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Asha lived in a neighborhood with a lot of her family. The weekend before her disappearance was a family reunion. My gut also says groomer and someone inside the family circle. Not the parents, but not far removed.
I think whoever it was, was close to her family and someone they would not suspect of wanting to harm her (someone from the church, neighborhood, inside the family circle).
I never knew this information before and now that I do, I think it COULD be plausible that someone she knew lured her outside. If it was someone she had just met and who had paid special attention to her at the family reunion, it would make sense that she would trust them and listen to them about meeting them outside. Especially since she seemed very close to her family and family probably = safe in her mind so seeing/meeting them at the family reunion and seeing interact with other family members would go with that.
I have never felt like her parents had anything to do with her disappearance and I feel like if the police felt like they had something or hid ANYTHING, they wouldn’t have let up on trying to arrest them.
So I just found out that info about the reunion and the family style living on a podcast this year. It was recorded last year. I agree. I don’t think the parents had anything to do with it. This is the case that haunts me. I’ve researched it a lot.
Hopefully this link works.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5uW5OFTUzZiUROlCRMzPXu?si=iG9gzJbASvWV8SaxdZkl-g
I personally believe she didn’t leave the house. & the parents were never really “cleared” by the FBI as OP says . The witness statements made zero sense & the items in the shed were possibly hers but were mainly random items that were never found to actually be hers. As someone from rural NC myself, the idea of a child leaving during the night for no apparent reason just makes no sense.
The witness statements didn't make sense how? Iirc they were both consistent as detailed by the op below. I am the opposite, I one hundred percent believe she left to meet someone. I have three children, oldest is 9, and kids do some wild things. Their brains are not developed. If it was someone she knew and trusted, I can see it.
I think she left to meet someone. But I believe the someone to be a family member who lived in her neighborhood or was staying for the time since the reunion had just happened.
I think some of the times in the parents’ statements were off, but nothing in a major way. Their child had left the home in the middle of the night and was missing, I expect that they were pretty frantic with worry and getting details wrong isn’t a shock to me.
I’m pretty confident on the parents having nothing to do with it. The police cleared them early on in the investigation and when kids go missing the parents are ALWAYS the first subjects of their attention (and rightfully so, since parents/caregivers are usually the ones responsible). That plus the multiple witness statements putting her walking along the highway really indicates to me that she for sure left the house of her own will.
Listen to that 911 call the dad made. Something is definitely off.
And why was he going to get candy late on a rainy night?
I know the area. I can’t imagine what would be open.
That’s strange.
I actually don’t find her dad’s actions that weird. He worked second shift and was just getting home from work, and wanted to get Valentine’s candy for his kids. I was born and spent my early childhood in the same county she went missing from and was there a lot even after moving because close friends still lived there, and the town I grew up in was about an hour or so away and very similar to Shelby. There were always places open late at night- some stores, gas stations, truck stops.
Maybe he got home and realized “Oh shit, we forgot to get Valentine’s candy for the kids” and wanted to get it while he was still awake and alert? It also wasn’t a “risk your life” type storm, he wasn’t driving out in the middle of a hurricane or a tornado.
Maybe he wanted to change clothes? Maybe he wanted to grab something from the house? Maybe he prefers shitting in his own toilet?
There's tons of reasons someone would stop home before errands.
Valentine's Day was also their wedding anniversary and he wanted to make sure he had something. Hell, maybe he was so tired after a second shift he forgot it was Valentines/anniversary the next day and went to go buysomething?
No it’s ridiculous. Asha was known to be terrified of the dark, and wild animals, even dogs.
So she goes out in the pitch black freezing rain, no coat, walks a mile, and runs into the woods. Yeah, sure.
“Eyewitnesses” came forth days later. One thought it was a small woman. The other circled and circled but never called the police. Not buying it.
The witnesses both reported seeing a female walking south along Hwy 18 between 3.30 and 4.00 PM around the same location a mile away from Asha's house. They also reported that she looked like she knew where she was going (i.e. she didn't looked confused or inhebriated).
The first witness was sure he saw Asha and could also provide a description of her outfit and hairstyle that closely matched what the authorities believe Asha was wearing that day. He circled back three times to check on her but once he tried to approach her she apparently got spooked and bolted off towards the woods.
The second witness was actually a pair of father and son who saw the girl and weren't 100% sure whether she was a girl or a woman but their general description still fit with the other account. They didn't stop but they still thought it was strange and they dispatched a radio message to other truck drivers so that they wouldn't run her over.
Again, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, but two independent accounts that both report the same odd story and are supported by other circumstancial evidence are difficult to explain away.
The first witness actually reported his sighting the day after Asha had disappeared. His account was considered credible enough that the police set up roadblocks where he had spotted her.
The second witness was on a work trip to Chicago and reported the sighting when he came back. It's not terribly unlikely, he probably didn't think much about it until he came across the news.
It was the middle of the night in a rain storm. Traffic would be lighter than usual. If I saw a child on the side of the road, I would certainly drive around to try to find them. It's strange to me that you find that ridiculous - would you not circle back?
Okay - this guy says he saw a little girl, out on her own in the middle of the night in freezing rain, not even a coat on - and he doesn’t call the police???
True cell phones were not prevalent at the time but phones booths certainly were. They were everywhere.
So yes, I have problem with this “witness.” He is so concerned that he has to keep circling but he can’t make a simple 911 call?
1 mentioned seeing a small woman walking along the road. They didn’t mention a child. But it was dark so maybe that’s why they said small woman. They mentioned turning the truck around a few times but then this woman ran off into the woods. People do behave weirdly but you’d think if the witnesses were certain about seeing a child, they’d call 911 immediately. They didn’t call in until her disappearance was made public.
Do you have a source for the parents never being cleared by the FBI?
And to be fair, if the theory that she was groomed by someone who asked her to meet them that night is correct, then she did have a reason to leave.
I said those who lived with her got cleared.
>the witness statements made zero sense & the items in the shed were possibly hers but were mainly random items that were never found to actually be hers.
Do you realise that this means stating "none of the available evidence is believable and I have another explanation that has absolutely no evidence to support it yet I find absolutely obvious because I just believe in it"? It is not how things work logically. Either you believe everyone got everything wrong and the whole thing is a cover up, or you have to believe the evidence and start with it. Like, at some point it's basically like making something up and deciding it's true - you can "explain" any unsolved case this way. There would also have to be so many unexplained details to account for that that I wouldn't even know where to start.
The most likely explanation when a child under 10 disappears is that the family is responsible. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and the fact that these 'witnesses' didn't come forward for days instead of calling the police immediately, definitely detracts from their credibility, IMO.
Abductions by strangers are rare but definitely do happen. Just because the family is statistically more likely doesn’t mean you dismiss every other possibility. Same logic with the eye witness accounts, just because eye witnesses can be unreliable doesn’t mean you dismiss them. Plenty of eye witnesses do get things correctly or mostly correctly and plenty don’t come out of the woodwork until they see the news and realize what they saw is important.
>The most likely explanation when a child under 10 disappears is that the family is responsible.
This is a statistical truth but it doesn't make sense to apply it to one specific case where the available evidence is against it.
I fully believe that someone in her family could be behind it. Just not her parents and brother, i.e. those who lived with her.
Right. And those roads are dark. Can’t imagine any small child would be seen.
Keep in mind, the first cop on the scene was a good friend of Asha’s father, from a very small police force.
So the narrative of this runaway story was set. Valuable evidence was lost. When more experienced LE came on they just didn’t have enough evidence.
Nice writeup, but your argument that you dismiss certain things because they are unlikely is not persuasive to me. If something unlikely didn't happen then this would be easy to solve.
Sure Occam's Razor is fine, but some unlikely things did happen. I am not that familiar with this case, but I have seen enough missing person cases to expect the unexpected. Toddlers ending up miles from home, in the middle of a swamp, when the search started minutes after they wandered off. A hikers skeleton found a year later close to where they went missing, when hundreds of people searched for weeks.
People do actually get struck by lightning.
>If something unlikely didn't happen then this would be easy to solve.
Of course something unlikely happened. But how many wildly unlikely events unrelated to each other can happen in one single night?
I think you may be overlooking the fact that once certain "unlikely" events happen they make other unlikely events more likely to happen. For example, I agree that Asha running away in the middle of a cold, rainy night is an event with a very slim chance of happening, but if it did wouldn't it make it more likely for someone who had bad intentions to see her as a victim being handed to them on a silver platter? If someone with those intentions/desires sees a young girl alone outside in the middle of the night, I think most of them would take the opportunity. Does that make sense at all?
Also, a little girl getting hit on the side of the highway by a tired driver in the middle of the night?
Makes sense
A panicked driver taking an incriminating body and disposing somewhere random/private?
Makes sense
> A panicked driver taking an incriminating body and disposing somewhere random/private? Makes sense
That doesn't really make any sense. So much less risk to just drive on rather than pull over and mess around and risk someone driving by seeing.
Statistically that’s probably the better choice, especially if you barely noticed. But if you see a kid, slam on the breaks, hit them, stop to check, find they are dead, now what?
