Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Yingying Zhang

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

When Chinese graduate student Yingying Zhang agreed to spend a year in America, she did so by looking forward to the opportunities it would present for her future. However, in June of 2017, 26-year-old Yingying would go missing while on her way to an appointment. Over the next several weeks, a dark saga would begin to play out as police began figuring out what had happened to her... For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit  https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-yingying-zhang/     

Hi crime junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And our crime junkie listeners will know that violent crime doesn't always make sense. I mean just last week we told you a story where one of the theories or possibilities of the case is that someone totally random could have committed the crime with almost no motive at all. So while some killers and other offenders can have motivations guiding their actions, we all know that others don't. These attackers often have no real motive, no incentive. They just do violent things because they want to. This can often lead to cases where the investigation struggles to find a suspect. And even when they do, answers can be hard to come by. And this is without a doubt the case

in Zhang Yingying's story which began unfolding in a popular college town back in 2017. It was Friday June 9th in 2017 when friends, acquaintances, and even professors of Yingying's began to notice her absence. She was normally a very punctual and reliable person who on this day seemed to have gone off the grid. No one could reach her by phone or by text. And her friends at the university knew that she was planning to meet with an apartment manager that afternoon to look at getting a new place. But that couldn't have taken all afternoon, like that should have been very short. She'd been gone several hours at this point which was a major cause for concern. Around 9 24 that night an associate professor who she was friends with reported her missing to

campus police. This led to an officer heading out to speak with Yingying's friends who all expressed worry for the missing woman. Now this officer was able to enter Yingying's apartment and quickly discovered that Yingying wasn't home. Surprisingly though most of her belongings were still there so it was unlikely that she'd left voluntarily. When the officer learns more about Yingying, he's told that she's a foreign exchange student originally from a small city in southeastern China and she was the oldest of two children and she earned good grades. She was always near the top of her class. She had hoped to become a professor when she was older. And you know when she was young she began to express herself musically as she became a teenager. She sang, she played the guitar

and according to this article in the Chicago Tribune she actually played in a band whose name can be translated as Cute Horse which is a great band name. I love it. Yeah so she was just like this all around like friendly fun expressive person. So following secondary school she attended both undergrad and graduate school in China and graduated in 2016. Now while she was in college she started dating somebody who she felt madly in love with and the two dated for years and eventually got engaged and planned to marry in the later half of 2017. However before they could marry Yingying decided to live abroad for a year so following her graduation in 2016 she decided to become a visiting scholar for the Chinese Academy of Sciences which is the largest research organization

in the world and there she wanted to focus on photosynthesis and crop productivity particularly in soybeans and corn and this focus actually led her to America for a year where she was going to do research at the University of Illinois at the Urbana-Champaign campus. Now I didn't study abroad ever but this has to be the most like life-altering flip your world upside down kind of experience. Yeah I'm sure I mean I haven't spent a lot of time abroad but I did spend a couple weeks in Malaysia and Singapore and that was a culture shock and for like a quarter of a year I spent in Miami that even turned my life upside down. Yeah you were in the same country so I can't imagine I mean she was away from everything she'd ever known away from her parents her brother her

friends her fiance and even China itself. However Yingying was excited for the trip and the opportunities that it presented for her future. When she first got to Illinois she began renting an apartment at the University of Illinois Orchard Downs complex which was roughly one mile south of campus and it was super affordable for her. However after a couple of months she began looking for something a little closer to her work center to make her commute a bit more manageable and this is exactly why she had taken that meeting on June 9th but knowing all of this about Yingying knowing that she didn't have a car knowing that she was here in the US without family her fiance and she only had a couple of friends who now couldn't get ahold of her the responding officer began to suspect

that foul play could have been involved in her absence and Yingying was officially named a missing person. The first thing police needed to do to track her down was to figure out her last movements according to her friends they knew that she'd left to go meet with the manager of the new apartment complex so they go talk to this manager and he says yeah we had a meeting scheduled for like two o'clock and at 1 39 I got some text from her saying basically she was going to be 10 minutes late and again she didn't have a car so in order for her to get to the apartment she was going to have to take two buses so it's about a 30 minute trip so he's expecting her to be 10 minutes late when she still hasn't shown up by 238 the manager texts her again saying you know are you still

