Investigators & Asha Degree’s family never gave up: A timeline in case close to Charlotte
Three sheriffs have tried to solve the mystery of what happened to Asha Degree. Two died before anyone found the answer.
Questions — and rumors — still swirl 25 years after the pigtailed 9-year-old vanished into a cold, stormy Valentine’s Night in 2000.
Asha’s fourth grade classmates are now in their 30s. Several FBI and SBI agents on the investigation have retired or died. Still, some recently told The Charlotte Observer, the haunting case crosses their mind daily.
Early on, investigators tried to make sense of how Asha disappeared. Why did she leave her loving home in the middle of the night? Why was she walking on the highway in a storm? The same storm had scared her into her parents’ arms hours before. How did she make it through the sludge and into the roadside shed? Where did she go after that? She couldn’t have just disappeared, right?
Did someone take her?
Who?
Did they kill her?
These questions have clung to Cleveland County officials and residents and internet sleuthers who have latched onto Asha’s case. The Charlotte Observer has tried to answer them, too.
Clues about what happened to the Fallston Elementary fourth grader sporadically popped up in the last two decades. When police in September searched a Shelby home and seized items they say could be related to Asha’s disappearance and death, questions resurfaced.
Here’s a timeline of what happened to Asha, according to more than 100 Observer stories:
Day 1
Sunday, Feb. 13, 2000, 8:30 p.m. — Asha wakes up after “lightning storms and high winds” roll in. She comes out in her nightshirt and sits with her parents, watches some television and goes back to bed around 9 p.m.
Monday, Feb. 14, 2000, 2:30 a.m — Asha’s father, Harold Degree, sees her sleeping in the room she shared with her brother, O’ Bryant Degree. Harold goes to his bedroom, less than five feet away from the kids’ room.
Monday, 3:30 a.m. — A trucker driving down N.C. Highway 18 sees someone fitting Asha’s description. If it is her, she’s more than a mile from her home in the dead of night.
Monday, 4 a.m. — A second trucker sees the girl who looks like Asha and turns his 10-wheeler Sun Drop Bottling Co. truck around on the two-lane, winding road once, twice, then three times. She has a backpack and is wearing “a little dress and white tennis shoes.”
The driver, Jeff Ruppe, tells police the next day when he sees Asha’s photo on the news.
Asha never looked up at him, he says, and she looked like she knew where she was going.
Monday, sometime after 4 a.m. — A girl fitting Asha’s description is seen getting hoisted into a “distinctive vehicle” — a dark green early 1970s Lincoln Mark IV or Ford Thunderbird, or something similar, with rust around the wheels, according to a report. Police will not release this detail until May 2016.
Monday, 6:30 a.m. — Asha’s mother, Iquilla Degree, walks into Asha’s room to wake her up for school. Asha is gone. She misses school for only the second time that year.
Monday, sometime in the morning — About 60 volunteers from fire departments, the Red Cross and the neighborhood gather at Mull’s Memorial Baptist Church, one block away from Asha’s home on Oakcrest Drive. They search for three miles. They find nothing.
Monday, 2 p.m. — SBI agents arrive at Asha’s home.
Monday, Feb. 14, 2000, nighttime — A hail storm rolls in. It’s the only thing that scatters family and neighbors from outside the Degree home. Asha doesn’t have a raincoat with her, her aunt tells the Observer.
Day 2
Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2000, 5 a.m. — Harold Degree goes to sleep after searching for Asha all night. Bleary eyed, he talks to Observer reporter Aileen Soper in Asha’s room. They’ve made her bed. Her posters of NBA players and Winnie the Pooh hang above rose sheets, untouched. A Barbie convertible peaks out of her closet.
Throughout the day, searchers find things they hope are clues — an open barn door, a footprint — but police say they don’t mean anything.
Charles Turner and his family turn in a wallet-sized photo they found on their land, where Asha was last seen, according to truck drivers. It’s not of Asha, and her family doesn’t recognize it.
Dogs cannot pick up Asha’s scent. Infrared equipment can’t find her, either.
Day 3
Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2000 — Cleveland County deputies buy the same shoes Asha was probably wearing to compare footprints in the mud.
None match.
Day 4
Thursday, Feb. 17, 2000 — While searching the Turner land again, volunteers find a candy wrapper. When police ask about it, the Turners turn over a pile of other things they found with the wallet-sized photo of the unknown girl.
They say they found a bow, candy wrappers, a pen and a pencil on Tuesday, but they didn’t think it was important after the photo was a dead end.
