Bullet, blood found in man’s drain after his ex disappeared — but his attorney says there’s no proof she’s dead

CLEMENS, Mich. (Court TV) — A man accused of killing a missing woman was absent from court as his trial began on Friday, electing not to participate in the proceedings.

Deandre Booker, 34, has pleaded not guilty to charges including first-degree premeditated murder, tampering with evidence and concealing the death of another in the presumed death of his ex-girlfriend, Ashley Elkins.

Elkins, 30, disappeared on Jan. 2, 2025, after parking her car outside Booker’s apartment. After surveillance video captured her going inside, she was never seen again, prosecutor Carrie Seward said in her opening statement to the jury on Friday.

Because Elkins was the mother of two young boys, her family grew alarmed when they couldn’t reach her. “She would not just up and abandon her kids, abandon her life and disappear. So what happened to Ashley Elkins?” Seward said. “Deandre Booker killed her, put her body into garbage bags, dumped her body in a dumpster and ran away.”

Seward said that Elkins and Booker had dated for about a year before breaking up in the fall of 2024. “But the defendant was not going to accept that,” she said. “He was obsessive. He would not let Ashley go.”

In the weeks before Elkins disappeared, Booker began searching things like “what does it mean when someone just thumbs up an apology text,” but those searches escalated into searches for things like, “silencers for guns and where to buy them,” “how to disappear,” and “what happens to trash after [it’s] picked up,” Seward said.

Booker’s defense attorney, Robbie Lang, dismissed the searches as unrelated to the case or as evidence that the defendant was researching suicide, not murder.

When investigators began looking into Booker, they found surveillance video showing him after Elkins was last seen, going in and out of his apartment, removing boxes and trash bags, and placing them in several different dumpsters at his and other apartment complexes in the area.

Inside Booker’s apartment, investigators did not find Elkins, but found what they believed to be blood in the bathroom, rubber gloves on the couch and a gun under the couch. A more intensive search revealed an earring, a clump of hair and a fired bullet in the bathtub’s drain.

Lang told the jury that the bullet was “old, rusty and corroded” and had been ruled out as having been fired from the gun found in the apartment.

Seward said that DNA from inside the drain matched Elkins’s profile, as did drops of blood found in a dumpster at the apartment complex. None of Booker’s DNA was found on the dumpster.

“People go missing for various reasons all the time,” Lang told jurors, as he urged them to question whether the alleged victim was even dead. He said she was not close with her family, and noted that she had been charged with felony drunk driving a few months before her disappearance.

Lang also questioned the police investigation, accusing officers of having a bias toward blaming his client and ignoring a message sent to Elkins’s family days after her disappearance claiming that she was being held at a building in Detroit. When officers went to that location, they found spent bullets but were not given access to the building and never applied for a search warrant, Lang said.

“They do not have any viable proof,” Lang said, urging the jury to view the prosecution’s evidence with skepticism.