Missouri woman is presumed dead: Her mom is devastated, her husband accused of murder

On a boardroom table in a Columbia law office, Ke Ren quietly spread out photos of her smiling daughter and granddaughter, placing each one gently, the way a doting mother might lay a precious child down to rest.

Then, from a bright silk scarf, she lifted a tiny pair of red satin booties that her daughter had worn as a toddler. A slight smile came on her face, as if she suddenly remembered a far off and happier past.

Less than 24 hours later, Ren stood on the banks of the Lamine River, about 20 miles west of Columbia.

Her eyes swollen like overstuffed pillows, from a lack of sleep and too many tears, Ren stared into the 64-mile-long tributary of the Missouri River, believing that somewhere beneath its muddy water is the body of her daughter, 28-year-old Mengqi Ji.

Police and volunteer divers have been searching the river and the area around it for weeks since Ren’s daughter disappeared on Oct. 8 from her Columbia apartment, leaving her keys, her car, her phone and her 1-year-old baby girl behind.

On Feb. 19, Boone County Prosecutor Daniel Knight charged Mengqi Ji’s husband, Joseph Elledge, a 24-year-old University of Missouri student from the Kansas City area, with first-degree murder. On Friday, a grand jury indicted Elledge on that charge and more.

He is being held in the county jail, with an arraignment scheduled for Monday. Knight has asked for a $5 million bond.

The prosecutor says the murder charge won’t stop police from continuing their months-long search for Ji, a petite, 105-pound Chinese national who came to the United States about seven years ago to attend the University of Missouri. She earned her master’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering in 2014 and then stayed in Columbia to work. Friends describe her as “sunshine,” a good listener, a hard worker and more like a sister.

Two days before Ji vanished, a former roommate, Siyu Cao, invited her to come visit her in New Jersey and promised her a celebratory barbecue at her new house.

“She said that she would come,” Cao said. “I still cannot believe that I won’t talk to Mengqi anymore. Nothing would make me more happy than to come home one day and there she is standing at my door.”

For Ji’s mom, the idea that her daughter may be dead fills her with insufferable sorrow. For months she blocked out the possibility — until her son-in-law was charged with murder. Instead she chose hope that her daughter would eventually be found. It’s what she flew more than 10,000 miles for.

“I don’t want to think that,” Ren said, through a translator. And then, overcome with emotion, she buried her face in her hands and wept.

Ren, a retired accountant, agreed to an exclusive interview with The Star because she wants people to know that her daughter is more than a name on a missing person’s report.

Her daughter was her whole life, Ren said. And what she has left now is a bag full of photos and mementos and unanswered questions about how something so unspeakable could have happened. There’s also hope, that she will take her granddaughter with her back to China, and that eventually her daughter will be found.

“I am not going to go home without Mengqi,” Ren wailed. “I won’t leave her here alone in this foreign land.”

Coming to Columbia

Ren, with her husband, Xiaolin Ji, came to Columbia from China on Oct. 15, 2019, five days after learning that their daughter was missing. Members of Columbia’s Chinese community helped the couple, who speak no English, to lease an apartment. But they had not planned to stay so long.

They thought they would join the search for their daughter, and find her, perhaps in need of help that they would gladly give her as they have always done.

While Ji was close to her parents, especially her mom, she was not one to ask for help, her mom said. But she did call her mom and video chat with her at about the same time every day, something the two had done ever since Ji went off to college in Shanghai in 2009. The last time they talked was about 3 p.m. the day her daughter disappeared.

“It is a routine that we had,” Ren said. It’s why she knew something had to be terribly wrong when she hadn’t heard from her daughter in two days.

Ren said her daughter had always been bright, talented, creative and even a bit precocious when she was very young.

Mengqi was born in Xi’an, in central China, on April 18, 1991 — the year of the sheep in the Chinese zodiac. Even though China had a one-child rule, Ren and her husband had decided that even without that rule, “We only wanted one child because we wanted to devote all our love to her,” Ren said.

