LadyTudorRose
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I've gotten really interested in this case recently and have been researching it, though I'm still pretty new to the evidence.
Here are my thoughts based on what I've heard so far and what I know from other cases. It's a lot so I don't expect many to actually read all this I just felt like I had to get it out.
1. I don't think the parents are involved. LE are generally reluctant to rule out those closest to the victim without having closely examined the evidence, barring cases where there is some corruption or the family has influence or connections to keep their names out of it. Fundamentally, and I know this isn't an exact science, the parents aren't acting guilty. They are acting like people who genuinely don't know what happened to their daughter and are determined to find her. Cases involving black children have historically gotten significantly less interest from the media than similar cases involving white kids. I've noticed some improvement on that in recent years, but it was definitely true in 2000. And even with cases of missing white children that got a lot of initial media attention, unless the case is extremely high-profile, keeping people interested and keeping the investigation going is often a full time job for the parents involved. The reason so many people know about this case is almost entirely because of the hard work of Asha's family (and friends in the community) to keep this in the media. If Asha's parents weren't fighting so hard to find their daughter, this case would've gone cold years ago. Why would they do that if they were guilty? Even in cases where families are trying to keep interest in the case alive, interest often dwindles. Interest in Asha's case seems to have grown stronger with time. If you had killed your kid and the police had bought your story, why would you spend the next years of your life trying to draw attention to it? Obviously you have to maintain a pretense that you care, but Asha's parents have gone above and beyond that. Organizing these annual walks, calling media outlets, running searches, all of these things take a lot of work, even if you have help running things there's still a lot of delegation and set up involved. I mean there's a possibility one parent killed her without the knowledge of the other parent or her brother, but I don't think that's very likely either.
Then you have to account for that in a scenario where they killed Asha they got extremely lucky in that people either mistakenly reported seeing Asha outside the house that night or that (if Asha got away and was later recaptured) people managed to see Asha outside but not anyone else in the family. Not only were they lucky, they were *very* smart as well. They managed to hide her backpack the night she went missing, and planted it somewhere miles away where (thanks to that luck again!) it was found later, further distancing the crime from their household. They successfully cleaned up all forensic evidence left behind in the house and either cleaned the murder weapon or disposed of it somewhere it was never found. They also either planted evidence in the shed or lucked into there being unrelated evidence of a child's presence in that shed that they could attribute to Asha. Most people who kill their kids aren't that smart. Usually, it's "she ran away" but none of her stuff is missing or the stuff that is missing turns up in a neighbor's dumpster a few days later or "someone broke in and abducted/murdered my kid" but nothing is missing and nothing is found in the house that wasn't there before or has unaccounted for fingerprints or DNA on it. So we're expected to believe the Degrees, who aren't professional criminals, were extremely adept at covering their tracks while simultaneously being extremely lucky. Now it is possible the police were incompetent in how they handled the case and maybe the Degree's weren't that smart, but in that case that makes them even luckier.