The Degrees recognize everything.
It’s Asha’s bow — a hard, plastic yellow one with a teddy bear on it. It’s her favorite candy’s wrapper — root beer-flavored Dum-Dums — and it’s a pencil from their family reunion. It says “ATLANTA” on it.
There’s hope.
Day 5
Friday, Feb. 18, 2000 — Searches — with 500 new volunteers — continue.
Nothing new.
Day 6
Saturday, Feb. 19, 2000 — Searchers find footprints 15 feet apart in a field near the intersection of N.C. 150 and N.C. 180. They mark them with a Styrofoam cup and a can of chewing tobacco.
They move on.
They find two little white socks. It looks like they’d been there for weeks.
They leave them.
Day 7
Sunday, Feb. 19, 2000 — After a collective 9,000 hours of probing the area and returning 200 calls to tipsters with information on where Asha may be, officials call off the search.
Asha’s family, though, keeps combing.
Month 2
March 2000
Billboards go up with Asha’s face on them. Some still stand today.
The Degree family appears on the TV show America’s Most Wanted to drum up attention and tips. A Kissimmee, Florida, woman calls to say she saw Asha in a supermarket.
“It just didn’t fit anything,” Cleveland County Chief Deputy Bob Roadcap said.
Meanwhile, some North Carolina counties launch a pilot program that interrupts broadcasts with information on a missing or kidnapped child. The month-old program was called N.C. Child Alert Notification and mirrored the Amber plan — which is now known as Amber Alert.
Month 3
April 2000
The Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office ups the reward for information leading to Asha from $9,300 to $18,000.
Month 4
May 2000
Asha’s mother returns to work. Her therapist told her that she and Asha’s brother needed a routine to cope.
Month 5
June 2000
Hope dwindles.
Cleveland County Sheriff Dan Crawford tells The Charlotte Observer: “We’re nowhere.” He still drives through Asha’s neighborhood, watching and thinking about everything he knows, hoping to trigger something in his mind that could lead to an answer. “It’s frustrating. When you see the family, you want to tell them something. We haven’t been able to give them anything.”
Month 6
July 2000
An SBI agent acts on a hunch in a different, nearby case. Billy Huddleston, 12, went missing and was found dead in a field. Bobby Richard Taylor Jr., an Oakboro man living on the other side of Charlotte an hour away, was sentenced to life for murder.
Month 7
August 2000
Asha turns 10 on Aug. 5.
Month 8
September 2000
Patrick Terry, 11, goes missing in Shelby. About 100 people searched for him for one day. He woke up to a horse licking his face and found railroad tracks that led him back into town. He hugged his family in the morning and they went to the county fair.
Month 11
December 2000
A stranger from Bermuda sends the Degrees flowers. A note says she’s praying for the family.
Iquilla Degree is touched — but nervous, she told the Observer.
“I don’t trust people no more,” she said. “I try to, but I can’t.”
Year 2
February 2001
One of Iquilla’s former classmates, Barron Ramsey, is in jail with a lengthy criminal record. Looking for a deal to get less time in federal prison for robbing a bank, he tells police and the Observer that he and another Cleveland County man bought drugs in Hickory and were heading back to Shelby when the man, who was driving, hit a girl. She was alive when she got in the car. The man dropped Ramsey at home and came back a few days later to go fishing.
Ramsey said the girl was dead, and he helped dump her in Moss Lake near Kings Mountain.
Police investigated the claim for months. They searched a stretch of N.C. 18 for car parts. They dragged Moss Lake twice. They used an infrared underwater camera and dive teams from Gastonia and York County, S.C.
They found nothing.
May 2001
A rookie NASCAR driver without a primary sponsor to display on the hood of his car raced in Concord with a photo of Asha. He wanted to help.
August 2001
Asha turns 11 on Aug. 5.
A day later, construction worker Terry Flemming finds her book bag three counties away and 26 miles up the same road she was last seen on. It’s wrapped in two black trashbags and farther away than she could have walked on foot, authorities said, indicating she was likely abducted, and possibly killed.
A 100-person search party quickly forms. They search a three-mile area along N.C. 18 — close to where the worker found her bag and where in 2024 “detectives now say they believe Asha was abducted and possibly killed.”
Just over a week later, Asha’s father, Harold Degree, drifted over the center line while driving a Oldsmobile, hitting a pickup truck head-on. He wasn’t working that Monday. He’d taken a vacation day to help build a playground for children in Kingstown — less than 10 miles from where he lived.