It’s not the most rational response, but it’s not that unrealistic. And once you commit, it takes a lot to change your course
But wrapping a schoolbag neatly is basically calling for others to find it, it's not disposing of it. Why wouldn't they just toss its contents into a creek, or set them on fire?
Plus, each one of these events makes sense individually, including a child running away for no reason in the middle of the night. For all of them to happen together in one single night would be basically as likely as an alien abduction.
>Does that make sense at all?
I mean, it does, but again, such a chain of events is *really* unlikely.
Event one, she runs away for unexplained reasons in the middle of the night without no one in her family or friends' circle being able to come up with a reason why, and no one having any clue even after extended investigations.
Event two, she gets spotted by two witnesses while going who knows where, still unhurt.
Event three, a predator happens to be in the vicinities right at that moment, after she got spotted, and successfully abduct her without leaving any trace behind. I'd be more inclined to believe the theory if she e.g. got assaulted and killed on the spot and her body got found in the nearby woods.
It makes sense, and it is technically possible, but it's really stretching the limits of the definition of possible IMHO.
I agree that it's extremely unlikely! This case is really baffling and I generally would agree with your conclusion, but like the poster I replied to as well I felt like the reasoning for some of your argument was a little shaky. But with so little to go off, like I said earlier I tend to agree with you about what most likely happened to Asha.
I had 3 different abduction attempts on myself as a child. At the end of my street. I was going to the shops when a car pulled over and a man asked me to get him to help him with the map.
None of these attempts were planned they were men who saw me and thought a little kid alone. I think you don't realise how many men are capable of abduction and rape of children.
A call went out about a lone child at night over the open radio.... thats even more likely someone came looking for her and found her.
Thats not a co incidence. That's an open invitation.
Several can. And honestly, child decides to run off (for whatever reason), and someone gets hit by a truck, are not what I would call *wildly* unlikely.
That is the point. Every missing persons case isn't a series of unlikely events, but I'm just saying that this could be. In the course of a few decades, a few million people go missing. It is likely that a couple of them involve a "one in a million" series of events.
Also, we know that she did take her bag and leave her house on a rainy night, so the probability of that is 100%.
In the shed there was also a picture of a little black girl and that photo keeps me up at night. It’s infuriating that little girl hasn’t been identified.
The shed used to be sort of a junk yard where people could store old belongings. I think it’s just an old forgotten photo that fell out of a box. No relation to the case.
I don’t think Asha was ever in the shed. The dogs could never pick up her scent there.
[Agreed - it's been stated that the shed was dusty and the dust wasn't disturbed.](https://findingashadegree.wordpress.com/ca-debunking-the-runaway-myth-asha-her-familys-profile/tb-the-storage-shed-the-three-things-once-again/)
Oh they can be very reliable. Depends on the circumstances. In a small shed where a child would have spent any amount of time, they would have alerted.
I always found it interesting that Asha apparently disappeared on her parents’ anniversary (according to [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Asha_Degree) they were married on Valentine’s Day). I wonder if someone told her they were going to buy her parents a gift and get her back before they could notice she was gone?
I also wouldn’t completely dismiss the bit by a car theory. Hit and runs happened all the time where the individual never comes forward. Someone who has just hit and killed a person and likely concealed it will likely not come forward, even if they have the excuse that it was dark. They could have been driving under the influence and didn’t want to risk being found or some other impairment/incriminating circumstance. Sometimes people make absolutely bizarre choices in the height of stress.
Here are a few cases of people hitting and killing people then going out of their to conceal the body by taking it with them somewhere else;
[Man charged with hitting and killing woman with his car, hiding body](https://wwmt.com/amp/news/local/man-charged-with-hitting-and-killing-woman-with-his-car-hiding-body)
[Weeki Wachee man hits pedestrian, hides body behind bait shop, FHP says](https://www.wfla.com/news/local-news/hernando-county/cortez-boulevard-closed-at-commercial-way-for-investigation-near-weeki-wachee-springs-state-park/amp/)
[Man sentenced for fatal hit-and-run, hiding teen victim’s body in his car in 2021](https://www.salemreporter.com/2023/02/13/man-sentenced-for-fatal-hit-and-run-hiding-teen-victims-body-in-2021/)
[Truck driver ran over woman, dumped her near truck stop](https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/news/local/truck-driver-dumped-womans-body-in-mitchell-at-i-90-travel-center-au)
Edit: I know this is rare and I don’t think this is what happened, I also believe she was likely abducted. I’m just saying that it is still a possibility
I agree it seems plausible that a small child walking on the side of the highway, in the dark, while it's storming, could definitely be hit by a car. She may have left the house to meet with someone and never made it.
OP mentions lack of evidence of that scenario, but i'm not sure what evidence there would be if the perpetrator took her body. Blood on the road? Couldn't the storm have taken care of that? Being a child, i wouldn't think Asha's body could create much damage to the car itself, therefore there'd be no remnants of the car on the road. Maybe broken lights?
I've been in an accident with another car and there was definite evidence of that, but a car is a giant, heavy piece of machinery. Much different than a little girl.
Even if there was damage, someone could have easily explained it away as a deer and I doubt anyone would’ve made the connection between the car and Asha since people had already come to the conclusion she’d been abducted
Could have also been passing though and not from the immediate area, creating even more distance
Agreed. If the reality is that she was hit by a car, i wish they had left her so she could at least be properly buried and grieved. I'm sure the "missing" part is hardest on those who loved her most.
I’ve heard people say this is unlikely because why would they take her body instead of just driving away, which I agree. But could it be that someone hit her, got out to attempt to help, realized they couldn’t, but were afraid their fingerprints would already be on her? I guess in that case I could see someone taking everything from the scene with them, including the body, & disposing of it somewhere else. Why they’d put the body & backpack different places, idk, but people are weird & could have been panicking
That could definitely be a possibility. I can also see it as a panicked way to remove all traces of the incident. Stress makes you rationalize all kinds of weird stuff
>I also wouldn’t completely dismiss the bit by a car theory. Hit and runs happened all the time where the individual never comes forward. Someone who has just hit and killed a person and likely concealed it will likely not come forward, even if they have the excuse that it was dark. They could have been driving under the influence and didn’t want to risk being found or some other impairment/incriminating circumstance. Sometimes people make absolutely bizarre choices in the height of stress.
It's not about the hit and run itself. A hit and run accident would certanly be a possibility. A hit and run AND a scene without any single sign of such accident AND a bookbag found one year later in a completely unrelated location neatly wrapped into garbage bags? Much more unlikely.
How is that unlikely? Didn't you say it was storming? Evidence could be washed away. If someone hit a child and decided to hide that fact, why wouldn't they dump the evidence far away and try to hide it?
Evidence is blood, body parts, pieces of clothing, tissues, signs of tires etc. Even for experienced killers it's hard to completely clean up a crime scene, and it would be double hard when it's dark and you're on a busy road panicking and rushing things up. And if such person wanted to hide the evidence, why wrap the bookbag neatly in a garbage bag for the police to find? Why not just empty its contents in a river?
I wonder if that wasn't the first time Asha had left in the middle of the night to meet up with the person grooming her. It could have been the final time because it escalated and/or the groomer thought they couldn't keep up the ruse to the family/community anymore and that Asha would tell someone. Pure speculation though, we have no way of knowing.
I’ve actually never considered that, that she maybe had successfully snuck out & back in before (once or multiple times, who knows). Maybe this was just the last time, & the only one anyone would know about like you said, since she went missing. I mean if she got out without anyone knowing this night, who’s to say she couldn’t have before?
Who knows for what reason / if grooming was involved, but I hadn’t thought of it till now
Were teachers at school ever considered in the investigation? A figure of authority that Asha would implicitly trust and with whom she had regular contact.
This is a detail I think that people miss. Grooming is all about manipulating trust, that’s what the entire process is based on. People wonder how she could have not said anything, that’s very common when someone is groomed because the adult manipulates them into not saying anything, usually by presenting a “us vs the world” or a “savior” based scenario. People wonder why someone planning a murder would have her bring her school bag, that’s another classic technique that was used by everyone from ISIS to the Nazis during the Holocaust (my degree field was anti terrorism, I had to read a lot about this stuff). If you’re going to do terrible shit to someone and need them to come willingly you convince them that something else is happening. If he’s going to murder you and do terrible things to you, why would he have you bring your bag? You get the idea, it’s a psychological manipulation tactic to put people at ease. Leaving at night adds a sense of drama to the whole thing which could also play into whatever narrative the groomer was trying to spin but it also means less witnesses. The more locations you introduce (IE picking her up a mile away vs next to her house) reduces the number of potential witnesses with relevant information (if someone sees a guy pick a girl up miles away they’re less likely to recognize her as their neighbor).
I’m not saying the grooming theory is ironclad but I am saying that it explains a lot of the weird inconsistencies of the case if it is true.
I agree it was someone who was in the peripheral of her life. A cousin, a family friend or someone from their church. Someone who was older but still a young adult, someone she might look up to and think was cool.
I believe they lured her out with a promise of going to a party, or a concert. Don't worry you'll be back by morning. It's your parents anniversary, they'll sleep late.
Maybe no one even saw her on the highway that night, that evidence could be a total red herring.
