Crime Junkie - MISSING: Asha Degree

Episode Date: January 7, 2019

In February of 2000, a 9-year-old girl named Asha Degree packed her book bag and tucked it away, waiting for the right time to sneak out of her North Carolina home. To this day, no one knows why she left, or why she was walking along Highway 18 alone around 4 in the morning. And the case would only get more confusing as her belongings start to pop up along that same highway, spaced out over 26 miles, and 18 months. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-asha-degree/    

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And welcome to the first episode of 2019. Yay! I hope you all had a wonderful New Year's Eve. I know I had a wonderful New Year's Eve at our Crime Junkie party. I know Brett couldn't be there.

It was insane. We had over 120 Crime Junkies come out, and it wasn't just Crime Junkies from Indiana, like I expected. We had people fly in from California and Georgia and Vermont. So wild. Yeah, there is this time-lapse, like, one minute video

of the party that everyone needs to go check out on our Instagram at Crime Junkie podcast. But I truly had the best time ever. It was so amazing meeting these fans, talking, dancing the night away. I want to live in my sequin jumpsuit that I had made. It was amazing. Yeah, you sent me a picture of yourself getting ready,

and I was like, how much fashion tape are you wearing? Yeah, not fashion tape. It was fashion glue. I was glued into that jumpsuit. Oh, my gosh, but you looked like a rock star. And speaking of rock stars, so even before the party, we're getting ready, New Year's Eve. And Brett, you called me crying,

and do you want to tell people why? Yeah, I was getting ready to go to the wedding that I had on New Year's Eve, and I was just scrolling through Twitter, and I noticed that an amazing writer, who is now my favorite writer, I think, wrote a piece for Rolling Stone on the Best True Crime Podcasts of 2018, and we were there. Yeah, her name is Laura Barcella.

She is my favorite person in the world right now. But we got named in Rolling Stone, and it's not even that we got named. It's the company that we were in, Brett. Amazing, amazing shows that we love and adore. Yeah, we look up to these people. It's been a dream of ours to create anything that would be in the realm of these other people.

But to see our names right next to them is amazing. Yes, it was so flattering, so amazing. We are so thankful to everybody who's been listening and sharing. The only reason we're in the top charts of iTunes right now is because of all of you telling your friends and family and getting the word out, and we appreciate it so much. And actually, one of the things that Laura mentioned in the article that we do and that we like to do

is talk about underreported cases. So I figured there is no better way to start 2019 than to tell you about the underreported case of a nine-year-old girl named Asha DeGree who went missing back in 2000. MUSIC This is one of the stranger disappearances of a young child I think I've ever read about.

And there are a couple of online forums and YouTubers that have talked about this case, but I'm a little surprised it hasn't gotten more attention. So that's what we're aiming for here today. Our story takes place in February of 2000 in a small town called Shelby on the western outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina. The little girl we're talking about, Asha,

is nine years old at the time, and she lives at home with her 10-year-old brother, O'Brien, her mom, Iquilla, and her dad, Harold. Sunday, February 13th, was a fairly unremarkable day for the DeGrees. That Sunday, they went to church, they ate lunch at their aunt's house, had some candy that they'd gotten for Valentine's Day,

which was just around the corner, and they went home with their mom. Their dad didn't go home that day and stay with them because he had to go work at his second job. Iquilla had a normal routine for the kids. She liked to bathe them before bed, but on this day particular, there was a crash near their home that knocked out the power

and prevented them from getting their nightly bath. So the kids went to bed at their normal time, around 8.30. Asha and her white nightgown with red trim and her hair and pigtails, knowing that they would have to wake up a little bit early to get that bath that they missed the night before. And I gotta be honest, Brit, the next part of the day is where my research kind of falls off a bit.

Things get really fuzzy because I went in circles online trying to figure out exactly what happened in this short couple of hours. I wanted to know the exact movements of everyone in that house, everyone in the family, between 8.30 and 2.30 in the morning, and I finally had to give up because my head was just spinning. There's just nothing out there? There's just nothing out there.

There's stuff out there? But my problem is there's a bunch of conflicting stuff out there, and I am having a really hard time tracking down all these conflicting accounts to an actual source. So I don't know where all this is coming from. These news articles from 2000 are really, really hard to find. So let me kind of tell you the couple of things that are said about what happens between 8.30 and 2.30.

