[3] Shao had last been seen on September 7 at a hotel outside Nevada, Iowa, a small town east of Ames, where ISU is located.

Police believe that after abruptly checking out of the hotel the following morning, he had used her phone to text her friends that she was going to be away for a while and that Li had to return to China for a family emergency.

While there was no evidence of Shao's purported travel, Li had flown back to Beijing, but beyond that point his whereabouts were unknown.

Early in 2015, authorities in Johnson County charged Li with first-degree murder and obtained an arrest warrant.

[6][7] Shao was born in the coastal Chinese city of Dalian in 1994, the only child of a family typical of China's emerging middle class.

[1] Shao was accepted at Iowa State University (ISU), in Ames, where she majored in chemical engineering in 2012, a choice that pleased her father since not many women enter that field.

"[8] In early 2014, he gave Shao's address as his on two occasions when he was cited for traffic violations while driving his 2009 BMW in Coralville, outside Iowa City.

Since his presence was not desired by her roommates,[8] they got into the beige 1997 Toyota Camry she had bought during a summer internship in Kentucky[9] and checked into the Budget Inn off U.S. Route 30 near Nevada, Iowa, a small town east of Ames,[10] on September 5.

They found a receipt for the Toyota Camry Shao had purchased in Kentucky, which still had that state's license plates on it.

[11] After a warrant was obtained, police found a body in the trunk, its decomposition accelerated by exposure to the late summer heat.

[13] Her head was found wrapped tightly in a towel consistent with those at the Nevada Budget Inn where she and Li had stayed, and next to the body in the trunk was a 15-pound (6.8 kg) barbell.

[4][8] Also in the trunk were travel documents showing that on September 6, Li had booked a flight from Eastern Iowa Airport in nearby Cedar Rapids to Chicago and then to Beijing.

[2][8] Three days after the body was discovered, a search warrant was executed on the hotel room in Nevada that Li and Shao had shared.

They came to believe that Shao had been murdered at the hotel before her body was placed in the trunk of her car and driven to the parking lot of Li's apartment complex in Iowa City.

[14] Upon further investigation, police learned of Li's September 3 "fuck my life" social-media post and the circumstances that gave rise to it.

[15] Users on the Chinese social media sites Sina Weibo and WeChat had begun circulating Li's picture and other identifying information along with the hashtag #FindLi.

[17] In an April 2015 CNN article about the case, Shao's father asked that Chinese and American authorities cooperate and share information to help capture Li and bring him to trial.

He said that a few weeks earlier, the Iowa City police had told him that the Johnson County district attorney's office had charged Li with first-degree murder and issued an arrest warrant.

Under Iowa law, prosecutors may in certain circumstances keep the existence of a warrant and any related indictment secret until after the arrest is made, and they did not confirm whether they had done so in Li's case.

[18] Later in April, however, investigators from China flew to Iowa and, accompanied by their American counterparts, interviewed witnesses and studied the crime scene.

Using the evidence from Iowa, agents from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation developed a case against him while Li remained in detention.

At the end of June the Ministry of Public Security announced Li's formal arrest on a charge of intentional murder.

[20] Shao's father said he had been told that Li would be tried in China even though the crime occurred in the United States.

In 2010 a Shanghai court convicted Xiao Zhen of murdering a taxi driver in Auckland, New Zealand, before fleeing to China.

Police in New Zealand shared their evidence with their Chinese counterparts only on the condition that Xiao would not be sentenced to death, since their country had abolished capital punishment.

He reported her missing; ten days later hikers found her body stuffed in a suitcase near Stave Lake, 60 miles (97 km) away.

Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had built a case against him that led to a murder charge in Canada against Li and an accomplice.

They would not share the evidence with their Chinese counterparts out of concerns, similar to those that attended the Xiao investigation in New Zealand, that Li would be sentenced to death if convicted.

They were still unsure about when exactly Shao had died, believing it most likely that she had survived Li's initial beating only to suffocate after he stuffed her body into a suitcase and put it into his trunk.