“Since she is a little girl she is always a good girl. She behaved well. She is always lively.”

At 5, Mengqi started practicing calligraphy and painting, her mom said. She started swimming and playing ping-pong at 7.

Ren recalled a story of compassion when her daughter was 7. Most days on her way home from work, Ren said she would buy vegetables from an old woman near their home. One day it was pouring rain by the time Ren arrived home from work. “Mengqi said, ‘It’s raining and it’s getting late. That old woman is probably still selling her vegetables. We should go and buy all her vegetables so that she can go home.’ That is what we did,“ Ren said.

At 10 she started learning to play guitar and erhu, a two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument.

Ji’s English was good. “She had an English tutor from elementary school through college,” Ren boasted. In junior high and high school, Ji took up photography. “But painting is her real passion,” Ren said.

“We thought that the development of hobbies was important for the growth of Mengqi,” her mom said. In high school she participated in the school talent shows, “so she was very popular. She had a lot of friends.”

Because she excelled academically, Ji attended one of the best high schools in Xi’an. “We put a lot of time and energy into educating her well,” Ren said. Ji, as a child, had spent many summers away at camp, going even as far away as Hong Kong, more than 800 miles.

After three years at East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai, at the recommendation of a school counselor, Mengqi traveled in 2012 with about five other exchange students to the University of Missouri, where she completed the final year of her master’s degree program. Ren said she wanted her daughter “to broaden her horizons.”

Ren came to the Columbia campus for her daughter’s graduation. “The original plan was that she would get her master’s degree in the United States and after getting the master’s degree she would go back to China to find employment,” Ren said. Instead, Ji accepted a job at a Columbia company, owned by one of her professors.

Finding friends and love

At Nanova, a company co-founded by MU professor Hao Li to develop and manufacture dental products, Ji met the young college intern she would eventually marry and start a family with.

All through college, during those daily video chats with her mom, Ji was told, “Don’t spend too much time studying. Go find a boyfriend and then get married,” Ren said.

Ji, a modest dresser who didn’t care much for makeup, had only dated two other young men before she met Joe Elledge. He was a part-time intern and she was a supervisor helping the newcomers to learn the ropes.

“Everything I learned how to do at Nanova, Mengqi showed me how to do,” said her friend Cao, who not only lived briefly with Ji but also worked closely with her in the Nanova lab. “She was very patient.”

Elledge joined their team in 2015. The two became fast friends and began to date.

“She didn’t know why but she was crazy about Joe,” said her friend Shuyi Jiang. “But after a couple of months she said Joe did not want to settle down. They broke up. But after a couple of weeks they got back together.”

In 2016, Ji traveled to China and announced to her parents that she had a boyfriend.

When Ren later learned that her daughter planned to marry Elledge, “I wasn’t happy,” she said. Ren was upset because she thought her daughter would move back to China. And because she had never met the new American boyfriend. They thought he was too young. Also, Ren and her husband had wanted their daughter to marry a Chinese man “so that we can communicate better with him,” Ren said.

But Ji insisted she was in a good relationship. Ren gave in. “I said all right, you win.” In August 2017, Ji returned to China and introduced her parents to her boyfriend.

In a letter to his daughter, Ji’s dad asked her to think clearly about why she decided to get married. He reminded her that she should only marry for love.

The couple married on Sept. 22, 2017 in Columbia. Her friend Jiang met Elledge for the first time at the ceremony, a small affair, she said, just a visit to the courthouse.

It wasn’t the wedding Ji’s mom would have planned. Ren said she had always hoped her daughter and her new husband would return to China together for a big celebration. In the Chinese culture it is customary for the new bride to be dressed “very pretty,” Ren said, and with her groom to kneel for a tea ceremony with the bride’s parents. “But now this is never going to happen.”

Cao said she thought that Ji was happy with her husband. When Ji became pregnant and her delivery date drew near, she left work. “She wanted to spend all her time with the baby,” Cao recalls her friend telling her.

