Shelby, NC
CNN
—
A billboard marks the spot where 9-year-old Asha Degree was last seen alive.
For years, her bright eyes have gazed out at drivers on North Carolina Highway 18 as they whiz past, silently imploring them to share any information that could lead to a breakthrough in her missing persons case.
By all accounts, Asha was an introspective and talented child who wore pigtails and loved basketball and spending time with her older brother, O’Bryant.
She rarely opened the front door without her parents’ permission, her family has said, and she was not the type to run away.
And yet, in the wee hours before dawn on Valentine’s Day in 2000, motorists reported seeing a child matching Asha’s description walking down the highway – sightings authorities have treated over the years as fact.
She was never seen again.
“All of a sudden, people who didn’t ordinarily lock their doors started to,” Brandy Beard, a local reporter who grew up in a neighboring county and has covered Asha’s case, told CNN. “As the years went on, people never really forgot.”
Asha’s disappearance gouged a hole in her Shelby, North Carolina, community. Over the last two decades, that vacuum filled with questions: Why did she leave the house? Could she possibly still be alive? And why has her story only recently made national headlines?
Asha’s mother, Iquilla Degree, has said she believes her daughter’s disappearance falls into the “Missing while Black” trap – a phenomenon in which the searches for missing children of color rarely get the attention they rightfully deserve.
But while the rest of the world may have never heard of the missing little girl dubbed “Shelby’s Sweetheart,” law enforcement personnel have diligently continued investigating her disappearance over the last 25 years.
Now, new public documents have thrust Asha’s case back into the spotlight – naming suspects and offering clues that make the answers to this decadeslong mystery feel closer than ever.
The evening before Asha disappeared, a storm swept through her neighborhood. Lightning woke the 9-year-old, the Degree family later told investigators, and she joined her family in the living room, where they watched TV together before Asha went back to bed.
Her father, Harold Degree, told police he checked on Asha in the room she shared with her older brother sometime after midnight, before he went to bed.
It was the last time anyone in the family saw her.
Iquilla Degree went to wake her kids for school around 6 the following morning and realized her daughter was missing, she told Jet Magazine more than a decade after Asha vanished.
“My son O’Bryant was under the covers, as he usually slept,” she recalled. “I realized that Asha was not in her bed.”
Iquilla and her husband combed the house for their daughter, then called around to relatives who lived close by. She wasn’t there.
“That’s when I went into panic mode,” the mother told Jet Magazine. Harold called 911.
In a city as small as Shelby, word of a missing child traveled fast. Soon, family and community members descended on the Degree home – and a search began.
State Highway 18 runs parallel to the street where the Degree family lived and investigators got tips a girl matching Asha’s description had been spotted walking along the road around 4 a.m.
But there was no sign of her that day – and no significant updates in the case for another 18 months.
Then, in August 2001, a construction crew found Asha’s book bag more than 20 miles north of where she was last seen. It had been shoved into black trash bags.
Among the items inside was a New Kids on the Block T-shirt that did not belong to Asha, according to the FBI. Several of the items were sent off for DNA testing.
Years passed and billboards featuring Asha’s glowing, grinning face were put up across the state, offering tens of thousands of dollars in reward money for information that could solve her case. In 2015, Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office began working with the FBI in Charlotte and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to re-examine her disappearance.
The partnership had generated more than 350 leads as of 2020, according to the FBI, including one that would shift the case in a new direction.
Asha may have been seen, a new tip revealed, “being pulled into a 1970’s green Lincoln, Thunderbird, or another similar vehicle” on February 14, 2000, according to police documents. In 2016, the FBI put out a request for any information or sightings of similar cars matching that description.
“Through the years, one thing has never changed and that’s just how badly people want to know what happened to Asha,” Beard said. “People say a whole bunch about the South, but one thing is for certain, and that’s: You don’t mess with our children.”
The years bled into decades with few public signs the investigation remained active. But that all changed last fall, when law enforcement descended on properties owned by a Cleveland County businessman named Roy Lee Dedmon.
Inside the newsroom of CNN affiliate WBTV, Beard said one of her colleagues got a tip: The search of Dedmon’s home was tied to Degree’s case.
“I don’t think a newsroom is ever fully silent,” she said, “but it got a lot quieter.”
At the time, not much was known about Dedmon, a father of three adult daughters who owned and ran nursing homes in the area, Beard’s colleague Cassidy Johncox explained.
But that night, news reports showed officers towing a green 1964 AMC Rambler from the Dedmons’ property. It was strikingly similar to the vehicle investigators described in the 2016 FBI notice.
Reporters at WBTV were among the first to obtain and publish copies of the search warrants for Dedmon’s properties and to get DNA from family members. The documents provided unprecedented insight into the decadeslong investigation of Asha’s disappearance.
