A "miniscule mistake" scuppered a former AI researcher's "perfect murder". Qinxuan Pan, 34, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate originally from China, almost committed the perfect crime when federal investigators were left chasing him for months after he gunned down Yale University student, Kevin Jiang, 26. Pan's dastardly activities became the topic of a recent 48 Hours special dubbed The Ivy League Killer on Paramount+.

Lead detective David Zaweski provided the inside story on how the car problems Pan experienced during his getaway gave the cops their lead. Pan - who was born in Shanghai but raised in Massachusetts - fired eight bullets into the graduate student before smashing in to the back of his Prius back in February 2021. In the months leading up to the crime, New Haven Police received reports of an unknown suspect firing .45 caliber bullets into four local homes. Though detectives interviewed the homeowners, they were unable to find a link between the four incidents. Pan was later identified as the gunman.

Before he was killed, Jiang had been spending the day with fiancée, Zion Perry. He left her apartment at around 8.30pm and was headed to the nearby home he shared with his mum when a black SUV smashed into the back of him. As he stepped out of the car, likely to check whether the other driver was okay, Pan riddled him with bullets - some of them grazing so close to his head that he was left with visible burn marks on it.

Pan - who used to work as an AI researcher - then raced away from the scene, but was tracked down 30 minutes later, with cops finding him on a railroad track beside a scrap metal yard. Pan told the officer he'd driven into the yard by accident, and was looking for the entrance to a nearby highway. With his clean license, the cop let him slip through his fingers, even helping him to get a tow truck and a hotel room nearby. Attending officer Sergeant Jeffrey Mills was unaware at the time that there had been a murder in New Haven.

He responded to another call at Arby's around 15 hours later. Employees there had discovered a gun and a box of .45 caliber bullets, which were similar to those found at the scene of the house shootings. The restaurant sat beside the Best Western hotel, the same lodgings he'd helped Pan get a room just a few hours before. Mills was now are of the murder, and put the pieces together after remembering the dark SUV that Jiang had been driving. He reached out to the homicide department of New Haven police.