Murdered girls uncovered at neighbour's home they thought was a refuge

Two girls aged 13 who disappeared from a modest housing estate in Oregon this year have been found murdered on a neighbour's property, one behind a shed and the other in a barrel buried beneath a cement slab in the garden.

Although nobody has been formally charged yet, police said yesterday they had all but cracked the case. The neighbour, a 39-year-old toolmaker called Ward Weaver, has a history of violence against women and is already in jail because of accusations this month that he raped his son's girlfriend.

The two girls, Miranda Gaddis and Ashley Pond, lived in a block of flats next to Weaver's rented house and spent time with him, having made friends with his daughter. Although accounts differ slightly, both girls apparently came from troubled homes and regarded the Weaver household as something of a refuge.

Ashley disappeared at breakfast time in January, and Miranda at the same time of day two months later. For months, the police were frustrated because they did not have enough evidence to justify a search warrant against Weaver, a man whose history made him an immediate focus of the investigation.

In the Eighties, Weaver spent three years in prison in California for attacking his son's babysitter with a 12lb chunk of concrete. Both of his ex-wives have restraining orders against him because of accusations of battery. Bizarrely, Weaver's father is on Death Row in California for murdering a young woman and burying her in his garden, also under a slab of concrete.

Partly because of the slow pace of the investigation into the disappearance of Miranda and Ashley, Weaver felt bold enough to give media interviews a month ago in which he boasted that he was the number one suspect in the case but the suspicions were baseless. He admitted pouring the concrete slab about the time of Miranda's disappearance, but said the two events were not connected. "I'm putting in a Jacuzzi," he told a newspaper. "The last time I checked, that wasn't against the law."

The crucial break in the case came on 13 August, when his son's teenage girlfriend ran naked out of the house screaming that she had been raped and almost murdered by Weaver. The son told police in an emergency call that his father had also confessed to killing Ashley and Miranda.

For the past two weeks, the families of the two girls have been in ferment. Ashley's stepmother, Mary Campobasso, took a walk round the garden of the former Weaver home – now unoccupied – and attached a big sign to the concrete slab reading: "DIG ME UP".

It took the Oregon police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation until last Saturday to begin a formal search. The victim behind the shed was found first and identified shortly afterwards as Miranda. Investigators uncovered the remains of the second girl on Sunday afternoon.