Trouble at home

Ji’s parents came to Columbia at the end of October 2018 to see their granddaughter born and to help Ji. But Ren noticed that their presence caused friction between the couple. “They argued on a regular basis … over trivial things,” Ren said. Her son-in-law wanted her to go home. So, “to keep the peace,” Ren said, on Nov. 18, Ji’s parents flew back to China. It was the last time they would be with their daughter.

Ren’s attorney, Amy Salladay, says she has listened to about 20 hours of audio — most of it recorded by Elledge — which captures the couple’s intense arguments. Salladay said Elledge makes racist comments and threatens Ji with deportation because her immigration status in the U.S. is based on a sponsorship by Elledge’s mother.

Police documents say he tells his wife he wants a divorce but doesn’t want to spend the money.

One of Ji’s former boyfriends, Daniel Culp, who remained her friend and is now a Kansas City attorney, told police that she had contacted him in late August 2019 asking about divorce.

Earlier, that year, in February, Ji had shown her mother a photo of a bruise she said her husband had left on their baby. Police documents say Ji had confronted her husband about it. Child abuse is not a crime in China, but Ren insisted her daughter take the baby to the hospital.

That spring, Ren said, the couple entered marriage counseling.

Her daughter’s closest friends said they believed Ji was happy.

“Mengqi never shared that her marriage was problematic, because Mengqi never complained,” said Jiang. “She only mentioned to me once that she thinks rushing into marriage is not a great option and that I should make the best out of being single.”

By the end of the summer, the couple started making plans to move to Carthage, Missouri, near Joplin, where they had lived for three months for one of Elledge’s internships.

“She had a plan,” Jiang said. “She had saved up enough for a down payment on a house. She told me she had already found the house. She told me Joe was going to graduate soon, and if everything goes well he would work there in Carthage. I can’t believe she would just leave everything behind.”

Officials at the University of Missouri said Elledge, who had been studying engineering, never graduated.

Her last conversation

It appears the last conversation Ji had was shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 8. On Facebook she talked with someone about plans to buy baby food the next day from a nearby Walmart.

She was in bed by 9:30 p.m., according to her husband’s statement to police. He stayed up watching videos until 11:30 p.m., he said, and when he woke about 5 a.m., he heard their 1-year-old crying and his wife was gone. But he was tired and so he went back to sleep.

Later that morning, with Ji still not at home, police documents say, Elledge tried to feed the crying baby “the same way he had seen” his wife feed her, because he hadn’t ever done it before. He told police that his wife “had still been breast feeding.”

An hour later, police say, he drove to Jefferson City with the baby, just to relax. After sunset, he told police, he drove for more than three hours to several remote places he’d never been to before, two of them along the Missouri River.

He did not mention visiting the Lamine River. But according to police documents, cellphone location data showed that Elledge spent about 45 minutes near that river. And cadaver dogs indicated a body in the river.

The Star reached out for comment to Elledge’s mother, Jean T. Elledge, of Blue Springs, and his father, Sydney C. Elledge of Oak Grove. Jackson County court records show that the two divorced in 2002. Elledge’s father did not return messages. When a reporter approached the house, his mother shouted, “No, go away. You’re not welcome here,” before closing and locking the door.

Elledge’s relatives have roots in the tiny town of Hoven, South Dakota, population fewer than 400 people, where his mother’s maiden name, Karst, is common. Grandparents are Marilyn and Duane Karst.

“We are his grandparents,” Marilyn Karst said by phone. “He does have a large family. I don’t think any of us will talk before speaking to his lawyer.”

What the police know, according to their report, is that in the hours after Ji vanished Elledge talked more than once with a member of his family and didn’t say anything about his wife being gone.

He texted his mom at 9 a.m. on Oct. 9 to wish her a happy birthday.

The next day, Oct. 10, Ren got worried because she had not heard from her daughter and sent a friend to the couple’s apartment to check on her. That’s when Elledge told Ji’s parents she was missing.

