This year marks 26 years since 9-year-old Asha Jaquilla Degree walked out of her family’s home in Shelby, North Carolina, during the early hours of Valentine’s Day and disappeared into the dark.
Asha’s case remains one of the most haunting child disappearances in modern American crime history. For years, no one could explain why a cautious little girl would leave home at all.
Highlights
- Asha Degree disappeared in 2000 after leaving her home alone during a storm, with witnesses spotting her on a highway.
- Her backpack was later found buried miles away, but the case remained unsolved for decades.
- New warrants, DNA links, and a reported confession have shifted the investigation toward a specific family.
It was a stormy night. Asha’s family had just returned from a family gathering following a church visit. Everything seemed normal. However, deep into the night, 9-year-old Asha woke up, packed a bag, and walked into the wilds.
She was never seen again.
The case continues to move forward, with an entire family identified as suspects and an ever-increasing reward for anyone who can help close it.
One night, 26 years ago, 9-year-old Asha Degree packed her little bag and walked into the night, forever
Image credits: Facebook
Asha was born on August 5, 1990, to Harold and Iquilla Degree, who had married on Valentine’s Day in 1988. They were raising Asha and her older brother, O’Bryant, in a house on Oakcrest Drive in a quiet area north of Shelby.
Harold worked as a dock loader, and Iquilla worked as a piano builder. Their life centered on school, church, and their extended family. The children came home after school, did their homework, and lived within the rules their parents believed kept them safe.
There was no computer in the house.
Years later, Iquilla recalled exactly why. “Every time you turned on the TV there was some pe**phile who had lured somebody’s child away, via the Internet,” she said. She described Asha as careful, shy, and obedient.
“She was scared to d**th of dogs,” Iquilla later said. “I never thought she would go out of the house.”
Image credits: FBI
In the days before she disappeared, nothing in Asha’s life suggested the kind of crisis that usually precedes a child running away. She was in fourth grade at Fallston Elementary.
On Friday, February 11, 2000, schools were closed, and she and her brother spent the day at their aunt’s house before heading to basketball practice.
The next day, Asha’s team lost its first game of the season, and she fouled out. Her parents said she cried with her teammates afterward, but by later that day, she seemed to have moved on and stayed to watch her brother’s game.
On Sunday, February 13, the family went to church from a relative’s house and returned home that evening. By all outward appearances, it had been an ordinary weekend.
Then came the night that would stop time for her family.
Image credits: FBI
Around 8 pm on February 13, Asha and O’Bryant went to bed in the room they shared. Not long after, a nearby car accident knocked out the power in the neighborhood. The lights came back on at 12:30 am on February 14, and Harold checked on the children.
Both were asleep.
He looked in again shortly before going to bed around 2:30 am and saw them both there once more. Sometime after that, O’Bryant heard Asha’s bed squeak, but did not think much of it.
He assumed she was turning in her sleep.
Instead, investigators came to believe, Asha got up, took a bookbag she had packed in advance with clothing and personal items, and walked out the front door, never to be seen again.
Witnesses reported seeing a small girl alone, running off the roadside and into the woods
Image credits: WBTV News
What happened next is one of the reasons the case has never let go of the public imagination.
Between about 3:45 and 4:15 am, during heavy rain and wind, at least two motorists reported seeing a small girl walking south along Highway 18.
One of them, disturbed by the sight, turned his car around because he thought it was “strange such a small child would be out by herself at that hour.” He circled back several times. When he approached, the girl ran off the roadside into the woods and disappeared.
A witness later described the conditions that night by saying there was a “storm raging.”
Investigators became convinced the child was Asha because the clothing matched. Sheriff Dan Crawford said, “We’re pretty sure it was her because the descriptions they gave are consistent with what we know she was wearing.”
Image credits: FBI
Back at the Degree house, the first sign that something was terribly wrong came at 5:45 am.
Iquilla woke up to start the children’s morning routine. Because of the power outage the night before, they had not bathed, so she began drawing water. When she went to wake them before their 6:30 alarm, O’Bryant was in bed, but Asha was gone.
