The investigations results have never been released to Zhu Lings parents or the general public. However, Tsinghua University declined to issue Sun Weis B.S. certificate and refused to provide her with the documentation needed to get a passport or visa in 1997. In 2018 the victims hair has been examined by the University of Maryland geologist Richard Ash using laser ablation ICP-MS mass spectrometry. He was able to confirm the timeline and pattern of poisoning. In 1999, Norwegian Terje Wiik was sentenced to 21 years imprisonment for poisoning his girlfriend with thallium. In June 2004, 25 Russian soldiers earned Honorable Mentions in the Darwin Awards after becoming ill from thallium exposure when they found a can of mysterious white powder in a rubbish dump on their base at Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. Oblivious to the danger of misusing an unidentified white powder from a military dump site, the conscripts added it to tobacco, and used it as a substitute for talcum powder on their feet. In 2005, a 17 year-old girl in Izunokuni, Shizuoka, Japan admitted to attempting to murder her mother by lacing her tea with thallium, causing a national scandal. In February 2007, two Americans, Marina and Yana Kovalevsky, a mother and daughter, visiting Russia were hospitalized for thallium poisoning. Both had emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1991 and had made several trips to Russia since then.
Her relatives received prison terms, the parents dying in jail. In 1988, members of the Carr family from Alturas, Polk County, Florida, fell ill from what appeared to be thallium poisoning. Peggy Carr, the mother, died slowly and painfully from the poison. Her son and stepson were critically ill but eventually recovered. The Carrs neighbor, chemist George J. Trepal, was convicted of murdering Mrs. Carr and attempting to murder her family, and sentenced to death. The thallium was slipped into bottles of Coca-Cola at the Carr and Trepal homes. Thallium was the poison of choice for Saddam Hussein to use on dissidents, which even allowed for them to emigrate before dying. In 1995, Zhu Ling was the victim of an unsolved attempted thallium poisoning in Beijing, China. In 1994, Zhu Ling was a sophomore studying physical chemistry at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She began to show strange and debilitating symptoms at the end of 1994, when she reported experiencing acute stomach pain and extensive hair loss. Ultimately she was diagnosed on Usenet with poisoning by thallium. To this day, there is still speculation among Chinese expatriates overseas as to the poisoners identity. The only suspect of the police investigation, Sun Wei, is a member of a family with high-level political connections, which may have been used to halt and suppress the results of the investigation. Sun Wei was Zhu Lings classmate and roommate in Tsinghua University from 1992–1997. Tsinghua University also said she was the only student who had access to thallium compounds at the school.