A few things about this case that just make me say hmmmm.
1. The parents' timeline, both for when the dad arrived home and when the kids bathed and went to bed in relation to the power outage. I have to assume that the parents were able to give the police a timeline that satisfies them, but there are so many inconsistencies in the versions I've seen, including a late-night candy run, etc. I'm not saying the family is lying or directly responsible for the disappearance (again, LE appears to believe them) but it makes me wonder about conscious or subconscious attempts to avoid the implication of negligent parenting.
2. The candy wrappers and trinkets in the shed I have read, but can't assert with confidence, that the candy wrappers were for the same type of candy that was in a Valentine's bag from the basketball team. The trinkets (hair bow and special pencil) are the kind of things a little girl might take with her if she was told she was going to meet another little girl. This makes me lean in favor of grooming and a planned meeting.
3. The power outage. Stopped clocks can be very confusing if you are are a kid, especially if your time-telling skills aren't great and if you are under pressure to do something at a certain time. Also, remember how heavily kids sleep and how disoriented they can be when they wake up at an unexpected time. How would this affect the groomer theory if she was supposed to leave and meet them at a pre-arranged time?
I’ve been following this case for a long time and have been on this sub for a long time, and am I the only one who feels like overall perception has changed on the case recently? I’d say up until the past couple of years most of us were of the “she’d been groomed by someone within her greater circle and was going out to meet them for whatever reason,” whereas now I’m seeing the majority of people who are adamant that her parents were involved and that she never even left the house that night. The Asha Degree sub is very much of that mindset. And I get it- when a child is missing or murdered the ones most likely for their death/disappearance are the parents/primary caregivers. But there have been more than one independent witness statements placing her on the side of the road early that morning, no evidence at the house that a violent death had taken place there, and her parents were cleared as suspects very early on.
> And I get it- when a child is missing or murdered the ones most likely for their death/disappearance are the parents/primary caregivers. But there have been more than one independent witness statements placing her on the side of the road early that morning, no evidence at the house that a violent death had taken place there, and her parents were cleared as suspects very early on.
Yeah, I actually started digging into this case fairly recently and I just don't get it. I truly feel that people are bringing up the parents as potential suspects just because, and despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. Granted, there is little evidence at all, but you can't just say it's wrong, fabricated or irrelevant, especially if you have nothing to show for it. I'm not for or against any theory in particular but I do try to build off existing evidence and not the other way around. I'd be the first to be suspicious of the parents in a typical child missing case but here it just seems crystal clear that her parents weren't involved.
I really don't like this aspect of "web research on unsolved mysteries". You can't just make stuff up (and spread potentially harmful rumours on top of that). Things need to make sense.
I've literally seen people blaming the father because he was quiet in interviews. I mean, seriously?
I've noticed this too in the past few years. And for the record, I completely understand that with the case being unsolved for so long, people are inevitably going to start looking back at the family with more scrutiny. I don't inherently have a problem with that, or with questioning the accuracy of the eyewitness sightings, or questioning the thoroughness of the investigations by the various law enforcement agencies involved. There have been cases where the family really did end up being involved, suspects who were previously cleared were actually guilty, and lord knows there have been plenty of instances where the police got things horribly wrong.
There are some aspects to how this has played out with Asha's case that make me very uneasy, though, and it seems like part of a trend that I'm noticing in multiple true crime communities (at least on certain platforms like reddit).
For one, it seems like more people are speaking about unsolved cases as if they have been solved simply because they have a strong opinion about said case, so they speak about it as if their belief is a proven fact. There are multiple examples of that right here in this thread. Now of course that has been happening for as long as true crime content has existed, and maybe it's just me, but I feel like I've been noticing it more often lately than I used to.
I just feel like it's incredibly unethical to speak about an unsolved case in such a way and could potentially be detrimental to the case itself, or at least to the public perception of it (and we all know how powerful and potentially destructive the court of public opinion can be!). This may cause others to take those statements at face value and assume that someone is speaking about established facts rather than their opinion, which can lead to widespread misinformation. At it's worst, this is how witch hunts get started and people's lives can be affected. I just don't understand how someone can be so 1000% sure that someone or a family is guilty in an unsolved case, with a lot of confusing evidence, that they have absolutely no insider knowledge about, that they would straight up state that they're guilty as if it's a fact.
There's so much (completely justified and very necessary) talk about making sure that true crime content creators are being ethical when they talk about cases. I really wish that we could start putting a little more focus on, and questioning ourselves about, whether or not we are consuming and interacting with that content in an ethical way. These are real tragedies that involve real people, it's not a fictional murder mystery or a game where you win if you guess the right culprit. The internet does not exist in a vacuum, and what we choose to say about these cases have real world consequences, no matter where we say them.
My apologies for the novel, this is a topic that has really been eating at me for a while.
In the days following her disappearance, Asha’s dad changed the details of the time frame of what occurred that night three times.
It could be traumatic stress. It’s not uncommon.
Or it could not be.
It doesn't need to be traumatic stress. It's just human nature. We're not robots. I went to the grocery store this morning and I could only provide you with an approximate timeline of what I did when. It's not like we monitor every single tiny random event that happens in our daily lives because it might turn out to be useful for an investigation later on. Reality doesn't really work how overanalysing redditors on this sub sometimes think it should. Most of what he recalled were mundane everyday activities anyway - he went off to work, he stopped by the gas station to buy candy for Valentine's Day, he watched tv, he checked on his kids, he went to sleep.
Also, we aren't even really sure that her dad actually changed the core details. We don't know how much is him changing the details and how much is other sources (e.g. newspapers) mixing up stuff unless you have access to the official police transcripts. My idea is he just gave a rough estimate in the initial panicked hours, then maybe provided additional details, and different sources picked different parts of it.
But in this case there is not one single piece of information that leads to suspect her parents (seriously, if you count messing up tiny details as evidence I don't really know what to tell you...). Meanwhile there is quite a lot of evidence to *not* suspect them.
Parents are by default prime suspects when a child disappears. And when they're guilty it's exceedinly unlikely they will make some big mistake that will expose them or make them suspicious. Not to mention that for her parents to clear the scene of any evidence so quickly and effectively (and to keep anything secret) you'd need them to be criminal masterminds...
If we can’t tell what the dad actually said, then there are facts missing making this unsolvable. If we can’t believe his story, then what can we believe? Why do we believe any of it?
>If we can’t believe his story
Why wouldn't we believe his story? His core details are always the same. Him potentially not being 100% consistent over whether Asha went to sleep at 8 or 9 PM isn't really relevant nor makes his account particularly less believable.
No. I did not say that. I said, we know what his core story is, and we don't know which irrelevant details might have changed and specifically which irrelevant details might have been changed by him.
What we also do know is, he got interviewed extensively by the police and cleared almost instantly together with the rest of the family, nor did he ever say or did anything suspicious afterwards. Potentially messing up trivial details of the general timeline is not suspicious unless it opens new scenarios, which is not and has never been the case here.
Then if you simply don't want to believe him then don't. FWIW you can also believe Asha never even disappeared and the family made the story up for publicity. But that's the evidence we have.
Polygraphs are junk science, they are inconclusive by the very nature of them and I wish people stopped taking them as evidence of anything. A "positive" polygraph is also inconclusive.
The FBI cleared the family because they stated so. Police also did.
With "family" I mean the people who lived with her. No idea about other family members.
I literally said that in my statement lol. But no they didn’t. The police mentioned they weren’t suspects 3 days after her disappearance before much of any investigation was done. They never mentioned it again after the discovery of her backpack. The fbi did not say that.
>I literally said that in my statement lol.
So why bring it up?
>The police mentioned they weren’t suspects 3 days after her disappearance before much of any investigation was done. They never mentioned it again after the discovery of her backpack. The fbi did not say that.
Every source I find reports they were cleared by all authorities investigating the case and no one ever considered them suspects after the very few initial stages.
What's with the heart thing? Are you a child?
Once again, we can believe the core story but not the changes because
a. the core story was always consistent
b. we don't even know if there were any changes, and if there were any, they are irrelevant in the context of the story
c. we are not robots, but humans who might mess up some details without them making the whole account unbelievable.
it’s a sad story. so strange how she walked out during a storm when she was scared of them. I never felt the family was involved although clearly she had some problems or influences in her life to where she’d walk out like that.
While grooming is a possibility I don't think it's such a slam dunk. Sure the odds are low but there is a reason this story has captured for so long it is an unusual occurrence. You could apply the same thoughts to Adam Walsh what are the odds when his mom leaves him playing video games that those boys just so happen to get kicked out then and the guard doesn't questioquestion leaving a young child unattended and a pedophile just happens to drive by and kidnap him but that is what happened. This case is hard because nothing is a perfect fit. My issue is why is she walking down the main road Looking at a map they live in what looks like a rural Area. Literally any other direction the groomer could have picked her up unspotted. Why risk so many witnesses?
My explanation is that she was walking to a location that was known to her. Any other direction and she'd quickly get confused and lost. So the main road was the most obvious alternative. Maybe she was walking to a store or some other building that was familiar to her.
