Chen Wen-cheng, born in Taipei in 1950, was a brilliant statistician whose death became one of the defining outrages of Taiwan's White Terror. After graduating from the Department of Mathematics at National Taiwan University, he pursued graduate study in the United States, earning his doctorate from the University of Michigan, and by the age of thirty-one had become an assistant professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. Warm-hearted and devoted to his homeland, he joined Taiwanese hometown associations during his years abroad and donated to the Dangwai publication Formosa Magazine — acts that placed him on the watch list of the security services. In May 1981 he returned to Taiwan with his wife and child to visit relatives. On July 2, three agents of the Taiwan Garrison Command took him away for "questioning"; the following dawn his body was found on the lawn beside the NTU graduate library. The authorities declared it suicide, but the forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who came from the United States to examine the body, found the injuries inconsistent with a simple fall. His death stunned American academia and Congress, drawing intense international scrutiny to Taiwan's human rights record. Though the case was never solved, the lawn where he died now holds a memorial square within the NTU campus, and his name endures as a spiritual landmark in Taiwan's pursuit of academic freedom and freedom of speech.

• Detained and interrogated by the Taiwan Garrison Command, July 2, 1981

• Found dead on the NTU campus the next morning; the unsolved case drew international human-rights scrutiny