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Chapter 1: What happened to the five women who went missing?
On a quiet Saturday morning, five women walked into a Lane Bryant store and never came home. The man responsible for their deaths was heard and even described by the lone survivor. But despite nearly being caught, he vanished into thin air. In the years since, new technology, new investigators, and new questions have changed what's possible. But the families are still waiting for answers.
The evidence is still there. And this case isn't cold. It's unfinished. Listen to CounterClock Season 8 wherever you get your podcasts.
Step into the 2020 True Crime Vault where you'll hear our most gripping stories.
We have this missing international student. How did this young visiting scholar just disappear? And all you could do is think, as a parent, my child is halfway around the world. Nobody knows where they are.
Chapter 2: How did technology change the investigation of Yingying Zhang's case?
We have about 2,000 cameras. And she got off the bus right here at this location, this spot right here.
It was a pretty eerie video to watch. As soon as the car drives up, basically, and stops right by Ying Ying, I'm just thinking, don't get in the car, don't get in the car.
OK, we're dealing with a kidnapping here.
That there was someone out there posing as an undercover cop trying to get people into vehicles.
Certainly didn't fit the profile of a kidnapper. Did you see this? Can you believe this? Look at who the kidnapper was. Oh, my god.
Look, you know that we didn't bring you all the way up here to talk about video games.
I needed to know where she was, like, now. And to find out, to trap him, they're having his girlfriend wear a wire, maybe even risking her life.
I'm turning this thing on. It's about 1240.
They want her to go undercover. The girlfriend is scared to death. I want to tell you. We see that he was on a group chat entitled Abduction 101. It was a fetish, a fantasy. It was clear this was something he wanted to do. She started really freaking out.
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Chapter 3: What led to the undercover operation involving the suspect's girlfriend?
We have had missing students in the past, but they're very rare that they're actually, that we don't find them immediately. And then some of her colleagues that are also grad students came in and would literally sit in our front office. Do you think they were just feeling you were not doing enough?
I think they were just so concerned for welfare and they had a sense of urgency about it that she needed help and that none of this made sense.
That night then we just stayed in front of the apartment building. We stayed maybe until midnight. Still we really didn't have any clue.
The News Gazette, this is Mary. The next day, Saturday, June the 10th, I was working here in the newsroom, and the phone rang, and it was a male friend of Ying Ying's. And he told me, we have this missing international student. And I have to admit, I kind of rolled my eyes. As a crime reporter, we get missing persons reports quite a bit.
There was something about the way these people were conveying, we think something's wrong, that made me say, okay, it won't hurt if we run a short story saying that the police are looking for her.
There was a determination to find her. There's that determination from campus and from law enforcement.
Our officers initially went there. Her apartment was in normal condition, so she didn't pack up her clothes, and she didn't have a car, so I assumed that she took a bus. So I basically checked with MTD buses in town here to see if she had got on a bus. That's when they started looking at the cameras, the buses, and to try to figure out her last movements.
about 2,000 cameras, so that changed everything. There's probably 10 cameras on this bus. One there, there, here. They're shooting every angle. Yeah. And then they discover that an exterior camera on the outside of the bus captures Yingying boarding a city bus at about 1.30 p.m. right in front of her apartment. Inside cameras show her walking toward the back, taking a seat.
So she was captured on video from the bus that dropped her off.
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Chapter 4: Who was Yingying Zhang and what was her background?
Because of the sunglasses, it would be tough.
Emily Hogan is so rattled that she posts about the encounter on Facebook. This is hours before Yingying's kidnapping. She warns people, don't get in a car, even if they say they are police or have a badge. If Yingying had just seen that post, perhaps she might never have gotten picked up.
It was just scary to know that somebody was out there just driving around wanting to pick up women.
Across the ocean in China, that video of Ying Ying getting into that black Saturn is seen on Chinese media.
One of the people watching that was someone very, very close to Ying Ying, her serious boyfriend, Xiaoding Hou. I saw the videos. I don't know what happened after she got into the car.
And I also have some bad feelings. What, days went by, nothing happened? Yeah, nothing happened. And we decided to go to the United States and to look for her by ourselves.
Yingying's boyfriend and her family wanted to do something that the FBI could not do, just find out for themselves exactly what happened to her.
They saw a girl in a small town. An Asian girl who just looked like Yingying. So you rushed right down? Oh, yeah. We went there. They said the girl was her. Some of them even said definitely it's her.
Let's continue to pay attention to Chinese scholar Zhang Yingying's kidnapping case in the United States.
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Chapter 5: What were the circumstances surrounding Yingying Zhang's disappearance?
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Campus police say surveillance video shows her entering a black Saturn Astra vehicle in Urbana that afternoon.
Yingying has been missing for days. The police and FBI agents are working 20-hour days because they know that they're up against the clock.
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Chapter 6: How did the investigation uncover the suspect Brent Christensen?
I mean, send your kid away to school, and then they never come back. Where'd you take her, Brent? We need to find Yang Yang. Tonight. Can you believe this?
Can you believe this? Like, that's Brent. That's our TA. I'm just absolutely blown away. They ask Christensen's girlfriend to wear a wire for them.
They want her to go undercover. That's fine. During the entire walk, Tara was recording everything that he was saying.
13. The best person I would consider on my level to actually do that. Good luck. The girlfriend is scared to death.
They want to find their daughter.
Please cut. She disappeared at the University of Illinois and still has not been found. No matter dead or alive, we just want to find her and bring her home.
Yingying Zheng was last seen on this campus video. Moving toward late June of 2017, this may have been the most frightening time for students, faculty, residents in Champaign-Urbana. You still had a missing young woman, and nobody knew who was behind this. There's this image of a black car that's been put out in the media.
People on campus are wondering, is there a kidnapper out there? Is he going to strike again? What the public doesn't know at this point is that authorities have tracked that vehicle to the owner, a U of I physics grad student named Brent Christensen. Initially, Christensen said he never left the apartment on June 9th, that he was sleeping and playing video games.
But in that interrogation, he admits that he picked someone up. And oh, by the way, that person he picked up
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Chapter 7: What evidence linked Brent Christensen to Yingying Zhang's case?
Like, just think about that. Just think. I want to tell you, I do want to.
In the middle of that visual is girlfriend with the FBI recording device. Suddenly, here's exactly what happened to Ying Ying Zhao.
She was valued. She worked.
She worked.
She paid. I remember Getting home that night, I couldn't sleep. Close to midnight, my phone rings, and it's my supervisor, and he goes, Tara's here. We're listening to the recording, and Christensen admits on the recording that he killed Ying Ying. Tara was... very upset when she was with us at our office. On the day of the memorial walk, she was very frightened many times.
She was very scared many times. Crying, just shaking. I mean, this really impacted her, the things that were said to her.
They will never find her. The family, you know, they're going to leave her behind because no one will ever know where she is.
With those admissions, we believe that we had enough evidence to now arrest him for kidnapping. We start tonight with breaking news. The FBI within the hour announcing charges against a man accused of kidnapping. News of the charges shocking to those who knew Christensen.
Finding out Brent Christensen was a student made the situation a little more scary. He was going to class here, he was going to work here.
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