Asha Degree disappeared in NC on Valentine’s Day 25 years ago. What do new clues mean?
Asha Degree, by all accounts, was a timid 9-year-old who had a knack for basketball and never opened the front door without permission.
Few people outside of friends and family knew more than that. But the grip her mysterious Valentine’s Day disappearance had on her small North Carolina community and beyond remains strong after 25 years.
Her father says he last saw her snug in her rose-colored bed, nestled below posters of Winnie the Pooh and NBA players, at 2:30 a.m. on Feb. 14, 2000.
Truckers say they saw a girl fitting her description walking early that morning on the side of winding, two-lane Highway 18. Later that week, a family turned in a hair bow, candy wrappers and a pencil with “Atlanta” on it they found in their outbuilding about 600 feet away from the highway. They were Asha’s. Her family had gone to a family reunion to the Georgia city the year prior.
Her backpack was found double-bagged and buried three counties away more than a year later, and in 2016 police said they believed she was last seen being hoisted into a long, retro green car sometime after 4 a.m. that rainy night.
That was the last major development in the case until September, when police searched several properties in Cleveland County and hitched a 1960s green car to a tow truck. In those search warrants, police suggested a theory they had never before publicly asserted: Asha was killed.
Still, no arrests have been made.
“I believe she’s still alive,” said Asha’s mother, Iquilla Degree, to a group of more than 50 people who joined her Saturday, Feb. 8, during a community prayer walk that traced Asha’s last known steps.
“Until somebody can prove me wrong, I’m still going to believe that, because all I have is hope.”
Sheriff Alan Norman — the third sheriff to investigate Asha’s case — promised the Degree family closure at the sunny, 60-degree afternoon walk.
It was far from Asha’s soggy, slippery middle-of-the night trek. Still, even in broad daylight, the steep roadside ditches and rushing traffic threatened trouble.
Questions linger over Asha Degree’s disappearance
In the days after the pigtailed fourth grader vanished from the small-town Shelby community — and in recent interviews with The Charlotte Observer — investigators and neighbors said they were haunted by one persistent thought:
What if that was my daughter?
It drove Bob Roadcap, the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office former chief deputy, back into the office after “five days and nights with no sleep.” The sheriff at the time, Dan Crawford, had told investigators to go home and rest. And yet, Roadcap recalled, he was there, too.
“This is the one case I still think about every day,” said the former deputy, who has been retired since 2001. He said Crawford, his longtime friend, felt the same way about the case until his death in 2015.
Rick Dancy, the former Cleveland County Red Cross director who organized search parties in 2000, drives by a billboard of Asha three times a week.
It advertises a $45,000 reward for information leading to answers. It also shows a rendered image of what Asha would look like now.
She’d be 34.
“It’s almost like watching her grow up, which is painful,” he told the Observer in September. Dancy doesn’t believe Asha is alive, but he “would love to be proved wrong.”
Iquilla and Harold Degree, the couple who met as juniors at Burns High School and became Asha’s parents, have weathered 25 years together without an answer to one agonizing question:
What happened to our daughter?
Nobody has come forward with information or a confession — except for one inmate who was looking to shave time off his stint in federal prison with a confession officers have since ruled ingenuine.
Still, Iquilla is holding out for closure — and Asha’s eventual return.
“A nine year old does not disappear off the face of the earth without somebody knowing something,” she said Saturday.
In search warrants filed and executed in September, Sheriff Alan Norman’s deputies told a judge they believed Asha’s body was concealed.
DNA testing on Asha’s undershirt — which in 2001 was found in her backpack — pointed to Shelby residents: Roy and Connie Dedmon, their daughter, AnnaLee Victoria Dedmon Ramirez, and a man they once took care of, Russell Bradley Underhill, according to court records.
Underhill died in 2004, according to search warrants, and the Dedmons’ daughter was 13 when Asha disappeared.
“Adult assistance from Roy Dedmon and Connie Dedmon would have been necessary in the execution and/or concealment of the crime,” police wrote in search warrants.