Jiang said Elledge also contacted her. She wanted to come to Missouri immediately to help look for her friend, she said, but he urged her to stay put in case Ji would try to reach her. Jiang said she thought to herself, “How could she without a phone?”

Shortly after 3:30 p.m. on Oct. 10, nearly two full days after he had last seen her, Elledge reported his wife’s disappearance to police. He spent that evening playing online games with a family member.

By this time, members of Columbia’s Chinese Community began to learn about Ji’s disappearance. Fliers were posted around the city. Friends were checking with friends in social media chats trying to come up with a scenario for why Ji might have just up and left her life behind. But those who talked with The Star could only conclude that Ji would never do something to worry her parents and they could not imagine her leaving her child.

The community arranged housing, transportation and food for Ji’s parents when they arrived Oct. 15.

That same day, six days after Ji went missing, police asked Elledge where he thought his wife might be. “He did not want to think about it because he had class,” according to police reports. “He was in his last semester of school before graduation, and just wanted to focus on school and his child.”

Police went to his apartment with a search warrant on Oct. 25, and found Elledge loading his car with clothing and other property as if he were leaving town. And a police document says that a search of his home turned up written statements that “closely matched the statement” he had given officers.

Prosecutors had yet to charge Elledge in his wife’s disappearance. But in late October, Boone County law enforcement, citing the February photos of his baby’s bruising, charged him with child abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. He pleaded not guilty and was held on a $500,000 bond. That case is expected to go to trial in April.

Friday’s grand jury indictment also tacked on a third-degree domestic assault count, in addition to the child abuse and endangerment charges. Elledge’s attorney, John O’Connor, declined to comment on the indictment, according to The Associated Press.

As Elledge has waited in jail, divers searched the Lamine River.

Knight, the prosecutor, who has tried about 30 murder cases over his career, was careful not to reveal too much about the evidence he has and what led to the Feb. 19 murder charge.

He doesn’t know yet when the murder trial might be held. But, unless Ji is found, this could be the third no-body murder case to be tried in Boone County in recent memory, Knight said.

And he said that while “the defendant is presumed innocent unless or until he is proven guilty in court … this is a terrible tragedy what has happened here, and we are going to do everything that we can to assure that justice is secured.”

That task will likely rest with a jury.

So many regrets

Every day since Ren arrived in Missouri she has felt “like I am in a haze all the time. It all feels like a dream. … Maybe we can wake up from our dream.”

She keeps telling herself “Mengqi still might be alive. Don’t think of her as not here anymore.”

And she wants answers. “We don’t want to suspect anyone. We just want him to tell the truth, to tell us what happened so we can bring Mengqi back home.”

Ren is filled with regret, “for letting her come to the U.S. Regret that I did not protect her well. I hope that Mengqi can forgive me.” Again, Ren wept.

She cares for the baby 10 out of 14 days, according to Salladay, who is representing Ren and her husband in a custody case. On the other days, the baby is with Elledge’s mother.

Ren wants to raise her granddaughter.

“Mengqi was our only child, and she is not here anymore. Now our granddaughter is the only thing that we have left,” Ren said.

“We hope that our granddaughter can leave this tragedy behind. We don’t want her to grow up having hatred in her heart. We pray that she can be with us forever because this is what Mengqi would have wanted to happen.”

Anyone with information on the disappearance is asked to contact the Columbia Police Department or call CrimeStoppers at 573-875-8477 (TIPS).

This story was originally published March 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM.

Mará Rose Williams

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4419

Mará Rose Williams is The Star’s Senior Opinion Columnist. She previously was assistant managing editor for race & equity issues, a member of the Star’s Editorial Board and an award-winning columnist. She has written on all things education for The Star since 1998, including issues of inequity in education, teen suicide, universal pre-K, college costs and racism on university campuses. She was a writer on The Star’s 2020 “Truth in Black and White” project and the recipient of the 2021 Eleanor McClatchy Award for exemplary leadership skills and transformative journalism.