“How does this happen to a kid?” It’s the question the family of Dee Dee Dawkins has been asking since the 13-year-old’s body was found on July 28, 1992, in Brookford, North Carolina.
And despite the case being more than 33 years old, it’s still fresh for Dee Dee’s family in Hickory, the Brookford community, and some of those who have investigated her homicide over the past three decades.
Investigators like Chief Willie Armstrong of the Brookford Police Department. He became chief of police in 2023 and has been investigating Dee Dee’s case ever since. At 26, he wasn’t even born when Dee Dee was killed, but he’s been familiar with her cold case for years — it has become part of the town’s history. “As a child, I had heard about this case because I’ve grown up here,” Armstrong told Dateline. “I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life, but this little girl mattered in this community and to the family, and it’s unfortunate that her case went unsolved for this many years.”
What Happened to Dee Dee?
Isis “Dee Dee” Dawkins and her older sister, Joy, lived with their mother, Barbara Dula, in Hickory. Kessiah Young is their cousin and recalls her childhood with Dee Dee and Joy fondly. “We grew up together. They were more like my sisters than they were my cousins,” she told Dateline. “Dee Dee loved her family, and she was loved by her family. All of us were really close.”
Kessiah described Dee Dee as very athletic. “She played every sport that was available for her to play, and she excelled at that,” she said. “She was just a very energetic, electric-type person.”
Myra “Joy” Forney, Dee Dee’s older sister, was only 15 when Dee Dee disappeared. “We were only 14 or 15 months apart,” she told Dateline. “She was my buddy. She was my friend. We did a lot of growing up together.”
According to Joy, on the evening of July 3, 1992, Dee Dee told her mother and sister she was heading “out back” behind the house. “I really didn’t know where she was going, but I know that our cousins stayed on that back row. And so she would normally go play with them, and they might go shoot ball at the gym,” she said.
Barbara was a single mother who worked the third shift. “She thought Dee Dee was going to be spending the night with one of her friends,” Kessiah said. The next day was the 4th of July, so Barbara wasn’t worried right away when Dee Dee didn’t come home. “We’re having a family gathering at my house,” Kessiah said. “And Joy’s out with her friend, and Dee Dee was supposedly with her friend.”
Stephanie Young was Kessiah’s high school sweetheart and is now her wife. She was also friends with Dee Dee in 1992. “We were more free-range kids back then,” she told Dateline. “At 13, kids might have went and stayed somewhere and not told their parents where they were at. We did that.”
“It was a different kind of time,” Kessiah agreed. “But I wish to God we would’ve known what was going, you know, what had happened at that point.”
When Dee Dee didn’t come home by the evening of the 4th, the family knew something wasn’t right. “Everything kind of unfolds, I guess, you know, later that evening when people are supposed to be coming home,” Kessiah said. “[Barbara] called around to friends’ houses and tried to find her.” According to Kessiah, Barbara learned that the friend she thought Dee Dee was meeting up with the night of the 3rd had been at a basketball tournament the whole weekend. The friend never had plans with Dee Dee.
Barbara went to the Hickory Police Department the next morning. “When [Dee Dee] wasn’t home on the 5th, she filed a missing person’s report,” Kessiah said. The family started searching the neighborhood. “It was just our family going out and looking for her,” Kessiah said. “I remember being in my car and driving around, you know, just in Hickory — just looking to see if I could, you know, see her anywhere, you know because I really didn’t know exactly where to look either.”
“All the family really knew to do was go to friends and neighbors,” Stephanie said. “They reported to the police, did the missing persons report, and thought that the police would do their job in looking for her,” she said. “They were doing the best they could. That’s what we thought,” Kessiah added. “That wasn’t happening.”
According to Kessiah and Stephanie, the Hickory Police Department’s initial investigation into Dee Dee’s disappearance was a series of “didn’ts”: The Hickory Police Department didn’t organize an orchestrated search. They also didn’t search her room for any evidence Dee Dee might have left behind. “There was no — nothing really done by the police to find her in that 25 days,” Stephanie said.
“According to the documentation that I’ve been able to obtain, the only thing that was done was a missing person’s report was filed,” Brookford Police Chief Armstrong said of Hickory PD. “I don’t have anything to lead me to believe that they did anything other than that.” Armstrong says that is unusual for a missing person’s case — especially when that person is a child. “Practices now and practices then are a little bit different, but I would still always imagine when a child goes missing, it’s held to a little bit higher regard,” he said. “And in her case, it just seems like the system failed her.”