She searched the house, then the family cars, then called Harold’s mother across the street. Asha was not there either.
“That’s when I went into panic mode,” Iquilla later said. “I heard a car next door ... I put shoes on and ran outside.” Her mother told her to call the police. By 6:40 am, the first officers were at the home.
The search was immediate and desperate. Police dogs could not find a scent trail. Iquilla ran through the neighborhood, calling her daughter’s name. Friends, relatives, neighbors, and church members rushed in to help.
By the end of the first day, almost nothing had turned up.
The only item recovered was a mitten that Iquilla said did not belong to Asha. Then the news reports brought the key witness statements. The two drivers who had seen the child on Highway 18 came forward after watching television coverage of the disappearance.
Their accounts gave the investigation its first real path, but not the answer everyone needed.
Construction workers found Asha’s bookbag in 2001, buried and wrapped in trash bags
Image credits: Facebook
The next day, investigators found the first cluster of personal items near a shed at a nearby business along the highway, close to the spot where Asha had reportedly run into the woods. There were candy wrappers, a pencil, a green marker, and a yellow hair bow that her parents recognized as hers.
There was also a wallet-sized photograph of another girl the Degrees did not know.
On February 16, Iquilla realized that some of Asha’s favorite clothes were also missing from her bedroom, including blue jeans with a red stripe.
A week later, after 9,000 man hours had been poured into searching the area, the official search was called off. More than 300 leads had come in. None broke the case open. Sheriff Crawford admitted the truth plainly:
“We have never really had that first good, substantial lead.”
Image credits: FBI
Even then, investigators did not have a clean theory. Asha had clearly prepared for the trip by packing her bag. Yet she did not fit the profile of a runaway, and there was no known trouble at home, no pattern of rebellion, no school crisis, no abuse allegation, no obvious trigger.
Still, investigators believed she had likely left on her own and then either got off track or was abducted after leaving the house. The FBI and the North Carolina SBI joined the investigation.
By then, the case had become a matter of national interest.
The Degree family appeared on The Montel Williams Show. America’s Most Wanted and The Oprah Winfrey Show also covered the disappearance. In March 2000, police placed a full-size billboard with Asha’s image along Highway 18 near where she had last been seen.
Then, in August 2001, came a disturbing discovery.
Image credits: FBI
During a construction project near Morganton, about 26 miles north of Shelby, workers found Asha’s bookbag. It was wrapped inside two black trash bags and buried. The worker who found it said the bag had Asha’s name and phone number inside.
The FBI sent it to Quantico for forensic analysis. In 2020, investigators disclosed that the backpack also contained two items that did not appear to have belonged to Asha before her disappearance: a copy of Dr. Seuss’s McElligot’s Pool from her school library and a New Kids on the Block T-shirt.
For a long time after that, the case stalled. Tips came in, but they led nowhere.
In 2004, investigators dug at an intersection in Lawndale after receiving information from a jail inmate. The bones found there were from an animal. The Degrees kept Asha’s name alive with annual awareness walks and later created a scholarship in her honor.
Her parents filled their house with photographs of her and age-progressed images showing what she might look like as an adult.
“I fully expect her to walk through the door,” Iquilla said.
A 2024 breakthrough led investigators to claim Asha had been the victim of a homicide
Image credits: WBTV News
The investigation regained momentum in 2015, when the FBI formally announced a renewed review of the case, a new round of witness interviews, and a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
In May 2016, there came a crucial new public detail. Investigators said Asha may have been seen getting into a dark green car from the early 1970s, likely a Lincoln Continental Mark IV or a Ford Thunderbird, along Highway 18 that night.
Image credits: FBI
In September 2017, the FBI deployed its Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team to Cleveland County, and by the following year, detectives publicly asked for information about the unusual items from Asha’s backpack, specifically the McElligot’s Pool book and the New Kids on the Block shirt.
The real break, however, came much later.