2. I think that Asha left the house to meet someone, someone she expected to see either at their house nearby or to have pick her up in a car near her house. If I had to guess, this was a Valentine's day "date" of some sort. Now with a kid Asha's age, you're talking about a completely platonic child's idea of a "grown up" date. Like when I was a kid my friends and I would sometimes stage fake weddings or "fancy" dinner where we'd eat fast food or microwave food on the good china and drink soda out of wine glasses. There seems to be an assumption she was planning to run away for good based on her having clothes with her. I don't necessarily agree. The clothes could've been intended as a gift, (kids often give each other stuff their parents bought them that they don't want anymore) or she could've been asked to bring them by someone who knew better than she did what would happen after she left. Maybe she was planning to work on a "surprise" that involved an extremely messy and elaborate art project and wanted extra clothes in case she messed up the ones she was wearing. The reason I think she was meeting someone is that a rainy, cold night seems like an odd choice if she were just running away on her own. Why not wait and do it the next night, unless there's someone she was supposed to meet? Why didn't she take a coat, or steal some money from her parents? I know kids that age don't typically put a lot of thought into planning things, but that's part of the reason kids that age don't typically run away in the middle of the night. Even as an adult, being out on your own late at night is terrifying. The only thing that makes it less scary is planning, knowing where you're going and how you're going to get there, which Asha probably didn't know, or knowing that you won't be alone. I think Asha expected that she wouldn't be alone, and also probably wasn't planning to run away for ever. I think she was planning to "sneak out" like teenagers do in movies and be back before her parents woke up. Now, as for who her "date" was with, I have two scenarios in mind:
-It was an older predator who lured Asha out. Perhaps a boy (or possibly even a girl) in their mid-to-late teens or early twenties. Someone who Asha would see as a cool older friend rather than a full-fledged adult. This would be someone connected to Asha through her church or family, most likely. I'm leaning towards this type of offender mainly because Asha's lack of internet access would preclude the sort of online grooming that might make more sense otherwise. Perhaps someone she saw at her cousin's slumber party; maybe a guest or relative of a guest, or maybe someone Asha knew prior to that who she snuck off to see at some point during the night and made plans to see again on Valentine's Day morning. I mention this because with a child that age there aren't a lot of opportunities to see or even talk on the phone with someone without your parents knowing. I remember being a bit older than Asha (sixth grade) and going to sleepovers with a friend who came from a large family that wasn't very well supervised. It was common for boys who were slightly older to sneak by and visit either in the house or hanging out in the yard extremely late at night. Some of the other girls took this as an opportunity to invite over boys there parents wouldn't let them see at home. Some would also use the slumber parties as a chance to talk on the phone with people their parents didn't let them call. Of course, in this case you're talking about 11/12 year-old-girls innocently flirting with 13/14 year-old boys. But, had one of the girls been in contact with a predator, it would have been very easy for her to take advantage of the same scenario to have unsupervised contact and even to have kept the rest of the girls out of the loop in the process. Either way I think the slumber party could be extremely relevant. This predator could be a teenager who lured Asha out of the house with the same method he would use on a girl closer to his own age and lucked out that she was able to sneak out without being discovered until morning. Which, honestly, would have been something of a gamble. Or it's possible, if this was maybe an older, more experienced predator, that very carefully planned this out and gave Asha precise instructions about how to get out of the house. See, one thing that I've thought about a lot in regards to this scenario is why a predator would have lured her out of the house in the middle of the night instead of taking her on her way home from school or getting her to sneak out when she was home alone. It's possible they were worried about her brother, but it still seems like that would be the more common situation when people abduct kids her age and that that would feel like a safer plan than having her sneak out. If her parents had caught her sneaking out, the jig would've been up entirely for this creep. So I think either this predator didn't put a lot of thought into the plan (i.e. a teenager just thinking about how easy it was for him to sneak out of the house) or the predator put an incredibly large amount of thought into the plan and gave Asha precise instructions for sneaking out and for finding him once she did. An extremely intelligent predator (perhaps one who'd offended before and has offended since) might also think that Asha disappearing from home in the middle of the night, with no evidence of an intruder, might point the police in the direction of her parents and away from the possibility of an outside predator. But they would've had to plan this carefully, and made sure Asha knew the specifics of her role in the plan. Maybe she even had a note with her with written instructions. The other possible explanation is that the plan was not to kill Asha or to abduct her even but to abuse her or even to have an innocent outing to boost her trust in them and have her back in bed before her parents woke up. If the plan involved sexual abuse, that might explain asking her to bring extra clothes with her. Asha might've envisioned a slumber party type situation, but an experienced and dangerous predator might've been planning to have her shower and put on clean clothes before going home to destroy evidence. Or they did plan on holding her long term and didn't want to take the risk of being seen buying little girls clothes. In this scenario the plan probably involved Asha sneaking away far enough from the house that her parents wouldn't see to get in a car driven by the predator. Perhaps she got lost initially, which explains all the wandering around on the road. Or she escaped at some point, and then was later recaptured.