Dateline sent the Hickory Police Department questions about what measures were taken by the department when they investigated Dee Dee’s initial disappearance in 1992. The Media & Community Services Coordinator, Kristen Hart, responded on behalf of the department stating that they are “legally prohibited from releasing any juvenile records” because they are “confidential and are not considered public records under the law.”
“We were all walking around the neighborhood trying to ask people if they’d seen her, you know, but the problem was that we were not cops,” Kessiah said. For weeks, there was no sign of Dee Dee or any of her belongings. “We had no idea that she was less than two miles from her house,” Kessiah said.
Finding Dee Dee
On July 28, 1992 — just 25 days after Dee Dee vanished — a repairman working on a sprinkler system at the local mill noticed a smell and found a body in the Henry Fork River in Brookford, a couple of miles from Hickory. “Essentially washed up in a river log,” Armstrong said. “She had not been placed or left for dead in that very location; her body had come to rest at that location.”
According to Armstrong, the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office and the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) took over the investigation from the Brookford Police Department immediately. “It was a one-person police department back then,” Armstrong explained, referring to the Brookford Police Department. “[They] did not have the manpower to conduct such an extensive investigation into the manner of death.” According to Armstrong, the Brookford police chief called the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office to the scene. While on the scene, the sheriff’s office requested assistance from the SBI.
Found wearing only a bra, socks and one shoe, the body couldn’t be identified right away. “They said initially that the body was a white female, so we didn’t think that was Dee Dee,” Kessiah said. According to the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office, the shoe was turned over to their office by the North Carolina Chief Medical Examiner’s Office.
It’s like the world stopped.
KESSIAH YOUNG SAID.
On August 15, a month and a half after Dee Dee disappeared, the family received word: the remains were Dee Dee’s. “It’s like the world stopped,” Kessiah said. “It was unreal.”
Dee Dee’s death left the family reeling. “This pain was so horrible that it was like something that you just don’t even talk about,” said Kessiah. “Sometimes things are just so terrible that you — you can’t even — you can’t even speak on it. You know, you don’t even –. It’s too painful to even mention. And I think that’s kind of what was happening in my family.”
Due to the condition of Dee Dee’s remains, very little could be learned beyond her identity. “Her death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner, but he couldn’t find a cause of death because of the decomposition,” Stephanie said.
Dateline spoke to Dr. John D. Butts, who served as Chief Medical Examiner for the state of North Carolina at the time of Dee Dee’s death, and handled her medical examination. According to Dr. Butts, Dee Dee’s toxicology testing came back undetected, meaning that she didn’t have any alcohol, drugs, or medication in her system when she died. Dr. Butts told Dateline the circumstances of her death were regarded as suspicious. “A young, healthy woman is found in the river — clearly not where she went in — and based on overall circumstances, we felt that more likely than not she had died as a result of the actions of other parties,” he said.
The Dawkins family couldn’t believe it. “It was just devastating for our family. I mean, just didn’t really understand what could have happened,” Kessiah said. “How did she end up there?”
The Initial Investigation
A number of homicides had taken place in the Hickory area over the summer of 1992, including Dee Dee’s. “I do think it played a factor in Dee Dee’s investigation,” Chief Armstrong said. “Simply because they were all so close together. And I do think it might have impacted the way it was investigated.”
In 1994, a man named Glen Edward Chapman was charged and later convicted of murdering two women in Hickory: Betty Jean Ramseur and Tenene Yvette Conley. According to Kessiah, the family heard from “police” that Chapman was connected to Dee Dee. “They ended up telling us when nothing ever got done with her case, that Glen Edward Chapman killed Dee Dee, and that they just didn’t have the proof, but at least he was in jail,” she said.
The family didn’t get justice in a court of law, but they told Dateline they felt a certain amount of closure at the time, believing Dee Dee’s alleged killer was locked away. “We trust the police to do their jobs. If they tell us that this guy’s the one that killed her, and that he’s in prison, then I’m OK with knowing that at least he’s in prison,” Kessiah said. “It still doesn’t make it better that our family has lost our family member and somebody who we loved, but at least he’s locked up.”
According to Kessiah, Barbara Dula had a hard time wrapping her head around the theory that Chapman had killed her daughter, particularly because of where Dee Dee was found. “Brookford at that time was known as a sundown town,” Kessiah told Dateline. “Black people would have stood out like a sore thumb over there. You would not have been able to even have access. You wouldn’t have known the area.” It didn’t make sense to Barbara that either Dee Dee or Chapman, who is also Black, would have been in Brookford. “She understood the underlying racism in our system that I didn’t understand at the time,” Kessiah said.
