‘It’s Like They Vanished Into Thin Air’

When 12-year-old Ashley Pond disappeared--just vanished from the apartment complex one day in January, didn’t show up at the bus stop for school--her friend Miranda was scared, then mad. Ashley had run away, she figured. Hadn’t bothered to call anybody. Left everybody worried for nothing.

“That was her way of dealing with it, I guess,” said Miranda’s mother, Michelle Duffey, who lives a few apartments down from the Pond family. Then, when the school dance team organized a benefit to raise money for a reward for Ashley, Miranda choreographed a solo routine as a special way of remembering her friend.

“Miranda started realizing that even if she did run away, she wasn’t coming back any time soon,” her mother said.

The dance benefit is scheduled for March 23 at Oregon City High School. But Miranda probably won’t be in it. Friday morning, in a case that has so many frightening parallels police believe they are linked, Miranda Gaddis, 13, also disappeared from the Newell Creek Village apartments. Said goodbye to her mother in the morning. Didn’t show up at the bus stop.

Did they run away together? Did Ashley contact Miranda, tell her where she was and persuade her to join her? Both families pray that’s what happened. But as the days go by, law enforcement officials are increasingly convinced that neither girl left home willingly.

“There is a growing belief that the cases are related, and while there’s a slight hope that they have run away, there is a growing belief that there was some kind of criminal activity involved,” said Beth Ann Steele, spokeswoman for the FBI, which has sent in agents to help the Oregon City police.

FBI Profilers Issue Advisories to Public

This week, profilers from FBI headquarters in Quantico, Va., were dispatched to this aging working-class suburb southeast of Portland. Agency officials went on television advising people, without explaining why, to be on the lookout for someone who recently sold a car, who shows signs of increasing drug or alcohol use, who appears tired from being up all night--profiles a parent can barely stand to contemplate.

Both Duffey and the Ponds say they believe neither girl ran away, but they are also sure that neither would have allowed themselves to be abducted by a stranger. “I really think someone they know did something,” Duffey said. “Because [Miranda] wouldn’t have gotten in the car with someone she didn’t know.”

The Pond family has kept a low profile since Ashley’s disappearance, but Ashley’s mother, Lori Pond, appeared with Duffey on all three television networks this week pleading for the return of her daughter. “She’s very loud and outgoing and she likes talking. So she would likely talk to you,” Pond said.

The 125-unit apartment complex is a cluster of neat, gray, two-story buildings with balconies, sheltered in a deep gully in a nest of forest--a place with plenty of kids and stay-at-home moms who are on the phone with each other several times daily. Parents are uncertain what danger to watch out for. A stranger lurking in the woods near the school bus stop? Or someone everyone knows, someone who knocked on the door Friday morning after Duffey kissed her daughter goodbye, warned her to lock the door and left for work?

With that haunting possibility in mind, at least four families have moved out of Newell Creek Village in the last few days, and another moving truck was parked at the complex Tuesday.

“There’s a lot of young families here, a lot of children, and a lot of people are up at that hour of the morning, getting kids off to school, going to work,” said Kim Hamlin, a neighbor. “I keep thinking to myself, it had to be someone they knew. Because for a stranger to have come and violently abducted them, somebody would have had to see something. It’s like they vanished into thin air.”

Hamlin, like many parents at the complex, won’t allow her 11-year-old son to play outside anymore. “I’ve heard a lot of parents feeling like we have to kind of raise our kids in cages at the moment,” she said. “I personally don’t feel comfortable and safe for my child unless he’s in the house under lock and key.”

Michelle Knoph allows her 12-year-old son to play with the two other boys she knows best, “and that’s about it. They don’t go anywhere else, with anybody else.”

“People are thinking that maybe somebody took them who knew them,” Knoph said, “but who do you even think about going to question?”

‘There’s No Way At All She Would Run Away’

Both girls were members of the dance team at Gardiner Middle School, and Miranda was eagerly anticipating getting ready for a Saturday morning competition the day she disappeared. The night before, Duffey helped her bleach her sandy blond hair a lighter hue, and Miranda called her dance coach, Sharonda Garrett, a close friend of the family, and asked her if she would braid it in cornrows for her the next day.

“It was just the whole, ‘I’m going to bed now.’ She was going to try to get on the Internet, but she couldn’t get on,” Garrett said. “There’s no way at all she would run away. She wouldn’t do that. There were so many things that were coming up that she was too excited about.”

The dance benefit for Ashley, among them. Miranda planned a solo to the tunes of Limp Bizkit, Britney Spears and ‘N Sync, Duffey said. Now, her 14-year-old sister, Marissa, will take her place, and the benefit will help raise money for two missing girls, not one. The Portland Trailblazers may attend, and the evening will culminate in Garrett and Marissa performing to the Lee Ann Womack song, “I Hope You Dance,” with its entreaty for a life lived fully, danced, rather than sat out on the sidelines.

“It’s very hard for them,” Garrett said of members of the dance team. “They’re all mourning in their own way. I mean, everybody is hanging onto their prayers and their knowing that they’re going to come back home. Their new motto is they’re not going to sit down and take it. They’re going to dance until they come back.”

At a vigil at Oregon City Christian Church for the girls Tuesday night, youth pastor Ken Swatman urged the nearly 150 gathered there to pray with hope--hope they’ll come home, or else hope that a divine presence is with them, wherever they are, making them strong enough to deal with whatever is happening.

“This is not a memorial service,” he emphasized. “We don’t seek closure here tonight. We are here to seek hope, to seek strength. Celebrations and memorials are reserved for when the girls come home.”

But as the night wore on, and the soft hymns were sung, hope faltered. Mothers clutched their daughters’ small, shaking shoulders, and tried to hush the sobs of children too young to cry quietly. Fathers stood near, shuffling from foot to foot, looking miserable.

Afterward, the girls’ classmates gathered at the altar and read notes and poems they had written over the last few days. “Ashley, please come home! Everyone loves you so darn much,” said one.

“My best [friend] Miranda is gone, and this poem goes on,” said another. “Ashley, do not be mad just because of the missing of Miranda makes me more sad. But don’t worry, we will get you back. I just can’t believe that they have been kidnapped. They were 13 years old. Oh so young. They couldn’t go for the gold.”

In the aisle near the front, Duffey sat silently, the head of her 11-year-old daughter Miriah Gaddis buried in her lap. Then she went home to see whether there were any messages on her answering machine.

“Miranda, this is your mom, and I love you very, very much, and I want you to come home. Wherever you’re at, leave your phone number and I’ll come get you, wherever you are,” the answering machine says. “And if this is someone who knows where she is, please bring her back, because I’ll never stop looking for her.”