Christopher Sanders (Peoria County Jail mug shot), Mona Ellison (WMBD screengrab)
A 45-year-old convicted murderer found guilty in just 40 minutes back in June was branded an irredeemable “coward” by the trial judge after he refused to face the music Thursday at sentencing in the “exceptionally brutal” death of his ex-girlfriend.
Mona Rae Ellison was 50 years old on Jan. 21, 2021, when she was beaten and strangled to death in Peoria and discarded in the woods of Illinois. She was found days later covered “head to toe” with bruises and stab wounds. At trial, Christopher James Sanders claimed that he wasn’t a killer and only moved the victim’s body from an alley to his home after happening upon her there. According to the defendant, he then moved the body to a wooded area in East Peoria via a taxi cab so he could buy time to find a lawyer, as local CBS affiliate WMBD reported.
Prosecutors with the Peoria County State’s Attorney’s Office grilled Sanders at trial, asking why he never called 911 if he was as innocent as he claimed of murdering a woman who had taken him in when he was homeless.
“You could have said ‘Oh my gosh, I found this body in the alley’ and called police but you didn’t,” Assistant State’s Attorney David Gast reportedly said.
In sum total, the prosecution emphasized that Sanders’ version of events made no sense. In doing so, prosecutors turned a defense remark about fictitious facts on its head.
“[S]ometimes, the fiction is so bad that it’s laughable,” Assistant State’s Attorney Brian FitzSimons reportedly said. FitzSimons went on to argue that the facts warranted nothing less than the maximum punishment: the rest of Sanders’ natural life in prison.
“It wasn’t enough just to hurt her. He did it to inflict pain in a purposeful way. Anyone who does that has no purpose living in any community,” FitzSimons said.
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Jurors didn’t need long to deliberate about what the facts showed and found Sanders guilty of first-degree murder two months ago.
“The evidence presented at trial showed Ellison was covered from head to toe with injuries. She had a fractured nose, a fractured cheek and nearly all her ribs were broken. Her cheek was cut through to her mouth, and Sanders had attempted to stitch that wound back together with a needle and thread that he left in the wound,” the Peoria County State’s Attorney’s Office said. “She had blunt force trauma on every part of her body, inside and out, and was alive through the beating until Sanders choked the life out of her.”
Sanders didn’t do himself any favors by skipping sentencing and staying in his Peoria County jail cell.
While sentencing him to the natural life max for the “exceptionally brutal or heinous” murder, Chief Judge Katherine Gorman of the Tenth Judicial Circuit Court called Sanders a “coward” from the beginning to the end of the case and said that he lied on the stand.
“I can’t find anything redeeming about Sanders,” the judge said.
Mona Rae Ellison was survived by her parents, nieces, nephew, and “many” extended family members, her obituary said.
Prosecutors said that one of Ellison’s nieces spoke at sentencing and only referred to Sanders as the “guilty person.”
“This will not end for us. Our lives forever will be with her in our mourning,” she tearfully said, echoing the grief of Mona Ellison’s longtime friends who have “loved and missed” her so much.
Jail records reviewed by Law&Crime show that before the 2021 murder, Sanders had been booked nine prior times in Peoria between 1996 and 2020 in cases of armed robbery, disorderly conduct, aggravated assault and home invasion, and domestic battery, and failures to appear.
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