Dateline NBC - Into Thin Air

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

After two young girls go missing two months apart in a Portland, Oregon suburb, a private eye is convinced it’s only a matter of time before someone else gets hurt. Can she crack the case before the FBI does? Keith Morrison reports in this Dateline classic. Originally aired on NBC on January 27, 2006.

It was evening, dark and cold, in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, when the call came in to dispatch a mother reporting a missing daughter. Strange, the immediate assumption a 12-year-old must be a runaway. Sue began the long, strange tale of what happened to Ashley Pond. Not with a bang, but a whimper. As it dawned on a young mother, what terrors could lie ahead? Let me have my baby back. Lori Pond's daughter, Ashley, had simply vanished, gone, or so it seemed, on her way to school in the town of Oregon City,

January 2002. It was very upsetting. A 12-year-old child had disappeared. You know, this is a child. Linda O'Neill is a member of Ashley's extended blended family. Linda's husband was once married to Ashley's grandmother. Not exactly a close relationship, but Linda certainly knew about Ashley. How would you describe her as a little girl? She was kind of known as having an attitude. But Linda was not just family. She was also a licensed private investigator. And in those first days, her experience told her Ashley was probably okay. My first thought would have been that she probably ran away. Police in Oregon City apparently agreed. But then a whole week went by. No sign of Ashley anywhere.

Runaways inevitably contact someone she didn't. And so now local officials, thinking abduction, called in the FBI. One of the problems with the case is that there was a wealth of suspects. Jim Redden is a veteran crime reporter who worked at the Portland Tribune at the time. Ashley, he soon learned, had disappeared from an apartment complex that was a mulligan stew of troubled souls. It had a lot of welfare cases. It had a number of mentally ill people that would be placed there by the county. A lot of single mothers who attracted a lot of really bad boyfriends. In fact, police searching for suspects found no fewer than 90 sex offenders living within

a mile of the complex. One possible suspect was Ashley's own biological father. He had been convicted of sexually abusing her during one of her visits. Had he taken her? And if not him, who? As weeks passed, a terrible realization began to set in around town. Ashley's little group of best friends knew it. Everybody seemed to sense it.

Something awful had happened to Ashley. It's really hard to believe that happened to one of your friends or something. Her name is Miranda. As she spoke to a television reporter from KATU-TV in Portland, she had no way of knowing that fate had its eye on her, too. In the weeks that followed, the task force would chase hundreds of leads. They would, according to newspaper reports, watch Ashley's mother and her mom's boyfriend. Investigators even began tailing a couple of male neighbors from the apartments.

No one, it seemed, knew anything. It was as if Ashley Pond had disappeared into thin air. And then, two months after Ashley disappeared, this girl, yes, the one interviewed earlier, the girl named Miranda, unbelievably, turned up missing too. Two girls from the same apartment complex, the same school, even the same dance team, vanished within eight weeks of one another. When the second girl disappeared, it caused panic, absolute panic.

They were afraid that there was a serial killer among them. In a suburb of Portland, Oregon, everyone could feel the chill. The disappearance of 13-year-old Miranda Gaddis was a sickening reminder of the way 12-year-old Ashley Pond vanished two months before. Now the FBI ramped up its investigation and called in scores of agents. Soon, more than 60 of them were working on the case. A true task force assigned to find the answers about Ashley and Miranda. Linda began to turn down other work, to work on this case full time. A little crazy maybe, given the size of the official investigation, but remember, Linda felt a real family connection with Ashley.

This was personal. What made you think that you could help solve this crime? The FBI would say we have no suspects, we have no crime scene, and we have no clues. So it appeared that they needed a little help. But where to start? Suspects were no problem. Narrowing it down was. Some on the list? A former neighbor on the wrong end of a restraining order taken out by an ex-girlfriend. Miranda's father, once convicted of abusing two minor girls. And that was just for starters. So Linda decided to start with a name she'd heard from Ashley's aunt. I asked, who are the people in Ashley's life?