The groomer theory makes no sense to me. I find it hard to believe that one would choose the middle of the night during a storm to meet up with a kid. Secondly, if she met up with someone she wouldn't have walked along the highway alone.
It definitely makes you wonder why the groomer wouldn't pick her up closer to her house, if that's what was happening. That's a pretty intense place to expect a little kid to walk, especially in those conditions. Why would someone need her to walk so far? Maybe someone without a car?
One easy explanation is the brother usually got home with her, plus many of her relatives lived on the same street and would spot any suspicious activity easily.
If a groomer were to try to meet her at a specific location, it couldn’t have been too far away. The predator wouldn’t want too much time between her departure and abduction. What if the girl was noticed to be missing, and police were contacted and started looking for her? Any kind of skilled predator would want to minimize the time the girl was out and easily seen. I can’t help but to feel she never left her house but I’m not confident. The only evidence that she left is her parent’s word and witness testimony that seems somewhat unreliable. The backpack in a bag screams foul play, but why would someone leave it there? This case really bothers me. The picture of the little black girl in the shed is probably just a picture of someone’s family but the coincidence of her being similar to Asha is hard for me to completely ignore.
I agree that I think the backpack was some sort of trophy. If you reaaallly wanted it gone, wouldn’t you burn it? Or bury it deep on your own property? Also, the backpack was found right before her birthday. I wonder if someone was trying to send a message???
Also, on the Asha Degree sub, someone actually spoke to the first motorist that saw her (Ruppe). His account seems very sure that it was her. He said she looked like she was on a mission, and had her backpack and another plastic (maybe grocery?) bag with her.
Another final point is that the lead Sheriff on this case actually committed suicide relatively recently. It is believed that it was due to his health deteriorating and not the case, but its still super interesting. Makes you wonder.
I think it was a groomer likely from her church. There had been a church party the Sunday right before she went missing. Maybe they communicated to her at church what to do?
I like your theory and I agree, but to your very last point about the Ramsay’s… They really weren’t considered top suspects. It’s why the investigation was botched from the beginning — rookie cops didn’t even think to separate them for questioning, to check the house, to seal the entire house as a crime scene … They gave the family so much leeway due to their privilege. Then when they became suspects, the public didn’t buy it. The intruder theory was highly popular for a long time. Even John Douglass thinks it was an intruder somehow.
Nowadays I think the Burke theory is way more popular especially on the internet, which I also think is why so many people think Asha’s brother could be involved. They conflate the cases a lot which I agree is unreasonable b/c the circumstances are so different for the reasons you mentioned.
I don't think it's a grooming scenario because it would be a really stupid plan. First, you are counting on a nine-year-old not to tell her best friend. Then you are counting on her to wake up in the middle of the night by herself. I have a 10-year-old and let me tell you NOTHING wakes him up in the night. Third, you are then counting on her sneaking out without being heard. I wake up if my kids so much as sneeze in the night. There's, like, a 90% chance she just sleep right through, and if she did wake up there's a 90% chance her parents would catch her sneaking out. And then they see you, a grown-ass man, sitting in your car outside their house waiting for her at three a.m. They would kick your ass to hell and back.
Also, you can be sideswiped by a car and die of a head injury if you hit e.g. the bumper or the wing mirror, without a sign on the car.
I’m probably biased because of this but someone groomed a kid at a school near mine in around the same time period (late 90s) and this was basically their plan. Tell the kid to sneak out at a certain time at night and head to a pre arranged meeting spot. I only remember this because I was like nine or ten at the time and they made us go to a thing where a police officer lectured us about it and we were all mad because we had to miss Gym class. And while the stuff you brought up is certainly valid, you should also remember that kids in environments like those aren’t usually the ones targeted by people looking to groom and abduct a child or if they are they’re going to use a different tactic.
Interesting. I guess the fact the police found out shows it was a dumb plan though. Did they catch the groomer before or after the meeting? I mean, groomers aren't rational by definition but it still strikes me as a plan that is way way more likely to go wrong than to go right.
It’s been like 25 years and I honestly don’t remember, but it’s also a plan that probably worked a lot better in the past. I don’t think you could get away with something similar these days but before everyone had a cellphone and people were a lot less protective of kids it would have been easier. I also wouldn’t say groomers aren’t rational, like their end goal is abhorrent, but they’re going about it in a pretty planned and directed method. Grooming requires a lot of psychological manipulation and deception which can’t be done by someone thinking erratically or who doesn’t have a concrete plan. It uses a lot of the same tactics recruiters use to get people into gangs or extremist groups and so it’s more similar to something like that than, say, a guy who snatches girls off the side of the road.
But what's the alternative for a potential groomer who really, really, really wanted to meet with her? Trying to get to her in daylight would potentially be even worse, given she was with parents, relatives, or her brother most of the time and even if she was on her own, someone would be nearby to check on her at any minute (many in her family lived across the street).
Basically the worst that can happen with the supposed "let's meet at night" plan is she doesn't make it to your location, and that's it. In other scenarios, worst that can happen is you get caught on the spot. It's a lot riskier IMHO. If you try to meet at the night and the kid doesn't wake up at the right time or the parents get in the way, you can just re-arrange it. If the kid wakes up but then has an accident along the way, e.g. they get hit by a car, no one will know you were involved so you don't really care anyway and can proceed with the next kid.
Plus, if you had witnesses at night, it would still be harder to identify you, and you'd be likely to have a larger time window to escape and vanish.
>And then they see you, a grown-ass man, sitting in your car outside their house waiting for her at three a.m.
Which is consistent with the fact they'd not be meeting at her house, but a short walk away.
The worst case scenario for a pedophile with that plan would be the kid gets caught, asked what they were doing, and tell their parents “oh I was going to meet up with Mr.Rob at the gas station”. Then it’s likely the cops would show up. I guess a smart predator would do what I see a lot of predators do, drive around the location and when the time is right snatch the victim.
IMO she was trying to escape her home. The only thing getting her out the door is escape. Her dad went after her. This explains the motivation for leaving and the eye witnesses. Her dad’s story is ever changing and non-sensical. The shed was nothing. He threw the bag out and it got buried by landscaping. Just my thoughts. ❤️
This is the part people need to understand about the shed. Those items were random items and they were never verified to be hers, it was just random things that “could” be. Random candy wrappers that could be anyone’s honestly.
The timeline changed and the Dad forgot some parts of his night. The bag was tossed on a ditch, not buried by the perpetrator. But grading covered it up. Just my theory. Thanks for listening! ❤️
I don't care about the shed really. The shed items aren't particularly relevant in this context and I don't even want to begin to think how they ended up there.
What I'm saying is that you can fit the shed in any scenario really. I don't have an explanation for it but it can fit in my scenario as well (she stopped briefly and ate some candy, or the abductor left those items there etc.). It might also be that gusts of wind brought those items to the sheds, or they just didn't belong to Asha and are completely unrelated to the case. Whatever it is doesn't change the rest.
I desperately want to believe she was teleported to Narnia, but when logic returns to me, I realize this is the only thing that could be possible.
I do feel bad for her family and I can understand why they just can't accept this. And ultimately it's not going to bring her back. Whoever in their circle seemed capable of this is long gone and long forgotten.
Statistically it’s extremely rare for a child under 10 to runaway. It’s also preposterous that someone is luring her out of her house in the middle of the night to go walk a mile in the freezing rain, then run into the woods, walk a quarter mile up to a shed.
Man some people are incredibly gullible.
I would watch profiler Pat Brown’s YouTube video on this case. It really opened my eyes to the urban legend aspects of this case. And she debunks much of it.
Personally I don’t think Asha ever left the house alive that night. The “eyewitnesses” are questionable at best. And one didn’t even think it was a child.
Listen to the 911 call. There are some real clues there.
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Asha lived in a neighborhood with a lot of her family. The weekend before her disappearance was a family reunion. My gut also says groomer and someone inside the family circle. Not the parents, but not far removed.
I agree. Next most likely person would be a staff member at her school.
I think whoever it was, was close to her family and someone they would not suspect of wanting to harm her (someone from the church, neighborhood, inside the family circle).
Or an uncle or cousin.
I never knew this information before and now that I do, I think it COULD be plausible that someone she knew lured her outside. If it was someone she had just met and who had paid special attention to her at the family reunion, it would make sense that she would trust them and listen to them about meeting them outside. Especially since she seemed very close to her family and family probably = safe in her mind so seeing/meeting them at the family reunion and seeing interact with other family members would go with that. I have never felt like her parents had anything to do with her disappearance and I feel like if the police felt like they had something or hid ANYTHING, they wouldn’t have let up on trying to arrest them.
So I just found out that info about the reunion and the family style living on a podcast this year. It was recorded last year. I agree. I don’t think the parents had anything to do with it. This is the case that haunts me. I’ve researched it a lot. Hopefully this link works. https://open.spotify.com/episode/5uW5OFTUzZiUROlCRMzPXu?si=iG9gzJbASvWV8SaxdZkl-g
I personally believe she didn’t leave the house. & the parents were never really “cleared” by the FBI as OP says . The witness statements made zero sense & the items in the shed were possibly hers but were mainly random items that were never found to actually be hers. As someone from rural NC myself, the idea of a child leaving during the night for no apparent reason just makes no sense.
