“I keep thinking about how she never screamed. Just took it like a champ,” John Wonder messaged a friend as he drove toward Nebraska, away from the Missouri home he shared with his wife and two children. “What a gal.”
That was shortly before 9 a.m. on September 22 — more than an hour and a half before police found the body of 29-year-old Ashli Ehrhardt in the couple’s Northland Kansas City home. A probable cause statement says that Wonder cut and strangled Ehrhardt. His surname was found written on her leg in blood, the Kansas City Star reports.
The couple was going through a divorce, and one of Wonder’s parents told investigators that he was to move out of the house on October 1.
Gerhardt and Wonder worked at the same company, and their employer asked police for a welfare check when neither showed up for work that morning. Officers responded at about 10:30 a.m., meeting the parents of both at the home. The front door was latched from the inside, but a sliding glass door on the deck was unlocked.
They found Erhardt’s body in a lower level laundry room with a belt around her neck and multiple puncture wounds on her side. She was nude from the waste down, according to a probable cause statement for Wonder’s arrest.
Investigators also found a large butcher knife and a meat cleaver near the body.
Investigators piecing together the story learned that Wonder had dropped the couple’s 2- and 4-year-old children off at Ehrhardt’s parents home at about 8:20 a.m., but left them on the porch and drove away rather than bringing them inside as he usually did.
Overnight, he left a Facebook message for a friend — who was at work and didn’t see the messages until much later — saying he was going to ditch his phone and was heading toward Fargo because he felt like “driving far, far away.” Shortly after 7:30 a.m., he messaged again, saying he hadn’t cried and “I still feel nothing.” He said he left Ehrhardt’s gemstones next to her body.
At 8:50, he wrote, “I’m in the car. I have no doubt I will be caught today. I keep thinking about how she never screamed. Just took it like a champ. What a gal. To honor her, I will not go out by a gunshot (suicide by cop), but hopefully a similar fate.”
At 10:33 a.m., he left a last message: “I’m guessing they will be finding her body right about now. I started getting calls at 9:30 a.m.
Ten minutes later, his sister texted him, asking where he was. “Hey kiddo,” he replied. “Sorry about the mess. For the record: it’s way easier and much more satisfying than you can imagine. See you around.”
Wonder was later tracked down in Valentine, Nebraska, about 8 hours from Kansas City and not far from the South Dakota state line. He’s being held there on a $1 million bond pending extradition, according to KSHB.
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[Featured image: Ashli Ehrhardt/Facebook and John Wonder/Cherry County Sheriff’s Office]