One account says that around 12.30, Harold returns home from his job, and by this time, the power has been turned back on in the home. Now, all of them agree that sometime in the night, the power comes back on. That's not really what's in debate. It's really what time does Harold get home and does he stay home?

Now, some articles and forums say that he watches TV to kind of unwind before he goes to bed around 2.30. Other places I found say he gets home, then goes back out to buy Valentine's Day candy for the kids, and then gets home later and again goes to bed at 2.30. Still other places say that after work, he went directly to get candy and then came home later, but again, in bed by 2.30.

And in one or two places that I could never track down to any source, it even says that supposedly there's a version of this story where he gets home at 12.30, and Asha is on the couch dressed in normal clothes watching TV and her dad tells her to go to bed, which is the strangest of all of these, but again, cannot track it to any real source, so I have no clue what's real and what's not.

And this is the problem with underreported cases and especially underreported cases from almost 19 years ago. I can't find the actual news articles to see where people got this, who's telling what, is this just a bad game of telephone where the story keeps changing the more people tell it online and the more people exaggerate and elaborate, or is Harold's story actually changing each time?

And I tend to lean more towards the former, thinking that people are making this up years later, trying to create suspicion to give themselves some kind of answer in a case where there is none, but I'll get more to that later. So what happens between 8.30 and 2.30 is fuzzy, but according to multiple sources, and this is where we kind of get back on track

and everything starts to agree again, the FBI's website, the Charlie Project's website, Asha's dad says he checks on the kids before going to bed around 2.30 and he sees them both sleeping. And just of note, O'Brien and Asha actually share a room, so he's able to check on both of them at once. Later in the early morning hours,

O'Brien wakes up and sees Asha standing in their room and it's thought that she may have used the restroom and then gone back to bed, because shortly after this, O'Brien hears her bed creaking, but he doesn't look over, he just assumes that she's moving around in her bed. But not placing eyes on her could have been a mistake because just a few hours later, at 5.45 in the morning, Iquilla's alarm goes off.

She set the alarm early that morning to give the kids their bath before getting them off to school. When talking about that specific morning, Iquilla was quoted telling a newspaper reporter, I woke up on February 14, 2000 at 5.45 a.m. The alarm went off for my children to go to school at 6.30 a.m. I went to the bathroom two feet away from the door to start the bathwater, because they could not take a bath

the night before, since we had a power outage. I opened their bedroom door, my son O'Brien was under the covers, as he usually slept, I called his name and he jumped up as usual. I realized that Asha was not in her bed. She goes on to tell the same reporter how she frantically started searching the house. She says she looked beside O'Brien's bed

because sometimes Asha would lay there, but she wasn't there. She checked the living room, maybe she'd gone to lay on the couch, but she wasn't there. She checked the kitchen, then all the closets in the house, and this is when she realizes that Asha is nowhere in the home. So she rushes to her bedroom where she hurriedly dresses while waking up her husband to tell him that Asha is missing.

They both check the cars together, and they start calling family members that she might be with. Perle's mother, who lived just across the street, Asha's aunt, who they'd all eat lunch with the day before, all to no avail. Iquilla said after they found out that she wasn't at her grandma's or her aunt's. That, that is when she went into panic mode.

She called her own mother hysterical and told her what was happening. And that's when her mother said, hang up the phone and call the police. I found a transcript of the 911 call, which appears to be accurate, but full disclosure. Again, this did not come from a news article. This came from the deep dark web of the internet

where I spent hours and hours and hours. So, I think I'm gonna read Harold, who's the one that actually called 911. And Britt, do you wanna read the dispatcher? Sure thing. 911. Yes, I'd like to report a child missing. From where?

From my house. What's your address? 3404 Oak Crust Drive. Is this an apartment? Yeah. And which apartment? Apartment 3406. Okay, is she missing from 3404 or 3406?

3404, Amy. There's not an apartment number? It's 340... No, no. It's not like an A or B. No, huh. And what's your name? Harold Degree.

Your phone number, Harold? The next door neighbor said she went down the road and said that she was just a kid on the road. What's the child's name? Asia Degree. What's her full name? Asia Dracula Degree. Can you spell that for me, please?

