$25,000 reward offered for location of missing Johnson County mother, believed dead
Somebody somewhere knows something about where Angela Green is, or — as her only child, 22-year-old Ellie Green, raised in Prairie Village, has long feared — where her murdered mother’s remains lie.
Perhaps now the lure of a $25,000 reward, being offered by an Iowa private investigator working with Angela’s relatives, could help bring her home, while bringing a measure of peace to her family.
“I’m putting it up because I know that sometimes money talks,” said the investigator, Steve Ridge of Ceder Rapids, a former successful business owner who said he’s working with the family for no fee after learning of the case.
“It’s strictly for either the location of Angela,” Ridge said, in the “unlikely event” she’s still alive. “Or it’s for the location and identification of her remains. We just want to find her … to give that degree of closure to the family.”
It will soon be four years since June 2019, when Angela Green, at age 51, vanished from her home in the 7600 block of Tomahawk Road.
In 2020, Ellie — an honors graduate from Shawnee Mission East High School, who was then a student at the University of Kansas — first told The Star of the strange circumstances surrounding her mother’s disappearance.
Over the next three years, until the strain took its toll, she shared the story nationwide to possibly keep leads alive: on “Dateline NBC,” on the “Dr. Phil” television program and, in 2022, with People magazine. For the last 18 months, a production company has been filming a planned 90-minute documentary.
The details, by her previous telling:
On June 20, 2019, her mother— who, in her 20s had been so lean and elegant that she worked as a fashion model in her native China — went missing. Only a few days prior, Ellie had returned from a month of studying in northern Italy following her freshman year at KU.
Angela, although deeply devoted to her daughter, had also been what Ellie called “a tiger mom,” driving her daughter to achieve academic excellence. She was prone to what Ellie wondered might be depression or bipolar disorder.
They argued over Ellie’s independence. “One day, she lashed out at me,” Ellie told The Star.
That night Ellie left, crying in Shawnee Mission East’s parking lot, before going to stay with her then-boyfriend’s grandmother and, later, his family.
Three days after the argument, she received a text from her father, Geoffrey Green, saying he had gotten her mother admitted to a nearby mental hospital, although he would not say where.
“He would never give me the place. Anything,” Ellie told The Star previously. “I asked. I asked. I asked plenty of times. Every single time, he shut me down.”
But she trusted her father at that time. Significantly older than his wife, Geoffrey then worked in information technology at the federal courthouse in downtown Kansas City.
Ellie said her father told her he didn’t want her to know exactly where her mother was hospitalized because he did not want her to visit her mother until she was doing better. Ellie thought that sounded reasonable. Her father, she said, also instructed her not to alert her mom’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 she kept. “Including the Guo’s until I know more about her condition.”
“I was like, I will respect that,” Ellie said.
Is her mother dead?
Three and a half weeks later, Ellie said, her father shocked her, delivering news that her mother had died of a stroke.
“I remember the world going blurry,” she recounted. “I fell to my knees on the driveway. I couldn’t even cry. I had no words. … Losing my mom has always been my worst nightmare.”
Nearly eight months passed. There was no casket, no cremated remains that Ellie saw, no funeral, no memorial. Each time she brought it up, she said her father put her off.
“People are like, ‘Did you not ask questions for the next eight months?’” she had said. “Of course I asked questions, like very single weekend, or whenever I went over there, or saw him, I would ask questions. But he would not answer anything about Mom.”
Although she said her father continued to ask her not to tell her mother’s relatives, she finally did, calling the Guo family, and leaving them in shock and disbelief. They questioned her. Is there a death certificate? She traveled to Topeka to look. She found none.
She said that when she confronted her father, asking him the name of the hospital where her mother died, he stared into space.
She filed a missing person report in February 2020, and has come to believe that her mother is likely dead.
Once the police were involved, she said, her father told her a different story: Her mother had not died, Ellie said he told her. She instead had run off with another man.
In March 2020, the Prairie Village police executed two search warrants, one for the home on Tomahawk Road, the other for an area in Olathe where Geoffrey stored cars he liked to restore. He hired Overland Park attorney Paul Cramm — who represented admitted killer Edwin R. Hall in the 2007 kidnapping, rape and murder of 18-year-old Kelsey Smith.