-Asha was meeting a kid close to her own age for something totally innocent and the other kid either didn't show up or Asha got lost and intercepted on the way. Let's imagine Asha and one of her friends decided to sneak out for a Valentine's "date" or even to find or make presents for their friends and family. I remember once sneaking out of bed late at night with my cousins a few days after Christmas to play with my cousin's new paint set unsupervised. Maybe Asha had a similar idea, but in her case she wanted to meet up with a kid who wasn't staying in the same house? To make Valentines to surprise her family with, perhaps? Or maybe she was inspired by all the fun she had at her cousin's slumber party? In this case the plan was probably to walk to her friend's house nearby her own or to walk to some third party location. Maybe the shed? Though her not having a coat makes me lean towards somewhere much closer by. Though kids do often have strange ideas when they need a coat and when they don't. Maybe she thought her outfit was too cute to cover up with a coat? Let's say she plans to meet her friend outside their house. Then there are several scenarios that could've happened. Maybe she got there and her friend wasn't there. Maybe she got lost along the way; everything looks different in the dark. Maybe she even tried to return home but saw a light on or something else that led her to believe her parents were awake and she would get caught if she came back in. A lot of theories seem to miss the fact that kids that age are *terrified* of getting into trouble, especially ones with strict parents. Even if her parents didn't punish their kids harshly (or at all), simply being told you did something bad and disappointed your parents can be deeply upsetting for kids. When babysitting for kids that age I've seen them do things that were more serious offenses, and often more dangerous ones, in order to avoid getting caught for a different infraction. Somewhere along the way Asha gets lost, and is too afraid to ask for help (and of anyone who tries to help her) and is either killed by an impaired motorist or intercepted by a predator. The obvious problem with this theory, of course, is why hasn't this other kid come forward. And that is a major problem, enough of a problem to make me lean away from this possibility. But I think there are a few plausible explanations. One is that there was a genuine miscommunication about when this meeting was supposed to happen. Perhaps they thought it was Valentine's Day night instead, and didn't think the planned meeting was a factor in her disappearance. Maybe they were under the impression Asha snuck out on a regular basis because she said something like that to make herself seem cool. There's also the obvious motive of not wanting to get in trouble with their own parents for sneaking out or trying to sneak out. That could explain not speaking out at first, but as for why they've said nothing the entire time, barring a scenario where they're not alive anymore or ended up an addict or in a cult or some other scenario that effects their memory or credibility, there's the possibility that whoever intercepted and abducted Asha was a relative of theirs, possibly a father or older brother, and they are covering for that person. Maybe that was the plan all along, maybe it was a crime of opportunity, but that would explain why this kid would be silent.
3. Like the Maura Murray case, there are two mysteries here that are probably related, but might also be entirely unrelated. Those mysteries are, what was Asha doing that night before she disappeared, and what happened to her after she was last seen? In Maura's case, I think there's a good chance she simply ran away from her car to avoid a DUI and then got lost and died of exposure. In Asha's case, there was almost certainly a third party involved who buried her backpack. I've already gone into something of my thoughts on why she might've been outside that night. There's a good chance we might never know, and it's probably something that made more sense to her than it would to anyone else. There's no truly logical reason why a child that age would be outside by herself wandering down the street that time of night. The most likely thing that happened to her was that someone abducted her. The question is, did they lure her out of the house first or was this a crime of opportunity? My thought process has leaned towards them luring her out of the house simply because her just happening to run into a predator that night seems like a big coincidence. But crimes of opportunity do happen all the time, just not to kids as young as Asha. There are a lot of high-profile murder cases that involved young women lost, walking around alone at night, running into the wrong man, and being abducted and murdered. You don't hear about that happening as much with kids, but kids also aren't wandering around outside alone at night very often. There also seems to be an assumption that if she was abducted by a random person in a crime of opportunity, it would have to have been a pedophile she ran into. I don't really agree with this. While if someone lured her out of the house in a premeditated plan to kidnap her I would lean towards that person being a pedophile (barring some type of family drama we don't know about) there could be a variety of scenarios at play in a crime of opportunity. It might not have been