And she told me about Ward Weaver. Ward Weaver was a neighbor, a family friend, whose home was right next to the apartment complex in which Ashley and her mother lived. Weaver did have a criminal record for assault, but it had been 16 years before. Now, he seemed like a hard-working single father, raising a daughter Ashley's age. And police had already checked out his alibi, and sent several teams of officers and dogs to search his house and property and found nothing. And after all, there were so many suspects. Why would Ward Weaver stand out in that group?

Because Ashley had complained that he had sexually molested her. And yet, as Linda learned, those allegations had apparently been investigated and no charges had been filed. But she decided to run a computer check on Weaver. And she was stunned. I get this information Ward Weaver is on death row. Death row? Yes. But you've got Ward Weaver in your town.

This fellow on death row for serial murder was Ward Weaver's father. Strange, but true. Weaver's father had been on California's death row for two decades. But surely, just having a father who was a killer wasn't reason enough to suspect the son, was it? Then, just about the time Linda was contemplating that question, a second private investigator offered to help. This valve work right? Harry Oakes is a bit of a maverick. He runs a for-profit search and rescue center. At the time, his partner was a 12-year-old pound-rescued mutt named Valerie.

Many police departments don't like him, said Harry. Don't use him. But in this case, he waived his fee, did some background work, showed Valerie some of Ashley's clothing, and went to work. The track led from the apartment complex up the road, the staircase, to Ward's property. That name again. Ward. Ward Weaver. Go to work. Harry, with his Valerie now excited and on the chase, knocked at Weaver's door and asked for permission to search the house. He said, I don't have any problem with you searching. They've already brought in seven different search dog teams. I have nothing to hide. During the

search of the house, she gave me a death alert on Ashley's scent in Ward's hallway. Did Valerie alert anywhere else? Yes. When we went outside to the back area, there was a slab that had been poured. Concrete slab? Concrete slab, where the slab met with the grass, the dirt, where they came together. My dog was smelling Ashley's scent coming out of there. Did you call 911? I made a report and turned it into Oregon City Police Department. A record of Harry's report shows it was indeed turned into police on March 20th, less than two weeks after Miranda disappeared. Was there any reaction from the police? They basically ignored us. What about the FBI? Ignored us. But not long after, Harry's report found its way to the desk of Private Eye, Linda O'Neill.

What did his report say to you as an investigator? It said, red flag. His dog had alerted a death alert over a freshly poured concrete slab in our ward weaver's backyard. And something about that slab resonated with Linda. Remember when she was digging into the background of Ward Weaver's father, the serial killer on death row?

She found out what he had done with one of his victims. Buried her in the middle of his backyard and then covered it with concrete. A concrete slab? Yes, a concrete slab. And Linda's suspicions were about to grow. Over the next few weeks, teachers, dance coaches, even Weaver's ex-wives would tell her stories

of disturbing and inappropriate behavior. There was the teacher who saw Weaver drop Ashley off at school, and here was this man in his late 30s locked in a passionate kiss with 12-year-old Ashley. There was the family friend who said Ashley spent weeks at a time at Weaver's house, often sleeping in his bed with him. There was the girlfriend who said that Weaver was angry with Miranda because she had been telling girls in the neighborhood, stay away from Weaver's house. He might molest you.

By June, Ashley, now gone six months, and Miranda, three months. The story had hit the cover of People magazine. But it seemed to reporters that the FBI wasn't anywhere close to closing the case. It was very much, we have a range of suspects, maybe six to eight different men. The entire impression that I got was that they had not, in fact, focused on any particular individual.

The reporter didn't know it, but he was about to play a key role in the case. And Linda O'Neill says she was about to get the scare of her life, returning home one day to see her son working on his car with a stranger. I came face to face with Ward Weaver. And he's with your son? He's with my son. What did he say to you?

He said, kids are so naive, aren't they? And I said, Mr. Weaver, I don't think that my family is any of your business. And he said, Ms. O'Neill, that's what I came here to tell you. I dug out my gun and loaded it and put it in my purse. Did you really think he might be coming after you or your family? I thought that he was capable of anything. By June 2002, Ashley Pond had been missing for six months, Miranda Gaddis for three.

