Ellie’s anguish: Johnson County teen seeks truth of mom’s mysterious disappearance
Is it truly possible that her beautiful mother is alive? Or is it more likely, as 19-year-old Ellie Green of Prairie Village has come to think in her anguish, that she is dead and her remains lie someplace unknown?
Maybe it was a suicide, an accident or a killing planned, or none of it at all. Did Angela Green, 52, tall and lean, striking enough to model once in her native China, run off and leave her only child behind, as her father says? All of it seemed impossible to her.
The problem is that, one year on, neither she nor the stymied Prairie Village police have any solid clues as to Angela Green’s whereabouts. Police told The Star it remains an open case. But it has gone cold. Green this past week decided to break her months-long silence on her mother’s disappearance, she said, in the hopes that public knowledge might bring clues.
No one has been arrested or charged. Leads, following two search warrants executed in March, have dried up. Geoffrey Green, who reportedly has chosen not to talk to police about his wife, has hired a criminal defense attorney.
“I don’t believe she’s alive anymore,” the daughter said.
All that she knows for certain is that it wasn’t long ago that her life in Johnson County, what she called “the Prairie Village bubble,” seemed nearly ideal. Her parents argued at times, yes. But nothing ever violent, she said.
She had her father, of Russian heritage, who worked in information technology at the federal courthouse in downtown Kansas City. She had her stay-at-home mom — born Xin He, the second daughter of college professors outside Beijing — who married her dad in 1998. Green was born two years later. Her mother became, in Green’s own words, a “Tiger mom” who was devoted to her daughter (taking thousands of photos ) and consistently pushed her toward academic excellence.
It worked. In 2018, her parents watched as Green — a pianist able to speak Spanish, Russian and fluent Mandarin — graduated with highest honors at Shawnee Mission East High School.
“I mean, I had a pretty happy childhood,” said Green, now a sophomore at the University of Kansas studying data analytics and finance. Of her mother, she said, “I was her life, basically.”
Just over a year ago Green’s life turned into “a nightmare” of confusion as it became entangled with stories, told by her father, she claims, of her mother having a breakdown, being forcibly placed in a mental institution and then dying of a stroke. Later those stories would change, Green claimed, with her father telling her that, in reality, her mother had run away.
Calls and texts by The Star to Geoffrey Green went unanswered. His attorney, Paul Cramm — who represented admitted killer Edwin R. Hall in the 2007 kidnapping, rape and murder of 18-year-old Kelsey Smith — declined a request for an interview or to make his client available for comment.
Green said she has cried in despair imagining where her mother might be. She believes her father knows more.
“I just want him to tell the truth,” she said.
A shocking message
Green said she has been interviewed by police several times about the timeline of events.
It all began to go wrong, she said, on June 20, 2019. Only five days prior, Green had returned from studying for a month in northern Italy after her KU freshman year. Green’s departure for college had been hard on her mother, she said. She wonders if it might have triggered something emotionally or psychologically.
Green had a summer job at Science City at Union Station and had just gotten home.
“I think she might have been depressed, or bipolar or whatever was going on,” Green said. “One day, she lashed out at me.”
Her mom, she said, was saying she wanted her daughter to be more productive. The argument grew to the point where her mother grabbed some of her daughter’s belongings and told her to leave the house.
“That had never happened before,” Green said. “She was like, ‘Well, you can just leave now.’”
One part of Green thought the argument was ridiculous, almost laughable. “I thought it would blow over in a few hours,” she said. She cried as she backed her Ford Fusion out of the driveway.
“I ended up going back to Shawnee Mission East and crying in the park for half an hour,” Green said.
Her boyfriend, Zach Krause of Fairway, picked her up and, that night, she slept at his grandparents’ home. Soon after, she would come to live full time at his parents’ home.
A day after the argument, Green’s dad texted her, she said. He wanted to meet up to talk about Mom. Green couldn’t. She had plans the following night. Another day passed. She received another text from her father. The message was shocking.
Her mom, her dad texted, had been admitted into a mental hospital. She said her father told her that he had tricked her mother to go to a grocery store parking lot, where mental health workers forcibly grabbed her and took her away.
“He told me this three days after I left, by text,” Green said. She has kept their correspondences on her phone and shared them with The Star.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God! I need to get Mom her clothes, her food, her makeup, whatever else she needed. She needs to be taken care of,” Green said.
Green said she asked where her mother was placed. But her father refused to tell her, other than “down south somewhere.”
“He would never give me the place. Anything,” she said. “I asked. I asked. I asked plenty of times. Every single time, he shut me down.”
But she also trusted her father. She said he told her he didn’t want her to know because he did not want her to visit her mother until she was doing better. It seemed reasonable. She said he also instructed his daughter not to alert Angela Green’s extended family, meaning her sister Catherine Guo, living in New York, until more was known about her health.
“Oh, don’t let anyone know about mom,” reads the text. “Including the Guo’s until I know more about her condition.”
“I was like, I will respect that,” said Green, raised to be a dutiful daughter.