A-S-H-A-J-A-Q-U-A-I-L. J-A- what? J-A-Q-U... I mean, yeah, yeah, J-A-Q-U-A-I-L-L-A. Degree? Yeah, yeah. How old is she? Uh, nine.

Why you're black? Black. When did you last see her, Harold? Last time I went to bed, she was in bed. We got up this morning, called her to get up to school, and she wasn't there. And her book bag's missing and her pocket book. So you don't know if she got dressed

or if she still got on her bedclothes or what? We don't know. Was the door open or anything? No. Her brother sleeps in there with her. And when he was in there, he didn't hear her when she got up. OK. All right, Harold.

I will get an officer to get in touch with you just as soon as possible. If you do happen to locate her, please call us back and let us know, OK? OK. Thank you. Bye-bye. Police were on scene by 640 to search the home

and the nearby areas. Police even brought search dogs with them, but the dogs were unable to pick up Asia's scent. When the police cleared the home and realized that Asia was nowhere inside, they expanded the search to surrounding neighborhoods and streets. By 7 o'clock, neighbors and friends had awoke and, shocked by the news,

offered their services to help search as well. But neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, they find nothing, not a single sign of or item belonging to Asia. As this search is going on, police do start processing the degree home like a crime scene. But there doesn't appear to have been a crime committed, no forced entry, no blood, no sign that anyone but the family

was inside that home. In fact, not only do they find nothing pointing to an intruder taking Asia, but they find evidence that perhaps Asia left on her own accord. Based on that 911 call, police know that her backpack, along with her purse, some clothes, sneakers were all missing. A neighbor saw her walking away by herself.

So did Asia leave on her own? If she did, why? Where was she going? And could she have been trying to meet somebody? Once police start to explore the idea that Asia left on her own, they start to think that maybe this was something she had been planning. But Asia's parents say, no way, this was so unlike Asia.

You see, she and her brother lived pretty sheltered lives. They didn't have a computer in their home. Outside of school, church, and basketball, they didn't do a whole lot of socializing. And beyond this, Asia's parents say that she was deathly afraid of dark. She was deathly afraid of storms and of dogs. So she would not have left the home in the middle of the night,

in the dark, while, by the way, it was storming. Also, they said that Asia was shy and timid. She was not the kind to run away. And it's really pretty rare that you hear of kids who live in pretty stable homes running away at such a young age. Yeah, she's nine. She's just a little kid.

I feel like I've read somewhere that runaway age kind of starts at 12, and nine is much younger than that. Yeah, that actually was something that I came across in this specific case, that someone from the FBI, I believe, said this, that it was at age 12 that they start really classifying kids as runaways. And usually, if they're younger than 12,

they almost always assume something happened to them, like some kind of foul play, unless there's like a specific reason, like something crazy was going on in the home. But that doesn't seem like it's the case here. Right. Everything here is pointing to the fact that she left willingly.

Also, I should mention that all of the doors were locked in the home when Asha's parents woke up. Now, she had a key that she kept in her book bag. So she seems to have left on her own locking the doors behind her. And what the police and the FBI later say is that it appears that her bag had been packed well in advance.

And it seems as if she had prepared to make this trip. And she got everything ready so that she wouldn't risk waking up her brother that night. And there's something else to suggest that she left willingly and on her own. Sightings of Asha start to come up the same night that she went missing.

Two motorists say they saw a young black girl matching her description walking along a two-lane highway. This is Highway 18, sometime between 3.30 and 4 o'clock in the morning, again, the same night she's thought to have left her house. Nothing about this sighting makes sense. I mean, it was a perfect description of her. So the FBI, the police, believe it is her.

But again, super bad weather. It's storming, raining. There's this little girl walking alone on the side of the highway. Because it happened, I understand why it stuck out to them. Nothing about this is normal. How far away is the highway from her house?

Well, at the time they spotted her, she was just about a mile away from her home. And she was walking along the road in the direction toward town. And this is actually a road she would have been somewhat familiar with and a direction she would have gone before, because this is actually the direction her school bus used to go.

