10/03/2002

By KYLE IBOSHI and ABE ESTIMADA, KGW Staff

The Clackamas County district attorney's office scheduled a court appearance for Ward Weaver, the chief suspect in the deaths of Oregon City girls Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis.

This appearance -- set for 3 p.m.Friday -- signals a likely indictment in the double murder case, according to legal experts.

Ward Weaver. (Police/KGW Photo)

The grand jury proceedings are kept secret until the accused is confronted with charges in court.

Clackamas County deputy district attorney Greg Horner declined to say what will be discussed at the hearing.

"There's going to be a court appearance. We aren't going to comment on anything else," he said.

Weaver's lawyer, Tim Lyons, did not immediately return a phone call Thursday.

Weaver had a history of violence, substance abuse and attacks on young girls stretching to the 1980s. If the grand jury hands down an indictment, it will mean a second generation of Weaver men have faced charges of murdering women and burying the bodies in the back yard of their family homes.

Weaver's father, Ward Weaver Jr., a truck driver, was convicted of raping and murdering 23-year-old Barbara Levoy. Her body was found in 1982 buried beneath a concrete foundation for a deck at his home in Oroville, Calif.

Weaver has been in Clackamas County Jail since Aug. 13 on a charge of raping his son’s fiancé. A week and a half later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and police found Miranda’s remains in a box inside a shed behind Weaver’s rental house in Oregon City.

They found Ashley’s corpse inside a barrel buried beneath a concrete slab in Weaver’s backyard.

The rape case is scheduled to go to trail on Oct. 10. Clackamas County prosecutors say it’s too early to discuss courtroom strategy.

But if Weaver is also indicted for the homicides of Ashley and Miranda, prosecutors will have to decide how to handle the different cases, said a Willamette University School of Law professor.

“It really is a time when a prosecutor makes his money by deciding how these cases ought to be structured,” said Jeffrey Standen, the law professor.

With Weaver’s consent, prosecutors could delay the rape case until the murder trial is over, or the district attorney could try to combine all the cases.

“To join cases together is a real advantage to prosecutors because he gets to tell a rape or murder jury that this person is a person who is also a rapist or a murderer,” Standen said.

The risk, he says, is that Weaver could appeal and argue that the two cases should’ve been heard separately.

(AP contributed to this report.)