All of Oregon City seemed to be clinging to faint hope. Their dance team. We love them. We're praying for them all the time. Their mothers. I mean, we can't wrap our arms around them. I mean, whoever did this took that away from us. And hopefully they're going to give our babies back so we can do that again. FBI canines were dispatched once again to sniff around the apartment complex where the girls lived,

even around Weaver's house, but apparently found nothing. An FBI spokeswoman continued to insist the agency had no suspects and virtually no clues. But this private eye disagreed. You must be going nuts. I couldn't think of anything else. Remember, Linda O'Neill was part of Ashley's extended family and had been working the case for months. And she believed the FBI should by now have focused on Ward Weaver, a 39-year-old single father who lived in a house near the apartments. I was getting very upset and nervous about what was going to happen next. Who was going to be next? Linda thought it was time to take what she knew to the FBI. Did the FBI understand that you were a recognized private investigator who was calling them?

Yes. What did he say to you? He said, we really don't need help from private investigators. You know, we're the FBI. We really don't think that Ward Weaver is a suspect. We don't think Ward Weaver is a suspect? Something like that. How did you feel when you got off the phone?

Devastated. More on the FBI's version of that phone call later. Still, whatever happened on that call got Linda so mad, so angry, and so hurt that she got in touch with reporter Jim Redden. She thought that she had legitimate information that they should be interested in, and they weren't responding the way she thought they should. She'd kind of blown her off. Yeah. She said, have you ever heard of Ward Weaver? And at that point, I had not heard of Ward Weaver. The private eye on the reporter came up with an idea.

What about an interview with Ward Weaver? And so one Sunday morning, the reporter got up early and drove over to Weaver's house and knocked on the door. And wonder of wonders, Weaver invited him in for an interview that would lift law enforcement's shroud of secrecy on the door. And wonder of wonders, Weaver invited him in for an interview that would lift law enforcement's shroud of secrecy on the case and put one name in the spotlight for the very first time. Did he seem to you at all like a potentially a sociopathic killer? He really seemed like a very normal kind of guy. The more he talked, the more nervous he got. And that's when he said, I'm the FBI's prime suspect.

What was your feeling as you sat there talking to the man? Well, he was coming across to me as sort of honest and candid. The reporter's gut feeling put Linda back on her heels. Jim Redden said to me, you know, he seems like an okay guy. Maybe you were the crazy one. Sort of was looking that way. But the reporter wrote the article putting Ward Weaver's name in print for the first time. Weaver was now the center of attention, and he seemed to be enjoying it.

And just days later, what did local police and the FBI do? They launched a huge raid, executing a search warrant, towing away vehicles that might contain suspicious materials and informing the target of all this attention that he had failed a polygraph test. The surprise? Well, the surprise was in the man's name. It was not Ward Weaver. I started saying, you know, I'm the number one suspect,

and, you know, they think that I did it. Another prime suspect? A neighbor of the girl's who denied any role in the murders said he had been interviewed five or six times, questioned about a camping trip he took the day Miranda disappeared, and his friends had been warned, stay away from him. What no one knew is that the big break was about to occur, and it would come not from the FBI task force or from local police, but from a woman, a teenager at the time, who'd never before spoken about what happened to her,

or how she somehow found the strength to survive. By August 2002, seven months had passed since Ashley Pond disappeared, more than four months since Miranda Gaddis vanished, and still Oregon City Police and the FBI appeared to the public to be no closer to an arrest, even though neighbor Ward Weaver had told whoever would listen that he was the prime suspect. And though Ashley's step-grandmother Linda O'Neill firmly believed there was enough probable cause to search his property for the two bodies, police did not appear to her to be interested. No search warrant was asked for or issued.

By early August, Linda learned Weaver had apparently had enough media attention. He told people he was going to Mexico or Idaho. He had emptied his entire house of all of his possessions. But with his house empty and apparently ready to move out of Oregon, Ward Weaver made a move that mystified everybody involved. He was a nice person to be around. He fooled people, I guess. That's the voice of Randy Oneida, who was the girlfriend of Ward Weaver's son, the mother of Ward's grandchild. When we spoke to her, she had never before revealed publicly what happened that day in August 2002,

when at the age of 19, she got in the car with Weaver, a man she assumed she could trust. All the way to his house, he wasn't acting different. And then you walked into the house. That's when he snapped. That's when I noticed a different face. He threw her to the floor, tore off her clothing, and raped her. She couldn't talk about the worst of it, she said. And her body seemed to stiffen at the memory. Do you remember the look in his eye?