The motorists who saw her, did they mention what she was wearing? Was she still in her nightgown? No, she was now in a long-sleeve white shirt and pants. And based on the items missing from her house, police and family were confident that this was her. From what I read, and again, these aren't 100% confirmed accounts, but it seems that there were two full outfits that were missing.

And one of them was jeans with a white long-sleeve shirt. Did either of the motorists call 9-1-1 about the sighting? So no. And obviously, this is one of the biggest mistakes in the case. If not the biggest, I mean, we probably wouldn't be here 19 years later if someone would have seen a nine-year-old girl on the side of the highway during a storm and just called the police.

Right, like a normal person. Like a normal person. Multiple people see a little girl walking along the highway, but no one reports it. Now, one guy did try and help her. He says that he made a U-turn to pull alongside of the road and ask her if she needed help. But he said that as soon as he rolled down his window,

she freaked out and ran away from the road into this tree line just down, just straight across from the road. And the man didn't see her again. To me, this is even more reason to call the police. Yeah, a little kid just ran into the woods. Yeah, and it's not like dense woods. But you know how there's tree lines on the side of rural roads, rural highways?

We have that all over Indiana. Yeah, definitely. So after this sighting, there were no more sightings of Asia on the road anywhere. For two days after this, there was just nothing, no sightings, no items found, searches continued, and there were thousands of man hours poured into this case, but absolutely nothing surfaced until February 17th.

Police in their search make it to this property off of Highway 18. That's the highway Asia was seen walking on. And when they start questioning the lady who owns it, asking if she saw anything, a light bulb goes off for her. She didn't see a girl, but she did find something on her property on the 15th, something that didn't mean much at the time because she didn't know Asia was missing,

but something that now she thinks might be significant. On the 15th, she went to her shed and found a Mickey Mouse hair bow, a green marker, and a pencil, all just inside of the shed, like right inside the front door. When she takes police back to the shed and gives them permission to search, they find even more. They find some candy wrappers, and they

confirm that those were the same kind that Asia had gotten after playing in a basketball game on the Saturday before she went missing. She had been there, but why had she gone there, and where was she now? Despite finding this clue, they were days behind her, and they weren't able to track her movements. They were forced to wait for another lead to surface,

and that next lead wouldn't come for 18 months after her disappearance. But when that lead comes, it leaves everyone with more questions than answers. In August of 2001, a contractor is cleaning out some land off of Highway 18, not the area near the shed where Asia was last seen, but some 26 miles from her home and in a different direction than she had been seen walking

on the night she disappeared. As this man is digging and clearing the land, he comes across a black trash bag, a bag that had been buried on his property. He knew he never buried this, so who did, and what could be inside? This man gets off of his excavating equipment and makes his way over to the black trash bag.

He picks it up, rustling it in his hands, and opens it to find another black trash bag. It's strange to say the least, and when he opens that second bag inside, he finds a child's backpack, not just any child's backpack, written on the bag with Asia's name and telephone number. Now, obviously, all of our crime junkies at the time would have been following the case and freaking out

after coming upon this, but this guy hadn't been following the news. This guy had no idea a young girl had been missing from this area of town for over 18 months, but it was still weird enough and stuck with him enough to mention it to his wife the next morning at breakfast. And luckily, his wife had been paying attention, and thank God, because it makes me sick to my stomach

to think that he could have just thrown it away or never knew what he was holding on to and how important of a piece of evidence he had in his hand. Yeah, that's insane. Once they realize what they actually have, they contact police who descend on this guy's property to do a thorough search of the land, having no idea if they're going to find more evidence

or maybe Asia herself. After an extensive search, all they come up with are some animal bones and a pair of men's khaki pants. The bag was sent to a federal laboratory for testing, but they cited a pending investigation and never released the results, and I haven't been able to find anything on the pants either. I assume they were deemed unrelated, but, like, man,

since I've been working with the police and going through cold case files here in Indiana, those pants are exactly the kind of thing we would get excited about, possibly finding some kind of DNA on with all this new technology. Now, granted, I have no info on how close or how far those pants were found from Asia's bag, and all of that would play into how likely it would be

that they're actually connected. But the FBI's releasing nothing, nothing from the pants, nothing from the bag. They say this is an ongoing investigation, but that makes me think they found something. They're holding on to some piece of evidence as they're, like, ace in the hole. So when they get somebody, they can prove he's the guy

