A JUNIPER TREE NEEDLE
A HUSBAND’S CALLOUS PLOT WAS UNCOVERED
After murdering his wife in their Missouri apartment in late 2019, Joseph Elledge told police and her family that the mother of one had simply disappeared. But his calculating web of lies was finally exposed when eagle-eyed forensic scientists discovered damning, if unusual, evidence on his boots.
Chinese-born Mengqi Ji moved to the
US to study. She opted for the University of Missouri and a degree in mechanical engineering, graduating in 2014, before taking a job as a supervisor at a factory manufacturing dental products. It was here she met Elledge and, after a whirlwind workplace romance, the couple were married in 2017. The birth of their daughter quickly followed, but a little over two years later, Mengqi was dead.
No one but Elledge can be certain what happened on the day the 28 year old died. A belated post-mortem on her body, which was discovered 17 months after she went missing, established the cause of death as a subdural haematoma – a bleed on the brain usually associated with head injuries. But how Mengqi suffered her fatal injury was fiercely contested in court when Elledge finally faced justice. He claimed it was an accident, while the prosecution portrayed him as a “stone-cold killer”. In the months after Mengqi’s death, however, it seemed Elledge might never find himself inside a courtroom. After reporting his wife missing to the local sheriff ’s department in 2019, he stuck to his story that he had no idea where she was. He even suggested she might have travelled back to China and, with no evidence of wrongdoing and no body, the police were getting nowhere.
BOTANICAL BREAKTHROUGH
Mengqi was eventually found buried in a state park five miles from the family home. It was suspicious that her final resting place was close to where Elledge had proposed to her, but that was circumstantial. What was evidential was that of the 11 soil samples taken from her graveside, seven matched those taken from Elledge’s boots. Even more revealing was the conclusion of a botanical expert that juniper plants and their needles found just metres from the grave matched needles that were visible on the soles of Elledge’s footwear.
Seeds found within both samples of soil provided further evidence that he had visited the area where his wife’s body had been hidden. With a tangible link between Elledge and the grave, he was charged with murder and his trial began in 2021.
Despite sharing a young child, the court were
told of a marriage in terminal decline. Police had uncovered social media posts, as well as audio tapes and a diary, in which Elledge detailed how he and Mengqi increasingly argued and had become physically distant. He also resented the presence of her parents, who had flown from China to stay with the couple following the birth of their granddaughter. By his own admission, Elledge was angry that they did not show him the respect he believed he deserved. There was also the revelation that he had discovered his increasingly estranged wife was secretly talking to a man in China on an instant messaging platform.
The defence insisted Mengqi’s death was accidental. Elledge testified that the couple had argued and begun shoving each other, and during the altercation, she had fallen and hit her head on a kitchen counter. The argument had then subsided and they went to separate bedrooms for the night.
The following morning, he found his wife unresponsive in bed. Speaking in court, he said he had panicked and, rather than notify the authorities, Elledge placed her body in the boot of his car and drove to the nearby state park.
His defence team wanted the case thrown out, while the prosecution demanded a charge of first-degree murder. The legal wranglings that followed resulted in a compromise and the jury opted to consider a charge of seconddegree murder, effectively accepting there was no premeditation in his crime. Elledge was found guilty and given 28 years behind bars, the longest sentence available to the judge.
CHILD ABUSE
“Her husband received one year for every year of her life,” Mengqi’s family said after the verdict. “This doesn’t bring her back.
It doesn’t make the nightmare of waking up every day and not being able to talk to or see your child go away, but it is justice in terms of what the American court system can provide.”
There was, however, more pain for her family. Just four months after his trial, Elledge was back in the dock, charged with abuse or neglect of a child, first-degree endangering the welfare of a child and third-degree domestic assault in relation to his infant daughter. During a police search of his apartment, officers had found devices with photographs and videos of “severe bruising” to the young girl’s backside, which they claimed were the result of Elledge hitting her. “He knowingly caused a child to suffer physical injury, as a result of grabbing or striking,” the 2022 indictment against him read. Elledge initially pleaded not guilty, but changed his plea and was given an additional ten-year sentence to run concurrently with his almost three-decade term for killing his wife. ■