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Hi, Crime Dunkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.
And if you are watching this episode on YouTube, you might notice I have a special guest with me today.
This has been a wild couple of weeks when it comes to updates in cold cases.
And one of North Carolina's most infamous cases, the disappearance of Asia Degree, was the latest to break.
And when I hear cold cases in North Carolina, there is one name that comes to mind.
Hi, everybody. Dillian DeAnne right here, host of CounterClock and Park Predators and proud North Carolina resident for most of my life.
Thank God we have a resident expert on call for all things North Carolina because when this happened, I was feverishly texting you.
I was like, you need to come tell this story.
You need to get all the search warrants and like get on a plane and come to Indianapolis immediately.
You were not in Indianapolis a day ago.
No, I was at home. And honestly, I think it was like within an hour of you sending me like that first text a couple days ago.
You're asking me like, hey, come to Indy in February from Florida, which like for any case, like, no, I would not do.
But because it is this case, I knew like, OK, I got to get my hands on these search warrants.
I'm totally down. And guess what she did.
So we are going to shake things up a bit today.
Britt and I actually covered this case on Crime Junkie way back in January of 2019.
But instead of the throwback to that episode, Delia and I are going to walk you through this case with fresh eyes and a whole new perspective, because what has unfolded recently, I think kind of changes everything.
It really does. And I've known about this case probably, you know, she was nine years old when she disappeared on Valentine's Day at 2000.
And so I've known about it for a long time.
And it really is one of those cases where, you know, if you're local and it was locally known well, but like agencies and news outlets outside of the state of North Carolina really didn't cover it much until recently.
And everyone is talking about this, like Crime Juggies, you are blowing up our DMs.
I hear you. And I am ready to jump right in because there's a ton of new information to cover.
But I do want to tell people like how we got here a little bit.
And the reason I was like feverishly texting you because the timing of all this is a little wild.
Yeah, it is really wild because I was also just texting you like a week ago saying like, hey, I'm looking at maybe like what's the next thing for counterclock, like what's the future season of counterclock or whatever.
And so I had brought up to you, I was like, you know, is there a world in which I can do a missing person's case on counterclock?
I was like, I needed the actual text.
I know. Like this might be the worst idea I've ever had.
I know. Because I've never done that.
I've never done a missing case on counterclock.
Like in order to do that, it would have to be like the right fit.
And we were kind of like talking about it.
And really, like Aisha's case came to top of mind.
But also to, you know, where she disappeared from is not that far from like the Winston -Salem area and the Charlotte area, which is where I spent a ton of time for.
Those are your stomping grounds.
I know for Counterclockwise season seven.
So I've really been inundated in that area.
And so, you know, it made me have more interest with that.
But then also I'd interviewed an FBI agent a couple of years back for Dark Arenas.
His name is Jim Grenosio.
And he actually was the FBI CARD team leader on Asha's case.
And CARD is Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team by the FBI.
So I got to know, like, some people with the FBI that had worked the case.
Like, I felt like I had some ends.
And so that's why I kind of was like, maybe as a journalist, this is, like, my way of trying to tackle it or whatever.
Delia tells me she's like, I'm going to just, like, reach out to some people, see if I can make some contact.
But nobody had reached back out to you.
And it's because it turns out everyone's been really busy.
Yeah. So I actually made my first, I told you, I made my kind of, like, first pass at reaching out to the Cleveland County Sheriff's Office, which is in charge of Asia's case.
and I knew like okay I need them to kind of be on board right and so then ghosted like nothing and then all of these like new things happened I'm like okay yeah they've been like this all makes sense uh you know why I didn't give it back yeah they've been they've been a bit busy like I said so tbd on the next
season of counter clock we'll see there might be another case for you to solve if this one gets solved but Delia's loss for counter clock is crime junkies gain because it has given her and I time to deep dive into all the new updates and you get to hear them right now.
So let's not waste a single moment.
We have a lot to get into.
It all starts on Valentine's Day morning in 2000.
Aisha Degree is nine years old and she's living with her mom and dad, Iquilla and Harold, and her 10 -year -old brother, O 'Brien.
The family's apartment is in Shelby, North Carolina, which is about an hour directly west of Charlotte, if I've got that right, Delia?
Yeah. Okay. So the degrees go to church on Sunday, February 13th.
They have lunch at one of Aisha's aunt's houses, which is just down the street from their place.
And then they turn in for the day at around like 8 .30 p .m.
Harold goes to work at a second job that he has, and Iquilla spent the evening with O 'Brien and Aisha.
