Crime Runs in the Family

Sept. 9 -- Eye color and sense of humor can run in a family. So can crime.

The killings of two adolescent Oregon girls may be the latest example of how different generations in a family can make the same terrible decisions.

Ward Weaver III, 39, is the principal suspect in the deaths of Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis, whose bodies were found buried beneath a concrete slab and in a shed at Weaver's home. He is jailed on charges of raping his son's girlfriend, and has a past conviction for assault with a deadly weapon.

Weaver admitted on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America he had failed a lie detector test, but denied involvement in the crime. His son Francis told police Weaver had confessed to raping and killing the girls.

Weaver's Father on Death Row for Similar Crime

It is not the first time Weaver's family has been associated with murder and sexual crime.

"They're trying to make a 'father and son' connection here because my father has a severe history," Weaver told Good Morning America in July.

Weaver's father, Ward Weaver Jr., is on California's Death Row for killing a young couple in 1981. The bodies were found under a freshly poured concrete slab behind his home.

He had also served time for rape and confessed to beating to death Robert Radford, 18, and raping and strangling the man's fiancée, 23-year-old Barbara Levoy.

According to court records obtained by the Portland Oregonian, the elder Weaver buried Levoy's body, then moved the remains to a hole behind his home. He forced his son Rodney, then 10 years old, to help dig the grave and cover it with concrete.

Ward Weaver III has yet to be charged in the deaths of Gaddis and Pond earlier this year, but criminologists say it is not surprising that crime may run in the family.

"It's very clear that there's a strong relation between violent behavior in parents and violent behavior in children," said Alan Lipman, the director of the Center at Georgetown University for the Study of Violence.

Studies dating from the 1930s have shown a link between families' criminal histories and the likelihood of running afoul of the law, and data from the nation's federal prisons back this up.