He was possessed. It wasn't him. It looked like Satan was inside of him, but the second he stood up off of me, his, like, face went back to normal. And then you ran? Yeah, and I pushed him with my feet and pushed him back and I ran. On the way out, she grabbed a tarp covering the concrete slab in Ward's backyard and then she ran naked and trembling after a savage sexual assault into the street where she flagged down a passing

car. And within hours, Ward Weaver was arrested, booked, and behind bars, charged with rape. Mr. Weaver, do you have any knowledge about the disappearance of Ashley or Miranda? That was the moment that I really thought, this is the guy. Linda O'Neill says she'd known it for months, known in her gut that Weaver was a violent man who'd killed Ashley and Miranda. And they had him in custody now for a violent rape, so she felt sure the FBI would move quickly to charge him in the disappearance of Ashley and Miranda. And they had him in custody now for a violent rape, so she felt sure the FBI would move quickly to charge him in the disappearance of Ashley and Miranda. Well, once he was in custody,

was a search warrant issued for his property? There was a search conducted that had everything to do with the rape, with the crime that had occurred that day. But then they took down the yellow crime tape and they left. And without crime scene tape or a steady police presence, Weaver's house became kind of an open house. After weeks of people seeing Weaver's name in the papers, of seeing him on the news sitting near that freshly poured concrete slab, and hearing of his arrest for rape, many of the locals had come to the same conclusion as Linda. What was the FBI waiting for? I'm out here to say they should dig it up. In mid-August, in the days after Ward was arrested for raping his son's girlfriend,

protesters gathered at the property and left their accusing signs lying around the unexamined backyard. Find those girls. They may not be there. Prove us wrong. How long was it between the time Ward Weaver was arrested and the time somebody got a search warrant to look into his property? Well, he was arrested August 13th, and it was August 23rd when they got the search warrant. Then, with crowds gathering again as if they knew what was to come, the FBI showed up in force, erecting two white tents, bringing in dozens of agents, tons of equipment. And hours later,

the first discovery. A box in a shed behind the house. The Oregon State Medical Examiner has positively identified the remains discovered as the body of Miranda Gaddis. The following day, another vigil, another discovery. Investigators finally dug up that concrete slab, the very spot at which that search dog had issued a death alert five months before. And there beneath it, they found another body.

These remains have been identified through dental records as those of Ashley Pond. It was very sad news because I think you always hope until there's a body. You always have hope. And even though I always believed the bodies were there,

the reality of it was difficult. These two beautiful young girls were gone forever. During all those days, weeks, months of anxiety and hope, the long investigation, the scores of officers, the bodies of two little girls were right there all along in Ward Weaver's backyard. And Weaver himself? At first, he claimed he had not a thing to do with it. I personally have no clue how she got there. In the end, Ward Weaver,

without explaining how or why, simply pleaded guilty and was sentenced to remain in prison for the rest of his life. I think everyone probably shares in the hope that there is a special place in hell for people like you. How could Ward Weaver have gotten away with it so long? And how could the FBI have seemed so, well, off? Especially when others seemed to have figured it all out so neatly. So there was sadness, yes, for the loss of those two girls, but also now anger. Her headline was, why did it take so long? And that was the question that we were trying to get answered. Although there's no evidence that a faster investigation might have saved Ashley or

Miranda, the question remained. What about Randy? The young woman whose presence of mind and physical strength in the face of rape and maybe something worse saved her own life. You know better than anybody else on Earth what Ashley and Miranda went through, don't you? If you hadn't had the abilities you had, what would have happened to you? I would be exactly where Ashley and Miranda are.

