Ward Weaver III: Murders, Guilty Plea, and Ignored Warnings

Ward Weaver III is an Oregon man convicted of the 2002 murders of two young girls, Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis, whose bodies were found buried on his Oregon City property. He pleaded guilty in September 2004 to avoid the death penalty and is serving consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.¹

The Victims and Their Disappearances

Ashley Pond, 12, vanished on January 9, 2002, while walking to a school bus stop near her apartment complex in Oregon City.² Miranda Gaddis, 13, disappeared on March 8 under nearly identical circumstances, walking to the same bus stop.³ The two were friends and both knew Weaver through his daughter. They had stayed at his home for sleepovers, and Ashley had actually lived there for several months before she went missing.⁴

The FBI and Oregon City Police reclassified the cases as abductions by mid-March, deploying roughly 60 FBI agents and a large share of the local force. Investigators questioned dozens of registered sex offenders and conducted hundreds of interviews, but as late as mid-March they said publicly they had no suspects.⁵

How Weaver Became the Suspect

Weaver lived in a small house directly above the apartment complex where Ashley had lived, and Ashley had previously accused him of molestation, though he was never charged based on those allegations. By June 2002, he had publicly admitted to the Portland Tribune that he was considered a prime suspect, while denying involvement.⁴

Suspicion focused sharply on a concrete slab Weaver had poured in his backyard shortly after Miranda disappeared. His ex-wife Kristi Sloan told the FBI he had dug a hole and cemented it over in the middle of the night during winter.³ A family member of one of the victims put a sign on the slab reading, “Dig Me Up.”⁶

The Arrest and the Bodies

On August 13, 2002, Weaver was arrested on an unrelated charge: raping his son Francis’s 19-year-old girlfriend as he was preparing to leave town. He was held in Clackamas County Jail on a million-dollar bond.³ Shortly afterward, Francis Weaver told police his father had confessed to raping and killing both girls.⁷

With a search warrant in hand, agents moved onto the property. On August 24, they found Miranda Gaddis’s remains in a box inside a storage shed behind the house, identified through dental records.⁸ The next day, investigators broke up the concrete slab and found Ashley Pond’s remains inside a barrel underneath.⁶

The Charges and Guilty Plea

Weaver was indicted on October 2, 2002 on 17 counts, including six counts of aggravated murder, two counts of abuse of a corpse, one count of attempted aggravated murder, and a series of rape and sexual abuse charges. Some of the sex counts related to the murdered girls; others covered the rape of his son’s girlfriend and the rape of a 15-year-old family friend.²¹

On September 22, 2004, Weaver appeared before Judge Robert Herndon and pleaded guilty to seven of the 17 charges, including aggravated murder, sex abuse, and abuse of a corpse. He entered no-contest pleas to the remaining 10 counts. Judge Herndon found him guilty on all 17 based on prosecutors’ representation that they had sufficient evidence for every charge.⁹ The deal took the death penalty off the table. He received consecutive life sentences without parole for the murders, plus additional prison time on the other convictions.¹

A Prior Record of Violence

Weaver had a violent history well before 2002. On Father’s Day in 1986, he bludgeoned 15-year-old Jocelyn Ordona with a 12-pound concrete block after pulling a family van over on a dark road in Fairfield, California, and attacked her sister Jennifer in a headlock. He served three years in prison and was released in January 1988.¹⁰ He also had a prior conviction for assault with a deadly weapon.⁷

Both of his ex-wives filed restraining orders against him, and Kristi Sloan testified to his “explosive temper.” He had been accused, but never charged, with raping relatives and torturing animals. When Sloan confronted him about the concrete slab and reminded him that his own father had buried a murder victim under concrete, Weaver put his hands on her shoulders and asked, “Do you think I could kill somebody without anybody noticing?”¹¹

The Warnings That Went Nowhere

Multiple people reported Weaver for sexually abusing Ashley Pond months before she vanished. Ashley’s teacher, Linda Virden, reported to Oregon Child Protective Services on September 4, 2001 that Ashley had accused Weaver of attempted rape. Virden said she never heard back, and later learned the report was never forwarded to Oregon City Police.¹²