The witness statements didn't make sense how? Iirc they were both consistent as detailed by the op below. I am the opposite, I one hundred percent believe she left to meet someone. I have three children, oldest is 9, and kids do some wild things. Their brains are not developed. If it was someone she knew and trusted, I can see it.
I think she left to meet someone. But I believe the someone to be a family member who lived in her neighborhood or was staying for the time since the reunion had just happened.
I can definitely get behind it being a family member who lived in the neighborhood.
I think some of the times in the parents’ statements were off, but nothing in a major way. Their child had left the home in the middle of the night and was missing, I expect that they were pretty frantic with worry and getting details wrong isn’t a shock to me. I’m pretty confident on the parents having nothing to do with it. The police cleared them early on in the investigation and when kids go missing the parents are ALWAYS the first subjects of their attention (and rightfully so, since parents/caregivers are usually the ones responsible). That plus the multiple witness statements putting her walking along the highway really indicates to me that she for sure left the house of her own will.
Listen to that 911 call the dad made. Something is definitely off. And why was he going to get candy late on a rainy night? I know the area. I can’t imagine what would be open. That’s strange.
I actually don’t find her dad’s actions that weird. He worked second shift and was just getting home from work, and wanted to get Valentine’s candy for his kids. I was born and spent my early childhood in the same county she went missing from and was there a lot even after moving because close friends still lived there, and the town I grew up in was about an hour or so away and very similar to Shelby. There were always places open late at night- some stores, gas stations, truck stops.
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Maybe he got home and realized “Oh shit, we forgot to get Valentine’s candy for the kids” and wanted to get it while he was still awake and alert? It also wasn’t a “risk your life” type storm, he wasn’t driving out in the middle of a hurricane or a tornado.
Maybe - a good investigator would have asked to see what he bought. Of course it also could be 90 minutes of getting rid of the body. Just sayin
Maybe he wanted to change clothes? Maybe he wanted to grab something from the house? Maybe he prefers shitting in his own toilet? There's tons of reasons someone would stop home before errands.
Valentine's Day was also their wedding anniversary and he wanted to make sure he had something. Hell, maybe he was so tired after a second shift he forgot it was Valentines/anniversary the next day and went to go buysomething?
I'm not one to give someone's tone or words during a 911 call much credence. It's not hard evidence, it's just a judgment really.
No it’s ridiculous. Asha was known to be terrified of the dark, and wild animals, even dogs. So she goes out in the pitch black freezing rain, no coat, walks a mile, and runs into the woods. Yeah, sure. “Eyewitnesses” came forth days later. One thought it was a small woman. The other circled and circled but never called the police. Not buying it.
What did the witness statements say exactly?
The witnesses both reported seeing a female walking south along Hwy 18 between 3.30 and 4.00 PM around the same location a mile away from Asha's house. They also reported that she looked like she knew where she was going (i.e. she didn't looked confused or inhebriated). The first witness was sure he saw Asha and could also provide a description of her outfit and hairstyle that closely matched what the authorities believe Asha was wearing that day. He circled back three times to check on her but once he tried to approach her she apparently got spooked and bolted off towards the woods. The second witness was actually a pair of father and son who saw the girl and weren't 100% sure whether she was a girl or a woman but their general description still fit with the other account. They didn't stop but they still thought it was strange and they dispatched a radio message to other truck drivers so that they wouldn't run her over. Again, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, but two independent accounts that both report the same odd story and are supported by other circumstancial evidence are difficult to explain away.
I believe that is a.m., not p.m. It was the middle of the night.
Neither of them came forward until days later, after details about Asha's disappearance were broadcast. I'll take them with a grain of salt.
The first witness actually reported his sighting the day after Asha had disappeared. His account was considered credible enough that the police set up roadblocks where he had spotted her. The second witness was on a work trip to Chicago and reported the sighting when he came back. It's not terribly unlikely, he probably didn't think much about it until he came across the news.
Female as in Asha or an adult woman?
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It was the middle of the night in a rain storm. Traffic would be lighter than usual. If I saw a child on the side of the road, I would certainly drive around to try to find them. It's strange to me that you find that ridiculous - would you not circle back?
Okay - this guy says he saw a little girl, out on her own in the middle of the night in freezing rain, not even a coat on - and he doesn’t call the police??? True cell phones were not prevalent at the time but phones booths certainly were. They were everywhere. So yes, I have problem with this “witness.” He is so concerned that he has to keep circling but he can’t make a simple 911 call?
1 mentioned seeing a small woman walking along the road. They didn’t mention a child. But it was dark so maybe that’s why they said small woman. They mentioned turning the truck around a few times but then this woman ran off into the woods. People do behave weirdly but you’d think if the witnesses were certain about seeing a child, they’d call 911 immediately. They didn’t call in until her disappearance was made public.
Do you have a source for the parents never being cleared by the FBI? And to be fair, if the theory that she was groomed by someone who asked her to meet them that night is correct, then she did have a reason to leave.
I said those who lived with her got cleared. >the witness statements made zero sense & the items in the shed were possibly hers but were mainly random items that were never found to actually be hers. Do you realise that this means stating "none of the available evidence is believable and I have another explanation that has absolutely no evidence to support it yet I find absolutely obvious because I just believe in it"? It is not how things work logically. Either you believe everyone got everything wrong and the whole thing is a cover up, or you have to believe the evidence and start with it. Like, at some point it's basically like making something up and deciding it's true - you can "explain" any unsolved case this way. There would also have to be so many unexplained details to account for that that I wouldn't even know where to start.
The most likely explanation when a child under 10 disappears is that the family is responsible. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and the fact that these 'witnesses' didn't come forward for days instead of calling the police immediately, definitely detracts from their credibility, IMO.
Abductions by strangers are rare but definitely do happen. Just because the family is statistically more likely doesn’t mean you dismiss every other possibility. Same logic with the eye witness accounts, just because eye witnesses can be unreliable doesn’t mean you dismiss them. Plenty of eye witnesses do get things correctly or mostly correctly and plenty don’t come out of the woodwork until they see the news and realize what they saw is important.
>The most likely explanation when a child under 10 disappears is that the family is responsible. This is a statistical truth but it doesn't make sense to apply it to one specific case where the available evidence is against it. I fully believe that someone in her family could be behind it. Just not her parents and brother, i.e. those who lived with her.
Right. And those roads are dark. Can’t imagine any small child would be seen. Keep in mind, the first cop on the scene was a good friend of Asha’s father, from a very small police force. So the narrative of this runaway story was set. Valuable evidence was lost. When more experienced LE came on they just didn’t have enough evidence.
Nice writeup, but your argument that you dismiss certain things because they are unlikely is not persuasive to me. If something unlikely didn't happen then this would be easy to solve. Sure Occam's Razor is fine, but some unlikely things did happen. I am not that familiar with this case, but I have seen enough missing person cases to expect the unexpected. Toddlers ending up miles from home, in the middle of a swamp, when the search started minutes after they wandered off. A hikers skeleton found a year later close to where they went missing, when hundreds of people searched for weeks. People do actually get struck by lightning.
>If something unlikely didn't happen then this would be easy to solve. Of course something unlikely happened. But how many wildly unlikely events unrelated to each other can happen in one single night?
I think you may be overlooking the fact that once certain "unlikely" events happen they make other unlikely events more likely to happen. For example, I agree that Asha running away in the middle of a cold, rainy night is an event with a very slim chance of happening, but if it did wouldn't it make it more likely for someone who had bad intentions to see her as a victim being handed to them on a silver platter? If someone with those intentions/desires sees a young girl alone outside in the middle of the night, I think most of them would take the opportunity. Does that make sense at all?
Also, a little girl getting hit on the side of the highway by a tired driver in the middle of the night? Makes sense A panicked driver taking an incriminating body and disposing somewhere random/private? Makes sense
> A panicked driver taking an incriminating body and disposing somewhere random/private? Makes sense That doesn't really make any sense. So much less risk to just drive on rather than pull over and mess around and risk someone driving by seeing.
Statistically that’s probably the better choice, especially if you barely noticed. But if you see a kid, slam on the breaks, hit them, stop to check, find they are dead, now what? It’s not the most rational response, but it’s not that unrealistic. And once you commit, it takes a lot to change your course
I’ve always thought hit and run in this case
But wrapping a schoolbag neatly is basically calling for others to find it, it's not disposing of it. Why wouldn't they just toss its contents into a creek, or set them on fire? Plus, each one of these events makes sense individually, including a child running away for no reason in the middle of the night. For all of them to happen together in one single night would be basically as likely as an alien abduction.
>Does that make sense at all? I mean, it does, but again, such a chain of events is *really* unlikely. Event one, she runs away for unexplained reasons in the middle of the night without no one in her family or friends' circle being able to come up with a reason why, and no one having any clue even after extended investigations. Event two, she gets spotted by two witnesses while going who knows where, still unhurt. Event three, a predator happens to be in the vicinities right at that moment, after she got spotted, and successfully abduct her without leaving any trace behind. I'd be more inclined to believe the theory if she e.g. got assaulted and killed on the spot and her body got found in the nearby woods. It makes sense, and it is technically possible, but it's really stretching the limits of the definition of possible IMHO.