‘My worst nightmare’
Three and a half weeks passed: July 16, 2019. Green said her dad contacted her again. She said he asked to see her in person. It was important. They met at the Krauses’ home late at night. The news sent her reeling.
“He pulls up to Zach’s house. He says Angela died of a stroke,” Green said. “I remember the world going blurry. I fell to my knees on the driveway. I couldn’t even cry. I had no words. He went over and told Zach, and then he left. I was sitting there in disbelief and he just left. It was horrible. Losing my mom has always been my worst nightmare.”
The next day, the Krauses invited Geoff Green to their home so he wouldn’t be alone. They had not met him before.
“He seemed in shock. He seemed very quiet and didn’t talk a lot, and his eyes were down,” said Zach’s mother, Sarah Krause.
She asked if there would be a funeral. No. A memorial? No. She offered to pen an obituary. Krause said he never followed up. Green said none was written.
The Krauses reasoned that everyone grieves differently. It was not for them to judge.
Green didn’t press her father, but she said she did ask: Will an autopsy be performed? “He didn’t answer,” Green said.
All of it confused her. She had zero experience with death or funerals, or the timing of things. Her father appeared to be grieving. She was still in shock.
“I knew my mom wanted her ashes sent back to China, as a cultural thing,” Green said, but that’s about all.
Once again, Green said, her father requested that she say nothing to her mother’s side of the family about her death.
Green told her own co-workers, her friends, her teachers.
Every time Green brought up a memorial or funeral arrangements, she said, her dad put her off.
“People are like, ‘Did you not ask questions for the next eight months?’” Green said. “Of course I asked questions, like every single weekend, or whenever I went over there, or saw him. I would ask questions. But he would not answer anything about Mom.”
Finally, in February, Green broke her promise. She had not spoken directly to her aunt, Catherine Guo, her mom’s sister, for as long as three years. She called.
“I couldn’t even say anything like for a minute, I was crying the whole time,” Green said. “I finally got the words out: My mom has died.”
Her aunt naturally thought it had just happened. “No,” Green said she told them, “this happened back in July.”
The family was shocked. They had heard nothing about it, said Michelle Guo, Green’s 27-year-old cousin. Over those months, the Guos had attempted to get in touch with Angela, mostly about an upcoming wedding in the family, to alert her about the engagement and ask whether she’d received an invitation.
They never heard back, but assumed it was Angela being temperamental.
“I think she just kind of thought that it was in Angela’s nature sometimes, that if she didn’t feel like talking, she wasn’t going to pick up,” Michelle Guo said.
Now they were told Angela was gone.
“I took off work the next couple of days,” Guo said, “because we were all so confused trying to figure this out.”
They spoke more to Green.
“I think we asked her: Does she have a death certificate?” Guo recalled. “We thought it was so strange that she had allegedly died eight months ago and there was absolutely no trace of it. We thought the only way we could get some proof is to see a death certificate and see what her cause of death was, and what day it was.”
Green traveled to Topeka to retrieve a death certificate. None was found.
Green saw her father soon after and confronted him.
“I asked him: ‘Where did Mom die?’ He said, ‘Kansas,’” Green recalled. She said she responded, “No she didn’t,” and said she had just been to Topeka and discovered that no death certificate existed.
Her father, she said, told her that he had to go home and look up the location of her death.
“I was like, ‘OK, he’s lying,’” she said and also asked him, “Where are the ashes?”
At home, she said she was told.
“I asked him what hospital and what doctor. He literally stared into space,” Green said.
Green filed a missing person report with the Prairie Village police in February. In March, two search warrants were executed, one for the Greens’ home in the 7600 block of Tomahawk Road, the other for an area in Olathe where Green’s father sometimes stores cars he likes to restore.
She said that police found an urn, but that it had been recently purchased and contained no ashes.
Later she would learn that police could not find a death certificate in Missouri, or anywhere in the country.
Is she dead or alive?
After the police got involved, Green said, her father changed the story: His wife had possibly run off with a friend.
For eight months, Green said, she thought her mother was dead. She called that news “unbearable” and “paralyzing.” With the investigation stalled, Green recently posted her frustration on her Instagram account, ell.a.green.
“To this day, my dad now maintains a story that my mom ran away with a friend,” she wrote. “My mom??? Never There’s no record she traveled anywhere, she didn’t use her bank account, she left her phone, car, passport, and driver’s license at home. I haven’t heard from her in over a year. That, is not my mom.”
She continued:
“There are plenty of days I walked across campus with tears in my eyes because something had reminded me of her. It was surreal to see my mom’s face as a missing person appear on the TV. … To watch your childhood home be torn apart as a search warrant is carried out. … And to my mom, who was loved by everyone she met and is the strongest person I know, I will never stop looking for you. I will never stop asking questions. I will get justice for you one day. I hope you are proud as you watch from above, and I will love you forever.”
Capt. Ivan Washington, commander of investigations for the Prairie Village police, said the whereabouts of Angela Green remain an ongoing investigation.
“We’re accepting leads and tips,” he said.
Anyone with information is asked to call the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-TIPS (8477) or the Prairie Village Police Department at 913-642-6868.
This story was originally published July 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