The warrants also unequivocally stated for the first time what many had long feared: Authorities now believed Asha Degree “is a victim of homicide, with her body concealed.”
Investigators analyzed evidence recovered from Asha’s book bag for DNA. The results, according to the warrants, narrowed the samples down to two people other than Asha: A man named Russell Bradley Underhill and a “hereditary family member” of Roy Lee Dedmon and his wife, Connie.
Underhill had “lived in at least two facilities operated” by the Dedmons at the time Asha was reported missing, according to the warrants. He died in 2004.
The Dedmons’ three daughters, meanwhile, had all been children when Asha disappeared: Lizzie Dedmon Foster, Sarah Dedmon Caple and AnnaLee Dedmon Ramirez.
“DNA samples indicated the likelihood that the hair stem sample from Asha Degree’s undershirt is a person genetically identical to the DNA standard collected from AnnaLee Victoria Dedmon Ramirez,” the warrant states.
Because the daughters were all young when Degree vanished, investigators allege “adult assistance from Roy Dedmon and Connie Dedmon would have been necessary in the execution and/or concealment” of an unspecified crime and that they obstructed justice.
When details of the warrants were made public in September, the Dedmon family’s attorney held a news conference. Lawyer David Teddy said he felt compelled to speak out “because of the rampant conjecture and speculation that has been happening in our community.”
“Roy Dedmon and his family are just like the rest of us, they don’t know what happened to Asha,” Teddy said at the time. “Like Sheriff (Alan) Norman said, it’s time for the conjecture and the speculation about what happened to her to stop until there are facts, supported facts, that we can rely upon to draw conclusions.”
CNN reached out in recent days to Teddy as well as each family member named in the September warrant. None responded.
An alleged confession and family texts fuel speculation
As news of the latest developments in Asha’s case dominated local headlines, witnesses began to come forward with more information, according to a second wave of search warrants made public last month.
One man told investigators he recalled being at a party in the mid-2000s with the Dedmon sisters and saw the eldest, Lizzie, “‘sobbing and (bawling)’ while being extremely intoxicated,” according to police documents.
He “stated that Lizzie said, ‘I killed Asha Degree,’” the warrant states. The man then heard Sarah tell Lizzie to “’shut the f**k up,’ while she grabbed her head,” according to the warrant. Sarah’s behavior, he added, was out of character.
Investigators gave the man a polygraph test to verify the information he shared; “he passed,” the warrant states. Polygraphs, however, are inadmissible as evidence in most states, including North Carolina.
In October, investigators were granted access to Lizzie’s iCloud account, and several “messages of interest” between the sisters are detailed in police documents.
On September 10, the same day law enforcement began searching the family’s properties, Sarah allegedly began texting with her sister Lizzie.
“They think it’s our shirt. It’s not (Asha’s) shirt. Her mom said it wasn’t hers,” Sarah wrote, according to the warrant. “I don’t remember that shirt. I’m scared though. Dad is probably going to be a huge suspect.”
Two days later, Lizzie texted Sarah after a conversation with Teddy, the family attorney, the warrant states.
“The theory is I did it. Accident. Covered it up,” she wrote, according to the warrant. “No,” Sarah responded, “Why would it be you.”
The warrants state investigators approached Lizzie on September 28 at her home in Texas to discuss the case, but she declined. The following day, Lizzie and Sarah exchanged texts about whether they should cooperate with investigators, the warrant shows.
“Honestly, I mean, I wanna do what dad says. But damn,” Lizzie wrote.
Her sister later responded, “You don’t want something we do or say (to) impact him but we also can’t be living like this either.”
No one has been arrested or charged in connection with Asha’s disappearance – a fact Teddy took pains to stress during the September news conference.
“The connection to Roy Dedmon and his family is tenuous at best,” the defense lawyer said. “And Roy has maintained and his family has maintained – and will continue to maintain – that they’re not involved with Asha’s disappearance and have no information that would help law enforcement figure out what happened to her.”
But, after 25 years, the latest developments have the Shelby community holding its breath and hoping that answers will soon come in Asha’s case.
“People want justice. People want her family to be able to find peace, for her soul to be able to find peace,” Beard said. “People just want this to end.”
Asha has grown up over the years, at least on billboards. The signs have now been updated with a sketch of what the missing little girl might look like if she lived.
Last month, her innocent smile and kind eyes gazed out at a crowd of family and friends who gathered to mark the 25th anniversary of her disappearance. It was an emotional milestone for a family that has never given up hope of finding their little girl.
“I believe she’s still alive,” Iquilla Degree said, “and until somebody can prove me wrong, I’m still going to believe that.”
Then, her voice broke.
“Because all I have is hope.”
CNN’s Zach Wasser and Rachel Wilson contributed to this report.
