Second Body Unearthed in Oregon Yard

OREGON CITY, Ore. — Authorities on Sunday found a second set of human remains here in the backyard of an ex-convict during an inch-by-inch search of the property. They also identified a body found earlier as that of Miranda Gaddis, a 13-year-old who had been missing since March.

An autopsy on the second set of remains--which had been stuffed into a barrel and buried under a concrete slab--is expected to be completed today. But the hundreds of mourners who stood vigil outside the unkempt property Sunday had little doubt what the medical report would show.

They fully expect the second body to be identified as that of 12-year-old Ashley Pond, a friend of Miranda’s from the Gardiner Middle School dance team. She has been missing since January.

Friends and neighbors of the girls--and many strangers--crowded in along with a crush of reporters to listen to Oregon City Police Chief Gordon Huiras and Charles Mathews, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Oregon office, make the grim announcements. Teens sat cross-legged in front of the microphones, wiping at their eyes as they awkwardly rubbed at tears that would not stop.

“Someone’s got to help me up. I’m shaking,” one woman cried, pushing free of the crowd as officials waved off reporters asking about the condition of the remains.

“That somebody could do this to someone is wrong and gross and sick,” sobbed Kayla Urbach, a lanky 14-year-old.

The bodies were found at the 1,200-square-foot rented house of Ward Weaver, 39, a toolmaker with a history of violence against women.

The home, sitting on an acre of sun-scorched yellow grass, is at the entrance of the apartment complex where Ashley and Miranda lived. Both girls disappeared last winter after breakfast, never making it to school.

Many here said the twin disappearances brought together the community in this working-class suburb 20 minutes south of Portland.

“Obviously, this is a very sad conclusion to this investigation,” Mathews said. “On the other hand, I think the case has been resolved.”

Weaver has not been charged in connection with the girls’ deaths.

He has been jailed on unrelated charges since Aug. 13, when his son’s teenage girlfriend ran naked from his house, screaming that he had raped and tried to smother her.

That night, Weaver’s son called 911 to report that Weaver had claimed that he had killed Ashley and Miranda.

Even before the son’s call, Weaver had been of interest to police and the girls’ relatives because of his criminal history--and his close ties to Ashley. As a friend of Weaver’s daughter, Ashley spent many nights at their house. Last summer, she told her mother Weaver had molested her, but no charges were filed.

But his name continued to crop up throughout the nationwide hunt for the girls. Authorities searched his home and car months ago, finding nothing.

For his part, Weaver did nothing to hide. In fact, he talked often with the media about the case, at times sounding close to boastful about suspicion cast his way. Weaver told one interviewer months ago that he was a “prime suspect”; he also volunteered that he had failed a polygraph test.

He even told Associated Press that his sister had warned him to “watch myself” around Ashley, apparently because she sometimes wore revealing clothes. “I said, ‘Shut up, she’s 12,’ ” Weaver recounted.

Weaver spent three years behind bars in California for bashing his son’s baby-sitter with a chunk of concrete. Both of his former wives have filed restraining orders against him.

In his interviews, Weaver emphasized that he treated Ashley as a daughter: buying her clothes, driving her to school when she missed the bus and even taking her on a family vacation to California last summer.

One of their stops, he said, was at San Quentin Prison--where his father is on death row for murdering a young woman and burying her body in his backyard.

The father, Ward Francis Weaver Jr., was convicted two decades ago of raping and murdering a 23-year-old woman and killing her boyfriend. The woman’s body was found buried beneath a concrete pad outside his Northern California home.

The elder Weaver’s son Rodney was there when authorities dug up the body at the Oroville home in July 1982.

So when he heard that his stepbrother Ward had poured a concrete pad in his Oregon City backyard not long after two local girls disappeared, Rodney Weaver was shaken.

“That blew me away,” he told the Oregonian newspaper.

“If he did it,” Rodney Weaver told the paper last week, “that’s where they’d be.”

The fresh concrete--Ward Weaver said it was a pad for a hot tub--drew the attention of the girls’ relatives too.

After Weaver was jailed on the unrelated rape charge, Ashley’s stepmother went into his backyard and taped a sign on the slab reading: “Dig Me Up.”

In the haze of a wrenching Sunday, the FBI did just that.

In front of Weaver’s house, against a chain-link fence, teddy bears and flowers bloomed into a ragtag memorial. Out back, dozens of FBI agents with shovels and picks broke through the concrete and started digging.

In front, teenage girls in pastel tank tops huddled, crying. Sport utility vehicles with canoes strapped to the roofs crept along at a gawker’s pace.

Out back, FBI agents sifted through three barrels that were found under the slab. Two were filled with dirt and gravel. The third held human remains, and agents set up a gurney.

In front of the home, a woman sat on a lawn chair, breastfeeding her infant, waiting for news.

Melissa Snider, passing by with her 15-month-old son, at first refused to think ill of Weaver. She knew him from a job at an auto supply store. She was friends with one of his old girlfriends. She used to baby-sit his daughter.

“He was very good with his daughter,” she said. “When I heard that he might have been involved, I was totally stunned.”

Then the police chief held the news conference, and Snider remained quiet as her fiance ran back and forth from the media crush to give her updates.

“I’m sick to my stomach,” she said, staring at Weaver’s house. “He needs to fry.”

Calvo reported from Oregon City and Simon from St. Louis.