Image credits: FBI
In September 2024, investigators executed a series of search warrants that marked the most dramatic turn in the case in years and brought a new family to the center of the investigation: Roy and Connie Dedmon, a Cleveland County couple later identified in warrants as suspects, along with members of their family.
Authorities have said the Dedmons had no known prior connection to Asha or her relatives.
Image credits: WCNC
The searches were based on what investigators described as physical evidence, and the warrants stated in direct terms for the first time that they believed Asha had been the victim of homicide and that her body had been concealed.
During those searches, law enforcement seized multiple items of interest, including a green 1964 AMC Rambler from a Dedmon property.
Image credits: WCNC
They also said DNA from items in Asha’s backpack linked AnnaLee Dedmon Ramirez and Russell Bradley Underhill, a man who had lived in facilities owned by the Dedmons and who passed away in 2004.
Another hair found on Asha’s undershirt was said to belong to AnnaLee Dedmon. By February 13, 2025, Roy and Connie Dedmon had been identified as suspects in search warrants. Still, no one had been arrested or charged.
Then came the allegation that changed the public’s understanding of how investigators may have gotten there.
A man connected to the Dedmons accused one of them of having confessed to Asha’s homicide
Image credits: X
According to search warrants made public in February 2025, a man told detectives that in the mid-2000s, when he was in his 20s, he spent time at bars and house parties with Lizzie Dedmon Foster and Sarah Dedmon Caple.
One night, he said, he saw Foster drunk, visibly distraught, “sobbing and bawling,” when she repeatedly blurted out that she had taken the life of Asha Degree.
Image credits: WCNC
He told investigators Sarah then turned stern and told her to “shut the f*** up.” The witness later said he was “100% positive” about what he had heard. Investigators said he passed a polygraph, though those results are not admissible in North Carolina.
The same warrants contained text messages that only deepened the suspicion.
Image credits: X
In one exchange from September 12, 2024, Foster texted Sarah after speaking with the family lawyer: “The theory is I did it. Accident. Covered it up.” In another message to her ex-husband, Foster wrote, “I feel so horrible” and then, “Idk what to do. I caused this.”
Image credits: FBI
Investigators said they believed Foster, Sarah, and Roy Dedmon may have obstructed justice in connection with Asha’s disappearance.
Because the Dedmon girls had been between 13 and 16 years old in 2000, investigators wrote that adult assistance from Roy and Connie Dedmon “would have been necessary in the execution and/or concealment of the crime.”
As of 2026, no individual has been charged in connection with Asha’s disappearance
Image credits: WBTV
The Dedmon family has denied involvement. In July 2025, a spokesperson for the family, Skip Foster, said they were stepping forward because only one version of events had been heard.
“There’s a courtroom — and then there’s the courtroom of public opinion,” he said. “And there’s only been one side of this story told.”
He argued the Dedmons did not own the green AMC Rambler at the time Asha disappeared, saying public records show it was not titled or registered in their name until a month later. At the same time, he said the family wanted answers too.
“They want to find out what happened as much as anybody,” he said. “But they want their story told.”
The investigation has continued to move.
Image credits: WCNC
In April 2025, authorities searched a Lincoln County property. In May 2025, the combined reward rose to $75,000. By June, an additional contribution pushed it to $100,000, and new billboards went up along Highway 18 and near Asha’s church reflecting the increased amount.
Yet, even as investigators now openly treat the case as a homicide, Asha’s mother has held on to a different belief.
Image credits: WBTV
February 14, 2026, marked the 26th anniversary of Asha Jaquilla Degree’s disappearance. Her family still holds hope that she’ll come back.
“I do not believe she is d**d. And I know someone knows something,” Iquilla Degree said. “I’m not crazy enough to think that a 9-year-old can disappear into thin air without somebody knowing something.”
Image credits: Missing Cleveland County
Anyone with information can call the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office at 704-484-4788, or the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation at 919-662-4500.
"This case haunts me." The search for answers continues two decades later
