Spooky or Not: The Dissapearance of Asha Degree

Among weirdos who spend a lot of time online theorizing over unsolved mysteries, most have a “pet case” that we they come back to again and again. One such case that some people keep coming back to is the disappearance of nine year old Asha Degree in 2000. It is, in my opinion, easily among the most baffling in the annals of American missing persons cases and deserves far more attention than it gets.

Asha, daughter of Harold and Iquilla Degree, lived in a semi-rural area of North Carolina with her younger brother, O’Bryant. Asha and O’Bryant were latchkey kids living in a sheltered and somewhat insular upbringing. The Degrees didn’t have a computer in the house due to Iquilla and Harold’s fear of predators coming into contact with their children. Asha was quiet, shy and well-behaved. According to her mother, she was afraid of dogs, the dark, bad weather and strangers and was content to abide by the rules her parents set. So it came as a shock when she left her house late at three in the morning and walked off, alone, into a stormy night.

Harold Degree, returning home from an evening shift at his job, saw both of his children asleep in the room they shared shortly after midnight on the 12th of February, 2000. He checked again before going to bed himself, at around 2:30, and again saw that they were both asleep. Sometime after Harold’s last check, O’Bryant heard Asha’s bed squeak; he assumed she was just shifting in her sleep and didn’t think anything was amiss.

We now know that Asha was getting out of bed to leave the house. She brought a backpack with several sets of clothes and other personal items and was wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt with no jacket. The weather was bad that night and it was raining.

At some point between 3:45 and 4:15 am, two seperate drivers spotted her heading away from her house. Thinking it odd that such a young child was outside alone at night--much less in a rainstorm--one of the witnesses circled back around to her position several times. Asha, apparently alarmed at this, ran into the woods lining the road. This is the last known sighting of her. 

Iquilla made the devastating discovery that her daughter was missing the next morning, when she woke the children up early to have a bath. Upon discovering that Asha was missing, Iquilla and Harold alerted the police, who arrived quickly and started a search. Friends and neighbours soon joined in. Police dogs were deployed, but were unable to pick up Asha’s scent. A week later, several of Asha’s belongings--candy wrappers, a pencil, a marker and a hair bow--were found in a shed near where Asha ran into the woods.

The trail went cold until August next year, when construction workers found Asha’s backpack, wrapped in plastic and buried 26 miles from her hometown. And...that’s it. No further evidence has ever been found. The bag was taken for forensic testing, but the results have not been shared with the public.

At first glance, we don’t have a lot to work with. But by looking carefully over the facts of the case, we can start to come to some tentative conclusions.

First off, the state of Asha’s backpack points pretty definitively to the involvement of someone else. While the sweet wrappers and other personal effects at the shed were likely left by Asha accidentally, the pack was obviously buried in an attempt to dispose of it. It strains credulity that a nine year old girl could have made it 26 miles from her home and then buried her belongings without being spotted by anyone (ignoring the question of why she would do that to begin with). Clearly, there was an unknown adult involved.

From here, we can make another conclusion: if Asha left the house at the behest of an adult, it was likely someone she knew. According to her parents, she was afraid of strangers. We saw this demonstrated in the way she responded to a driver showing interest in her--by running into the woods. That level of wariness tells me that she wouldn’t have been likely to leave her house in the middle of the night and go trekking around in the rain at the request of someone she didn’t know and trust.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that she left the house entirely unprompted, and just happened to run into someone who meant her harm. Chance fatal encounters do occur, but despite what crime procedurals would have you believe the world isn’t swarming with serial killers and predators waiting to snatch anyone who leaves their home at night, and I’m skeptical about Asha happening to run into someone dangerous in the small amount of ground she could have covered in the hours before people started looking for her. It’s obviously possible, but on the balance of probability I’m leaning towards the involvement of someone else.

As to who that person might be... I have no idea. There have never been any suspects. Naturally, a lot of people gravitate towards Asha's parents as being involved, but there's zero evidence implicating them in her disappearance in any way.

This, to me, is simultaneously the most tragic and the scariest thing about this case: the idea that even a sheltered child whose parents did everything in their power to keep her from bad influences could have been in contact with someone who meant her harm, and apparently no one knew about it.

It's for this reason that I'm going to designate this case…