Now, normally Iquilla would give her kids a bath that night, but there had been some kind of car accident or, like, crash near their home that had kind of, I guess, knocked out their power.
So, their normal routine is basically just, like, out the window for that night.
And so because of that, Iquilla had planned to just, like, do it all the next morning, which would be Monday, February 14th, which is, of course, Valentine's Day.
So overnight, between the 13th and 14th, sometime between 1230 and 230, 30, Harold gets home from his second job, and before he goes to bed, he checks on his kids.
Aisha and her brother actually share a room, so he was able to peek in and lay eyes on both of them at the same time.
By 5 .45 in the morning, Iquilla is up for the day, and she goes to start the kids' bath like she planned, do the whole morning routine thing so they can get out the door for school by 6 .30.
But when she enters O 'Brien and Aisha's room, she only sees O 'Brien asleep under his covers.
Aisha's just gone. So the family searches all over their house.
They search in the cars.
They have, like, talking to family members who live nearby and they're getting frantic as more and more time goes by and they can't find Aisha after doing all of that.
So they decide at around 6 .30 a .m., like, okay, now it's time to call the police, right?
Like, they don't wait all day long.
By 6 .30, they know something is wrong.
So Harold gets on the phone with 911 And actually, back when Britt and I did our original episode, I had found a transcript of the 911 call.
And she and I actually voiced it.
So I will give everyone a throwback of me reading Harold's words and Britt as the dispatcher.
911? Yes, I'd like to report a child missing.
From where? From my house.
What's your address?
3404 Oak Crest Drive.
Is this an apartment?
Yeah. And which apartment?
Apartment 3 -4 -0 -6. Okay, is she missing from 3 -4 -0 -4 or 3 -4 -0 -6?
3 -4 -0 -4, I mean. There's not an apartment number?
It's 3 -4... No, no.
It's not like an A or B?
No, huh? And what's your name?
Harold Degree. Your phone number, Harold?
The next -door neighbor said she went down the road and said that she was just a kid on the road, What's the child's name?
Asha Degree. What's her full name?
Asha Draquilla Degree.
Can you spell that for me, please?
A -S -H -A -J -A -Q -U -A -I -L...
J -A -what? J -A -Q -U...
I mean, yeah, J -A -Q -U -A -I -L -L -A.
Degree? Yeah, yeah.
How old is she? Nine.
White or black? Black.
When did you last see her, Harold?
Last time I went to bed.
She was in bed. We got up this morning, called her to get up to school, and she wasn't there, and her book bag's missing, and her pocketbook.
So you don't know if she got dressed or if she still got on her bedclothes or what?
We don't know. Was the door open or anything?
No. Her brother sleeps in there with her, and when he was in there, he didn't hear her when she got up.
Okay. All right, Harold.
I will get an officer to get in touch with you just as soon as possible.
If you do happen to locate her, please call us back and let us know, okay?
Okay. Thank you. Bye -bye.
The Cleveland County Sheriff's Office responds to that call by 6 .40 in the morning.
And right away, they're using scent dogs and sending out more deputies to look for Aisha.
By 7 a .m., the degree's friends and neighbors are all awake and they learn what's going on.
And initially, investigators look for signs of forced entry at the family's house.
You know, like anything that might indicate an intruder came in.
But there's just none of that.
In fact, based on what Harold told the dispatcher, which was that some of Asha's things like her backpack and pocketbook and like shoes and stuff were missing.
They're also considering whether there's a possibility she could have just walked away on her own.
Right. Yeah. I remember that theory cropping up early on.
Like, did she just decide to leave her life?
But I don't think that lasted very long because I think it became pretty clear, at least from information her parents told authorities, that Aisha, just like, she wasn't the kind of girl to venture off like that on her own.
And she's nine. She's, like, still little, too.
Yeah, and she, like, reportedly was very timid, shy, super afraid of the dark and stuff.
So, and not to mention, she had, by all accounts, a really good home life.
Exactly. But for some reason, and a reason no one could really explain, her stuff is gone.
Oh, and I might have forgotten to mention this, but all of the doors to the Degrees' house were reported to have been locked when everyone woke up.
And interestingly, Aisha did have her own spare key in her book bag.
So I think maybe that kind of also made people assume that she might have left on her own and then took her stuff, used her key to lock up.
Otherwise, why was everything, like, locked up like that?
Right. Yeah, I remember the key thing.
And I don't think anyone disputes that she physically left on her own.
But I think the big question is why.
