On June 9, 2017, 26-year-old visiting scholar Ying Ying Zhang was standing at a campus bus stop at University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign when her ride home never came. Behind her, a man in what appeared to be a police uniform offered a lift. In seconds she was inside his car, disappearing from the busy street and into a nightmare. Surveillance later captured her getting into a black Saturn Astra with Brendt Christensen behind the wheel — the last known trace of the bright scholar whose body wo