Chief Armstrong agrees. “It would make no sense for her to be in Brookford during this time frame,” he told Dateline. “I have confirmed by multiple residents in the town, and law enforcement, and some law enforcement during that time, that Brookford was not friendly for people of color.”
But Barbara’s doubts couldn’t stop what was already in motion. “We are totally helpless. The man’s in prison. What else can we do?” Kessiah said. “Cops have already told us they don’t have enough evidence to get him, but they know he did it.”
In 2008, Chapman was exonerated for the murders of Ramseur and Conley, “due to perjury or false accusation, official misconduct, and inadequate legal defense.” The family says they didn’t learn about Chapman’s exoneration until 2015. “I was shocked to find out he was out, and that he’d been out that long, and no one had even bothered to even contact our family,” Kessiah said. “They didn’t formally charge him with Dee Dee, so we wouldn’t even be on the victim list. It was just like Dee Dee’s just invisible again.”
“Nobody looked into Dee Dee’s case at all, even after [Chapman] was exonerated,” Chief Armstrong told Dateline. The Ramseur and Conley cases are still open. “No information to suggest that anybody’s looked back into the cold cases involved with him after he was exonerated, which means those cases are completely unsolved,” he said.
Dateline reached out to the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office about Dee Dee’s case and the cases of Ramseur and Conley in the wake of Chapman’s exoneration. In response, they wrote: “Cases connected with Chapman were originally investigated by Hickory Police Department. Our office does not have information on the present status of those cases. Our office is not commenting on or releasing information, including suspect information, pertaining to our ongoing investigation.”
Dateline also reached out to the Hickory Police Department for a statement on the status of the Ramseur and Conley cases, but has not received a response.
Dateline also contacted the Catawba County District Attorney’s Office and received a written response from District Attorney D. Scott Reilly: “I cannot speak to what investigators may have said more than three decades ago. I have no record or evidence indicating that the District Attorney’s Office ever concluded that Glen Edward Chapman was responsible for Dee Dee Dawkins’ death. Any statement to that effect would have been made long before my tenure.”
A Fresh Look
Kessiah was just 16 when Dee Dee was killed in 1992. “Our parents tried to protect us,” she said. “But as an adult, I’m bringing it up to my dad, and I can tell he’s bothered by it. These are feelings that are buried deep down in my family’s heart.” In the decades after Dee Dee’s death, Kessiah and Stephanie got married and raised a family.
It’s now or never.
Stephanie young said.
After Dee Dee’s father’s death in 2022, Kessiah felt a pull to solve Dee Dee’s case, so she and Stephanie are now leading the family’s charge for justice. “We just had this urgency that it’s time. Now is the time. It’s now or never,” Stephanie said.
“We decided we were gonna start really putting our time and energy into figuring out exactly what happened,” Kessiah said. “So we started pulling every file we could find pertaining to anything with Dee Dee.”
They say they went to the Hickory Police Department to pull Dee Dee’s missing persons report, only to come up empty. “We asked for the incident report because they’ll give you the first page of something like that,” Stephanie said. “And they didn’t have anything for her missing report.”
Dateline also asked the Hickory Police Department about Dee Dee’s missing persons report, but due to their policies regarding juvenile records, they said they were not able to comment.
Kessiah and Stephanie’s investigation also brought them to Chief Armstrong of the Brookford Police Department, the place where Dee Dee’s body was found, who had his own questions.
“In July of 2023, the family comes in to visit me and they come to tell me about this case,” Armstrong recalled. “I say, ‘Well, let me look into it and see what else I can find.’” On behalf of the Brookford Police Department, Chief Armstrong opened an investigation into Dee Dee’s case, and says he requested the original 1992 case files from the Catawba County Sheriff’s office and the SBI. What followed, according to Chief Armstrong, was “immediate resistance” from both entities. “I was not met with welcoming arms by any means when I first started looking into it.”
There’s no accurate reason to describe why the case was closed and why the case was not followed up on in 30 years.
CHIEF ARMSTRONG SAID.
Armstrong says his 2023 investigation uncovered a host of oddities, including the status of Dee Dee’s case, which, according to NBC affiliate WCNC, was closed by the SBI in 2001. “There’s no accurate reason to describe why the case was closed and why the case was not followed up on in 30 years,” he said. “You go back and you follow up on that every so often because it remains open and it’s an open cold case. This case was listed as closed, and there has been no follow-up.”