And I know there was some coverage that said she'd fouled out of a basketball game the Saturday night before she vanished.
But, like, that's hardly a reason to just, like, take off.
I mean, I know that you're nine years old, but no?
You know, yeah, I think that's always been a bit of a stretch, like, of an assumption, at least in my mind.
And it's never been definitively stated as the reason she left.
To your point, she had a good home life as far as we know.
So I think that people were just, like, looking for anything.
And that's, like, the biggest wrong thing in the world of a nine -year -old.
Anyway, fast forward a little bit, and the next big thing that comes up to investigators is that a motorist was apparently driving along Highway 18, which is this two -lane road near the family's house.
And this motorist tells authorities that they saw a young girl who matches Aisha's description walking along that roadway sometime between 3 .30 in the morning and 4 o 'clock in the morning.
Now, where she is seen is like a mile from her front door and she's headed into the town of Shelby.
But at the time, it was like raining and storming, which I think is important.
And other than the fact that this motorist saw her, it doesn't seem like they were able to gather anything else and potentially because of the rain and the storm.
The only really big detail is that when Aisha is reportedly seen by this person, she is not in her nightgown that she'd been wearing when her mom put her to bed the night before.
Now she's actually said to have been wearing this long sleeve white shirt and pants.
So she's like dressed in her normal like day clothes.
Now, there's another sighting of her by a truck driver who said that he made a U -turn to try and see if she needed help.
But for some reason, when he got closer to her and asked her if she was OK, she just like ran off into the tree line.
And that was the last reported sighting of Asha ever that we knew about at the time.
But then like two days later, though, don't the cops find some of her stuff?
Right. So that happens on February 17th.
authorities who were still searching for her like high and low all over the area at this point.
They're like searching a rural property off Highway 18.
And they end up talking to this lady there who tells them that on February 15th, so that would have been the day after Aisha vanished, this woman found a random Mickey Mouse hair bow, a green marker and a pencil inside of a shed.
And the items were just kind of like tossed right on the ground near the doorway of this shed.
And when law enforcement, which at this point, by the way, includes the FBI, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, when they come in and they do their own search of this shed, they find a bunch of candy wrappers that match some of the candy that Aisha had gotten for Valentine's Day weekend
before she vanished.
But this doesn't lead them to Aisha, and they don't get another lead for more than a year after that.
It's not until early August of 2001 that a contractor digging an access road for a new house about 50 yards away from Highway 18 near this place called Burke County, which is more than 25 miles from the Degrees home.
This guy finds a black trash bag buried in the land that he's working at.
Buried. Buried. And then when he takes that out, inside that black trash bag is another black trash bag.
And then inside of that bag is a kid's book bag with Asha's name and phone number written on it.
And I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly.
You might know, Delia.
But I, at the time, feel like I remember me and Britt talking about how he, like, sees this buried thing, again, in trash bag and trash bags and he doesn't do anything.
He ends up, like, telling his partner or wife or whoever at home.
Yeah, yeah. Like, so his partner at the time was like, wait a minute, that's a big red flag.
Like, you need to call the sheriff's office because they knew about Asha's case and they knew, like, what was going on.
There was this little girl missing.
Even if there wasn't like a little girl missing, like a kid's book bag buried in a bag in a bag, like, why does it take the wife to like make a call?
But that's again, we said that day one the story for another day.
So eventually the sheriff's office gets their hands on this evidence.
They do call the police and they do search the property themselves, but they actually don't find much of anything else related to the case.
But when they look inside the book bag that has Asha's name on it, they find a Dr.
Seuss book from her elementary school library and a New Kids on the Block concert T -shirt.
But the thing is, they don't really say much about those items at the time.
They don't say if they were hers.
In fact, if I remember correctly, I don't even think they tell people right away what was in it.
I think that comes out, like, to the public years later.
Yeah, it does. But they did send the book bag and its contents off to the FBI's lab for forensic analysis.
And by 2003, some kind of results had come back, but the sheriff's office didn't release those publicly.
And clearly, whatever it was that they got wasn't enough to solve this case because it just languishes after that for another year and another.
And then the 10 -year anniversary comes and goes.
Then the 15th. There's even a large reward that they end up offering, but there are just no new leads.
Yeah, and I think the reward actually got up to like $45 ,000, but like nothing.
And it really isn't until 2016 because that's when the whole like, I think the green car thing comes out, right?
The green car, yes.
This becomes super important.
So in May of 2016, the FBI released that they believed a girl matching Asha's description again.