planning on coming by but he never got any kind of response from her so what they piece together from this is that she likely had been hanging out in her apartment until about 1 39 whether she fell asleep or just lost track of time or whatever she realized she was going to be late for the meeting so shortly after texting the manager she would have left her house and maybe this was they think maybe around like 145 the rest of her movements they were able to track down using security footage they know she caught the teal line bus which took her from the orchard down apartment complex where she lived to the intersection of springfield and matthew street there she's picked up on camera now she hopped off the bus and she was hoping to catch the 22

limited this is the next bus that she was going to take to one north apartment where she was hoping to move into unfortunately it wasn't until she's already off the bus and waiting that she realized the connection she needed to get on that 22 limited picked up on the other side of the road so she could still see the bus as it's picking up and as it's starting to go off so she starts running down the road after the bus trying to catch it but that didn't stop the bus from accelerating down the road with her just falling behind about a block and a half that seems kind of rude like why wouldn't the bus driver just stop so i agree however i actually looked into this and believe it or not that is totally within company policy for most bus companies or public

transportation drivers are not supposed to stop for pedestrians on the wrong side of the road because doing so generally leads to people illegally crossing they can get hit by cars like it's it's like a liability thing yeah exactly so now that she's missed her connection yinging returned to the bus stop slightly defeated and she knew the next bus wasn't coming for several minutes and so she was undoubtedly going to be even more late for her appointment with the apartment manager and it was here at exactly this point when police are watching this video that they get their first clue as to what happened to yinging and dread sweeps over them when they realize what they're seeing yinging is standing there alone on the sidewalk and they see a black

car drive by then three minutes later the same black car drives by but this time it doesn't pass her the car stops next to the curb and the driver seems to have started chatting with yinging because on the video they can see her leaning into the passenger side window and the two the driver and yinging seem to be speaking to one another for about a minute whatever the driver said or however desperate yinging was to get to her meeting at the apartment she was convinced to get into the car with this person yinging shuts the passenger door the car accelerates forward out of frame and yinging would never be seen or heard from again while the video was helpful in determining you know when and where she disappeared from it only gave police one really tangible lead to follow

the car they could tell that it was a black car it was a four-door Saturn Astra but they couldn't get a plate number or really even a clear description of the driver other than he appeared to be a white male luckily though this particular Saturn was a pretty rare car which was only sold between the years of 2008 and 2009 and the fact that they could tell it was a four-door and out of two-door narrowed it down even more so they look into this car and thankfully there weren't many of these in the region in fact there were only 18 registered in Illinois Champaign County so this helped them create a list of people to speak to which would expedite the investigation significantly in those first couple of days while police are making their list of Saturn owners that they want to talk to

a few of ying's loved ones flew from China to Illinois this included her father and her fiance and later on her mother and brother would join them as well and they all wanted to pitch in on search efforts and help raise awareness for the case and they told the media the press anyone who had listened that we're not going to return to China until ying is found and it wasn't just the family and the police looking the disappearance of the 26 year old student had galvanized the large foreign student population who helped organize search efforts around campus they even began spreading into the neighboring towns and cities but unfortunately they were unable to pick up any trace of ying investigators and searchers were unable to uncover any clues pointing to her

whereabouts what about her cell phone were police able to track down that at all so they actually tried to they were able to see that ying had been texting the manager of the apartment complex just like he said but just minutes after she had gotten into that black Saturn her cell phone stopped peeing off of cell towers in the area so to police this indicated that it had either been turned off or it had been destroyed but they might not need her phone records to find their suspect because within two to three days police had met with or spoken to most of those Saturn owners in the area including a young college student from the area who quickly became one of their main suspects just a few days after ying's disappearance police went to the apartment of a

man named Brent Christiansen he lived in Champaign Illinois with his wife and as police approached the apartment do you want to know what they first noticed uh a black Astra of course it's the vehicle that led them there in the first place sitting right in the parking lot a 2008 black Saturn Astra which looked exactly like the car in the surveillance video so police walked up knocked on the apartment door and met Brent Christiansen for the first time this is just like you know their first meeting very general they ask him a few questions mostly about his whereabouts for the few days prior particularly between the hours of two o'clock and three o'clock on that Friday and he's basically like my I don't know I probably would have been sleeping maybe playing some video games all day long

but he makes it seem like his afternoon was a bit of a blur so in this chat Brent did verify that the black Saturn was his and he allowed police to search the vehicle but they weren't able to find anything of real value just by glancing around in it and after speaking to Brent for a bit they end up leaving empty handed and they continue down their list of possible suspects and continued looking for any vehicles that might match the description as these investigators continue to hit the pavement so to speak some other officers continued analyzing the surveillance footage and within another day or two they were able to learn more about that vehicle that she'd gotten into beyond it being you know just a four-door black Saturn Astra the vehicle they