because he knows maybe what's in the bag or the condition of the bag. I don't know. How weird is this whole thing, though? Like, clearly a nine-year-old isn't going to put her book bag in two trash bags and then bury it, right? I mean, I can't even see how she'd want to get rid of it because it's the only thing that she had with her,

and it has all of her possessions. But if somehow she did get rid of her backpack, no way is she doing it like this. So we have to assume someone else buried it, right? Yeah, I think so, because you're right. If she wanted to get rid of her backpack, why on earth is she doing it like this? And it seems like whoever buried it there

was almost trying to preserve it. Like, if you were just wanting to get rid of it because it was, like, evidence or a link to paper, a link to back to you, you just wanted it gone. Why double-bag it before you bury it, right? To me, that's like, I'm trying to preserve this. So what, you can go back and get it later? Nothing makes sense.

Yeah, it's really strange. Or did they somehow know that the area was about to be excavated and they, like, wanted it to be found? But even in that case, to me, if you buried it recently, you knew it was going to get found. Why double-bag it unless you wanted something preserved? There's something inside of there that you were, like, taunting police and wanted them to find?

And I would also want to know, and again, something they never released, is, like, how fresh was the area where it was buried? Did it look like it had been there for 18 months? Did it look like it had been placed there a few weeks ago? All of this is unanswered. All of these questions I have. But I think we definitely have a perpetrator.

And this is something I think most people who look at this case can agree on, including Asha's family. They say that, yes, even though it doesn't make sense, it wasn't her personality, she probably left the house of her own free will. That's what all the evidence points to. But somewhere along the way, she had to have met with foul play. Investigators officially announced

that they consider Asha's disappearance to be a criminal matter, and foul play is suspected after that book bag is discovered. Do you know, did they ever consider the parents as people of interest or potential suspects? Or was it pretty clear all along that they had nothing to do with it? So they actually did for a hot minute.

Iquilla said that they were looking at the family hard in those first few hours after she was missing, but they started to realize that something bigger was going on when they got those sightings of Asha the day that she went missing. But even though they started looking outside of the family, like the same day, they ended up going back to the family in March, just a month after Asha went missing,

when all of the leads were drying up. They gave both of them polygraphs, and I assume they did OK because neither Harold or Iquilla were ever named as suspects or persons of interest. And I think now, again, 19 years later, I have no idea what happened in the early days. But after the sightings, after we find that backpack, I don't think law enforcement have any lingering suspicions

about the family, or if they do, they've never said it publicly. OK. Now, that backpack would be the last piece of physical evidence ever found in this case. And I'm not sure the last time the backpack or the trash bags were forensically tested. But I would hope that the family is pushing the FBI

to have that stuff retested because it seems like the only hope for answers at this point. Wait, does that mean there has been nothing since 2001? Not exactly. That was the last piece of physical evidence. OK. So in 2014, the case kind of gets stirred up again because a man named Donald Ferguson gets arrested,

and he is all over the news, and starts getting linked to Asha's case. And I need to tell you a little bit about why Donald is in the news. In 1990, a seven-year-old girl named Shalonda Poole went missing, and she was found just one day after her disappearance. Behind an elementary school, she had been sexually assaulted,

stabbed, and strangled. Her case had actually gone unsolved for many, many years until there was a DNA hit in her case in 2014. And this DNA hit came back to Donald Ferguson, a man who had known the Poole's, a man who had helped the family search for Shalonda when she had gone missing. As he was arrested and tried and investigated, it came to light that he had actually

been in North Carolina at the time of Asha's disappearance. And a lot of people wonder if he could have been involved. The cases are a little different because, OK, there's two years different age, but I think it's still, to me, seven and nine are almost like the same. They're definitely in the same bracket, yeah. Yeah, also he knew Shalonda, so he could have been grooming her, whereas Asha would have been a total stranger.

