Missing: The Oregon City Girls. Rick Watson
ones. She knows that sifting through mountains of useless information eventually changes attitudes. And the “no crime scene, no witnesses” mantra only adds to collective confusion.
Harry Oakes, a man on the outside looking in, has been a search dog trainer for years and paid his dues to the profession.2 But for mysterious reasons, the established dog handlers in the area have never accepted Harry as a legitimate member of their profession. His dog, Valorie, is just as smart as theirs. Perhaps, he thinks, I’m too outspoken when I think the established handlers get it wrong. When the authorities refuse to allow Oakes to join their official search for Ashley, he calls the girl’s mother, Lori Pond, and offers to search for her daughter. She is ambivalent, but she meets with Oakes and Valorie on the morning of March 7. After he briefs her about his techniques, she is impressed enough to cooperate. “I need a personal item,” he tells her matter-of-factly, “for a good scent…shirt or pants, something like that. Preferably something that hasn’t been washed. Anything she would have worn recently.”
Lori surrenders a pair of knee socks that Oakes carefully places into a plastic bag. He thanks Lori for letting him volunteer his expertise and promises he’ll be returning to conduct a private search.
Incredibly, the very next day, March 8, Miranda Gaddis disappears from almost the exact same location as Ashley. Oakes knows that the FBI and the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Department will be all over that whole area. But it doesn’t mean that he can’t search too. After all, he has secured the permission of the first missing girl’s family.
Harry and his dog Valorie thoroughly search the Newell Creek Canyon on March 10. For hours and hours they methodically prowl back and forth across every square foot of the rugged terrain. Just before dark, while she crawls under some thick foliage at the bottom of a steep canyon below Beavercreek Road, Valorie finally releases one, enthusiastic alert. She howls and howls. Oakes makes note of the location, realizing that it is getting too dark to continue. He resolves to return soon and resume.
Because of several personal conflicts, Oakes isn’t able to return with Valorie until March 15. Early that morning he arrives where his dog had alerted, determined to discover the basis for the disturbance and hopeful it will yield a clue. He begins the ritual as he always does, by giving Valorie her head when they reach the familiar spot. Once again the dog wails in a mournful, whimpering cadence that means, “There’s a dead body here somewhere!” Valorie then unexpectedly bounds up the slope and races frantically under brush and over dead tree limbs, Oakes sprinting to keep her in sight. Finally the dog shifts direction and lopes toward the lone house at the end of the road by the apartment complex. Harry senses excitement. Valorie is definitely interested in something here. He hesitates, thinking, Well I still have to do things right, but this could be our big break. After carefully mulling over the situation, Harry walks up to the front door and knocks. A shirtless teenage boy pushes the door wide open. He stares at Oakes, then at Valorie who is panting and wagging her tail. “What do you want?”
Oakes extends his hand, but the teen refuses to shake it. “Well, I’m Harry Oakes, a private dog handler. I’m helping in the search for the missing girls and would it be okay, I mean can I have permission to let her explore the ground for scents?”
The shirtless one shrugs. “I don’t even live here. I’ll have to call my dad and ask him. If he says it’s all right, then, okay. I’ll be right back.” He slams the door, leaving Harry standing for several minutes. The door opens again with the teenager, this time wearing a white tee shirt, smiling.
“My dad says it’s okay, as long as you keep your dog away from the new concrete slab in the backyard. He’s getting ready to install a hot tub on it. That slab was just poured and he doesn’t want it messed up.”
Harry thanks the boy for his cooperation and while the kid observes from the kitchen window, Harry takes Valorie around back and puts her to work. Valorie pays no attention to any surrounding ground but instead makes a beeline for the concrete slab. First she merely hovers over it, but soon she is pacing back and forth with increasing intensity. Finally, she throws her head back high in the air and unleashes her unique, blood curdling death alert. She lunges at the slab, scraping its hard surface with her front paws. Harry has to yank her chain to pull her back. Valorie erupts with a thirty-second non-stop bark blast. “Quiet, Girl! Quiet!” Harry commands. Harry is so shaken he pulls Valorie tightly and briskly walks her off the Weaver property and on down Beavercreek Road to a strip mall. He enters a store and asks to use their phone to call the police.
A female officer takes his call. Harry’s heart is still pounding. “I’m telling you ma’am, there’s something under the slab at Ward Weaver’s house. It needs to be checked out.” She records his telephone number and address before thanking him for the tip. That is the end of it! Nothing! When Oakes does not hear from the police, he writes a letter to Oregon City Chief of Police, Gordon Hurias, detailing Valorie’s March 15 reaction to Weaver’s concrete slab. He sends copies to the Pond family and the FBI task force.3
On the same day that Harry Oakes and his dog are investigating Weaver, a blonde young man named Brian Taylor stands in the upstairs apartment above Lori Pond’s unit, involved in an energetic exchange with two middle-aged males wearing FBI windbreakers. “Yes, on March 8, I was camping up at Bagby Hot Springs, out near Molalla.”4
“Camping in March?”5
“Hmm, where are you from?”
“Chicago.”
“Well I don’t know about Chicago, but in Oregon it’s not unusual to go camping in March.”
The second agent asks, “You went camping on March 8. Does that mean that you left for your camping trip on March 7 and spent that night so you were at the Hot Springs on the morning of March 8, or…”
The young man interrupts testily. “No, I spent the night of March 7 here. I went camping about noon on Friday and stayed camping through Saturday night and came home on Sunday.”
“Were you with anybody who can verify this?”
“No, I was alone. I go camping to be alone. How many different guys do I have to say this to?”
The interview comes to an end with nothing accomplished.
At this point, the Newell Creek complex is crawling with federal and county officers and their search dogs. They approach one apartment after another, but the procedures yield no information. Another young girl has vanished into thin air.
Meanwhile, Linda O’Neal is conducting her own investigation. Oliver Jamison is one of the people Linda O’Neal employs for technological work. They rarely interact face to face. Linda pays out hundreds a month in subscription fees to this disembodied voice for access to all of the top-notch criminal and civil databases available. She purchases the technical capacity to find out any fact that is recorded somewhere and can measure that fact against others retrieved similarly. Unfortunately, Linda’s personal computer skills are limited. Thank God for experts! Linda often pats herself on the back for the stroke of great luck that brought techno genius Ollie into her life by random chance. During their many years of working on cases together, she has always marveled at his uncanny knack to write the most astute queries. Not only does he know which database to search, but he can create a query that gets the information wanted and only the information wanted. Linda hates to admit it, but Oliver has evolved to a crucial level of importance in her professional life, because 80 percent of her investigations involve computer searches.
Ollie is a fifty-something, burly, retired army sergeant who is supporting a daughter born in Italy and saving what little money he has left over to afford a shabby inner city studio apartment. The dark walls are covered by bookshelves and file cabinets. Next to a scraggly futon are scattered piles of un-filed documents atop