also could tell you know again this footage is like super grainy it's not what you might be imagining but they're able to like clarify it a little bit analyze it they realize that it has a sunroof and after inspecting it even closer they find that the front passenger side hubcap of the vehicle was cracked and it was cracked in such a way that it would have a very unique look so officers decide to revisit all the Saturns that they previously looked at in effort to see which one really fit this description and after looking at all 18 vehicles again they discovered only one fit this criteria and it was Brent Christiansen Saturn which was black had four doors had the sunroof and had the exact same damage along the front hubcap and to the naked eye those vehicles were

virtually identical yeah so now we are at June 14th now this is the day that they identified Brent Christiansen's car as the vehicle that Yingying got into they obtained a search warrant to search the vehicle more extensively in particular they're looking for any evidence that Yingying had been inside the car maybe hair follicles DNA clothing fibers whatever if they could prove that she'd been in that car at all they could prove that Brent Christiansen had been the last person to have seen her and likely had lied to investigators about his whereabouts that day I mean which is a crime in and of itself right exactly this was a big deal and police treated it as such early the next morning we're now June 15th police executed the search warrant

on Brent Christiansen's vehicle and even asked if he would mind coming down to the near FBI field offices to conduct an interview so he accepts and within an hour was being grilled by federal investigators during this interview Brent went back on his original statement now he does remember what he was doing and he told police that he had actually been driving around the U of I campus that previous Friday again the same day that Yingying disappeared he made it seem like he just confused his days like oh I didn't lie to you before I was mistaking Thursday for Friday or something like that his story is totally changing oh totally and he even admitted to seeing a young Asian woman standing on the street corner near campus who he said looked distressed now he says

he never got this young woman's name so he wasn't sure if it was Yingying but he does now say that he stopped and offered this woman a ride which she accepted and he says that they drove off in a minute or two later the young woman became panicked he says so he pulls over to the side of the road lets her out in a residential neighborhood a few blocks away and that's it he drives away that seems like the most ludicrous story I've ever heard like going from not even leaving the house that day to being on the campus seeing her talking to her and then oh yes actually I did pick her up oh but I dropped her off yeah even even if you confuse the days like if police are coming asking you about you know a woman who's like gone missing you what you thought it was Thursday not

fried you know I mean like it's not adding up clearly his story is changing and police didn't really seem to buy this story either at least not the particular series of events and they didn't think that Brent Christiansen had just like so happened to pick up a woman minutes before she disappeared forever so as they spoke to Brent the police officers back at his apartment start talking to his wife who he had been at home with that morning that they came by so she says that she'd actually been out of state the weekend that yin yin had gone missing so there wasn't much information that she could offer but she did allow police to search their apartment and she gave them consent to take away multiple pieces of potential evidence and this was like their computer cell phones like

anything like that that they could potentially get something off of these collected items would eventually prove to be the building blocks for their entire case but before we get into that we have to step back just a little bit and explain who Brent Christiansen really was so he was actually a graduate student at the University of Illinois and he lived in the city of Champaign Illinois with his wife the two had met while attending the University of Wisconsin and had and they had married back in 2013 and they were at the time in 2013 and like their early 20s so for a while their marriage was stable things seemed to be fine but in the winter of 2016 things began to take a turn for the worse Brent started ignoring his classes his grades began to suffer and eventually

he had to fully drop out of his doctorate program in physics and instead he set his sights on obtaining a master's degree which for him seemed like a derail of all of his life's ambitions now in this time period his relationship with his wife had begun to fall apart he began turning to drugs and alcohol which only made things worse and he began to develop a dependency on alcohol in particular that really drove a wedge between him and his wife now eventually they reached a point of no return and in an effort to keep their marriage intact they decided what they needed was an open relationship so Brent's wife quickly got a boyfriend and Brent himself joined several dating websites and apps where he described himself as being in an open relationship he was like very honest about it

and he got a girlfriend of his own the following month and she began to introduce him to the world of BDSM which normally like wouldn't be an issue right like it's too consenting adults like everyone has their thing sure however his introduction to this BDSM world through his girlfriend only seemed to exacerbate Brent's existing issues which had apparently been festering for months at this point you see he started falling into a spiral of repeated dark thoughts which were only made worse by his substance abuse so in March of 2017 this is again roughly a couple of months before yin's disappearance Brent met with a counselor at the University of Illinois and he admitted that his marriage was on the rocks and contributed a part of that to his own shortcomings