Are you angry? Yeah, I'm very angry. What does that anger feel like? It's anger, frustration that, you know, this happened to me. It could have been stopped. I really believe that it could have been stopped. Who could have prevented it? I think the FBI, the Oregon City Police. If they were watching Ward Weaver, how did he move all of his possessions out of his house, give notice, and rape and almost kill one more girl? How indeed? We wondered how the police and

the FBI would respond to allegations that they had taken too long or bungled their investigation. What could they say to Randy Oneida? After all the waiting, the investigating, the discovery of the bodies of Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis, and the arrest and conviction of their killer, Ward Weaver, that's when the questions really began. A question splashed in a banner headline, why exactly had it taken so long? Police and the FBI agreed to answer their Portland critics. Were they in some way ashamed of their investigation?

Well, as a matter of fact, absolutely not. This was a very, very successful investigation. Robert Jordan was special agent in charge of the FBI's office in Portland when we sat down with him. He came to Portland after the murders were solved. Gordon Harris was the chief of the Oregon City Police Department at the time. Their two agencies made up the task force on this case, and they bristled at suggestions that they didn't move as quickly as they should have. The investigators involved were driven to solve that case. They put their heart and soul in that case.

They would have arrested someone just as soon as they had probable cause to make an arrest in that case. There are those who believe, though, that probable cause existed long before the rape of Randy O'Neill. People who were not associated with the investigation. People like Linda O'Neill, who later co-wrote a book detailing her investigation called Missing the Oregon City Girls. Remember, it was Linda who said she called the FBI in June 2002, two months before Weaver's arrest, to outline what she said was solid circumstantial evidence that Weaver was the killer and that the girl's bodies were buried on his property. Information, it turned out, that was true. Linda said the FBI agency spoke to wasn't interested in her opinion,

and reporter Jim Redden confirmed Linda told him the same story. But the head of Portland's office told Dateline no record of such a call exists. The first and only documented contact our investigators had with the author was in March, March 27th. And she said that she had a tip she wanted to pass on. The tip was a psychic tip. And that is the only documented contact this investigation had with the author. But, we wondered, could an agent have spoken to Linda, heard her allegations about Ward Weaver, without keeping a full record of the call? Absolutely. We had over 4,000 tips that came into us. But yet many people wanted to

tell us Ward Weaver did it. But all those people were interviewed, and none of those interviews provided us with a witness or something we could put in an affidavit for probable cause to arrest Mr. Weaver or search his property. The FBI said Weaver was always among the top three suspects, especially after flunking a polygraph. Our polygrapher followed him out to his car, literally haranguing him, trying to get him to confess, and he wouldn't. You know, this is the United States of America.

We don't have any physical ways to make somebody confess. And so the investigation continued, said police, until Weaver was arrested for raping Randy Oneida. And Weaver's own sons came forward with incriminating information that allowed prosecutors and the task force to agree that finally, 10 days after the arrest, they now had probable cause to search his property. We were working an investigation to try to, A, find the girls, and if we couldn't find them safe and alive, find out who did it. And we did that. That's a successful investigation. Is that what you'd say to Randy Oneida? No, I don't think I'd say that to Randy Oneida.

What would you say to her? She was at risk. There's no question about it. She was at risk from Ward Weaver. And as for Linda and her book, the task force came out swinging. The FBI saying the book was not credible and pointing to an author's note that tells of reconstructed conversations, composites of characters, and the fact that some names have been changed. The book is fictionalized in some manner.

So what's fiction, what's real, it's hard to say. Well, I was offended. Linda said she made it quite clear that while some names and narrative details were altered, her story is a true telling of events from her own perspective. Did they have some point that it's easy for you to say we could have moved quicker, but you weren't part of the investigation, so how would you know what went on? I wasn't part of their investigation. I was on my own conducting my own investigation and all I know is what I did and what I found out. We contacted Ashley Pond's mother for comment on our original report.

She said that she will be forever grateful to the FBI and all the police agencies who worked on the case and that any criticism of their efforts is unfair. So, should Ward Weaver have been stopped sooner than he was? The question for Randy Oneida was altogether too personal. What has he done to you? He's ruined me. I really believe that they could have stopped him before he'd gone as far as he did. Around Oregon City, Oregon, the strange disconnect has lingered. Bitterness among some who believe it took too long to solve the murder of two little girls, and among police, satisfaction

for a job well done.