a sex crime at all. She could've been killed by a mentally disturbed drifter who thought she was a demon. She could've been abducted by a couple in some sort of cult who wanted to induct her into it. She could've been abducted by a mentally ill woman suffering from infertility who believed God was sending her a daughter. Or she could've been killed because, wandering in the woods that night, she saw something she wasn't supposed to see. These scenarios are certainly far-fetched and unlikely, but this is a highly unusual case no matter what happened. This also could've been a serial killer who targeted victims of a variety of ages, or who was primarily interested in adult women but wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to take a vulnerable victim when he ran into one. Ted Bundy was primarily interested in women in their early twenties, with a few teenagers as well, but his final victim was only twelve, and she looked young. He also hinted there may have been other very young victims but that he would be too ashamed to talk about those cases, and some younger possible victims have been proposed. There have also been plenty of cases of sex offenders who were convicted of crimes involving children as well as those involving adults. And of course plenty of killers don't sexually abuse any (or most) of their victims. It seems like there were a lot of truckers on that road and Asha could've fallen victim to a serial killer who operated all over the country or who primarily operated in another state. Especially if the CB radio notice happened and was widely heard. It basically would've been broadcast to any predators in the area that there was a child out on the road alone. She also could've been found by a human trafficker, or a criminal of any type who had the connections and inclination to turn her over to human traffickers. There may even be two separate predators involved working completely independently of each other, one who lured her out and one who ran into her that night. Statistically, that's pretty unlikely but I think it's not much more far fetched than some of the theories I've heard. There is also the possibility she was killed by an impaired driver who attempted to cover up the crime by burying her in secret and burying her backpack in a different location. Given it was the middle of the night during a thunderstorm, I could easily see her being hit by a car on a more remote rural road near where she was walking at some point during the night.
4. The question that ultimately matters the most here, especially for Asha's family, is whether or not she's still alive. Most of my theories, if you've made it this far in my ramblings, involve scenarios where she's not alive anymore. I think, unfortunately, it's probably more likely than not that she was murdered, but there are reasons to hold out hope. There have been cases like this where the child was found alive decades later, notably Jaycee Dugard. One thing I've thought about recently is about when Jayme Closs was abducted. According to the police files, the first thing her abductor did when he got her back to his house was make her change into his sister's clothes and then burn the clothes she was wearing in the fireplace. To me, that detail didn't make a ton of sense because why would he be so worried about Jayme's clothes being found in his house while Jayme herself was still alive in that same house. But to him, I guess it made sense. Maybe he planned on killing Jayme later (in that case she's very lucky she escaped when she did), or maybe in his mind he thought Jayme could be controlled and kept hidden, or threatened into (as Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart were) lying about her identity if anyone found her. My point here is that, while earlier my assumption might've been that Asha's backpack being buried pointed towards her being dead, I can now more easily imagine a scenario where her kidnapper felt the need to hide the backpack while still keeping Asha alive. Furthermore, if the backpack was buried after Asha was murdered, I wonder why he would go through the trouble of burying the backpack separately from wherever he placed Asha's body. So the same piece of evidence that initially had me leaning towards her not being alive anymore now has me more convinced she could still be alive, or at least was kept alive for an extended period of time after she was abducted. We only have to look at the Jaycee Dugard case for a scenario where a girl who was only slightly older than Asha was abducted and then kept alive for a period of time almost as long as Asha's been missing. Maybe, even being as young as she was, this was a genuine runaway situation and she was furious at her parents for some reason and some genuinely non-predatory person believed she was being abused at home and let her live with them under a fake name and she's out there somewhere living a normal life, perhaps even wanting to reach out to her family but afraid of getting the people who took her in in trouble. Again, an extremely unlikely scenario, but one that would be plausible if only she'd been a few years older. In fact, one of the really tricky things about this case is there are so many plausible scenarios if she'd been a few years older (12+ instead of 9) or if she'd been several years younger in which case it's much easier to imagine her wandering off for basically no reason at all.
Here are my thoughts based on what I've heard so far and what I know from other cases. It's a lot so I don't expect many to actually read all this I just felt like I had to get it out.
1. I don't think the parents are involved. LE are generally reluctant to rule out those closest to the victim without having closely examined the evidence, barring cases where there is some corruption or the family has influence or connections to keep their names out of it. Fundamentally, and I know this isn't an exact science, the parents aren't acting guilty. They are acting like people who genuinely don't know what happened to their daughter and are determined to find her. Cases involving black children have historically gotten significantly less interest from the media than similar cases involving white kids. I've noticed some improvement on that in recent years, but it was definitely true in 2000. And even with cases of missing white children that got a lot of initial media attention, unless the case is extremely high-profile, keeping people interested and keeping the investigation going is often a full time job for the parents involved. The reason so many people know about this case is almost entirely because of the hard work of Asha's family (and friends in the community) to keep this in the media. If Asha's parents weren't fighting so hard to find their daughter, this case would've gone cold years ago. Why would they do that if they were guilty? Even in cases where families are trying to keep interest in the case alive, interest often dwindles. Interest in Asha's case seems to have grown stronger with time. If you had killed your kid and the police had bought your story, why would you spend the next years of your life trying to draw attention to it? Obviously you have to maintain a pretense that you care, but Asha's parents have gone above and beyond that. Organizing these annual walks, calling media outlets, running searches, all of these things take a lot of work, even if you have help running things there's still a lot of delegation and set up involved. I mean there's a possibility one parent killed her without the knowledge of the other parent or her brother, but I don't think that's very likely either.
Then you have to account for that in a scenario where they killed Asha they got extremely lucky in that people either mistakenly reported seeing Asha outside the house that night or that (if Asha got away and was later recaptured) people managed to see Asha outside but not anyone else in the family. Not only were they lucky, they were *very* smart as well. They managed to hide her backpack the night she went missing, and planted it somewhere miles away where (thanks to that luck again!) it was found later, further distancing the crime from their household. They successfully cleaned up all forensic evidence left behind in the house and either cleaned the murder weapon or disposed of it somewhere it was never found. They also either planted evidence in the shed or lucked into there being unrelated evidence of a child's presence in that shed that they could attribute to Asha. Most people who kill their kids aren't that smart. Usually, it's "she ran away" but none of her stuff is missing or the stuff that is missing turns up in a neighbor's dumpster a few days later or "someone broke in and abducted/murdered my kid" but nothing is missing and nothing is found in the house that wasn't there before or has unaccounted for fingerprints or DNA on it. So we're expected to believe the Degrees, who aren't professional criminals, were extremely adept at covering their tracks while simultaneously being extremely lucky. Now it is possible the police were incompetent in how they handled the case and maybe the Degree's weren't that smart, but in that case that makes them even luckier.
2. I think that Asha left the house to meet someone, someone she expected to see either at their house nearby or to have pick her up in a car near her house. If I had to guess, this was a Valentine's day "date" of some sort. Now with a kid Asha's age, you're talking about a completely platonic child's idea of a "grown up" date. Like when I was a kid my friends and I would sometimes stage fake weddings or "fancy" dinner where we'd eat fast food or microwave food on the good china and drink soda out of wine glasses. There seems to be an assumption she was planning to run away for good based on her having clothes with her. I don't necessarily agree. The clothes could've been intended as a gift, (kids often give each other stuff their parents bought them that they don't want anymore) or she could've been asked to bring them by someone who knew better than she did what would happen after she left. Maybe she was planning to work on a "surprise" that involved an extremely messy and elaborate art project and wanted extra clothes in case she messed up the ones she was wearing. The reason I think she was meeting someone is that a rainy, cold night seems like an odd choice if she were just running away on her own. Why not wait and do it the next night, unless there's someone she was supposed to meet? Why didn't she take a coat, or steal some money from her parents? I know kids that age don't typically put a lot of thought into planning things, but that's part of the reason kids that age don't typically run away in the middle of the night. Even as an adult, being out on your own late at night is terrifying. The only thing that makes it less scary is planning, knowing where you're going and how you're going to get there, which Asha probably didn't know, or knowing that you won't be alone. I think Asha expected that she wouldn't be alone, and also probably wasn't planning to run away for ever. I think she was planning to "sneak out" like teenagers do in movies and be back before her parents woke up. Now, as for who her "date" was with, I have two scenarios in mind:
-It was an older predator who lured Asha out. Perhaps a boy (or possibly even a girl) in their mid-to-late teens or early twenties. Someone who Asha would see as a cool older friend rather than a full-fledged adult. This would be someone connected to Asha through her church or family, most likely. I'm leaning towards this type of offender mainly because Asha's lack of internet access would preclude the sort of online grooming that might make more sense otherwise. Perhaps someone she saw at her cousin's slumber party; maybe a guest or relative of a guest, or maybe someone Asha knew prior to that who she snuck off to see at some point during the night and made plans to see again on Valentine's Day morning. I mention this because with a child that age there aren't a lot of opportunities to see or even talk on the phone with someone without your parents knowing. I remember being a bit older than Asha (sixth grade) and going to sleepovers with a friend who came from a large family that wasn't very well supervised. It was common for boys who were slightly older to sneak by and visit either in the house or hanging out in the yard extremely late at night. Some of the other girls took this as an opportunity to invite over boys there parents wouldn't let them see at home. Some would also use the slumber parties as a chance to talk on the phone with people their parents didn't let them call. Of course, in this case you're talking about 11/12 year-old-girls innocently flirting with 13/14 year-old boys. But, had one of the girls been in contact with a predator, it would have been very easy for her to take advantage of the same scenario to have unsupervised contact and even to have kept the rest of the girls out of the loop in the process. Either way I think the slumber party could be extremely relevant. This predator could be a teenager who lured Asha out of the house with the same method he would use on a girl closer to his own age and lucked out that she was able to sneak out without being discovered until morning. Which, honestly, would have been something of a gamble. Or it's possible, if this was maybe an older, more experienced predator, that very carefully planned this out and gave Asha precise instructions about how to get out of the house. See, one thing that I've thought about a lot in regards to this scenario is why a predator would have lured her out of the house in the middle of the night instead of taking her on her way home from school or getting her to sneak out when she was home alone. It's possible they were worried about her brother, but it still seems like that would be the more common situation when people abduct kids her age and that that would feel like a safer plan than having her sneak out. If her parents had caught her sneaking out, the jig would've been up entirely for this creep. So I think either this predator didn't put a lot of thought into the plan (i.e. a teenager just thinking about how easy it was for him to sneak out of the house) or the predator put an incredibly large amount of thought into the plan and gave Asha precise instructions for sneaking out and for finding him once she did. An extremely intelligent predator (perhaps one who'd offended before and has offended since) might also think that Asha disappearing from home in the middle of the night, with no evidence of an intruder, might point the police in the direction of her parents and away from the possibility of an outside predator. But they would've had to plan this carefully, and made sure Asha knew the specifics of her role in the plan. Maybe she even had a note with her with written instructions. The other possible explanation is that the plan was not to kill Asha or to abduct her even but to abuse her or even to have an innocent outing to boost her trust in them and have her back in bed before her parents woke up. If the plan involved sexual abuse, that might explain asking her to bring extra clothes with her. Asha might've envisioned a slumber party type situation, but an experienced and dangerous predator might've been planning to have her shower and put on clean clothes before going home to destroy evidence. Or they did plan on holding her long term and didn't want to take the risk of being seen buying little girls clothes. In this scenario the plan probably involved Asha sneaking away far enough from the house that her parents wouldn't see to get in a car driven by the predator. Perhaps she got lost initially, which explains all the wandering around on the road. Or she escaped at some point, and then was later recaptured.