in particular his alcoholism however in this conversation he also admitted that he'd recently been drawn to certain very specific negative thoughts not only causing harm to himself but thoughts about harming other people and he even claimed to have been drawn to certain idols like horrible people like Ted Bundy who he seemed to admire for their ability to kill without being caught yeah that's a pretty big red flag yeah and I think that's putting it mildly so during this conversation with the counselor Brent said that these issues you know they're all in the past I have no desire to act out on these dark thoughts however months later these statements would become incredibly incriminating so if we fast forward now police have Brent in custody and during his

interview he made himself out to be a pretty normal guy so he denies any wrongdoing he said you know the only thing I admit to which he obviously knows is the only thing they could prove is that yin yin had gotten into his car but he said that's it he sticks to his story that he lets her out just down the block he refuses to budge and is like listen she got in I didn't even know her name I had nothing to do with what happened to her however while he's speaking to the police and holding firm on this they get their extensive search warrant for his car and all of those electronics that they pulled from his house and so while they're searching what they find in the vehicle is that his vehicle had been extensively cleaned recently and what was strange was that

while the entire car had been cleaned in particular the area around the front passenger seat had been cleaned like way more diligently than anywhere else and consumed like the majority of the work there was a real focus on the passenger side where yin yin would have gotten in but what they find on his phone and internet history are even more incriminating evidence there they discovered that he'd become enamored with abductions and in fact his exposure to the bdsm community had exposed him to some extreme fetishes which included forced abductions like he was looking up stuff about abducting women like how to fantasy videos stuff like that and investigators would quickly learn about brent's long-term interest in these violent abductions as well as his idolization of

serial killers but even though he seemed like their guy none of this was getting them any closer to finding out what happened to yin yin or where she was right now so proving that he did something to her just on him being a creepy guy wasn't going to be enough police decided they couldn't arrest brent but they could put him under a microscope so they let him go but they start to surveil him and their hope was that he would lead them back to yin yin somehow whether she was alive whether she was dead like maybe he would panic and try and cover up the crime or go revisit somewhere something like that right but in their surveillance police had someone on their team who brent never expected police were able to get brent's new girlfriend to wear a wire now brent spent a lot

of time with his girlfriend who he'd been seeing for a couple months at this point and they had become incredibly close she seemed to spend more time with brent than his own wife did so she was probably the closest person to him during this time spam now she literally recorded the conversations with brent for the better part of two weeks and i think deep down she did this and she even kind of alluded to this that she was hoping to clear him of suspicion because for almost two weeks she felt like she was proving her own case see like he couldn't have done anything he hasn't said anything to me not even like insinuated right but after two weeks of him not saying a single incriminating thing the floodgates opened in the most unlikely of places

on thursday june 29th this is 20 days after yin yin's disappearance her family members and her fiance organized a memorial walk on campus which they hoped would raise awareness for her still unsolved case this memorial walk was attended by hundreds of students who came out to show support for yin yin's loved ones and among them was none other than brent christensen who attended the event with his girlfriend now brent again at this point is totally unaware that his girlfriend was quite literally wearing a wire and he made several alarming comments during this event saying that he only came out because he wanted to see how many people attended then he said that everyone was there for him as if he was the star of the show and i don't know what his girlfriend had to have

been thinking when all this was coming out if she thought he was lying or if she finally saw what police had been seeing in him but she didn't drop it that evening over drinks brent would end up detailing to her exactly what happened to yin yin oh my god he confessed to abducting beating raping and torturing her in his apartment and eventually hitting her in the head with a baseball bat a baseball bat that he had lamented was now in police custody he then claimed to have dragged yin yin's body to his bathtub and then stabbing her in the neck before decapitating her oh my god during this confession which took place over several hours brent proceeded to get increasingly intoxicated and he would even brag about being an amazing killer who had killed multiple women

over several years and by his count he said he had murdered about 13 women over roughly a decade long period dating back to when he was just 19 years old however in his words yin yin was the only victim whose disappearance had led back to him the rest he said were women whose names he didn't even know and he tried to brag to his girlfriend and say that he was just like ted bundy i found something particularly chilling within the trial transcripts when brent is talking to his girlfriend about yin yin he said quote yin yin is gone she is never going to be found the fbi has looked for her the police and the fbi don't know where she is i'm apparently very good at this the family won't leave until she's found and they are going to leave empty