When those search warrants led police to search multiple properties owned by the Dedmons, they removed the green, retro car — matching the description of the car investigators say Asha was seen getting hoisted into — from a home on Cherryville Road.
It had damage on the front end, according to search warrants.
A relative in September told police she saw Roy Dedmon “digging a chest deep hole” on that property years ago.
According to the tenant living inside the Cherryville Road home, “there are three rooms locked with padlocks that have remained locked since he moved into the residence.”
Police also searched the Dedmons’ property on Hawthorne Lane — which is registered, according to public records, as a United Daughters of the Confederacy location. Connie Dedmon was the president of the Cleveland Guards Chapter of the nonprofit organization for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers, the Shelby Star reported in 2015.
Authorities searched the Mecklenburg County house where AnnaLee Victoria Dedmon Ramirez and her husband live. No new information has been released since.
David Teddy, who represents Roy Dedmon, held a news conference on the searches in September.
He said Roy Dedmon “has been interviewed by law enforcement authorities and has denied any involvement in the disappearance of Asha Degree.”
Teddy in early February declined to comment on the Dedmons’ involvement as the only suspects currently named in Asha’s disappearance.
Authorities have not made any arrests since the searches, but Asha’s disappearance isn’t a cold case, Norman said. His deputies have been sorting and testing evidence since September.
“We’re always searching for answers,” said O’Bryant Degree, Asha’s older brother, at Saturday’s walk. “You try not to get your hopes up. Yes, you want closure, but now you start rushing the result. Unfortunately, these things take time.”
He said his family “probably could be more demanding of the police department… make them give… certain answers.” But, he said, “just like it’s not easy being her parents and her brother, it’s not easy being an investigator on the case or the detective on the case… everybody just wants to get it right.”
Norman told the Observer the case “will be solved.”
“And, if the right person is reading this in print,” he said. “You know what you did, and it’s quite possible I know who you are.
“Turn yourself in before I knock on your door.”
Why did Asha Degree leave?
Asha, her family says, was quiet and cautious. She wouldn’t even open the door for her aunt “without getting her mother’s permission,” Patricia Banks, Harold Degree’s sister, told the Observer the day after Asha went missing.
For Asha’s family and friends, the mystery doesn’t start with “Where did Asha go?” It starts with “Why did she leave in the first place?”
Her household was known to be loving. Just hours before she maneuvered from her home — a rented, two-bedroom duplex on Oakcrest Drive — to the two-lane highway around the corner, she had crawled out from her bed and onto the family’s couch.
She was scared of the lightning storms and high winds that had rolled in that night. She sat between her parents before going back to her bed in a room she shared with her brother.
That was around 8 p.m. on Feb. 13, 2000. She was in bed, her father told police, sleeping at 2:30 a.m.
At about 6:30 a.m. on Feb. 14 — her parent’s anniversary — Iquilla went to wake up her daughter. She was gone, and she was never seen by her family again.
Her classmates speculated that “The Whipping Boy,” their most recent fourth-grade reading assignment about two youngsters who run away and hide in sewer pipes, could have prompted her uncharacteristic journey outside.
Her family thought Asha might have been upset about fouling out of her basketball game two days earlier. She was a starting player for the Fallston Elementary Bulldogs, and she was upset, her mother and teammates recalled. But she seemed to calm down after a night’s sleep.
Howard Camp, a deacon at Asha’s church, saw her the next morning, he recalled in an interview Feb. 8. She tugged on his pant leg and asked the Sunday-morning question he’d come to expect.
Mr. Camp, how’d I play yesterday? Asha asked.
Honey, you played great, he replied. Better than your brother!
She was savvy, Camp told the Observer, especially for her age. He laughed. The memory of Asha’s grin resurfaced as he stood just inside the family’s church.
That was the last place he saw her.
Police would later establish that two truckers saw a girl matching Asha’s description trekking down Highway 18 at 3:30 a.m. and 4 a.m. A driver for Sun Drop Bottling Co. turned his truck around on the road three times to check on the girl. She never looked up, he said, and veered off into “the fog and darkness,” the Observer reported in 2000.
