Former prosecuting attorney speaks about Elledge murder charge
EDITOR'S NOTE: Law enforcement has referred to Mengqi Ji as Mengqi Ji Elledge. An attorney for her family said Thursday that she never took her husband's last name.
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Prosecutors charged Joseph Elledge with first-degree murder Wednesday in connection to the disappearance of his wife Mengqi Ji.
Ji has been missing since October, and Boone County Prosecutor Dan Knight has named Elledge as the primary suspect in her disappearance.
The probable cause statement in the case said Elledge drove to several areas with access to the Missouri River and to an area he thought was secluded and wooded.
It also said Elledge told investigators he drove to Rocheport but then returned home. According to his cell phone location, he drove to Boonville and then to a river access at the Lamine River.
Police have searched the Lamine River for months in an effort to find Ji, but have not found any evidence.
Former prosecuting attorney Bill Tackett said despite not having a body, a prosecutor could still bring forward first-degree murder charges based on circumstantial evidence.
"It's putting it together, but it has to be something that 12 people can look at and agree, hey, this doesn't make any sense. His movements don't make any sense," he said.
Tackett said the evidence investigators pulled from Elledge's phone will play a major role in the trial.
"With technology tracing the phone and showing the defendant in places where he normally wouldn't go. Showing him for 45 minutes at an undisclosed part of a river," he said. "The piece fit together for a circumstantial case very clearly."
Tackett said, although they may be more difficult to argue, cases like this one are not unusual.
"You would like to have a confession of the defendant, always. But that's just not the way prosecutions work and if you stay around long enough in prosecution you're going to run across a substantial number of circumstantial cases," Tackett said.
