Missing: The Oregon City Girls. Rick Watson
inside his studio, Philip hooks up the tape he shot at Molalla and soon is examining his playback. Linda notices a stack of pages dangling from the front of her fax machine. She puts on her reading glasses and snatches a fistful to peruse. While she saunters toward Philip’s space, she becomes transfixed, absorbing paragraphs, slowly switching from page to page. Fully engrossed, Philip stares at some Molalla house footage showing the bald man with the scraggly beard. Linda startles him when she places a hand on his shoulder. “Philip,” she exclaims, “I’ve just got the background checks on Roettger and Weaver. Ollie’s note on the cover page says that while there were over five hundred registered sex offenders in Clackamas County, not one of them was registered as living in the Newell Creek Apartments.”
“What about Roettger? What have you got on him?”
“Pretty much what we expected. They initially hit him over the head with a lot of counts. It looks like thirty-nine total counts of sodomy and child rape, but inexplicably it was all plea bargained down to just one count of ‘attempted unlawful penetration of a minor’. But here’s a really strange thing, the background check on Ward Weaver10 says that right this minute he resides in San Quentin Prison on death row, awaiting execution for a double homicide committed in 1981.”11
Philip shuts the video off and stares at Linda. “That’s impossible, he’s in Oregon City!”
Linda shakes her head and rattles one of the papers. “No, no. It says he had clubbed a stranded motorist to death.” She runs her fingers along a paragraph. “It says he raped and strangled the guy’s female companion before finally burying her in a grave and sealing it with concrete. This was all done in Weaver’s own backyard. And he got the death penalty for it in 1984, yet incredibly, according to this, he’s still alive. Unbelievable!”
Philip asks the obvious. “What the hell is going on, Linda?”
Linda reluctantly comes to the only conclusion she can. “There must be more than one Ward Weaver! I guess I need to get the date of birth on the Oregon City Weaver so we can find out if there is any connection between him and the one on death row.” She shakes her head and shuffles the many pages. “You know, this is beginning to feel like that old movie, The Hills Have Eyes.”
“What about the stuff we taped tonight?”
“Did you get a clear shot of the license plate?”
For an answer Philip begins playing the videotape and initiates a freeze-frame depicting a close-up of the Virginia plate. She smiles and quickly kisses the back of his head before jotting the number down. “Tomorrow morning I’ll have Oliver run that plate through DMV and the utility bills for that old house. Maybe we’ll get the lead we need.”
With no new information forthcoming on either Ashley Pond or Miranda Gaddis, frustration and fear build. On Saturday evening Linda, Philip and the two boys are in the living room watching America’s Most Wanted. During a commercial break, Linda reminds the others about an important event scheduled early Sunday morning. “Maria called and said a massive private search for the missing girls has been organized.12 Tomorrow morning, they plan to scour every inch of that whole canyon around Newell Creek,” she says solemnly. “They need more volunteers. I think we should all participate.”
Her son, Jonathan, immediately protests. “Aw Mom, I’m going fishing with a friend tomorrow, I told you about it last week.”
Philip’s son, Damon, also complains. “I’m going bowling tomorrow.”
Philip squeezes her hand. “I’ll go for sure if you want to.”
“I need to. I think a day of physical searching will do me some good. It’s all so frustrating.”
“Okay Love, but I’ve got to warn you, it is very rugged terrain with a lot of brush. You don’t do well with sticker bushes and pine cones.”
Linda’s reply surprises him. “I don’t care. I’ve got to look for these girls myself.” At this moment, Linda feels like she’s gotten nowhere and let Ashley and Miranda down. She is determined to do anything that will help find them or at least eliminate a place where they might be.
The commercial ends and the TV screen flashes a large graphic containing Ashley and Miranda’s photos with a large caption underneath, “1-800-CRIME-TV.” Then, for a few minutes, a full segment airs profiling the basic facts of the mystery before ending with a desperate plea for viewers to come forward with any tips that could be useful.13
Early the next morning, Linda, Philip and twenty other adult volunteers assemble in the back parking lot of the Newell Creek Apartments. They’re joined by a platoon of uniformed, teenage Explorer Scouts, wearing backpacks and carrying walking sticks. A stocky thirty-year-old man approaches with a bullhorn. “Thank you all for your assistance this morning. This is the third search that I’ve organized.14 Today, we will spread out and look over every square foot of both sides of the canyon. There are four sector leaders. They are the fellows wearing white armbands and whistles. If you come across anything, anything at all that seems suspicious, holler loudly and the nearest leader will take command. Any questions? Okay, let’s proceed.”
Clusters of citizen searchers slowly fan out from one another, walking one step at a time, eyes glued to the ground. Linda does her pacing between Maria and Suzie. She painstakingly explores her assigned area, but finds nothing. Turning to climb back up the steep slope, Linda trips over a protruding root and rolls into a patch of thick ivy. Philip rushes to her aid and pulls her up. “Are you okay, Sweetie?”
Upset at what she perceives as her own clumsiness, Linda scrapes some mud from her jeans and straightens her glasses. “I’m fine. I’m fine, really.” A shrill blast from a coach’s whistle rings out. The entire party converges on the sound, hiking up and over a steep embankment. They discover a skinny, dark haired fourteen-year-old scout on his knees, bending over a round white object and shouting excitedly.
Somebody asks, “What’s he doing?”
Finally Linda and Philip have gotten close enough to recognize the round object. It is unmistakably a human skull. The feeling of accomplishment felt by the search party upon the discovery quickly dissolves when the Deputy State Medical Examiner15 concludes that the bones are those of an adult who has likely been dead up to a year. The local press is puzzled by the fact that the FBI task force had supposedly traversed this same territory during several of their intensive sweeps. Why wasn’t the skull spotted then?
The Medical Examiner tells newspaper reporters the remains could have been washed into the area by heavy rains after the initial FBI searches. An alternative theory suggests that despite the fact the FBI had searched Newell Creek Canyon six or seven separate times, they had not necessarily examined the spot where the skull was found, because there was no evidence that any human had been there in the months since Ashley disappeared. After all, he reminds them, the skull was discovered in a very steep, overgrown area near a stream that feeds Newell Creek. The bottom line: there is still no suspect and no crime scene.
More weeks come and go. Despite over twenty-five hundred tips that have poured in from the ever increasing national publicity, none have proven fruitful. Linda begins to empathize with the FBI task force—many leads, but nothing to give her a viable suspect either.
Because private investigators get so involved in the murky behaviors that clash between perps and victims, they frequently are subpoenaed to put their observations up for public scrutiny. It’s amazing how precise language must be when testifying “under oath.” One misstatement of fact can sabotage an acquittal.
Linda O’Neal, at this moment, finds herself in just such a situation. Dressed