with the help of Christensen’s former girlfriend, Terra Bullis, led to his arrest. In the recordings, Christensen described in detail how he killed Zhang and her “valiant” attempts to fight back, and claimed no one would ever be able to find her body. In her testimony, Bullis told the court Christensen confessed the murder to her when they attended a vigil for Zhang after she had been reported missing. He grabbed her phone and typed, “It was me,” and, “She is gone.
. Bullis agreed to help the FBI by wearing a wire and recording her conversations with the suspected murderer.Christensen’s defense attorneys attempted to delay the sentencing, arguing that prosecutors turned over too many victim impact statements at the last minute, and that translating the videos of interviews of Zhang's family from Chinese to English would take weeks. U.S.
“After Yingying Zhang went missing two years ago, many Chinese people were rattled,” BBC journalist Zhaoyin Feng . “This is not because Zhang was a well-known celebrity. She was quite the opposite: an average Chinese student in the U.S., who was new to this country and trusted a stranger.”, Zhang had only been in the U.S. for about a month before her disappearance. A native to China’s Fujian province, she was a visiting researcher with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s department of natural resources and environmental studies.