Hand in hand, Brendt Christensen and his girlfriend faded seamlessly into the crowd at a 2017 vigil for missing Chinese scholar Yingying Zhang.
As their oblivious fellow marchers walked around the University of Illinois campus, Christensen began to mutter about the kind of person who makes an ideal victim, federal prosecutors allege. He pointed out to his girlfriend which people nearby might make easy prey.
For days beforehand, he had talked about how he held Zhang against her will and how she tried to fight back, prosecutors say.
What Christensen — then married to another woman — didn’t realize was that his girlfriend was recording every word for the FBI.
Those chilling recordings are at the center of a sensational trial set to kick off in earnest this week with opening statements at the federal courthouse in downstate Peoria. Christensen, a once-promising graduate student at the Urbana-Champaign campus, is charged with the kidnapping, torture and murder of the 26-year-old Zhang.
If the jury convicts Christensen of the charge of kidnapping resulting in death, the same 12 women and men would then determine whether to sentence him to death. If that happens, he would be the first to be given capital punishment in any federal court in Illinois in nearly 15 years.
The visiting scholar’s disappearance in June 2017 stunned the University of Illinois community and sent shock waves through China, where the case underscored a growing concern about the safety of Asian students on U.S. campuses. Some 5,600 Chinese students are enrolled at U. of I., more than at any other U.S. college, according to recent government data.
After the case was reassigned to a federal judge in Peoria, he moved the proceedings there from Urbana last December. With interest in the case still high, a throng of reporters and spectators is expected to descend on the small courthouse with opening statements expected to take place Wednesday. Jury selection, underway since June 3, is scheduled to wrap up Tuesday.
Zhang’s body has never been found, but authorities charged Christensen with killing her “in an especially heinous, cruel or depraved manner” involving torture or serious physical abuse, though no official cause of death has been determined without a body.
Authorities have said Christensen viewed threads on a sexual fetish website that discussed planning a kidnapping and detailed abduction fantasies. Bloody handprints were found in Christensen’s apartment, and a cadaver-sniffing dog at his home alerted to the presence of a dead body, according to prosecutors.
Also included in a list of trial exhibits is a baseball bat recovered in Christensen’s home with trace amounts of blood. Investigators also say Christensen gave his girlfriend a copy of “American Psycho,” a book about a seemingly normal professional man who devolves into a deranged serial killer. The two had met in an online chat room for fetishists, authorities have said.
Meanwhile, Zhang’s parents, who hadn’t been back to the U.S. since 2017, arrived in Illinois from China last month to attend the trial. J. Steven Beckett, a lawyer working with the family, said the family hopes the proceedings provide some closure.
“One of the things they say is, ‘We miss our daughter every day,'” Beckett told the Chicago Tribune in a recent interview. “Can you imagine? A family’s worst nightmare, to have daily contact with your daughter … and all of a sudden she’s gone.”
Visits to ‘Abduction 101’
Christensen, who turns 30 later this month, grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Stevens Point, Wis., a two-hour drive north of Madison. A former Ph.D. candidate in physics at the University of Illinois, Christensen was an instructor at the university at one point who was so well-liked that his students rated him “outstanding.”
But prosecutors allege Christensen’s clean criminal record and respectable background belied a dark secret, one that surfaced on the afternoon of June 9, 2017, when Zhang was on her way to sign a lease at an Urbana apartment building two months after beginning her research appointment.
Zhang unsuccessfully tried to flag down a bus before walking to another stop. Shortly after, federal authorities allege, Christensen lured Zhang inside his car. Surveillance video from a nearby parking garage captured Zhang speaking to the driver of a black Saturn Astra for several moments before getting into the front passenger seat.
One of Zhang’s professors reported her missing by that evening after several calls and texts went unanswered.
After determining from public records that only 18 such Saturn Astras were registered in Champaign County, the FBI questioned the owners. Three days after Zhang’s disappearance, Christensen told the FBI he had been home all day playing video games.
The investigation quickly homed in on him, however. A closer look at the surveillance footage showed the Saturn Astra had a cracked hubcap on its front passenger side. Two days after interviewing Christensen, investigators returned to his home and discovered his car had the same “unique hubcap deformity,” prosecutors said.
That night, FBI agents again questioned Christensen, who changed his story, telling agents he got the date mixed up, according to court records. He said he was driving on campus, happened on an Asian woman looking distressed and offered her a ride because she said she was late to an appointment, authorities said.
The woman panicked after he made a wrong turn, Christensen told police, and he let her out of his car a few blocks from where they met.
At that point, law enforcement began round-the-clock surveillance of Christensen.
A search of his car determined that the front passenger seat had been cleaned in a way to conceal evidence, FBI agents alleged in court documents.
Police also searched his phone and found visits to a sadomasochism fetish website with discussion threads on kidnapping fantasies, prosecutors have alleged. According to a criminal complaint, his visits to the “Abduction 101” forum on fetlife.com in April 2017 included views of threads called “Perfect abduction fantasy” and “planning a kidnapping.”
But of all the evidence expected to be presented at trial, perhaps none is so chilling — or critical — as what Christensen allegedly told his girlfriend in the recordings she made for the FBI. In all, she recorded at least nine conversations with him, either in person or on the phone.
Prosecutors have said Christensen described in a recording how Zhang fought and resisted him while he held her against her will. He also allegedly threatened someone close to the case.
On June 29, 2017, a day before Christensen’s arrest, the woman was wearing a wire as the two attended a walk and concert for Zhang at the Urbana-Champaign campus. News footage of the vigil briefly captured Christensen and the woman from behind as they walked hand-in-hand.
According to prosecutors, Christensen was captured on the recording describing his “ideal victim” as he pointed out people in the crowd.
The girlfriend, an environmental studies major who was conducting research in the Urbana area, has been identified by prosecutors in court filings only by her initials, T.B. The Tribune attempted to reach her last year at her family home in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, but her mother said that her daughter was terrified and did not want to talk.
T.B. is expected to be a crucial witness at trial.
Court filings by Christensen’s attorneys seemed to reinforce that the woman was traumatized by her cooperation. In a failed attempt to have the recordings suppressed last year, the defense revealed that text messages she sent from her phone on the day she agreed to wear the wire showed that she was distraught, including one message in which she said she “went into shock” while talking to Christensen.
“I’m just upset,” the woman wrote in one message, according to the defense filing. “The FBI is going to take me in again soon … for more questioning.”
In a filing over the weekend, Christensen’s attorneys sought records on T.B.’s alleged recent mental health treatment, saying the prosecution had refused to turn over documents that were relevant to her credibility as a witness.
“There are strong indications that T.B. is an extremely damaged and unstable individual who has required mental health treatment at numerous times in her life,” the defense filing said.
Homicidal and suicidal thoughts
While the death penalty remains a tool for federal prosecutors, the decision to go that route is rarely taken in federal court and requires the personal approval of the U.S. attorney general.
Dr. Ronald Mikos, the last person to be sentenced to death in a federal courtroom in Illinois, was convicted in 2005 in Chicago of murdering a former patient to keep her from testifying against him in a Medicare fraud trial. Mikos, 70, who lost his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court nearly a decade ago, is still on death row in the maximum-security prison in Terre Haute, Ind., while fighting a legal battle for a new trial on other grounds, court records show.
The fact that Christensen’s trial is unfolding in a state that has its own tortured history with the death penalty has added to the intrigue. In 2003, after years of allegations of deep flaws in the state’s justice system, then-Gov. George Ryan cleared the state’s death row by commuting the sentences of inmates condemned to die to life in prison. The death penalty was officially abolished in Illinois state courts in 2011.
If the jury convicts Christensen of kidnapping resulting in death, proceedings would then move to a sentencing phase, at which the defense could present evidence of Christensen’s apparently troubled mental health history. Just a few months before Zhang’s disappearance, Christensen visited a campus counseling center seeking help for homicidal and suicidal thoughts, his attorneys revealed in a court filing earlier this year.
His lawyers want jurors to hear that Christensen did not receive the help he needed. In addition to other shortcomings, staffers at the U. of I. facility did not “develop an adequate treatment and safety plan,” according to one defense expert who might testify during sentencing.
Similar to their decision on Christensen’s guilt, jurors must be unanimous in their decision for the death penalty to be imposed.
Meanwhile, Beckett, the lawyer for Zhang’s family, said the relatives have tried to remain patient despite significant delays in the start of the trial and cultural hurdles in their understanding of U.S. court procedures.
“I think they’re having a very difficult time,” Beckett said. “I think ultimately you put some measure of trust in the American justice system.”
Even with everything prosecutors have alleged, Zhang’s family still holds on to a sliver of hope — however remote — that she remains alive and one day will be found.
“If law enforcement tells us that she’s not alive, you have to place weight on that,” Beckett said. “The family doesn’t want to give up hope. Since we haven’t seen that she’s not alive, they hope she’s still alive.”
mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @crepeau
Twitter @jmetr22b