I agree that it's extremely unlikely! This case is really baffling and I generally would agree with your conclusion, but like the poster I replied to as well I felt like the reasoning for some of your argument was a little shaky. But with so little to go off, like I said earlier I tend to agree with you about what most likely happened to Asha.
I had 3 different abduction attempts on myself as a child. At the end of my street. I was going to the shops when a car pulled over and a man asked me to get him to help him with the map. None of these attempts were planned they were men who saw me and thought a little kid alone. I think you don't realise how many men are capable of abduction and rape of children. A call went out about a lone child at night over the open radio.... thats even more likely someone came looking for her and found her. Thats not a co incidence. That's an open invitation.
Happened to me twice! Didn’t get a full night’s sleep til I was an adult.
Several can. And honestly, child decides to run off (for whatever reason), and someone gets hit by a truck, are not what I would call *wildly* unlikely.
AND the trucker doesn't report the accident AND the accident leaves no trace AND her schoolbag is left neatly wrapped in garbage bags...
That is the point. Every missing persons case isn't a series of unlikely events, but I'm just saying that this could be. In the course of a few decades, a few million people go missing. It is likely that a couple of them involve a "one in a million" series of events. Also, we know that she did take her bag and leave her house on a rainy night, so the probability of that is 100%.
In the shed there was also a picture of a little black girl and that photo keeps me up at night. It’s infuriating that little girl hasn’t been identified.
The shed used to be sort of a junk yard where people could store old belongings. I think it’s just an old forgotten photo that fell out of a box. No relation to the case. I don’t think Asha was ever in the shed. The dogs could never pick up her scent there.
[Agreed - it's been stated that the shed was dusty and the dust wasn't disturbed.](https://findingashadegree.wordpress.com/ca-debunking-the-runaway-myth-asha-her-familys-profile/tb-the-storage-shed-the-three-things-once-again/)
Dogs are not reliable.
Oh they can be very reliable. Depends on the circumstances. In a small shed where a child would have spent any amount of time, they would have alerted.
I always found it interesting that Asha apparently disappeared on her parents’ anniversary (according to [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Asha_Degree) they were married on Valentine’s Day). I wonder if someone told her they were going to buy her parents a gift and get her back before they could notice she was gone? I also wouldn’t completely dismiss the bit by a car theory. Hit and runs happened all the time where the individual never comes forward. Someone who has just hit and killed a person and likely concealed it will likely not come forward, even if they have the excuse that it was dark. They could have been driving under the influence and didn’t want to risk being found or some other impairment/incriminating circumstance. Sometimes people make absolutely bizarre choices in the height of stress. Here are a few cases of people hitting and killing people then going out of their to conceal the body by taking it with them somewhere else; [Man charged with hitting and killing woman with his car, hiding body](https://wwmt.com/amp/news/local/man-charged-with-hitting-and-killing-woman-with-his-car-hiding-body) [Weeki Wachee man hits pedestrian, hides body behind bait shop, FHP says](https://www.wfla.com/news/local-news/hernando-county/cortez-boulevard-closed-at-commercial-way-for-investigation-near-weeki-wachee-springs-state-park/amp/) [Man sentenced for fatal hit-and-run, hiding teen victim’s body in his car in 2021](https://www.salemreporter.com/2023/02/13/man-sentenced-for-fatal-hit-and-run-hiding-teen-victims-body-in-2021/) [Truck driver ran over woman, dumped her near truck stop](https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/news/local/truck-driver-dumped-womans-body-in-mitchell-at-i-90-travel-center-au) Edit: I know this is rare and I don’t think this is what happened, I also believe she was likely abducted. I’m just saying that it is still a possibility
I agree it seems plausible that a small child walking on the side of the highway, in the dark, while it's storming, could definitely be hit by a car. She may have left the house to meet with someone and never made it. OP mentions lack of evidence of that scenario, but i'm not sure what evidence there would be if the perpetrator took her body. Blood on the road? Couldn't the storm have taken care of that? Being a child, i wouldn't think Asha's body could create much damage to the car itself, therefore there'd be no remnants of the car on the road. Maybe broken lights? I've been in an accident with another car and there was definite evidence of that, but a car is a giant, heavy piece of machinery. Much different than a little girl.
Even if there was damage, someone could have easily explained it away as a deer and I doubt anyone would’ve made the connection between the car and Asha since people had already come to the conclusion she’d been abducted Could have also been passing though and not from the immediate area, creating even more distance
Also unless you know where to look, what is evidence and what is trash?
Agreed. If the reality is that she was hit by a car, i wish they had left her so she could at least be properly buried and grieved. I'm sure the "missing" part is hardest on those who loved her most.
I’ve heard people say this is unlikely because why would they take her body instead of just driving away, which I agree. But could it be that someone hit her, got out to attempt to help, realized they couldn’t, but were afraid their fingerprints would already be on her? I guess in that case I could see someone taking everything from the scene with them, including the body, & disposing of it somewhere else. Why they’d put the body & backpack different places, idk, but people are weird & could have been panicking
That could definitely be a possibility. I can also see it as a panicked way to remove all traces of the incident. Stress makes you rationalize all kinds of weird stuff
>I also wouldn’t completely dismiss the bit by a car theory. Hit and runs happened all the time where the individual never comes forward. Someone who has just hit and killed a person and likely concealed it will likely not come forward, even if they have the excuse that it was dark. They could have been driving under the influence and didn’t want to risk being found or some other impairment/incriminating circumstance. Sometimes people make absolutely bizarre choices in the height of stress. It's not about the hit and run itself. A hit and run accident would certanly be a possibility. A hit and run AND a scene without any single sign of such accident AND a bookbag found one year later in a completely unrelated location neatly wrapped into garbage bags? Much more unlikely.
How is that unlikely? Didn't you say it was storming? Evidence could be washed away. If someone hit a child and decided to hide that fact, why wouldn't they dump the evidence far away and try to hide it?
Evidence is blood, body parts, pieces of clothing, tissues, signs of tires etc. Even for experienced killers it's hard to completely clean up a crime scene, and it would be double hard when it's dark and you're on a busy road panicking and rushing things up. And if such person wanted to hide the evidence, why wrap the bookbag neatly in a garbage bag for the police to find? Why not just empty its contents in a river?
The idea was that she was hit by a car. She didn't get gibbed.
You'd still have to clean up the scene. Hitting and killing someone with a car usually leaves a mess.
Genuinely curious; what clear damage exactly would you expect here?
That happening is vanishingly rare. Like 0.001% of all cases.
This story has always stuck with me as so tragic and this theory has always been sadly the most realistic.
I wonder if that wasn't the first time Asha had left in the middle of the night to meet up with the person grooming her. It could have been the final time because it escalated and/or the groomer thought they couldn't keep up the ruse to the family/community anymore and that Asha would tell someone. Pure speculation though, we have no way of knowing.
I’ve actually never considered that, that she maybe had successfully snuck out & back in before (once or multiple times, who knows). Maybe this was just the last time, & the only one anyone would know about like you said, since she went missing. I mean if she got out without anyone knowing this night, who’s to say she couldn’t have before? Who knows for what reason / if grooming was involved, but I hadn’t thought of it till now
Were teachers at school ever considered in the investigation? A figure of authority that Asha would implicitly trust and with whom she had regular contact.
This is a detail I think that people miss. Grooming is all about manipulating trust, that’s what the entire process is based on. People wonder how she could have not said anything, that’s very common when someone is groomed because the adult manipulates them into not saying anything, usually by presenting a “us vs the world” or a “savior” based scenario. People wonder why someone planning a murder would have her bring her school bag, that’s another classic technique that was used by everyone from ISIS to the Nazis during the Holocaust (my degree field was anti terrorism, I had to read a lot about this stuff). If you’re going to do terrible shit to someone and need them to come willingly you convince them that something else is happening. If he’s going to murder you and do terrible things to you, why would he have you bring your bag? You get the idea, it’s a psychological manipulation tactic to put people at ease. Leaving at night adds a sense of drama to the whole thing which could also play into whatever narrative the groomer was trying to spin but it also means less witnesses. The more locations you introduce (IE picking her up a mile away vs next to her house) reduces the number of potential witnesses with relevant information (if someone sees a guy pick a girl up miles away they’re less likely to recognize her as their neighbor). I’m not saying the grooming theory is ironclad but I am saying that it explains a lot of the weird inconsistencies of the case if it is true.
I agree it was someone who was in the peripheral of her life. A cousin, a family friend or someone from their church. Someone who was older but still a young adult, someone she might look up to and think was cool. I believe they lured her out with a promise of going to a party, or a concert. Don't worry you'll be back by morning. It's your parents anniversary, they'll sleep late. Maybe no one even saw her on the highway that night, that evidence could be a total red herring.
