,
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: the judge, and then the family flew home without her.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: What is left in Illinois is a garden. At the
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: corner of North Goodwin and West Clark, At the bus
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  Speaker 1: stop where the camera caught the astros circling, the university
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: dedicated a 600-square-foot memorial in October 2018. A winding path
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: of stones designed to fade as they approach a bench.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: A weeping cherry tree. A memorial stone. And buried in
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: that garden, because there were no remains to bury, is
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: a box containing Yin Ying's clothes. In the first days
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: after the arrest, before any of it was planned, people
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: had already begun tying flowers and photographs and a teddy
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: bear to a cypress tree near the stop. The formal
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: garden just made permanent what grief had improvised. And the
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: people who loved her built things too. The family seeded
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: a memorial fund at the university with $ 30, 000, joined by
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: more than 400 donors to help other international students caught
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: in crisis far from home. Her fiancé, Hu Shaolin, spent
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: two years teaching disadvantaged children in Guangdong province, taking up
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: a dream that had been hers, and he has sworn
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: to care for her parents as his own. to keep
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: them company in the place where their daughter grew up.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: He still remembers, he says, the days when they would
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: read together and talk endlessly. A documentary, Finding Ying Ying,
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: followed the family between Nanping and Illinois, and built its
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: portrait from her own diaries, her own handwriting, her own
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: voice on the page. That is the version of this
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: case worth carrying, not the man performing serial killer fantasies
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: into a hidden microphone, but the woman who sang in
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: a band called Cute Horse, sent money home, and got
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: on a bus to sign a lease. So where does
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: the recording leave us? It convicted him. It could not
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: find her. The girlfriend's wire closed the case and could
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: not close the wound, because a courtroom can establish what
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: happened and still be powerless over where. Her family's vow
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: stands unfulfilled not for lack of a verdict, but for
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: lack of a map that anyone but Christensen ever held.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: And the counseling center question, what an institution owes when
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: someone says the quiet thing out loud, was dismissed from
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: court without ever being answered anywhere else. 21 days of investigation,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: 90 minutes of deliberation, and a sentence that will not end,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: and a corner in Urbana where the stones in the
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: path are designed to disappear. Next time, a case that
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: inverts this one. No confession, no recording, no narrator at all,
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: just physical evidence sitting silent for decades, and the one
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: question it could not answer until a stranger's family tree did.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening.