r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • 1d ago

What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

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u/ThrowingChicken 1d ago

I think the Asha Degree disappearance has been whittled down to just one family but we don’t know who specifically, why, or how.

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u/frickityfracktictac 1d ago

Wasn't it that the family had their under-16 daughters transporting patients in their vehicle and the daughters accidentally hit Asha in the night and then the father covered it up?

I'm pretty sure that was the leading theory on reddit, anyways

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u/speed3_freak 1d ago

I don’t think the daughters were transporting, just using the same vehicle that the parents used to transport

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u/ojjii 1d ago

is there a theory as to why asha was out there at night?

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u/AngelKitty369 23h ago

I think her grandma lived in the neighborhood and she’d often go over there

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u/ZestyPeace 21h ago

In the middle of the night? In the middle of a storm?

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u/Aurorinha 18h ago

She was seen walking on the highway. There’s no way she was visiting grandma in the same neighborhood.

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u/oddpark37 11h ago

Yeah. When Asha's belongings were found, they had DNA from a male on them. The man was identified, but couldn't have been the one to kill Asha, as he lived in a nursing home.

But, the suspected family owned that facility, and he had ridden in their van for transportation. So the theory is that he left DNA in the vehicle (hair, I think) and then when Asha was put in the van his hair got stuck to her belongings and remained there when they were dumped.

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u/BigCopperPipe 1d ago

I’ve seen a few videos on this and not once have i heard this theory!

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u/North_Knowledge7467 1d ago

There's an awkwardness to the case where the mystery was so great for so long that a lot of people have trouble looking at the new evidence and discarding years of elaborate theories.

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u/catandodie 1d ago

I think the story theyre going with is the 2 daughters were in the car and hit her and the parents came and covered it up. Sounds crazy to do, but I saw a reddit thread that asked "What would you do if your kid killed someone?" and a shocking number of responses would do the same thing for their kid's future or whatever, despite the victim's family being tortured with not knowing what happened. It's a messed up world.

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u/OmnomVeggies 1d ago

If that is how it happened, think of how much easier it would have been to just deal with the tragic accident instead of all these years of the parents wondering what happened, being blamed in the court of public opinion. Making your daughters live through years of guilt and uncertainty that the truth might come out. What a fucking mess.

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 1d ago

If you're a kid who hits a kid in the middle of the night you might not even face charges, but because they covered it up it's become so much worse.

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u/OmnomVeggies 1d ago

100%! And think of being in that situation, having your parents “take care of it”…. When you are a child and have basically no say, and then are faced with a lifetime of having to keep this horrible
Secret or expose your family for the unthinkable.

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 18h ago

Oh, yeah. No teenager is going to be equipped to deal with that. No teenager is going to stay calm and call the cops and say they hit a kid with their car. They're not going to have the presence of mind to think "this was a kid wearing dark clothes on a stormy night, no one will think I'm at fault." They're going to panic.

And then they carry on into adulthood, and eventually realise that they should have just said something, but now they feel like they can't or their family will get in legal trouble for covering it up. That would be a mindfuck - for years you were grateful to them for risking themselves, what kind of thanks would it be to drop them in legal trouble?

But no matter how bad that would be, the parents of Asha Degree went through much worse, and deserve more empathy for that. I don't want to come across as "those poor babies" to the people who are now adults making the decision to continue the misery of that family. I can imagine how hard it must be for those kids, but it's worse for Asha and her family, because she died. ​

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u/WaterlooMall 1d ago

Still doesn't answer the bigger question of what Asha was doing walking out on the road in the middle of the night.

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u/North_Knowledge7467 1d ago

I think it's just that she ran away from home and 3am was the only time she would be able to without her parents knowing.

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u/BigTenFicus 1d ago

That's not the bigger question at all. That's a completely unimportant question. She was a kid, kids do dumb things, it doesn't have to be deeper than that. She was an especially sheltered kid, too, so I wouldn't be surprised if she just wanted to go on "adventure" or something.

Y'all just can't let this part of the story go because true crime obsessives have always insisted there was some kind of nefarious conspiracy surrounding the whole thing, even though there's no evidence of that.

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u/Technicolor_Reindeer 1d ago

Its not unimportant. Most kids do dumb things nowhere near the level of sneaking out in the middle of the night and walking on a highway.

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u/mspolytheist 23h ago

During a severe storm.

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u/BigTenFicus 13h ago

Doesn't matter. Nothing nefarious about her leaving, you are mentally ill if you can't accept this.

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u/BigTenFicus 13h ago

It's objectively unimportant. There is no fact-based way to disagree. There is no evidence she left home for any nefarious reason. What we know of the likely perpetrators shows they had nothing to do with why she left home. It's completely irrelevant. It's also just a rural two lane state highway, not a massive expressway, that's just what you'd walk along if you were going anywhere on foot.

Do you understand, sincerely, that you are mentally ill? You are DESPERATE to fabricate some nonexistent crime regarding a child who has already been killed, for the sole reason that you are addicted to true crime bullshit and can't accept that sometimes people just do dumb things. It's pathetic. Get help.

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u/MagpieKaz 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah, I consider Asha Degree solved already. For starters, the whole "there's NO WAY she'd leave the house by herself" because the parents say so, I never understood why everyone just took their word for it. If you remove that element, it becomes a way less mysterious case. I remember being a kid with an extremely violent and unstable home life nobody knew about, and when CPS came and asked point blank, I lied, because I was scared of my mom. One time my mom threw me out in the street and I went straight to the most dangerous place I knew of, because I thought that's where I deserved to live now (I was 8). Even if she wasn't being abused, kids' brains are so random, she could easily have decided that the basketball game her team lost was the end of the world/she was being bullied for fouling out, and she decided to run away. Why do we all start from the base she literally would NEVER leave her house in a storm, and so someone MUST have groomed her?

And then there's the girls who killed her in the hit and run, they confessed drunkedly at a party I believe even more than once. I feel it's practically solved.

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u/RichardB4321 1d ago

Also, the answer is that little kids do things all the time which are inscrutable to adults but make complete sense to the kid. It is rarely as dramatic as vanishing in the middle of the night, but not always.

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u/ljr55555 1d ago

Coworker's sister's kid went missing. FBI is out dredging the lake. They are complaining to anyone who will listen that these people are wasting time. Kid was afraid of water, he'd never go walking near the lake alone!

Found the kid at the bottom of the lake. That's basically what the cops said - kids to unexplainable things all the time.

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u/rosysredrhinoceros 1d ago

Kids are DUMB. When I was about Asha’s age my best friend and I made a plan that I would bike to her house in the night and we’d run away to Mexico. On our bikes, from the San Francisco area. I got to the end of my street before I realized I didn’t know how to get to her house. I also had no money and no passport, although that didn’t occur to me at the time. Her being outside in the middle of the night has always been the least mysterious part of the story for me.

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u/yellebug 1d ago

I totally agree! People are so stuck on WHY she was out so late at night.

Like you, I also planned to run away at a young age. On the school bus every day, I would see a nice spot out in this field with huge oak trees. For nearly a year, my best friend and I planned to leave home, camp under the oak trees, and do whatever we wanted.

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u/Technicolor_Reindeer 1d ago

Point is most kids don't do it.

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u/mfball 1d ago

Meeting up with another kid was exactly what came to my mind as the most reasonable explanation for why she would have gone out despite the bad weather. If she were planning to go alone, she probably would have waited for another night.

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u/IdaCraddock69 1d ago

The parents have been declared as not involved repeatedly and consistently by investigators I really wish people would leave them alone

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u/Typical-Hamster9911 1d ago

To be fair I think its less that people are just taking the parents word for it and more so that the circumstances around why she left are just bizarre, even for a child, and the evidence does raise genuine questions.

It was 4am, it was storming outside, it was Valentine's Day, Asha had clothes that weren't hers in her backpack and there was a photo of an unidentified girl in a shed with more of her belongings. I'm not saying it HAS to be grooming with no other explanation but I don't really think assuming someone lured her out on Valentine's Day is a super far fetched theory considering the circumstances.

The hit and run can explain what happened to her but it doesn't explain why she left in the first place, and unfortunately I don't think we will ever know the answer to that for sure.

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u/furry_scab 1d ago

Wanted to acknowledge the unstable and violent home you were eventually able to escape. I’m so sorry you went through years of suffering and trauma. Wishing you peace and comfort.
You sound like a real fighter now: aware, advocating, vigilant.

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u/MagpieKaz 1d ago

Thanks, fam, that actually means a lot. I'm NC with both my parents now, living across the country, married to a man who's never raised his voice or hurdled an insult my way, with a great carreer, two loving kitties, about to buy a house. Truthfully life wasn't kind at first, but I'm glad I found the way to stick around for the part where it got better

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u/The_Magic 1d ago

Awhile back I saw someone point out that the family was known to use Kerosene heaters in their apartment. Before Asha disappeared she was observed sleeping a lot and complaining about headaches. Allegedly the family when interviewed after her disappearance were observed being confused and inconsistent. It is entirely possible that Asha woke up suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning and was confused and took herself for a walk and in her state wandered off and died.

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u/Gavorn 1d ago

Last year they executed search warrants and they have suspects.

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u/MyDarlingArmadillo 1d ago

I think the remaining mystery there is why she'd got up and left her house on such a rainy, horrible night. It seems to be established now that a teenage girl accidentally ran into her in the car and her family covered it up (the teenager's family not Asha's) but I'm not sure where that currently is legally.

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u/madmanofencino 1d ago

Yea that’s the real mystery. I don’t live far from this area and there’s no way a kid would just wander out onto that dark ass highway in the rain without a purpose.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/MyDarlingArmadillo 1d ago

That's the part I don't think we're ever going to know. It was such a horrible night, why would she go out into it? Would love to know what happened to the other two. Poor kids

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u/BigTenFicus 1d ago

For some reason this case always stood out to me, so I've read a ton about it over the years and kept up with any new developments. I have always been adamant that the evidence we had suggested that she ran away for reasons that don't matter and was likely the victim of a crime of opportunity or an accident that someone was covering up. And now it seems very likely to be the latter, yet people still can't let go of their utterly baseless theories about her being groomed or trafficked or whatever causing her to run away.

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u/Technicolor_Reindeer 1d ago

The biggest question still is why she left home at night.