What the private eye knew

By June 2002, Ashley Pond had been missing for six months and Miranda Gaddis, for three.

All of Oregon City seemed to be clinging to faint hope: their dance team, their mothers, the whole community.

Lori Pond: We can’t wrap our arms around them. 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 Weaver’s house, but apparently found nothing. An FBI spokesman continued to insist the agency had “no suspects,” and “virtually no clues.”

But this private eye disagreed.

Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent: You must’ve been going nuts!

Linda O’Neal, private eye: I couldn’t think of anything else.

Remember, Linda O’Neal, 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.

O’Neal: 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.

Morrison: Did the FBI understand that you were a recognized private investigator who was calling them?

O’Neal: Yes.

Morrison: What did he say to you?

O’Neal: He said, “We really don’t need help from private investigators, you know. We’re the FBI and we really don’t think that Ward Weaver is a suspect.”

Morrison: How did you feel when you got off the phone?

O’Neal: Devastated!

Click for related content The FBI, Oregon police respond

Still whatever happened on that call got Linda so mad, so angry, and so hurt, that she got in touch with Portland Tribute reporter Jim Redden.

Jim Redden, Portland Tribute reporter: 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 said, “Have you ever heard of Ward Weaver”? And at that point, I had not heard of Ward Weaver.

The private eye and the reporter came up with a plan: A surprise interview of Weaver. So the reporter got up early one Sunday morning and drove to Weaver’s house, knocked on the door and wonder of wonders, Ward Weaver invited him in for an interview that would lift law enforcement’s “shroud of secrecy” on the case, and put one suspect in the spotlight for the very first time.

Morrison: Did he seem to you at all like a potentially sociopathic killer?

Redden: 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.”

Morrison: What was your feeling as you sat there next to the man?

Redden: Well, he was coming across to me as sort of honest and candid…

The reporter’s gut feeling put Linda back on her heels.

O’Neal: Jim Redden said to me, "You know, he seems like an okay guy."

Morrison: Maybe you were the crazy one!

O’Neal: It 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. He even appeared on national television, saying “She’s better off hiding out wherever she’s found a place to live.”

And just days later, what did the local police and the FBI and local police 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’d failed a polygraph test.

The surprise? Well, the surprise was in the man’s name: It was not Ward Weaver.

It was another prime suspect, a neighbor of the girls, who denied any role in the murders, said he’d been interviewed five or six times. He was questioned about a camping trip he took the day Miranda disappeared. And his friends had been warned to 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 local police. But from a woman, a teenager at the time, who’s never before spoken about what happened to her— or how she somehow found the strength to survive.

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