Like she knew where she was going. Search parties later found some of Asha’s belongings in a shed 600 feet away from the highway.
Sometime after 4 a.m., police told the public in 2016, she was seen getting hoisted into a “distinctive vehicle.”
It was a dark green early 1970s Lincoln Mark IV or Ford Thunderbird, or something similar, with rust around the wheels, according to a report.
A day after Asha’s 11th birthday, a construction worker in August 2001 found her backpack three counties away and 26 miles up the same road where she was reportedly last seen. It was buried further away from her home than she could have possibly walked, authorities said. Her basketball uniform was inside, Iquilla told reporters at the time.
Search parties quickly formed but found nothing.
“My biggest fear is that she is somewhere, hurt, not able to get help,” said then-Cleveland County Sheriff Dan Crawford in 2000. “What if she is only a tenth of a mile further from where we looked?”
About a week after authorities found the backpack, Harold Degree’s Oldsmobile drifted over the center line and hit a pickup truck head-on. He’d taken a vacation day to help build a playground for children in Kingstown, about eight miles from where he lived.
Rumors swirled. People were convinced he’d been involved in his daughter’s disappearance and was trying to commit suicide, Iquilla Degree recalled.
Police have repeatedly gone on the record saying Asha’s family passed every polygraph interview with local authorities and the FBI.
Iquilla, during an interview with the Observer, echoed the same.
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the FBI, the SBI and any other ‘I,’” she said. “If I thought for half a second, a millimeter of a second, that he had something to do with my child being missing… Oh, he would have been dead a long time ago.”
Asha was a daddy’s girl, she said. She still is.
Asha Degree’s family reflects on 25 years
As the case has for 25 years been propelled, stalled and revived, O’Bryant Degree, Asha’s brother, grew up without a room to share and without a best friend.
He’s never called anyone but Asha his “best friend,” he said.
His little sister is just 11 months younger. In the early 2000s, being just a 10-year-old child himself, he rarely spoke to reporters.
“I don’t think it’s really hit him yet,” Harold Degree told the Observer two days after Asha went missing. O’Bryant played a football video game on his Nintendo 64 as his parents spoke to reporters.
Now, O’Bryant told the Observer in an interview Saturday, he’s “taken that torch.” He’s taken it upon himself to speak for his family.
“To my dad, because other people might not say it, I’m going to apologize to you for what you have had to endure for these 25 years of people saying that you had something to do with my sister’s disappearance,” O’Bryant, now a 35-year-old, said to a crowd through tears Saturday. “I know the love you have for her, and I know the love you have for me and my mama. I know you had nothing to do with this…
“I don’t know how you have went through this,” he said, “but I’m glad that you have shown me how to be a man through it all.”
Harold Degree, a quiet man whose family says has the same composure as Asha, spoke during an interview with the Observer in a Bible study room at the small Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Waco on Saturday. He said he knows his son didn’t plan on the emotional address after the walk.
“You can’t change people’s opinions,” he said. “People are going to form opinions about you regardless, whether good or bad. You can’t change it. You just gotta let them say what they’re gonna say and try to move on past it.”
Moving on has been hard, Iquilla said.
She still has the same phone number she had when Asha vanished, and, up until about six years ago, the family kept renting the house Asha went missing from. For nine years after she vanished, they didn’t touch her twin bed.
“It was the only thing I had control over,” Iquilla said.
The family had planned on buying their first home right before Asha disappeared. They shifted their plans for more than two decades until, eventually, Harold said it was time to move.
“I didn’t like it. I cried for about two weeks,” Iquilla said.
Inside the new home, which is closer to their Waco church, there’s no bed waiting for their daughter. They moved that out when O’Bryant’s daughter, who is now 16, was born. Her middle name is Asha.
But there is a softball uniform, Iquilla said. Asha never got to play in it after graduating from T-ball, but the team gave it to her.
The FBI has the one thing she really wants: Asha’s basketball uniform.
This story was originally published February 12, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