September 2001
Search parties for clues were postponed after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
October 2001
Authorities search an 8-mile stretch along N.C. 18.
They find nothing.
News coverage trails off for two years.
September 2003
A man who lives close to where Asha’s backpack was recovered in 2001 confesses to raping and abducting an 11-year-old girl and an 18-year-old woman. Deputies question the man, Danny Ray Johnson, about Asha and eventually rule him out as a suspect in her case. He later pleads guilty in 2004, according to Observer reporting.
November 2004
“The truth about what happened to a Cleveland County girl who disappeared nearly five years ago has been buried under a mountain of questions” and “has gained momentum several times in the past four years, the most recent being this week when state and local authorities began digging behind an abandoned trailer near Lawndale,” the Observer reported.
Onlookers hoped that Asha might have been found. The community whispered that her body had been found. Authorities dispelled that rumor.
April 2005
Police conduct another dig following a tip. Cadaver dogs are present. No new information is released.
July 2005
A person says they saw Asha in a Cleveland County grocery store. It “appeared to be a case of mistaken identity,” authorities said.
August 2005
Asha turns 15.
January 2007
“The cops and media believe that your child is dead, but you can’t give up,” Asha’s mother, Iquilla Degree, says after two Missouri boys who were missing for four years were found.
February 2010
The following is an excerpt from an Observer story by Glenn Burkins, now the publisher of QCity Metro, on the 10-year anniversary of Asha’s disappearance:
To enter the home of Harold and Iquilla Degree is, in some ways, to travel back in time.
Little has changed since the morning of Feb. 14, 2000, the day the couple reported to Cleveland County authorities that their 9-year-old daughter, Asha, was missing.
Their living room is overstuffed with family photos. Asha, her hair in braids, smiles out from many of them, frozen as friends and family remember her.
Despite a decade of speculation, rumors and unanswered questions, the couple, both 40, said they remain firm in their faith that Asha, somewhere, is alive. So convinced, they say, that they have refused to move from the rented, two-bedroom duplex on Oakcrest Drive in Shelby.
“This is the last place she knew where we lived,” Iquilla Degree said in an interview. “My phone number, that was the last number she knew I had. So I refuse to change it.
“I can’t stop change,” the mother continued, “but what I can stop, I have stopped.”
August 2010
Asha turns 20.
February 2015
After five years void of news, The Charlotte division of the FBI says it is “re-examining the case, re-interviewing witnesses and following new leads to determine what happened to Asha.” It also offers a reward of up to $25,000 for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible for her disappearance. In addition to the FBI’s reward, a community group is offering $20,000. That same amount — a total of $45,000 — remains available today.
August 2015
Asha turns 25.
May 2016
The FBI and the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office say someone matching Asha’s description might have been seen getting into a “distinctive vehicle” along N.C. 18 where Asha was last seen.
The car is described as an early 1970s Lincoln Mark IV or possibly a Ford Thunderbird, dark green, with rust around the wheel wells.
September 2017
The FBI announces it is adding “additional resources” to Asha’s case. It does not specify why.
October 2018
The Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office announces two “new possible clues”: a Fallston Elementary School library copy of “McElligot’s Pool” by Dr. Seuss — which shows a fish chasing a worm on a hook on its cover — and a concert T-shirt from New Kids on the Block.
The school’s library records don’t go back to the year of Asha’s disappearance, officers said. They ask anyone who knew of someone who had this Dr. Seuss library book around the time of Asha’s disappearance and lost track of it to call them.
The Sheriff’s Office asked anyone who had a shirt of the 1980s band or knew someone who did — at any time — to call them. They do not specify how the clues are related to the search.
August 2020
Asha turns 30.
September 2024
Cleveland County Sheriff Alan Norman says investigators believe Asha was killed.
Deputies signaled new developments in the case when, in a driveway four miles south from the Shelby home Asha never returned to, they hitched a long green, 1960s style car from Roy and Connie Dedmon’s property. Asha’s brother turns 35 days after police search the properties and his sister’s story is launched back into the news.
February 2025
A week before the 25-year anniversary of Asha’s disappearance, her mother, father and brother walk the same steps authorities believe the 9-year-old took in 2000. They’re joined by more than 50 others.
“At least this year, we know a little bit more than we knew 24 years ago,” said Iquilla Degree, Asha’s mother, to the crowd.
Sheriff Norman promises closure for the family.
He asked that anyone with information on the case call his office at 704-484-4756 or the FBI’s Charlotte office at 704-672-6100.
This story was originally published February 12, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
