Kidnap-murder or a ‘gone girl’ case? Chinese pair’s disappearance in California remains unsolved after 20 months
- When Cheng Zhang, an Uber driver in California, waited a week before reporting his wife and stepdaughter missing from the familly home, suspicion fell on him
- But police can’t disprove his story about being knocked out by a spray and waking up to a kidnapper’s note and, 20 months on, are seeking new leads
Cheng Zhang’s story initially strained the belief of detectives in Irvine in the US state of California. His wife and 12-year-old stepdaughter were missing – kidnapped from their flat, he claimed – and he had waited more than a week to report it.
Zhang, a 42-year-old Uber driver, said he had been knocked out by a stranger at his door who used an unidentifiable spray. He then followed kidnappers’ instructions to behave as usual, cleaning the blood from the house and posing as his missing wife on WeChat. He told his stepdaughter’s school that the missing seventh grader was sick at home.
All of this helped to establish Zhang as the top suspect when he finally approached police on December 2, 2019. Experience told detectives that a husband who killed his wife and stepdaughter was a far simpler and more believable scenario than a mystery kidnapping.
Irvine advertises itself as America’s safest midsize city, and for a year-and-a-half, its police department said little about the unsolved disappearance of 34-year-old Amber Aiaz (also known as Mei Yi Wu) and her daughter, Melissa Fu.
But now, after what they call an exhaustive investigation, including more than 40 hours of interviews with Zhang and a parallel investigation by the FBI, detectives say they have not been able to disprove Zhang’s bizarre account. Instead, police say, it has proved consistent on point after point.
“We have exhausted every lead that we have to try to tie him to this disappearance,” Irvine Police Detective Haldor Larum says. “We have to be open to alternate possibilities.”