The SBI declined to comment to Dateline about the investigation or the case status, due to “ongoing court proceedings and investigations.”
When Dateline first started looking into Dee Dee’s case in June of 2025, her case was not listed as a cold case on the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office website or the SBI website. In late July 2025, both the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office and the SBI added Dee Dee’s case to their Cold Case lists.
Chief Armstrong told Dateline the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office had a hard time locating Dee Dee’s file when he initially requested it. “They said they couldn’t find it,” he said. The records division eventually shared a case file with Chief Armstrong, but according to Armstrong, it was fewer than 20 pages. “And they tell me that this is all they had,” he said. It is out of the norm, Armstrong explained, for a murder investigation file to be so thin. “This is all you got on a 13-year-old child that was murdered? And they say, they’re, like, pretty much, ‘Yeah, this is all we can find.’”
According to the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office, the case file initially provided to Chief Armstrong reflected the investigative work done between 1992-1996 and was “contained in a records management system housing records from that era.” Later, the office located an investigative file stored in record archives. “The file turned over to Chief Armstrong represents the complete file as it was in 2024,” the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office responded to Dateline in a written statement.
And another blow: The physical evidence collected from Dee Dee’s body — a single shoe — was missing. According to Chief Armstrong, the Catawba County Sheriff’s Department’s last record of it was on August 12, 1992, three days before Dee Dee’s body was officially identified. “That was the last time the evidence was last seen,” Armstrong told Dateline. “From there till this day, no one can tell me where it has [gone] since. It has disappeared.”
According to the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office, records from the original investigation reveal that a single shoe was turned over to the sheriff’s office by the NC Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in 1992. However, the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office no longer has that piece of evidence in its possession. They said their electronic evidence records only date back to 2001, and a search was conducted of paper records, but “no record of this piece of evidence was located in those records.”
It’s a challenging situation for a long-standing cold case like Dee Dee’s. “In this case, the evidence that was collected, not only was not tested, you know, it appears, but obviously it’s not even here anymore,” Chief Armstrong said. None of Dee Dee’s other clothes or belongings have ever been found. “That’s an extremely unusual circumstance and just some poor evidence managing,” Armstrong said.
“It really speaks volumes,” Armstrong continued. “I didn’t understand that at first, but I most definitely do understand now why I was met with so much resistance that they didn’t want this case opened back up. They didn’t want me peeking back into this case.”
Over the years, Kessiah and Stephanie’s personal investigation has brought them face-to-face with the difficult elements in Dee Dee’s case. “We knew by getting this deep into this thing and working with Chief Armstrong that it was gonna open a lot of wounds for the family,” Stephanie said. “Of course, there’s been no closure, but people have tried to move on, and now everything’s fresh again.”
Kessiah and Stephanie have made themselves experts on every bit of information they can get their hands on. “We’ve been to libraries for hours on end, days on end, using phone books from ‘91, ‘92, ‘93,” Stephanie said. “The phone books are the only — the closest thing to Google we could get.”
They say they made contact with J.D. Pitts, now retired from the Catawba County Sheriff’s Department, who was one of the lead detectives on Dee Dee’s case. “We went to his house — just knocked on his door — and I said, ‘Before my grandma dies, my grandma’s 89, I wanted to come and talk to you to see what you can tell me about what happened to Dee Dee,’” Kessiah recalled. “And it was shocking what he told us.”
“We’ve always thought that they just probably didn’t really investigate because they had the other women that were murdered that summer,” Stephanie said. But that wasn’t the case. According to Stephanie, Pitts told them law enforcement had already identified a suspect in Dee Dee’s case. “They basically had solved the case and turned her file over to the DA’s office for prosecution.”
Chief Armstrong says he also connected with J.D. Pitts. “He has confirmed that there was paperwork that was turned into the district attorney’s office, and that is undiscoverable to this day,” he said. That summary has never been included in any of the documents Armstrong says he has recovered from the initial investigation.
Dateline reached out to retired detective Pitts, but he declined to comment, citing Dee Dee’s case as an active investigation.
“Law enforcement knew who was the killer at this time,” Chief Armstrong told Dateline. “Law enforcement had a great idea and took key information to the district attorney’s office in an attempt to solve this case, and the district attorney’s office and law enforcement failed her and walked away from it.”
According to the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office, the summary existed in partial form, but was never officially shared with the DA. “There is a partial, incomplete prosecution summary authored by Detective Pitts from 1996 contained in the case file, but there is no indication that partial summary was shared with the District Attorney’s Office,” they told Dateline in a written statement.
