W***n
发帖数: 11530 | 1 Killer of Illinois Scholar Shares Disturbing New Details About How He
Disposed of Her Body
People Jeff Truesdell,People 2 hours 6 minutes ago
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The killer kidnapped his victim, then raped, choked, stabbed, beat her with
a baseball bat and decapitated her.
Afterward, according to information shared with his attorneys and relayed to
the victim’s family after his conviction and sentencing for the 2017
murder, Brendt Christensen placed cut-up pieces of 26-year-old Chinese
scholar Yingying Zhang‘s body into three trash bags, which he tossed into a
dumpster behind his apartment in Champaign, Illinois.
From there, the dumpster’s contents were collected and compacted before
winding up in a landfill under additional layers of trash
Desperate to retrieve Zhang’s remains for proper burial even as Christensen
, 30, kept mum throughout his trial last month about what he did with her
body, the victim’s family now knows those remains “could be smaller than a
cellphone,” Zhang family attorney Steve Beckett said at a news conference
Wednesday, reports WTTW.
“It is evident that any attempt to recover Yingying’s remains would be
complicated and expensive, would require government oversight and the
cooperation of the landfill owners, and would have no certainty of success,
” said Beckett.
The family only learned details about the remains on July 25, after
Christensen’s trial ended and prosecutors shared information gleaned from
Christensen’s defense attorneys that previously had been kept secret under
a prosecution immunity agreement, said Becklett, reports The News-Gazette.
“This information came from the defense lawyers, and that information
indicated that the remains, as it traced down, could be found in a landfill
in Vermilion County,” Beckett said last week, according to the newspaper.
Brendt Christensen | Macon County Sheriff's Department
Responding to Christensen’s claims, Zhang’s father, Ronggao Zhang, said at
the Wednesday news conference through a translator, “If what that man said
is true, it further confirms that he is a heartless and evil person,”
according to the outlet.
“We condemn his brutal and malicious actions and we hope that he suffers
the rest of his life as he made Yingying suffer in the final moments of her
life,” he said.
“We now understand that finding (Yingying) may be impossible,” he said.
RELATED: Man Arrested and Charged With Kidnapping of Chinese Student, Who is
Now Presumed Dead by Authorities
Christensen was sentenced July 18 to life in prison without the possibility
of parole for Zhang’s 2017 kidnapping and murder by federal Judge James
Shadid, who termed the crimes an “inexplicable act of violence,” reports
the Chicago Tribune.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Zhang arrived in the U.S. from
China as a visiting scholar in April 2017 to do post-graduate research at
the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana campus. She had texted to say
she was running late but on her way to an appointment to sign an apartment
lease when she vanished on June 9, 2017.
Colleagues who could not reach her reported Zhang missing that same day.
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Security camera video later showed Zhang accepting a ride from a black
Saturn Astra traced to Christensen, a former physics Ph.D. candidate. A
female witness who subsequently identified Christensen said that earlier in
the day, he’d posed as a police officer and asked her to get into his car
to answer questions. That woman had refused and alerted police.
It later was alleged that Christensen had conducted searches about abduction
fantasies on a fetish website, according to a criminal complaint obtained
by PEOPLE.
Police questioned Christensen and placed him under surveillance. His arrest
on June 30 came one day after he attended a walk to raise awareness about
the search for Zhang — and confessed in a recording made by his then-
girlfriend that he had killed her, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Christensen told his own attorneys that on June 10, the day after he
kidnapped and murdered Zhang, he placed her dismembered remains in the trash
outside his apartment to be hauled off during regular trash collection
three days later.
RELATED: Suspect in U. of Illinois Scholar Kidnapping Allegedly Searched
Fetish Website for Abduction Fantasies
Beckett and another Zhang family attorney, Zhidong Wang, said at the news
conference that they learned those dumpster contents were hauled to a
private landfill in Danville and compacted at least twice. They said the
likely dumping area is about 50 yards wide and topped with at least 30 feet
of garbage.
Despite such challenges, federal investigators have not given up the idea of
searching for the remains, even though investigators “described for us
that at this stage, with decomposition and then compaction, the size of the
remains could be smaller than a cellphone,” said Beckett, reports WTTW.
Christensen, who faced the death penalty, had offered to say what he’d done
with the body in exchange for a plea deal to save his life, according to
WTTW.
But prosecutors said no. His attorneys again offered up the information, but
on the condition that prosecutors wouldn’t use it against Christensen at
his trial, resulting in the immunity agreement that kept Zhang’s family in
the dark until recently.
‘Christensen lied so many times,’ said Wang, the Zhang family attorney,
reports WTTW. “We do not believe his attorneys had any reason to lie to the
prosecution’s team. But at the same time, no one can say for sure
Christensen told his attorneys the truth.’
This week the university announced the creation of an endowment fund in
Zhang’s name, Yingying’s Fund, to “support international students in
moments of crisis.”
“She planned to study at the University of Illinois and pursue her dream of
becoming a professor in China,” according to the announcement, which said
Zhang was conducting her research in the Department of Natural Resources and
Environmental Sciences. “Yingying loved her family and her fiancée
Xiaolin Hou. Her family wanted to create a fund to help international
students in emergencies and times of great struggles.”
“The Zhangs, cherished members of our own Illinois family, are going
through one of the most challenging points in their lives, and yet they are
still thinking of others,” university Chancellor Robert Jones said in a
statement. “Their gift will make an enormous impact when these students and
their families need it most.” | W***n
发帖数: 11530 | 2 Wish the soul of this killer MONSTER will live in HELL perpetually | M****H
发帖数: 1057 | 3 那个垃圾填埋场有多大多深啊？到底需要多少钱来挖开找？这个众筹的话我肯定捐钱，
太惨了 |
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