But it's not completely out of the question that perhaps he was just driving late at night, saw her walking, his perfect victim, just there for the taking. A crime of opportunities. Yeah, but again, why was she out there in the first place? It's absolutely killing me. And I've thought about it every which way,

and nothing makes sense to me. Again, the investigators said whatever they found made them think that she'd planned this trip for days before she had left. But they couldn't find any reason, no abuse in the home, no real reason whatsoever. Some people say that she was sad about her team losing a basketball game the Saturday

before she disappeared. Like she was apparently the star of the team, and that game she had to sit out, and so she felt really bad. But I don't know that you pack your bag and plan to leave home because your team lost their first game. Some people say she was inspired by this book

she was reading about a runaway who had all these adventures. But again, none of this really plays into what we know about her and her personality. Yeah, I was going to say, Ash, you and I have very different personalities. And even as a kid, you were totally the type to get mad and run away, right? Well, so here's the thing.

I think I was the type to get mad and threaten to run away. But I would never, I never actually went through with it. I never packed a bag. But you had that in you to threaten it at least. Oh, here's the thing, yeah. I would have never threatened to do that. Yeah, and I think the difference is if I ever felt like I had to, and I think that's the real thing,

is at the end of the day, I was mad at my parents, but nothing ever made me really want to go. But I had full confidence in myself that if I had to leave, I would survive on the land by myself just fine. Whereas I would be like, I'm going to die, so I'm just going to stay here, I guess. So that's fine.

And I feel like she's maybe a little bit more of my personality than yours. Well, and that's what they kept saying. Sounds like she never even threatened to run away. Yeah, that's what they kept saying over and over. Like, she wasn't dramatic. She never once talked about running away. So it's crazy that this like one basketball game,

or she reads this one book, and then she's like, yeah, I'm going to leave at 3 o'clock in the morning when it's storming and walk across the highway to go where? Like, none of this makes sense. Is there any possibility that someone maybe could have lured her out, or she was going to meet someone somewhere? But who?

Like, I have to believe 19 years later, they looked into everyone in her life. They haven't found any suspects. So if it's a case like Shalonda, where someone was grooming her, who was this person? Did they stay totally under the radar? Like, you know, in 2019, I'd love to be like, oh, she probably met this person online.

They didn't even have a computer. Exactly. And also, like in 2000, how many nine-year-olds were in chat rooms? Like, the 2000s internet is not the 2019 internet, you know what I mean? No, totally. There's, well, I was going to say,

when you were talking about the news articles, news agencies, local news agencies, weren't even putting articles online in like 2000, 2001. Yeah. Very, very rarely do they even have websites. I mean, this is the baby internet. Yeah, so she would have had to have like met somebody online at a computer that was maybe at her school, which

what they probably had wasn't even the internet. They probably just had like computer games. I mean, I would just find it really, really, really hard to believe that she was being groomed by some stranger. So the most likely if she was going to meet somebody, it's somebody in that she knew in her daily life. In their circle, yeah. Who's just like gone totally under the radar.

But we don't know. So in 2015, the FBI announced that they are reinvestigating the case. And they, along with the community, come up with $45,000 as a reward for anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person involved. It takes a year, and it's still super unclear exactly what the tip was that came in.

But in May, 2016, a new tip does come in. And from this, I mean, somehow they decide that this lead is super credible. And they make an announcement to the public that the night Asia went missing, she was seen getting into a dark green, either early 70s Lincoln Continental, Mark IV, or possibly a dark green early 70s Ford Thunderbird.

And she was seen getting into this car along Route 18, or Highway 18, near where she was last seen by those two motorists. Now, the car was described as having rust around the wheels. But they're both pretty distinctive cars. So Britt, you have pictures of these cars. So the first one is the Lincoln. Second one is the Ford Thunderbird.

And remember, this isn't like a case that happened in the 70s or 80s. This is like 2000. These are very distinctive cars in 2000, because they're classics. Yeah, they are absolute boats. I used to drive a Lincoln, and I kind of miss it. They're actually really both cool cars.

They're really cool. Yeah, again, they're classic cars. So I understand why this would have stuck out. Shocking, though, that we don't know who owned them. Anything else. Right, you would think like tracing down who owned these kind of cars in 2000 might have been a little simpler.