handed because they will never find her she is gone forever end quote the fbi you know after hearing all of this now had confirmation from brent himself that he'd been involved in the disappearance and death of yin yin and so that following day june 30th 2017 which also happened to be brent's 28th birthday he was arrested so after his arrest police began conducting a more thorough search of his apartment and eventually found evidence that seemed to validate what brent had confessed to the prior day what do you mean by like more thorough i thought they had already searched it honestly i have no clue like i would have hoped that the first time they went through his place would have been like with a fine tooth comb i don't know like the extent of their search

warrant i don't know if they were just looking for items that first time and when they came back they're looking for blood i honestly have no idea but i i think based on his story what i imagine is maybe they had come back and spent like extra time and given particular interest to maybe that bathroom if he took her in there and that's where he stabbed her and decapitated her okay perhaps they were focused on that following his arrest brent was charged with federal kidnapping which if it had led to the death of someone could result in either life imprisonment or the death penalty on july 12th he was officially indicted by a grand jury and on july 20th he would plead not guilty to the crimes he'd been charged with now the next two years would pass with the state

and defense preparing their cases i mean this was a massive case and all the while brent refused to cooperate with investigators refusing to give up the location of yin yin's remains at least that's what the public would be told at the time his actual trial didn't start until this past summer june of 2019 and this is when the public learned a whole lot more the prosecution argued that brent christensen had become enamored with dark violent fetishes in particular those abduction fetishes in which he would abduct someone a particularly young woman and force her to do sexual acts out of her control he would abduct this woman and force her into a large duffel bag in in his fantasy which just so happened to match one that he had purchased online just days before

yin yin's disappearance and all of this seemed to fit with the official narrative that prosecutors were working to establish their narrative was that brent christensen had premeditated every facet of this crime down to the victim profile he was going after a young woman of small stature that he could easily overpower and force into his duffel bag and who had no official link back to him and that's what led him to prowling the university of illinois campus on that day the ninth so from what i can tell from this case and from everything the prosecution is saying it's not like he drove by and it was like a crime of opportunity he had been driving around the entire day prowling looking for the perfect victim and it eventually led him to yin yin who accepted a ride

out of necessity or some other reason and made her the perfect victim so along the lines of this premeditation what they brought up in trial is they specifically read a text that i think is pretty ominous that he had sent his girlfriend and here's a direct quote from the trial transcript quote fading into nothingness is the default for most people you want to know what terrifies me it's that i will not fade away i refuse i don't care how i will be remembered just that i am good bad revered infamous i don't care think back over the past 2000 years who do you know the people who pushed the limits and those who supported them fading into nothingness is not an option i would rather destroy humanity than let that happen i know most would disagree end quote wow that is

some really dark stuff it really is i mean it shows you where his mindset was i mean again he's he is plotting and planning something so that he can become infamous and hopefully be remembered now another thing we learned after that trial started was that yin yin might not have been his first attempt at abduction that day there was a woman walking on the u of i campus who had reported to police that a young man pulled her over along the side of the road and he pretended to be an undercover officer he had intended to lure the woman inside his vehicle but she refused and eventually informed the police about this man like basically attempting to abduct her okay so maybe yin yin didn't just go with him because she needed the ride she could have fallen for this

undercover bit right yeah so according to cbs chicago that's what they're saying federal prosecutors are alleging that this was his ruse and she had fallen for it whether it was because she was trusting whether she actually needed the ride and thought maybe a police officer was giving it to her maybe because she was from another country and not used to you know what you need to be asking of an undercover officer so it very well could be now based on the evidence that police gathered it's believed that brent had incapacitated yin yin inside his vehicle forced her into that large duffel bag that he purchased a week prior and then he was able to sneak her into his apartment where he raped and murdered her over a span of several hours eventually he would murder her

inside his bathroom by hitting her in the head with the baseball bat cutting her throat with a knife and ultimately decapitating her in his bathtub following this the prosecution alleged that he disposed of her remains and then disposed of her personal items in numerous garbage cans throughout campus trying to separate them so none of them could be traced back to her after this he began an exhaustive cleanup effort which lasted through most of the weekend and again remember his wife's gone all weekend so he had the place to himself right he made numerous trips to local stores where he was buying several cleaning items like roughly half a dozen bottles of drano which he used to erase all trace of yin yin from his bathroom drain yet despite his exhaustive cleanup efforts

