What the private eye knew

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

OREGON CITY, ORE. - It was evening, dark and cold, in a suburb of Portland Oregon, when the call came in to 911 dispatcher. A mother was reporting a missing daughter. During her 911 call, the immediate assumption was that 12 year old must be a runaway. So began the long strange tale of what happened to Ashley Pond. It began not with a bang, but a whimper, as it dawned on a young mother what terrors could lie ahead. 

Lori Pond’s daughter, Ashley, had simply vanished— gone, or so it seemed on her way to school in the town of Oregon City in January 2002.

Linda O’Neal, relative: It was very upsetting. A 12-year-old child had disappeared, you know? This is a child!

Linda O’Neal is a member of Ashley’s extended family; Linda’s husband was once married to Ashley’s grandmother.  Not exactly a close relationship... but Linda certainly knew about Ashley.

Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent: How would you describe her as a little girl?

Linda O’Neal: Well, 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.

O’Neal: 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, but she didn’t. And now local officials, thinking “abduction,” called in the FBI.

Jim Redden, crime reporter for Portland Tribune: One of the problems with the case is that there was a wealth of suspects.

Jim Redden is a veteran crime reporter for the Portland Tribune. Ashley, he soon learned, had disappeared from an apartment complex that was a "mulligan stew" of troubled souls.

Redden: It had a lot of welfare cases. It had a number of mentally ill people that would be placed there by the county. There were 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’d 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, and everybody seemed to sense it— something awful had happened to Ashley.

A friend of Ashley’s, Miranda Gaddis, was interviewed by a TV reporter, not knowing that fate had its eye on her too.

Miranda Gaddis (TV footage): It’s really hard to believe that happened to one of your friends or something.  It’s just really different and really sad.

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, the girl interviewed by a reporter, Ashley Pond’s friend Miranda unbelievably, turned up missing too. Two girls vanished from the same apartment complex. They went to the same school, and were even on the same dance team! Both vanished, within 8 weeks of one another.

O’Neal: When the second girl disappeared, it caused panic, absolute panic. They were afraid that there was a serial killer among them.

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