As per the search warrant records made public on Monday, it is now suspected that the girl who vanished from Cleveland County in 2000 was murdered.
Asha Degree went missing in February 2000 at the age of nine. According to the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office, she was the victim of a homicide. Investigators believe there may be a connection between Degree’s disappearance and a Cleveland County family.
On Monday, September 16, a number of search warrant applications pertaining to recent searches conducted by the FBI, state investigations bureau, and sheriff’s office were made public. Several sites, including a home and property in Shelby, an assisted living facility in Vale, and a home in Charlotte, were the targets of search warrant executions by law authorities.
The Dedmon family owns the properties and resides there. According to the records, search warrants were sought when Degree’s DNA was connected to both a guy called Russell Underhill and a woman named AnnaLee Dedmon Ramirez.
Degree vanished on the evening of February 14, 2000, and has not been seen since. In Burke County, however, a few of her possessions were discovered more than a year after she vanished.
About 17 months after Degree went missing, her backpack was found over 30 kilometers from her claimed last sighting. Court records from Monday stated that the girl’s possessions were discovered “wrapped in two sealed black plastic garbage bags” along Highway 18 close to Morganton.
According to reports, two of the backpack’s contents produced evidence that connected DNA to Underhill and Dedmon Ramirez. Degree vanished when Dedmon Ramirez was thirteen years old.
The papers stated that a hair stem sampled from Degree’s undershirt seemed to have Dedmon Ramirez’s DNA in it.
In February 2000, there were two additional Dedmon sisters, ages 15 and 16.
Degree was listed in the search warrant application as a “victim of homicide, with her body concealed,” according to investigators’ current theory. Investigators surmise that the Dedmon sisters’ mother, Connie Dedmon, and father, Roy Dedmon, “would have been necessary in the execution and/or concealment of the crime” due to the sisters’ young ages at the time.