Yeah, I mean, access to like registrations, stuff like that. I mean, there can't be that many of these cars left in 2000. I would think, and you know, of course, whoever put in this tip didn't get any kind of license plate where they out of state, but God, and I mean, I almost wonder why you, I mean, maybe she was going the wrong direction to see a license plate. But again, even a little girl walking on the side of the road

getting into a car, also red flags. Yeah, red flags, someone call 911 for the love of God. OK, so besides the red flags, why now? Why in 2016 does this person come forward with this information when they saw it happen the night she went missing? That is something that I've seen everybody go into rabbit holes on because it is super strange.

I don't, to me, I don't know if it's just because maybe they heard a podcast or saw a YouTube video. You know, they saw this case and they're like, oh, I remember that because it was super unique. To me, if it didn't stand out to you enough to remember it and report it at the time, it's shocking that you would like recall it. We're putting two and two together now.

Yeah, and recall it well enough. But I have to believe like whoever put in this tip knew something very specific that only a person who actually saw that would know because otherwise, I don't know why the police would take it or the FBI would take it so seriously. You know what I mean? Maybe they knew she was wearing something

or saw something specific. I don't know. What could they have said that was so believable that we have this tip now? Like, I can't even think of something that would be like, yes, I believe you now because you said this one thing. Right. And something that I wonder too is this kind of calls

into question the whole timeline we thought we knew because we, they say, I mean, every report, they say she went to that shed. So did she run away, go to that shed, come back and get in the screen car? Did she actually never make it to the shed at all? And all of that's, again, it keeps coming up in the reports after they know about the screen car.

So I feel like she had to have made it to the shed at some point. And there's no real details about, like, what time they saw her get into the car. Maybe it was daylight, which would make more sense how they know it's a dark green car. So it was later that morning. I mean, again, I have 1,000 questions about why this tip was validated, but there's something.

There's something they're not telling us for them to put this out as, like, fact in the case. And unfortunately, because this person waited so long, it's going to be way harder to track down. That car likely has changed hands so many times between 2000 and 2016, now 2019. Like, who knows who owned it? This is a shot in the dark, but any chance

Donald Ferguson ever owned a green car like this? Girl, I was searching, but I wasn't able to find out anything. I am still dying to know. I'm dying to know about anyone in North Carolina or the surrounding states who owned either of those in 2000. I feel like they're pretty distinctive cars. And you know one thing that sticks out to me too? If she got in, why?

I almost think she, this goes back to maybe her being lured out there. I almost feel like she would have to know the person, because if you remember that other motorist who's tried to stop to help her. She ran away from him. Yeah, she freaked out and ran away from him. And again, what about this person who rolled up?

Did they just look familiar? Again, I don't know. I could theorize for days. But the truth is, we have no answers. In 2017, the FBI assembled their car team. And I don't know if you remember that from our Monster and Fort Wayne episode on April 10th. Yeah, they're like the specialized team that go out

on like abductions and really likely to be solved cases, right? Specifically for children. And by the way, total side note, but I have gotten all of your messages, listeners. We are working on a follow-up episode about April Tinsley and her killer being arrested and sentenced. Please be patient. It's taking some time.

We thought there would be a trial that we were going to cover. He pled guilty. We're working on it. We hear you. It's going to happen. But anyways, so they assemble this car team in Asia's case. And according to Wikipedia, so take this as what you will, they've done over 300 interviews since they

started in late 2017. But the interviews and reinvestigations haven't led to any new developments in the case. And law enforcement and the family are waiting for that one person with the right piece of information, that person who knows somebody in 2000 who was driving that kind of green car, that person who maybe heard a story from a friend

about picking up a young girl on the road that night, that person with the one piece of information that could break this case wide open. If you have any information on Asia Degrees case, you can submit a tip through the FBI Charlotte office at 704-672-6100. And if you want to see the cars that we're talking about, just to double check because maybe

they sound familiar. You can go to our website and go to our episodes blog for this specific episode at crimejunkiepodcast.com. And Britt, if people want to check us out on social, you can follow us on Twitter at Cremjunkiepod and on Instagram at Cremjunkiepodcast. And we will be back next week with a brand new episode. This episode of Crimejunkie was researched, written,

and hosted by me with co-hosting by Britt Prewott. All of our editing and sound production was done by David Flowers. And all of our music, including our theme, comes from Justin Daniel. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

Arggh.