which focused again primarily on his bathroom and his vehicle brent missed numerous spots he cleaned his carpets but missed the flooring underneath the carpets there and along his mattress police were able to find numerous red spots which were later determined to be blood that positively matched with yin yin okay so how did brent's defense even try to argue against that i mean i feel like it's a pretty clear cut case of murder right yeah so here's the thing is they didn't try to argue against the fact that he did it um in their opening statement brent's attorneys argue that he indeed killed yin yin verifying that much of what the state alleged was in fact true however what they pushed back against were like some of the minor discrepancies in the case in

particular the confession that he made to his girlfriend which is what informed much of the follow-up investigation so brent's attorneys argued that he was incredibly drunk at the time so like fruit of the forbidden tree i don't know i mean basically they're saying like he was super drunk so you wouldn't have had that if he wasn't super drunk and then you wouldn't have got the rest of the stuff so the rest of the stuff doesn't i don't know to me like to me it seems crazy and luckily i'm not the only one who thinks that because it was surprisingly not very effective brent's attorneys seemed to place the blame for his crimes on his substance abuse but they also debated the merits of their own client's authenticity they contested that the fbi had found no evidence

of brent being a serial killer or really committing any other crimes throughout his life so much of what he said in that original confession could be chalked to bs so i don't know if they're saying like you know that's bs this other stuff could be their defense is just to me very muddy and i i didn't really understand the point of it it's almost them just continuing saying like but maybe not yeah i think the logic was to try to like pivot certain arguments in favor of the defense but it didn't work the jury would deliberate for less than two hours before returning their verdict and on june 24th 2019 brent christiansen was found guilty of kidnapping resulting in death and two charges of making false statements to the fbi agents he would have to wait a few weeks for

his sentence but he received good news when he learned that he would not be facing the death penalty rather he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole i mean i mean it still doesn't seem like enough you know like this this case is just so heartbreaking and tragic and and like you said at the beginning of the episode really truly senseless yeah but wait till you hear this part so following his sentence saying it was announced that in november of 2018 this is months before the trial even started brent had actually disclosed the location of yingyi's remains however he'd done so as part of an immunity deal meaning that the information couldn't be used against him in trial so they had even more

information that they possibly could have used to secure a harsher sentence but they didn't because of this deal so following the resolution of the trial that's when this information can come out and prosecutors were able to meet with yingyi's family and her fiance and they told them about the information that they gathered which they had unfortunately been sitting on for the better part of a year so yingyi's family is actually the ones who released a statement and in their statement they alleged that brent christensen had disposed of yingyi's remains in three garbage bags which were placed in dumpsters at his apartment complex and picked up by the waste disposal company on june 12 this is just three days after her disappearance from there they were taken to a nearby landfill

in danville illinois where they were buried and compacted multiple times making it nearly impossible for officials then or now to find her remains yeah i i can imagine that would be an incredibly lengthy and expensive process and you'd have to get like some sort of green light from the government right oh yeah and i mean unfortunately as far as i know that process hasn't even started yet and i'm not sure if it ever will so it remains unknown if yingyi's family will be able to make good on their word of not returning to china without her but only time will tell despite making himself out to be a methodical serial killer the likes of which hadn't been seen since ted bundy brent christensen was nothing more than an opportunistic coward who took advantage of a woman

less than half his size police would even reveal that in the months after his arrest brent had agreed to give up all the information about the case in exchange for a life sentence because he was so afraid to lose his own life at the time prosecutors had rejected the deal hoping to pursue the death penalty through the trial process unfortunately that subjected yingyi's family to a really lengthy trial in which horrific details of her death were aired in a public forum making it so that her family was basically victimized again and again and as they had to learn about what happened to their poor 26-year-old daughter day after day i just can't imagine being put through that to date yang yingyi's remains have not been found and despite brent receiving a life sentence for

kidnapping her and her murder she very much remains a missing person i only hope for her family's sake that her remains can be found and returned to her home country where she can finally be laid to rest if you'd like to see pictures from this case or check out our sources read all the trial transcripts you can find those on our website crimejunkiepodcast.com and be sure to follow us on instagram at crimejunkiepodcast we will be back next week with a brand new episode crime junkie is an audio chuck production so what do you think chuck do you approve