The Note in Chinese: The Disappearance of Amber Aiaz and Melissa Fu

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

November 16, 2023

Amber Aiaz, also known by the names Mei Yi Wu and Meiyi W. Wu, was thirty four years old in November 2019, living in an apartment near Michelson Drive and University Drive in Irvine, California, with her husband, Cheng Zhang, and her twelve year old daughter, Melissa Fu. Amber stood about five foot nine, weighed around a hundred eighty pounds, with black hair and brown eyes, of Chinese descent. Melissa, her daughter from a previous relationship, was noted in records as a tall twelve year old, already close to five foot eleven and two hundred pounds, also with black hair and brown eyes. The family's household, on the surface, looked like an ordinary Southern California life built around a blended family and Zhang's work driving for Uber.

On November 22, 2019, Amber had driven to Las Vegas and was expected home that evening with a car full of produce, an unremarkable errand for a woman who, by her husband's later account, ran some kind of import or resale business. Back at the Irvine apartment, Zhang was home with Melissa. Around 4:30 that afternoon, according to the story Zhang would eventually tell investigators, there was a knock at the door. He answered to find a man and a woman he did not recognize, both appearing to be in their forties and of Chinese descent. Before he could react, the woman sprayed something toward his face, and Zhang said he lost consciousness almost immediately.

Waking Up to an Empty Apartment

When Zhang came to, Melissa was gone. Amber, who should have arrived home from her Las Vegas trip that same evening, never did. In the apartment, investigators would later find bloodstains on the carpet and a bloody handprint on a kitchen wall, along with traces of blood beneath the carpet padding that were believed to belong to Amber. In the days that followed, Zhang said he began receiving handwritten notes, written in Chinese and left for him under his door, instructing him on how to behave. The notes reportedly told him that Amber and Melissa were safe and would be returned home within days, but only if he did not contact the police, warning him that if he did, he would never see his wife and stepdaughter again. The notes also instructed him to clean up the apartment and continue acting normally in the meantime.

Zhang did not go to police right away. He waited more than a week, finally reporting the disappearance on December 2, 2019, ten days after the incident he described. In the interim, according to investigators, he had told Melissa's school she was out sick, had cleaned blood from parts of the apartment, and had reportedly used his wife's WeChat account to send messages as though she were still present and simply unreachable. Each of those actions, on their own, read to investigators as exactly the kind of behavior someone might engage in if they themselves were responsible for two people going missing, rather than the behavior of a man honestly following a kidnapper's instructions out of fear for his family's safety.

Forty Hours of Interviews, Forty-Four Days of Surveillance

Once Irvine police and the FBI became involved, Cheng Zhang became the natural focus of an intensive investigation. Detectives conducted more than forty hours of interviews with him over time, and at one point placed him under around the clock surveillance for forty four consecutive days, watching for any sign that might connect him directly to whatever had actually happened to Amber and Melissa. Investigators also looked closely at the substance Zhang described being sprayed with, ultimately identifying an anesthetic called Fluothane as a chemical capable of producing the kind of near instant unconsciousness he described experiencing.

What made the case genuinely strange, even to the investigators working it, was that none of that scrutiny ever produced anything that contradicted Zhang's account. Detective Haldor Larum, who worked the case for the Irvine Police Department, put it plainly at one point, saying investigators had exhausted every lead they had trying to tie Zhang to the disappearance and had come up empty each time, adding that they had to remain open to alternate possibilities beyond their initial suspicion of him. Rather than falling apart under scrutiny, Zhang's bizarre story of a masked couple appearing at his door and incapacitating him with an unknown chemical held up, point after point, against everything investigators could throw at it.

A Theory Built on Deception

As the investigation continued, a possible motive began to take shape, one centered not on Zhang but on Amber herself. Investigators developed evidence suggesting that Amber had misrepresented her financial situation to her husband for some time, reportedly leading him and possibly others to believe she had access to substantial wealth, including claims of millions of dollars in investments, when her actual financial position was apparently far more modest. If that deception had extended beyond her own household, to business associates or others she had dealt with, it opened the door to a theory that whoever abducted Amber and Melissa may have done so believing they were owed a substantial ransom or debt, only to discover, whether before or after the abduction, that the wealth they believed existed was never real to begin with. That theory has never been confirmed, and no arrests have ever resulted from it, but it remains one of the more actively pursued explanations for why two people would be taken from an apartment in broad daylight and never located again.

The physical descriptions Zhang provided of the two people at his door have circulated in the case file for years without ever leading to an identification. The woman was described as about five foot eight, of average build, with black hair worn in a bun. The man was described as about five foot ten and roughly a hundred ninety pounds, with short black hair. Investigators have also noted the possible involvement of a black Cadillac connected to the pair, though that detail, like nearly everything else about the two alleged abductors, has never been developed into anything more concrete.

A Case That Refuses to Resolve

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, working alongside the Irvine Police Department, has offered a ten thousand dollar reward for information leading to the location of Amber Aiaz and Melissa Fu, a reward that has stood unclaimed since shortly after their disappearance. Investigators who have spoken publicly about the case have described it as one of the more unusual disappearances they have encountered in recent memory, precisely because the evidence has never definitively pointed anywhere. It has neither confirmed the version of events described by the one person who was in the apartment when it happened, nor conclusively ruled him out either, leaving the case suspended in a rare kind of investigative limbo years after it began.

Melissa Fu would be a young adult today, in her mid to late teens when she vanished and old enough now to be finishing her education or starting an independent life of her own, had that November afternoon in 2019 gone differently. Her mother would be approaching forty. Neither has surfaced in the years since, no confirmed sighting, no communication, no trace beyond the blood found in their own apartment and a handful of handwritten notes in Chinese that promised a return home that never came.

Anyone with information about the disappearance of Amber Aiaz and Melissa Fu is asked to contact the Irvine Police Department or the FBI.

Sources