Weaver's father buried body in yard in 1981
OREGON CITY, Ore. — Two decades before investigators searching for two girls found human remains at the rented home of Ward Weaver, the body of a raped and murdered woman was found buried in his father's yard.
Weaver's father, Ward Francis Weaver Jr., is on death row in California for two murders.
The truck driver was convicted of the 1981 killing of Robert Radford, 18, whose car had broken down, and of kidnapping, raping and killing the man's girlfriend, Barbara Levoy, 23. Her body was found in 1982 buried beneath a deck at the elder Weaver's home in Oroville, Calif.
The prosecutor in that case, Ron Shumaker, said Weaver's truck route matched 26 unsolved hitchhiker homicides, but that Weaver was never charged with any of those crimes.
For Barbara Levoy's brother, Bob Levoy, the search at the younger Weaver's home is raising bad memories.
"It's like it's all happening all over again," Levoy, of Lebanon, Mo., told KPTV in Portland. "And I know how the parents of those girls are feeling. I'm glad they've finally started to do some digging."
Over the weekend, FBI agents searched the Oregon City home, looking for clues to the disappearances of Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis, two 13-year-olds who lived in a nearby apartment complex and knew the younger Weaver's daughter.
Weaver was evicted after being jailed on an unrelated charge of raping the girlfriend of his 19-year-old son.
Saturday, human remains were found in a shed behind the home. Yesterday, a second set of human remains was found beneath a concrete slab he had poured behind the home. Also yesterday, the FBI identified the body found in the shed as Miranda.
Ward Weaver, 39, told a half-brother in Idaho the only reason police suspected him in the disappearances was because of their father's grisly crimes.
Rodney Weaver, 31, in an interview last week at his home in Shoshone, Idaho, said his brother "kept blaming it on our dad." Rodney Weaver is the youngest of the elder Weaver's five children.
The father was sentenced to prison for a year and a half in 1978 on a rape conviction. In 1981, he was convicted and sentenced to 42 years in prison after picking up two runaways, arranging for a friend to shoot the 18-year-old man and raping the 15-year-old girl before letting her go. While in prison for that attack, he confided to a cellmate he had killed another couple. That is the case for which he has been sentenced to die.
The younger Ward Weaver has a record of brushes with the law. In the 1980s, he served three years in a California prison for beating a baby-sitter with a block of concrete and for credit-card forgery.
One of his two wives, Maria, accused him of threatening to have her shot in 1993 and obtained a restraining order against him, according to The Portland Tribune. They divorced two years later.
A future wife, Kristi Sloan, accused him in 1995 of hitting her over the head with a cast-iron skillet as she slept. The assault charge was dismissed because of evidentiary problems with police seizure of the skillet. Weaver and Sloan married in 1996 but divorced four years later.
Weaver has admitted a close relationship with Ashley. He said that he took her along with his daughter and his girlfriend on a vacation trip to California last year.
During the trip, he said, they stopped at San Quentin Prison to visit his father.
Information from The Oregonian is included in this report.