In his written statement to Dateline, DA Reilly said he is unaware of a prosecution summary ever being shared with his office regarding the Dee Dee Dawkins case. “Our office has searched its records and found no file, memorandum, or documentation of any such summary. It is important to note that 1992 was five administrations and approximately 33 years ago. I cannot speak to decisions made by prior District Attorneys, but to my knowledge, no charging decision was made because no completed case file or prosecutorial summary was ever formally submitted for review,” he wrote.
For Dee Dee’s family, learning about the prosecution summary and what it might have meant for her case decades ago has been difficult. “It’s hard to talk about her without talking about the failures,” Stephanie said. “It’s painful to know she was failed so badly. It felt like she didn’t matter.”
The Investigation into Chief Armstrong
In a written statement, the Catawba County Sheriff’s office told Dateline that on November 7, 2024, they were made aware of allegations that Brookford Police Chief Willie Armstrong “audio recorded a suspect in the Dawkins murder investigation without that persons equal knowledge and without he or Armstrong being present. Those allegations, if true, would constitute felony violations of both state and federal law… Our office referred that information to the FBI and NCSBI.” According to the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office, in November of 2024, the FBI and SBI initiated a joint investigation into the allegations against Armstrong.
Dateline reached out to the SBI about the allegations against Chief Armstrong, but they declined to speak “on any ongoing court proceedings and investigations.”
On January 24, 2025, Chief Armstrong was in New York, hosting On Patrol Live, a television show following law enforcement. While hosting, Armstrong announced he was going to run for sheriff in Catawba County. He told Dateline his decision to run for sheriff was as a result of the resistance he says he faced from local agencies while investigating Dee Dee’s death. “Sometimes, in order to make a change, you have to do it from within,” he said. “And so you can’t really complain about it if you’re not attempting to solve the problem.”
After arriving home in North Carolina, Chief Armstrong says the SBI asked to meet with him on January 27, 2025, at which point he was informed that he was the subject of an investigation following a tip from the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office. Armstrong believes there is an “insane conflict of interest,” as the allegations made by the sheriff’s office were brought to him days after his announcement that he would be running for election against the incumbent sheriff. Dateline reached out to the sheriff’s office and was told that beyond reporting the allegations on November 7, 2024, they have had no part in the investigation into Armstrong, nor did they know of Armstrong’s plans to run for sheriff when they reported the allegations.
According to an indictment obtained by Dateline from the Catawba County Clerk’s Office, Chief Armstrong was indicted on May 5, 2025, on one count of felony altering, destroying, or stealing criminal evidence and one count of misdemeanor willful failure to discharge duties. Prosecutors allege he altered or destroyed part of an audio recording during the investigation into Dee Dee’s death.
In October of 2025, Armstrong’s attorney filed a Motion to Dismiss, obtained by Dateline from the Catawba County Clerk’s Office. According to the motion, Chief Armstrong, accompanied by a Brookford Police Captain, met with a witness in Dee Dee’s case at a private residence in October of 2023. Armstrong recorded the interview on his phone, and unintentionally left that phone in the residence, where it continued recording. Armstrong returned to the residence, retrieved his phone, and reviewed the footage, and found that the only content recorded during that time was background audio of a television show. According to the motion, “upon information and belief, Chief Armstrong may have trimmed this portion of the recording, as it was irrelevant and non-evidentiary.”
Armstrong claims there was no interference with the integrity of the Dee Dee Dawkins investigation. “All I’ve tried to do is do the right thing to try and solve this case,” he said. “They have me arrested for trying to solve this case that’s older than I’ve been alive, and it’s insane.”
The motion states, “Upon information and belief, this prosecution constitutes a malicious abuse of process by CCSO and the SBI in retaliation for Chief Armstrong reopening a racially sensitive cold case and intending to run against the incumbent sheriff.”
Armstrong alleges the investigation into him is a distraction and is disrespectful to Dee Dee’s family. “We’ve already done this family so much injustice over 30 years by failing them, but we’re gonna go ahead and add further insult to that, and we’re gonna arrest the only police chief — and I’ll tell you, I’m a Black police chief — that has tried to solve this case in 30 years,” he said.
The Catawba County Sheriff’s Office vehemently denied the claims made in Armstrong’s motion. “Without exception, all allegations made by Chief Armstrong and or by and through his counsel are false,” the sheriff’s office wrote in their statement to Dateline.