-Asha was meeting a kid close to her own age for something totally innocent and the other kid either didn't show up or Asha got lost and intercepted on the way. Let's imagine Asha and one of her friends decided to sneak out for a Valentine's "date" or even to find or make presents for their friends and family. I remember once sneaking out of bed late at night with my cousins a few days after Christmas to play with my cousin's new paint set unsupervised. Maybe Asha had a similar idea, but in her case she wanted to meet up with a kid who wasn't staying in the same house? To make Valentines to surprise her family with, perhaps? Or maybe she was inspired by all the fun she had at her cousin's slumber party? In this case the plan was probably to walk to her friend's house nearby her own or to walk to some third party location. Maybe the shed? Though her not having a coat makes me lean towards somewhere much closer by. Though kids do often have strange ideas when they need a coat and when they don't. Maybe she thought her outfit was too cute to cover up with a coat? Let's say she plans to meet her friend outside their house. Then there are several scenarios that could've happened. Maybe she got there and her friend wasn't there. Maybe she got lost along the way; everything looks different in the dark. Maybe she even tried to return home but saw a light on or something else that led her to believe her parents were awake and she would get caught if she came back in. A lot of theories seem to miss the fact that kids that age are *terrified* of getting into trouble, especially ones with strict parents. Even if her parents didn't punish their kids harshly (or at all), simply being told you did something bad and disappointed your parents can be deeply upsetting for kids. When babysitting for kids that age I've seen them do things that were more serious offenses, and often more dangerous ones, in order to avoid getting caught for a different infraction. Somewhere along the way Asha gets lost, and is too afraid to ask for help (and of anyone who tries to help her) and is either killed by an impaired motorist or intercepted by a predator. The obvious problem with this theory, of course, is why hasn't this other kid come forward. And that is a major problem, enough of a problem to make me lean away from this possibility. But I think there are a few plausible explanations. One is that there was a genuine miscommunication about when this meeting was supposed to happen. Perhaps they thought it was Valentine's Day night instead, and didn't think the planned meeting was a factor in her disappearance. Maybe they were under the impression Asha snuck out on a regular basis because she said something like that to make herself seem cool. There's also the obvious motive of not wanting to get in trouble with their own parents for sneaking out or trying to sneak out. That could explain not speaking out at first, but as for why they've said nothing the entire time, barring a scenario where they're not alive anymore or ended up an addict or in a cult or some other scenario that effects their memory or credibility, there's the possibility that whoever intercepted and abducted Asha was a relative of theirs, possibly a father or older brother, and they are covering for that person. Maybe that was the plan all along, maybe it was a crime of opportunity, but that would explain why this kid would be silent.
3. Like the Maura Murray case, there are two mysteries here that are probably related, but might also be entirely unrelated. Those mysteries are, what was Asha doing that night before she disappeared, and what happened to her after she was last seen? In Maura's case, I think there's a good chance she simply ran away from her car to avoid a DUI and then got lost and died of exposure. In Asha's case, there was almost certainly a third party involved who buried her backpack. I've already gone into something of my thoughts on why she might've been outside that night. There's a good chance we might never know, and it's probably something that made more sense to her than it would to anyone else. There's no truly logical reason why a child that age would be outside by herself wandering down the street that time of night. The most likely thing that happened to her was that someone abducted her. The question is, did they lure her out of the house first or was this a crime of opportunity? My thought process has leaned towards them luring her out of the house simply because her just happening to run into a predator that night seems like a big coincidence. But crimes of opportunity do happen all the time, just not to kids as young as Asha. There are a lot of high-profile murder cases that involved young women lost, walking around alone at night, running into the wrong man, and being abducted and murdered. You don't hear about that happening as much with kids, but kids also aren't wandering around outside alone at night very often. There also seems to be an assumption that if she was abducted by a random person in a crime of opportunity, it would have to have been a pedophile she ran into. I don't really agree with this. While if someone lured her out of the house in a premeditated plan to kidnap her I would lean towards that person being a pedophile (barring some type of family drama we don't know about) there could be a variety of scenarios at play in a crime of opportunity. It might not have been