Elledge was convicted in November, as a jury recommended the maximum sentence for second-degree murder of 28 years.

Ji, 28 at the time of her death in October 2019, as Elledge alleged she fell during an argument and out of panic after finding her dead in their bed the next morning, he put her body in the trunk of her car and buried her in Rock Bridge State Park south of Columbia two days later.

After he buried her, Elledge reported her missing and allegedly misled police for months saying he didn’t know what happened to her before her body was found in March 2021.

Boone County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Knight called Elledge during the trial a “stone-cold killer,” who was also the “biggest complainer in the history of the Boone County Jail.”

Knight said Elledge has filed 28 complaints about conditions in the jail, including temperature, noise from the heating system, plumbing, toilets and the TVs in the facility. Elledge reportedly called the constant sound “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Knight also presented arguments during the trial that Elledge should be sentenced for first-degree murder, claiming her death was intentional.

Ji met Elledge after she moved to the U.S. from China to study engineering at the University of Missouri.

Before Jacobs handed down his sentence, which couldn’t have exceeded the jury’s recommended one, Knight called for him to put Elledge behind bars for as long as he could, KOMU-TV reported.

“The defendant deserves no break because he displayed no remorse,” Knight said.

Elledge’s second-degree murder conviction will require him to serve at least 85 percent of his sentence before being eligible for parole.

Prosecutors used social media posts, audiotapes and a journal Elledge kept to document the couple’s volatile relationship.

On Oct. 10, 2019, with the couple’s then-year-old daughter in the car, Elledge drove to Rock Bridge State Park, about 5 miles (8 kilometers) south of Columbia. There, he dug a grave and buried Ji not far from where he had proposed to her. He then returned home and reported her missing.

Elledge’s attorney Scott Rosenblum argued that his client was awkward and made “unbelievably dumb” decisions after Ji died, but that he never intended to kill his wife and should not have been charged with murder. Rosenblum filed a motion for a new trial, but Jacobs denied it.

Elledge said he discovered in the days before Ji’s death that she had been exchanging sexually suggestive messages on social media with a man from China. He also testified that the couple’s relationship suffered because of tension caused by her parents, who moved from China to live with them after their daughter was born in October 2018.

But Knight said in an interview with The Associated Press on Friday night that the defense “fabricated” the story that Ji’s death was accidental. Knight said Rosenblum said in a 2020 bond hearing that Ji “took off.”

He said he wasn’t able to question Elledge or Rosenblum about the discrepancy because of attorney-client privilege.

“I wish I would have been successful in convicting him of murder in the first degree,” Knight said. “It didn’t happen. The defense asked for an outright acquittal. We were a lot closer in getting what we wanted than the defense.”

The couple met in 2015 at Nanova, a company that makes dental products, where Ji was Elledge’s supervisor. They began dating the following year and eventually traveled to China, where Elledge asked Ji’s parents for permission to marry her. The couple married in 2017.

Ji earned a master’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of Missouri in December 2014. Elledge was a student at the university when his wife died.

The family’s attorney, Amy Salladay, said in a statement that Ji’s parents, Ke Ren and Xiaolin Ji, are grateful that Jacobs upheld the jurors’ recommended sentence.

“Her husband received one year for every year of her life,” Salladay said. “This doesn’t bring her back, it doesn’t make the nightmare of waking up every day and not being able to talk or see your child go away but it is justice in terms of what the American court system can provide.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.