Hairstylist Ashley Elkins Was Moving on After a Failed Relationship. Then She Disappeared

Shortly after opening shop on the morning of what promised to be a busy New Year’s Eve in 2024, hairstylist Ashley Elkins, 30, and her sister Alexis, 22, stood quiet and still behind the blinds of the home that doubled as Ashley’s salon in Warren, Mich.

Outside the front door, a man who had hastily scheduled an appointment that morning — Ashley’s estranged boyfriend DeAndre Booker, 32 — knocked impatiently. “We were trying to figure out what he was doing and thought he was just trying to get her attention because she wasn’t talking to him,” recalls Alexis [Booker’s attorney accused the family of “lying” in its account of this incident].

After about five minutes, Booker gave up and left, she says, while the sisters shrugged off the incident as harmless. “They were giggling,” says their mother, Monika Elkins. 

Two days later, Monika called and texted Ashley repeatedly and received an abrupt text message that didn’t sound like her daughter.

“We started to get worried because she will usually call in to check on her kids,” says Alexis, who was taking care of her nephews Braden, 10, and Jaden, 7, that morning. “She knows that her boys expect to hear from her.”

Desperate to find Ashley, her family reported her missing to police and tracked her phone to Booker’s address in nearby Roseville, Mich.

On Jan. 8, after police found Ashley’s car abandoned near his house, Booker — whom police claim searched on Google “is blood traceable” and “how to beat a polygraph test” — was arrested on a charge of lying to police and held in Macomb County Jail.

And although an intensive search of Booker’s property and a landfill in neighboring Lenox Township failed to turn up a body, on Jan. 30, 2025, the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office, citing the suspicious Internet searches and blood found in Booker’s bathroom, charged him with first-degree murder and mutilating a dead body.

A working single mother with two children from a previous relationship, Ashley still managed to find time to help others while studying to be a beautician.

“She makes sure her kids do well in school, takes them on trips, and she teaches them to be kind to each other and love each other,” Alexis says of her older sibling. “She’s always kept me under her wing, and she was good to a lot of people in the community.”

Ashley and Booker, a machine operator and former certified nursing assistant, met on Facebook and got together in 2023. From the start of their seemingly happy relationship, her family was impressed by the attention that Booker paid to them.

He took Braden, Ashley’s older son, to the barber and arranged for an Uber to take Monika to a hospital when she had an accident. When the sisters’ father, Gene Robinson, 51, was murdered in Detroit last April, Booker accompanied them when they went to identify his body.

“We thought he was the one,” Ashley’s uncle Maurice Morton says of Booker.

Taking a break from school to recover from losing her dad, Ashley bounced back by starting her own hair salon in her kitchen, with a hair washbowl, a mirror and a TV for clients to watch.

Booker was initially supportive, Monika says. But in time he grew possessive and demanded that Ashley rent a booth at a salon instead of having male clients come to her house. In the fall of 2024, Ashley found messages from other women on Booker’s phone and broke off the relationship. She never expressed any concern for her safety. 

Booker has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. His trial has not yet been scheduled.

“I don’t have any real comment on what people search or don’t search [on the Internet] and I don’t know where that quantifies as guilt for anything,” Booker’s defense attorney Robbie Lang told PEOPLE recently.

Even though investigators “supposedly” found Ashley’s blood in Booker’s bathroom, Lang said, she had been to the residence “a lot within a year of her disappearance.”

“So, I don’t know that that would prove anything,” Lang said.

When asked about Booker’s reported visit to Ashley’s home on Dec. 31, Lang accused her family of “lying” but declined to state if their contention about the visit was false.

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As authorities continue to investigate what happened to Ashley, her son Jaden, who is on the autism spectrum and doesn’t understand his mother’s disappearance, waits for her to return.

After attending a recent vigil for her at a park in Roseville, he returned home and asked the same question: “Where’s mom?”

Says Alexis: “At this point we know my sister’s no longer here. I’m just hoping that the police find her, and we can actually put her to rest, because I don’t see any of us getting closure if we don’t have her.” 

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.