Ashley’s stepmother, Mary Campobosso, separately reported the attempted-rape allegation to state authorities, along with information that Weaver’s girlfriend had said Weaver and Ashley were sharing a bed. Kristi Sloan also reported the alleged abuse to an FBI tip line. Neither woman was contacted for follow-up.¹²

After Ashley’s disappearance in January, Virden repeated the information to Oregon City Police, but by her account it “was evidently not considered serious enough for them to take steps.” Oregon Child Protective Services later admitted its process for screening reports and referring them to law enforcement had been “deficient.”¹² Weaver was ultimately arrested only because of the unrelated rape of his son’s girlfriend, nearly a year after Ashley’s initial allegation.

The Federal Lawsuit

The victims’ families sued Oregon authorities in federal court in Estate of Pond v. Oregon, alleging a state agency had failed to timely report the sexual abuse allegations to law enforcement and therefore failed to protect the children. In 2004, the U.S. District Court for Oregon ruled against them, holding that the delay in reporting the abuse did not “create the danger” to the child, because Ashley had remained in the custody of her mother, who already knew about the allegations. On that reasoning, the delay could not support a federal civil rights claim.¹³

His Father’s California Death Row Case

Weaver’s father, Ward Weaver Jr., was already on death row at San Quentin when his son committed the Oregon City murders. In February 1981, the elder Weaver, a long-haul trucker, came upon 18-year-old Robert Radford and 23-year-old Barbara Levoy after their car broke down near Tehachapi, California. He beat Radford to death with a metal pipe, kidnapped Levoy, raped her twice, and strangled her.¹⁴ He buried Levoy in his backyard in Oroville, California, and built a platform over the grave. According to trial testimony, he forced his 10-year-old son Rodney to help dig the hole for the concrete pad.¹¹

Ward Weaver Jr. was convicted of first-degree murder for both killings in Kern County Superior Court in 1984, with multiple-murder and kidnapping-murder special-circumstance findings, and was sentenced to death on March 7, 1985. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in 2001.¹⁴ Both men murdered young women, buried victims in their backyards, and concealed the graves under concrete.

The Son Who Turned Him In

Francis Weaver, raised by Ward Weaver III as his son though later DNA testing showed they were not biologically related, was the person who told police in August 2002 that his father had confessed to the killings. That tip led investigators to the girls’ remains.¹⁵

Francis was later convicted for his own role in a 2014 murder in Canby, Oregon. He and two others, Michael Orren and Shannon Bettencourt, conspired to steal 15 pounds of marijuana from 43-year-old Edward Kelly Spangler, who was shot in the face and shoulder and found dead near his crashed vehicle.¹⁶ Francis pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison on March 11, 2016. Orren, identified as the shooter, pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and received life with a minimum of 30 years before parole eligibility.¹⁷

1
The Oregonian. Chronology Three Generations of Crime
2
ThoughtCo. The Ward Weaver Case
3
CNN. Second Set of Remains Found at Oregon Home
4
Beaverton Valley Times. Ward Weaver Killings Family Explored in Book on the Origins of Evil
5
ABC News. Oregon Girls Now Considered Abducted
6
Gainesville Sun. Second Set of Remains Found at Oregon Home
7
ABC News. Ward Weaver Suspect in Oregon Girls Disappearance
8
CBS News. Police Dig Into Site of Grisly Discoveries
9
Los Angeles Times. Oregon Man Admits Killing Two Girls
10
The Oregonian. Ward Weaver III Like His Father
11
Los Angeles Times. Like Father, Like Son
12
CBS News. Could Murders Have Been Prevented
13
Americans for Effective Law Enforcement. Estate of Pond v. Oregon
14
Justia. People v. Weaver, 26 Cal. 4th 876
15
KATU. Ward Weaver’s Stepson Pleads Guilty in Drug-Related Murder Case
16
ABC 30. Ward Weaver’s Son Charged With Murder
17
The Oregonian. Canby Man Who Admitted Killing Sentenced