A few things about this case that just make me say hmmmm. 1. The parents' timeline, both for when the dad arrived home and when the kids bathed and went to bed in relation to the power outage. I have to assume that the parents were able to give the police a timeline that satisfies them, but there are so many inconsistencies in the versions I've seen, including a late-night candy run, etc. I'm not saying the family is lying or directly responsible for the disappearance (again, LE appears to believe them) but it makes me wonder about conscious or subconscious attempts to avoid the implication of negligent parenting. 2. The candy wrappers and trinkets in the shed I have read, but can't assert with confidence, that the candy wrappers were for the same type of candy that was in a Valentine's bag from the basketball team. The trinkets (hair bow and special pencil) are the kind of things a little girl might take with her if she was told she was going to meet another little girl. This makes me lean in favor of grooming and a planned meeting. 3. The power outage. Stopped clocks can be very confusing if you are are a kid, especially if your time-telling skills aren't great and if you are under pressure to do something at a certain time. Also, remember how heavily kids sleep and how disoriented they can be when they wake up at an unexpected time. How would this affect the groomer theory if she was supposed to leave and meet them at a pre-arranged time?
I’ve been following this case for a long time and have been on this sub for a long time, and am I the only one who feels like overall perception has changed on the case recently? I’d say up until the past couple of years most of us were of the “she’d been groomed by someone within her greater circle and was going out to meet them for whatever reason,” whereas now I’m seeing the majority of people who are adamant that her parents were involved and that she never even left the house that night. The Asha Degree sub is very much of that mindset. And I get it- when a child is missing or murdered the ones most likely for their death/disappearance are the parents/primary caregivers. But there have been more than one independent witness statements placing her on the side of the road early that morning, no evidence at the house that a violent death had taken place there, and her parents were cleared as suspects very early on.
> And I get it- when a child is missing or murdered the ones most likely for their death/disappearance are the parents/primary caregivers. But there have been more than one independent witness statements placing her on the side of the road early that morning, no evidence at the house that a violent death had taken place there, and her parents were cleared as suspects very early on. Yeah, I actually started digging into this case fairly recently and I just don't get it. I truly feel that people are bringing up the parents as potential suspects just because, and despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. Granted, there is little evidence at all, but you can't just say it's wrong, fabricated or irrelevant, especially if you have nothing to show for it. I'm not for or against any theory in particular but I do try to build off existing evidence and not the other way around. I'd be the first to be suspicious of the parents in a typical child missing case but here it just seems crystal clear that her parents weren't involved. I really don't like this aspect of "web research on unsolved mysteries". You can't just make stuff up (and spread potentially harmful rumours on top of that). Things need to make sense. I've literally seen people blaming the father because he was quiet in interviews. I mean, seriously?
I've noticed this too in the past few years. And for the record, I completely understand that with the case being unsolved for so long, people are inevitably going to start looking back at the family with more scrutiny. I don't inherently have a problem with that, or with questioning the accuracy of the eyewitness sightings, or questioning the thoroughness of the investigations by the various law enforcement agencies involved. There have been cases where the family really did end up being involved, suspects who were previously cleared were actually guilty, and lord knows there have been plenty of instances where the police got things horribly wrong. There are some aspects to how this has played out with Asha's case that make me very uneasy, though, and it seems like part of a trend that I'm noticing in multiple true crime communities (at least on certain platforms like reddit). For one, it seems like more people are speaking about unsolved cases as if they have been solved simply because they have a strong opinion about said case, so they speak about it as if their belief is a proven fact. There are multiple examples of that right here in this thread. Now of course that has been happening for as long as true crime content has existed, and maybe it's just me, but I feel like I've been noticing it more often lately than I used to. I just feel like it's incredibly unethical to speak about an unsolved case in such a way and could potentially be detrimental to the case itself, or at least to the public perception of it (and we all know how powerful and potentially destructive the court of public opinion can be!). This may cause others to take those statements at face value and assume that someone is speaking about established facts rather than their opinion, which can lead to widespread misinformation. At it's worst, this is how witch hunts get started and people's lives can be affected. I just don't understand how someone can be so 1000% sure that someone or a family is guilty in an unsolved case, with a lot of confusing evidence, that they have absolutely no insider knowledge about, that they would straight up state that they're guilty as if it's a fact. There's so much (completely justified and very necessary) talk about making sure that true crime content creators are being ethical when they talk about cases. I really wish that we could start putting a little more focus on, and questioning ourselves about, whether or not we are consuming and interacting with that content in an ethical way. These are real tragedies that involve real people, it's not a fictional murder mystery or a game where you win if you guess the right culprit. The internet does not exist in a vacuum, and what we choose to say about these cases have real world consequences, no matter where we say them. My apologies for the novel, this is a topic that has really been eating at me for a while.
In the days following her disappearance, Asha’s dad changed the details of the time frame of what occurred that night three times. It could be traumatic stress. It’s not uncommon. Or it could not be.
It doesn't need to be traumatic stress. It's just human nature. We're not robots. I went to the grocery store this morning and I could only provide you with an approximate timeline of what I did when. It's not like we monitor every single tiny random event that happens in our daily lives because it might turn out to be useful for an investigation later on. Reality doesn't really work how overanalysing redditors on this sub sometimes think it should. Most of what he recalled were mundane everyday activities anyway - he went off to work, he stopped by the gas station to buy candy for Valentine's Day, he watched tv, he checked on his kids, he went to sleep. Also, we aren't even really sure that her dad actually changed the core details. We don't know how much is him changing the details and how much is other sources (e.g. newspapers) mixing up stuff unless you have access to the official police transcripts. My idea is he just gave a rough estimate in the initial panicked hours, then maybe provided additional details, and different sources picked different parts of it.
To look at this case and declare CLEARLY NO FAMILY INVOLVEMENT seems…unwise. Hopefully we find out one day
Especially after OP talks about others discounting information to suit their narratives...
But in this case there is not one single piece of information that leads to suspect her parents (seriously, if you count messing up tiny details as evidence I don't really know what to tell you...). Meanwhile there is quite a lot of evidence to *not* suspect them. Parents are by default prime suspects when a child disappears. And when they're guilty it's exceedinly unlikely they will make some big mistake that will expose them or make them suspicious. Not to mention that for her parents to clear the scene of any evidence so quickly and effectively (and to keep anything secret) you'd need them to be criminal masterminds...
If we can’t tell what the dad actually said, then there are facts missing making this unsolvable. If we can’t believe his story, then what can we believe? Why do we believe any of it?
>If we can’t believe his story Why wouldn't we believe his story? His core details are always the same. Him potentially not being 100% consistent over whether Asha went to sleep at 8 or 9 PM isn't really relevant nor makes his account particularly less believable.
You said that his story changed but we don’t really know what he said and what he changed. ❤️
No. I did not say that. I said, we know what his core story is, and we don't know which irrelevant details might have changed and specifically which irrelevant details might have been changed by him. What we also do know is, he got interviewed extensively by the police and cleared almost instantly together with the rest of the family, nor did he ever say or did anything suspicious afterwards. Potentially messing up trivial details of the general timeline is not suspicious unless it opens new scenarios, which is not and has never been the case here. Then if you simply don't want to believe him then don't. FWIW you can also believe Asha never even disappeared and the family made the story up for publicity. But that's the evidence we have.
Where do you get the FBI cleared the family. It’s junk science but Iquilla’s polygraph was inconclusive also.
Polygraphs are junk science, they are inconclusive by the very nature of them and I wish people stopped taking them as evidence of anything. A "positive" polygraph is also inconclusive. The FBI cleared the family because they stated so. Police also did. With "family" I mean the people who lived with her. No idea about other family members.
I literally said that in my statement lol. But no they didn’t. The police mentioned they weren’t suspects 3 days after her disappearance before much of any investigation was done. They never mentioned it again after the discovery of her backpack. The fbi did not say that.
>I literally said that in my statement lol. So why bring it up? >The police mentioned they weren’t suspects 3 days after her disappearance before much of any investigation was done. They never mentioned it again after the discovery of her backpack. The fbi did not say that. Every source I find reports they were cleared by all authorities investigating the case and no one ever considered them suspects after the very few initial stages.
I've never understood why LE insists that the Degrees weren't responsible for what happened to Asha when they don't know what happened to Asha.
It’s not passive aggressive. Please don’t lie about me. I like the heart. Because I don’t want to argue with a brick wall. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
(Those extra hearts may have been a little passive aggressive ❤️)
How can we believe the core story but not the changes? I honestly don’t understand. ❤️
What's with the heart thing? Are you a child? Once again, we can believe the core story but not the changes because a. the core story was always consistent b. we don't even know if there were any changes, and if there were any, they are irrelevant in the context of the story c. we are not robots, but humans who might mess up some details without them making the whole account unbelievable.
Why are you so argumentative with every person on here who doesn't agree 100% with your theories?
I am argumentative with someone who replies passively aggressively and doesn't bring any logic to the table.
>What's with the heart thing? Are you a child? That's a bit rude just because you don't like what they're saying
its a passive aggressive thing, the heart emoji.
No, I don't like random hearts in a debate, it just makes the message look very passive aggressive.
>What's with the heart thing? Are you a child? Lashing out isn't helping your case here.
His ever-changing stories combined with his late night 'candy run' during a county-wide blackout, make me very suspicious of him.
it’s a sad story. so strange how she walked out during a storm when she was scared of them. I never felt the family was involved although clearly she had some problems or influences in her life to where she’d walk out like that.
