Asha Degree

In the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2000, during a cold winter storm, a truck driver on a two-lane highway outside Shelby, North Carolina, saw something strange in his headlights.

It was a little girl, walking alone along the side of Highway 18, in the dark and the rain. She was wearing white pants and a white long-sleeved shirt. It was around four o’clock in the morning.

The driver thought it was odd, and he turned his truck around to pass her again. Another driver noticed her too. When the truck driver came back toward her, he later said, the little girl ran off the road and into the woods.

She was nine years old. Her name was Asha Degree. And she has never been seen again.

Asha

Asha lived with her parents, Harold and Iquilla Degree, and her ten-year-old brother, O’Bryant, in a small brick house on a country road outside Shelby, a town in the foothills of western North Carolina. She was in the fourth grade. She was a shy, careful, well-behaved girl, by every account — an honor student who played on the school basketball team and was afraid of the dark and of dogs. Her parents said she had never run away and had never shown any sign that she wanted to.

The day before she disappeared, a Sunday, Asha’s basketball team lost a game. It was the only game they’d lost all season, and Asha had fouled out. She was upset, but her family said she seemed to get over it. That evening, there was a power outage caused by a car accident nearby, and the family went to bed around eight o’clock by candlelight, once the power came back on.

Asha and her brother shared a room. Her father checked on them around 2:30 a.m. — he’d been up late — and saw both children in their beds. At 5:45 a.m., her mother went to wake them for school.

Asha’s bed was empty.

The Road

The family searched the house and the yard, then called relatives, then called the police. By the time officers arrived, it was clear that Asha had left the house sometime between 2:30 and 5:45 in the morning, during a heavy rainstorm, apparently on her own. There was no sign of a break-in. She had taken a backpack, packed with clothes.

The truck driver and another motorist who had seen the little girl on Highway 18 came forward. They said they’d seen her walking south along the highway, about a mile and a half from her home, sometime between 3:30 and 4:15 a.m. It was pouring rain, cold and dark, with winds strong enough to bring down tree limbs.

The next day, searchers found a few traces of her near the highway, in a shed at a business on a road nearby: candy wrappers, a pencil, a marker and a hair bow — a Mickey Mouse bow — that her family identified as hers. It looked as if she had taken shelter there for a while. And then the trail went cold.

The Backpack

For eighteen months, there was nothing.

Then, in August 2001, a construction worker clearing land off Highway 18 in neighboring Burke County, about twenty-six miles north of Shelby, uncovered a bundle buried in the dirt. It was Asha’s backpack, wrapped in two plastic trash bags. Inside were her things — and some things that didn’t belong to her, including a T-shirt from a band Asha didn’t know and a book that wasn’t hers.

The backpack was found far from where Asha had last been seen, and in a different direction from the one she had been walking. Someone had put it there.

The Questions

Asha’s disappearance has baffled investigators and the public for more than a quarter of a century.

Why would a shy, careful nine-year-old girl, who was afraid of the dark, leave her warm house in the middle of the night, in a violent rainstorm, with a backpack packed with clothes? Some investigators believed she must have been planning to meet someone, and that she had been lured. Others wondered if she was trying to run away after the lost basketball game, or for some other reason no one knew about. Her parents never believed she would have left on her own without someone influencing her.

In 2016, the FBI announced that witnesses had seen Asha getting into a car along Highway 18 that morning. They released a description of the vehicle: an early-1970s Lincoln Continental Mark IV or Ford Thunderbird, dark green, with possible rust around the wheel wells. They asked anyone who had known someone with a car like that in 2000 to come forward.

New Developments

In recent years, the investigation has moved forward in ways the Degree family had waited decades to see.

Starting in 2024, investigators served search warrants on properties connected to a local family and seized a vehicle, and court documents named several members of that family as suspects. According to the warrants, DNA from items found with Asha’s backpack was linked to people connected to the family. Investigators have said they believe Asha was killed and her body hidden.

It’s important to say clearly: as of this writing, no one has been charged in connection with Asha’s disappearance, and the allegations in those documents have not been tested in court. Everyone named is presumed innocent. But for the first time in a quarter of a century, it appears that investigators believe they are close to the truth.

The Walk

Every year on the anniversary of her disappearance, Asha’s family and community walk the route she took that night, along Highway 18 in Shelby, in her memory. Her parents have never moved from the house she left. They have said they want to be there if she ever comes home.