- OREGON CITY, Ore.
(Reuters) - FBI agents on Sunday conducted an "inch by inch"
search of the backyard of a potential suspect in the case of two missing
Oregon teen-age girls, while an autopsy was underway to identify a body
found a day earlier in a shed.
-
- Oregon City police said on Saturday that the remains
of one person had been found in the shed behind the home of Ward Weaver,
a neighbor of the girls.
-
- He has told reporters he is a prime suspect in the case
of the two 13-year-olds -- Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis -- who disappeared
two months apart last winter in Oregon City, a rural community 20 miles
south of Portland.
-
- FBI spokeswoman Beth Anne Steele said investigators also
removed a concrete slab that Weaver poured shortly after the second girl's
disappearance in March.
-
- "Investigators are going over the rest of the property
inch by inch," she told a news conference.
-
- She hoped the autopsy results would be available "as
soon as possible."
-
- Steele said no one has been charged in the case and it
is unlikely that charges will be filed until the investigation concludes.
-
- Press reports speculated that the concrete slab could
contain human remains.
-
- Weaver, who has denied any involvement in the disappearance
of the two girls, is being held in the Clackamas County jail in lieu of
$1 million bail on charges he raped his son's girlfriend on Aug. 13. He
has pleaded not guilty to the rape charges and is scheduled for an October
trial.
-
- When asked why investigators failed to discover the human
remains on Weaver's property earlier in the search for the missing girls,
Steele said, "there is no evidence that a body was here at that point."
-
- She added that investigators have "used every legal
means at their disposal."
-
- Weaver's rented home is just outside the entrance to
the apartment complex where both girls lived. Pond disappeared in January
and Gaddis vanished in March, both before school.
-
- The two girls were friends of Weaver's daughter and spent
time in his home.
-
- After Weaver's arrest for the rape of his son's girlfriend,
his distraught son called 911 dispatchers and said his father admitted
to killing the two girls, according to reports printed in the Portland
Oregonian newspaper.
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