08/19/2002

By AP and KGW Staff

The stepmother of one of two missing girls from an Oregon City apartment complex issued a public plea Friday to authorities investigating a neighbor in an unrelated rape case.

"I just got so upset that nothing was being done," said Mary Campobasso, the stepmother of 13-year-old Ashley Pond and mother of Pond's two half-siblings.

Campobasso spoke to KGW on Friday. (KGW Photo)

Campobasso was interviewed over the weekend by NBC’s “Today Show” host Soledad O’Brien. She posted a sign at Ward Weaver's home Thursday night proclaiming "Dig me up."

The sign, which had been removed Friday, was a response to reports that Weaver had poured cement in his backyard shortly after Miranda Gaddis disappeared last March.

On Friday night a dozen or so people held a candlelight vigil outside the Weaver house, to urge police to search the site.

Campobasso placed this sign on the slab in Weaver's backyard. (KGW Photo)

"We don't know if the girls are there or not but we won't have any answers to that question until the girls are found," Campobasso told The Associated Press on Friday.

She went to Weaver's house to see the cement slab for herself and placed scented candles there. She said she was upset that the FBI was not conducting a more active search of Weaver's backyard.

Pond and Gaddis, both 13 and residents of the Newell Creek Apartment Complex, disappeared within two months of each other earlier this year.

The concrete slab in Weaver's backyard has been the focus of Campobasso's plea. (KGW Photo)

Weaver remained in jail Friday on $1 million bail after his arrest on Tuesday for allegedly raping his son Francis's girlfriend. Francis Weaver, 19, has a 22-month-old child with that girlfriend, also 19.

Earlier this week, Francis Weaver told 911 dispatchers when he reported the rape that his father also admitted killing Pond and Gaddis, according to transcripts of the call obtained by The Oregonian.

Ward Weaver, 39, has denied any involvement in the girls' disappearances, but has told AP that he is considered a suspect.

Maria Shaw, Francis' mother and Ward Weaver's ex-wife, said Friday that Francis Weaver had a strained relationship with his father. She said Weaver hit their son and sent him away to live in California and then Idaho.

Ward Weaver in his video arraignment last week. (KGW Photo)

In Idaho, Francis spent a month in a juvenile detention facility three years ago after shooting at a truckload of teenagers and wounding a friend.

Francis Weaver's last known address was his father's house, but it was unclear Friday whether he still lived there.

Relatives of the missing girls were unsure whether to believe Francis Weaver's claims.

"They (police) don't know if what he's saying is actual or if he's just really angry at his dad," Michelle Duffey, Miranda Gaddis' mother, said Friday on CNN.

Francis Weaver, had no comment on the case.

An eviction notice was tacked to Weaver's door Friday giving Weaver ten days to move out. An FBI agent stopped by Friday, but he refused comment.

Oregon City Police Chief Gordon Huiras said investigators have no new evidence linking Ward Weaver to the girls as a result of his arrest. Clackamas County authorities have searched Weaver's home and his car.

Charles Mathews, the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, said his team is following up on leads and has narrowed the pool of suspects to 10 to 20 people, but he has not identified any of them.

Ward Weaver has a history of run-ins with the law.

In the 1980s, Ward Weaver served three years in a California prison for beating a baby sitter with a block of cement and for credit card forgery. In 1991, a former wife of Ward Weaver's filed for a restraining order in Clackamas County, accusing him of threatening to shoot her and of hitting their children.

Another ex-wife, Kristi Sloan, told CNN that she got a restraining order against him after he once attacked her with a frying pan. They divorced in October 2000.

(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)