a sex crime at all. She could've been killed by a mentally disturbed drifter who thought she was a demon. She could've been abducted by a couple in some sort of cult who wanted to induct her into it. She could've been abducted by a mentally ill woman suffering from infertility who believed God was sending her a daughter. Or she could've been killed because, wandering in the woods that night, she saw something she wasn't supposed to see. These scenarios are certainly far-fetched and unlikely, but this is a highly unusual case no matter what happened. This also could've been a serial killer who targeted victims of a variety of ages, or who was primarily interested in adult women but wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to take a vulnerable victim when he ran into one. Ted Bundy was primarily interested in women in their early twenties, with a few teenagers as well, but his final victim was only twelve, and she looked young. He also hinted there may have been other very young victims but that he would be too ashamed to talk about those cases, and some younger possible victims have been proposed. There have also been plenty of cases of sex offenders who were convicted of crimes involving children as well as those involving adults. And of course plenty of killers don't sexually abuse any (or most) of their victims. It seems like there were a lot of truckers on that road and Asha could've fallen victim to a serial killer who operated all over the country or who primarily operated in another state. Especially if the CB radio notice happened and was widely heard. It basically would've been broadcast to any predators in the area that there was a child out on the road alone. She also could've been found by a human trafficker, or a criminal of any type who had the connections and inclination to turn her over to human traffickers. There may even be two separate predators involved working completely independently of each other, one who lured her out and one who ran into her that night. Statistically, that's pretty unlikely but I think it's not much more far fetched than some of the theories I've heard. There is also the possibility she was killed by an impaired driver who attempted to cover up the crime by burying her in secret and burying her backpack in a different location. Given it was the middle of the night during a thunderstorm, I could easily see her being hit by a car on a more remote rural road near where she was walking at some point during the night.
4. The question that ultimately matters the most here, especially for Asha's family, is whether or not she's still alive. Most of my theories, if you've made it this far in my ramblings, involve scenarios where she's not alive anymore. I think, unfortunately, it's probably more likely than not that she was murdered, but there are reasons to hold out hope. There have been cases like this where the child was found alive decades later, notably Jaycee Dugard. One thing I've thought about recently is about when Jayme Closs was abducted. According to the police files, the first thing her abductor did when he got her back to his house was make her change into his sister's clothes and then burn the clothes she was wearing in the fireplace. To me, that detail didn't make a ton of sense because why would he be so worried about Jayme's clothes being found in his house while Jayme herself was still alive in that same house. But to him, I guess it made sense. Maybe he planned on killing Jayme later (in that case she's very lucky she escaped when she did), or maybe in his mind he thought Jayme could be controlled and kept hidden, or threatened into (as Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart were) lying about her identity if anyone found her. My point here is that, while earlier my assumption might've been that Asha's backpack being buried pointed towards her being dead, I can now more easily imagine a scenario where her kidnapper felt the need to hide the backpack while still keeping Asha alive. Furthermore, if the backpack was buried after Asha was murdered, I wonder why he would go through the trouble of burying the backpack separately from wherever he placed Asha's body. So the same piece of evidence that initially had me leaning towards her not being alive anymore now has me more convinced she could still be alive, or at least was kept alive for an extended period of time after she was abducted. We only have to look at the Jaycee Dugard case for a scenario where a girl who was only slightly older than Asha was abducted and then kept alive for a period of time almost as long as Asha's been missing. Maybe, even being as young as she was, this was a genuine runaway situation and she was furious at her parents for some reason and some genuinely non-predatory person believed she was being abused at home and let her live with them under a fake name and she's out there somewhere living a normal life, perhaps even wanting to reach out to her family but afraid of getting the people who took her in in trouble. Again, an extremely unlikely scenario, but one that would be plausible if only she'd been a few years older. In fact, one of the really tricky things about this case is there are so many plausible scenarios if she'd been a few years older (12+ instead of 9) or if she'd been several years younger in which case it's much easier to imagine her wandering off for basically no reason at all.
MOO