He has refused to speak to police. Attempts by The Star to reach him Wednesday were unsuccessful. Cramm, his attorney, chose not to comment.
Prairie Village police still consider the case to be “an open investigation,” one that has involved other law enforcement and the FBI.
No arrests or charges have been filed in the case.
“We are still taking tips and leads from the community,” said Capt. Ivan Washington, public information officer with the Prairie Village police.
A private investigator
Ridge, the private investigator, said that those wishing to pursue the reward should contact the police and not him.
Angela’s relatives are grateful, as the emotional toll over much of the last four years has been intense.
In the last year, Ellie has tried to regain a semblance of a normal life, attempting to put emotional and physical distance between herself and what she is convinced is her mother’s murder. She now lives in Colorado.
“Ellie, like she’s said, she’s at peace with it,” said cousin Michelle Guo. A corporate attorney in New York City, Guo, 29, has taken up the mantle of dealing with the police, the media and raising awareness.
Guo’s TikTok page, @mishguo, focusing on finding justice for Angela Green, has some 166,000 followers.
“Like she (Ellie) knows that her mom’s no longer alive,” Guo said. “She really just wants to move on with her life and not have this traumatize her every single day. I mean there is a part of her that is suppressing it, just to protect herself. Otherwise, she’d just drive herself crazy if she thought about this 24/7. That’s the reason she has completely taken a step back from everything.”
For herself, Guo said the first 18 months after her aunt went missing was “horrific.” She took a leave of absence from work, entered intense therapy four times a week for several months. She had night terrors and panic attacks.
“It affected me in the worst ways possible,” she said. Although she has mostly recovered, she said, she called it “an ongoing process.”
“I have my bad days,” Guo said. She does not intend to let the case disappear.
“I just can’t accept it not being resolved,” Guo said. “My aunt was such a beautiful person. She deserves to be remembered. She’s worth fighting for.”
Asked if she wanted to make a statement, Ellie texted her cousin saying that she also appreciates Ridge’s generosity, and that despite the hardship of the last 3 1/2 years, she’s “been able to pick herself back up again and even recently got a promotion at work,” asking people to “respect her privacy.”
Then she wrote more personally.
“The progress in this case,” she texted, “would have never been possible without my cousin, Michelle, who’s literally my big sister. We talk on the phone hours everyday, whether it’s chatting about reality TV shows, or just silently keeping me company. … She’s the most important person in my life.
“After I told her that I couldn’t do this anymore because it was destroying me mentally, she supported my decision 100%. She’s the one who’s been leading the investigation, spending hours and hours of her time that I’m not even aware of, because that’s just the kind of person she is. … Words can’t even describe how much I love her.”
Guo said she and Ellie got to know Ridge after he saw them in national media and contacted them. Guo had posted a Gofundme site asking for donations to hire a private investigator. Ridge said he worried about them wasting their money.
Guo said she was skeptical of his no-fee offer. But they gradually got to know and trust him, she said.
Ridge said that his interest in the case is partially personal. His daughter, Ryanne Ridge, at one time lived only a short distance from the Greens’ home in Prairie Village.
“All that area is quite familiar to me,” Ridge said. “I mean this is literally something that happened in my daughter’s neighborhood.”
According to his LinkedIn page, before he became a private investigator, Ridge worked as an executive for Capital Cities Communications and then for Magid, a media consulting firm, where he retired as chief operating officer in 2020.
He made headlines in Iowa when he reportedly helped uncover fresh information in the case of Jodi Huisentruit, a local television news anchor in Mason City, who disappeared in June 1995 and has never been found. Huisentruit was declared legally dead in 2001. Her case remains unsolved.
Ridge said that his company, Magid, worked with Huisentruit early in her career. Investigating unpaid and on his own, he has grown close to the family. In February, The Des Moines Register reported that Ridge offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to Huisentruit’s whereabouts.
“I’m not a publicity seeker,” said Ridge. “It’s mind-boggling. Families live in absolute desperation, you know, without ever having answers. The agony people live through is incredible. Their lives are never the same.”
He will use his own funds to pay out any rewards He balked at the suggestion that a purpose of the reward was to help bring some emotional closure.
“I don’t know if you ever get closure when a family member is murdered,” he said, “ but obtaining some peace in terms of what has happened — that would be what I think.”
This story was originally published March 1, 2023 at 6:30 PM.