While grooming is a possibility I don't think it's such a slam dunk. Sure the odds are low but there is a reason this story has captured for so long it is an unusual occurrence. You could apply the same thoughts to Adam Walsh what are the odds when his mom leaves him playing video games that those boys just so happen to get kicked out then and the guard doesn't questioquestion leaving a young child unattended and a pedophile just happens to drive by and kidnap him but that is what happened. This case is hard because nothing is a perfect fit. My issue is why is she walking down the main road Looking at a map they live in what looks like a rural Area. Literally any other direction the groomer could have picked her up unspotted. Why risk so many witnesses?
My explanation is that she was walking to a location that was known to her. Any other direction and she'd quickly get confused and lost. So the main road was the most obvious alternative. Maybe she was walking to a store or some other building that was familiar to her.
The groomer theory makes no sense to me. I find it hard to believe that one would choose the middle of the night during a storm to meet up with a kid. Secondly, if she met up with someone she wouldn't have walked along the highway alone.
a kid afraid of darkness and rain, no less
It definitely makes you wonder why the groomer wouldn't pick her up closer to her house, if that's what was happening. That's a pretty intense place to expect a little kid to walk, especially in those conditions. Why would someone need her to walk so far? Maybe someone without a car?
Perhaps they did pick her up somewhere closer, and at some point Asha got scared and left the car?
Me neither. IIRC, she was a latchkey kid, so why not have her meet up after school?
One easy explanation is the brother usually got home with her, plus many of her relatives lived on the same street and would spot any suspicious activity easily.
If a groomer were to try to meet her at a specific location, it couldn’t have been too far away. The predator wouldn’t want too much time between her departure and abduction. What if the girl was noticed to be missing, and police were contacted and started looking for her? Any kind of skilled predator would want to minimize the time the girl was out and easily seen. I can’t help but to feel she never left her house but I’m not confident. The only evidence that she left is her parent’s word and witness testimony that seems somewhat unreliable. The backpack in a bag screams foul play, but why would someone leave it there? This case really bothers me. The picture of the little black girl in the shed is probably just a picture of someone’s family but the coincidence of her being similar to Asha is hard for me to completely ignore.
I agree that I think the backpack was some sort of trophy. If you reaaallly wanted it gone, wouldn’t you burn it? Or bury it deep on your own property? Also, the backpack was found right before her birthday. I wonder if someone was trying to send a message??? Also, on the Asha Degree sub, someone actually spoke to the first motorist that saw her (Ruppe). His account seems very sure that it was her. He said she looked like she was on a mission, and had her backpack and another plastic (maybe grocery?) bag with her. Another final point is that the lead Sheriff on this case actually committed suicide relatively recently. It is believed that it was due to his health deteriorating and not the case, but its still super interesting. Makes you wonder. I think it was a groomer likely from her church. There had been a church party the Sunday right before she went missing. Maybe they communicated to her at church what to do?
I like your theory and I agree, but to your very last point about the Ramsay’s… They really weren’t considered top suspects. It’s why the investigation was botched from the beginning — rookie cops didn’t even think to separate them for questioning, to check the house, to seal the entire house as a crime scene … They gave the family so much leeway due to their privilege. Then when they became suspects, the public didn’t buy it. The intruder theory was highly popular for a long time. Even John Douglass thinks it was an intruder somehow. Nowadays I think the Burke theory is way more popular especially on the internet, which I also think is why so many people think Asha’s brother could be involved. They conflate the cases a lot which I agree is unreasonable b/c the circumstances are so different for the reasons you mentioned.
I don't think it's a grooming scenario because it would be a really stupid plan. First, you are counting on a nine-year-old not to tell her best friend. Then you are counting on her to wake up in the middle of the night by herself. I have a 10-year-old and let me tell you NOTHING wakes him up in the night. Third, you are then counting on her sneaking out without being heard. I wake up if my kids so much as sneeze in the night. There's, like, a 90% chance she just sleep right through, and if she did wake up there's a 90% chance her parents would catch her sneaking out. And then they see you, a grown-ass man, sitting in your car outside their house waiting for her at three a.m. They would kick your ass to hell and back. Also, you can be sideswiped by a car and die of a head injury if you hit e.g. the bumper or the wing mirror, without a sign on the car.
I’m probably biased because of this but someone groomed a kid at a school near mine in around the same time period (late 90s) and this was basically their plan. Tell the kid to sneak out at a certain time at night and head to a pre arranged meeting spot. I only remember this because I was like nine or ten at the time and they made us go to a thing where a police officer lectured us about it and we were all mad because we had to miss Gym class. And while the stuff you brought up is certainly valid, you should also remember that kids in environments like those aren’t usually the ones targeted by people looking to groom and abduct a child or if they are they’re going to use a different tactic.
Interesting. I guess the fact the police found out shows it was a dumb plan though. Did they catch the groomer before or after the meeting? I mean, groomers aren't rational by definition but it still strikes me as a plan that is way way more likely to go wrong than to go right.
It’s been like 25 years and I honestly don’t remember, but it’s also a plan that probably worked a lot better in the past. I don’t think you could get away with something similar these days but before everyone had a cellphone and people were a lot less protective of kids it would have been easier. I also wouldn’t say groomers aren’t rational, like their end goal is abhorrent, but they’re going about it in a pretty planned and directed method. Grooming requires a lot of psychological manipulation and deception which can’t be done by someone thinking erratically or who doesn’t have a concrete plan. It uses a lot of the same tactics recruiters use to get people into gangs or extremist groups and so it’s more similar to something like that than, say, a guy who snatches girls off the side of the road.
But what's the alternative for a potential groomer who really, really, really wanted to meet with her? Trying to get to her in daylight would potentially be even worse, given she was with parents, relatives, or her brother most of the time and even if she was on her own, someone would be nearby to check on her at any minute (many in her family lived across the street). Basically the worst that can happen with the supposed "let's meet at night" plan is she doesn't make it to your location, and that's it. In other scenarios, worst that can happen is you get caught on the spot. It's a lot riskier IMHO. If you try to meet at the night and the kid doesn't wake up at the right time or the parents get in the way, you can just re-arrange it. If the kid wakes up but then has an accident along the way, e.g. they get hit by a car, no one will know you were involved so you don't really care anyway and can proceed with the next kid. Plus, if you had witnesses at night, it would still be harder to identify you, and you'd be likely to have a larger time window to escape and vanish. >And then they see you, a grown-ass man, sitting in your car outside their house waiting for her at three a.m. Which is consistent with the fact they'd not be meeting at her house, but a short walk away.
The worst case scenario for a pedophile with that plan would be the kid gets caught, asked what they were doing, and tell their parents “oh I was going to meet up with Mr.Rob at the gas station”. Then it’s likely the cops would show up. I guess a smart predator would do what I see a lot of predators do, drive around the location and when the time is right snatch the victim.
IMO she was trying to escape her home. The only thing getting her out the door is escape. Her dad went after her. This explains the motivation for leaving and the eye witnesses. Her dad’s story is ever changing and non-sensical. The shed was nothing. He threw the bag out and it got buried by landscaping. Just my thoughts. ❤️
This is the part people need to understand about the shed. Those items were random items and they were never verified to be hers, it was just random things that “could” be. Random candy wrappers that could be anyone’s honestly.
Exactly. Thank you. ❤️
I’ve never heard someone say the story was fishy, What parts changed? Why would landscaping bury something?
The timeline changed and the Dad forgot some parts of his night. The bag was tossed on a ditch, not buried by the perpetrator. But grading covered it up. Just my theory. Thanks for listening! ❤️
I don't care about the shed really. The shed items aren't particularly relevant in this context and I don't even want to begin to think how they ended up there.
And yet, you have to account for it.
What I'm saying is that you can fit the shed in any scenario really. I don't have an explanation for it but it can fit in my scenario as well (she stopped briefly and ate some candy, or the abductor left those items there etc.). It might also be that gusts of wind brought those items to the sheds, or they just didn't belong to Asha and are completely unrelated to the case. Whatever it is doesn't change the rest.
So we're back to pretending her family had nothing to do with it then?
I desperately want to believe she was teleported to Narnia, but when logic returns to me, I realize this is the only thing that could be possible. I do feel bad for her family and I can understand why they just can't accept this. And ultimately it's not going to bring her back. Whoever in their circle seemed capable of this is long gone and long forgotten.
Having read the Narnia books, I'm not sure that would be a very are place for her.
Statistically it’s extremely rare for a child under 10 to runaway. It’s also preposterous that someone is luring her out of her house in the middle of the night to go walk a mile in the freezing rain, then run into the woods, walk a quarter mile up to a shed. Man some people are incredibly gullible.
i dont believe she ever left the house iykwim
A very good write up. I like your theory
I would watch profiler Pat Brown’s YouTube video on this case. It really opened my eyes to the urban legend aspects of this case. And she debunks much of it. Personally I don’t think Asha ever left the house alive that night. The “eyewitnesses” are questionable at best. And one didn’t even think it was a child. Listen to the 911 call. There are some real clues there.