Kessiah and Stephanie have been vocal in their support of Chief Armstrong, as well as their disappointment in his indictment and its impact on Dee Dee’s case. They feel the investigation into Armstrong has been unfair. “These agencies, the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office and the SBI, they are not wanting to solve her –. They don’t want to do anything except make sure that Chief Armstrong is not on her case,” Kessiah said.
While the SBI declined to comment on the family’s statements, Catawba County District Attorney D. Scott Reilly shared a written response with Dateline. “That characterization is completely false. Nothing could be further from the truth. Both the Sheriff and I have met personally with members of Dee Dee’s family to discuss the case and to assure them that we want justice for Dee Dee. During that meeting, we were honest and transparent in answering their questions to the best of our ability. It was evident that some members of the family had been told misinformation prior to meeting with us, and we did our best to correct that by providing truthful and accurate information about the case. Nothing would bring me greater satisfaction than to hold accountable whoever is responsible for the death of this 13-year-old child.”
Following the indictment, the Catawba County District Attorney’s Office requested that Chief Armstrong’s files be turned over to the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office and that the sheriff’s office work with the SBI’s Cold Case Unit to continue the investigation. District Attorney Reilly wrote in his statement to Dateline, “I believe it would be wholly inappropriate for Chief Armstrong, who has been indicted for felonies arising out of his involvement in this very investigation, to have any further role in the case. Our office has made three written requests of the Town of Brookford for their investigative file. All requests have been denied.”
Armstrong says he is continuing to investigate the case on behalf of the Brookford Police Department. “We’ve got to hold them accountable for a case that they messed up 30 years ago,” he told Dateline. “And I’m the one that they’ve weaponized the system and turned around on, to try to shut me — to not only get me fired, but take my freedom.”
Catawba County Superior Court Judge Matthew Osman denied Armstrong’s motion to dismiss, and on November 19, 2025, Chief Armstrong pleaded not guilty to the felony and misdemeanor charges. The case is scheduled to go to trial on March 16, 2026.
What’s next?
In Brookford, just around the corner from the embankment where Dee Dee’s body was found, Kessiah and Stephanie hung a large banner by the road, featuring photos of Dee Dee and a family tipline number. The banner remained up for 10 months but disappeared in early May 2025, they say. After raising funds, they have now put up three new banners at the same intersection.
For the family, the future of the case rests with witnesses who may know something, but haven’t yet gone to investigators. “What happened in Brookford stayed in Brookford,” Kessiah told Dateline. “It’s getting people to come forward and actually go to the police with what they know,” Stephanie added.
The tipline featured on Dee Dee’s banner is solely operated by the family, independent from the official investigation. They take every piece of information they get to the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office, the SBI, and Chief Armstrong. They also look into it themselves. “Someone asked us one day, ‘Why is it important to y’all to keep talking to people in the family or keep talking to people that knew things back then?’” Stephanie said. “The answer is, because if there’s never justice for Dee Dee, at least we can try to put some pieces together and find out, as people who love her, what happened to her.” Every piece of information gathered means something to the family. “Even if it’s something they tell us that might hold up in court or that it’s not important in court,” Stephanie said. “It’s important to us.”
On October 13, 2025, Governor Josh Stein announced that the state of North Carolina is offering a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for Dee Dee’s homicide.
“Even when all leads have been exhausted in a case, we cannot stop pursuing justice,” Stein said in a press release. “I urge North Carolinians who have information about this case to contact local law enforcement so that the family can find closure and the murderer can be held to account.”
“There are people who know what happened,” Kessiah stressed. “If they would just come forward, it would help our family.”
Chief Armstrong agrees. “There’s people that know things in this community, and there are law enforcement who know things, and no one has chosen to do the right thing here, and to come forward with the truth,” he said. “And it breaks my heart for this family.”
While the family is hoping for justice, they also just want to keep Dee Dee’s name alive.“She had a passion for life,” cousin Kessiah said. “She loved life. Like, she loved living her life.”
At only 13, Dee Dee didn’t really get to do that.
So Kessiah and Stephanie have a mission. “Let people know who she was and that she existed and that she mattered and she was loved and missed,” Stephanie said.
If you have information about Dee Dee’s case, please contact the Brookford Police Department at 828-358-2025, or the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation at 800-334-3000, or the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office at 828-465-8340, or Kessiah and Stephanie Young’s tipline at 828-383-4063. You can also reach out to [email protected].
If you have a story to share with Dateline, please submit it here.
