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A MURDER RUNS THROUGH IT
Ashley Pond
March 1, 1989 — January 9, 2002
On the day she disappeared, Ashley Pond was a twelve-year-old girl, just weeks away from becoming a full-fledged teenager. She lived in Oregon City, Oregon, with her mother, Lori Pond, and three younger siblings. That particular morning she was running a little bit late for the bus.
Life had never been easy for Ashley, but the previous four years had been especially hard. Her parents divorced, and in those proceedings it was learned that David Pond — her mother’s husband and the only father Ashley had known — was not Ashley’s father. Instead, science and an Oregon court determined that her father was a man named Wesley Roettger, Jr.
While unearthing the truth accomplished David Pond’s goal of paying less child support, losing her father upended Ashley’s world and was the first step toward the unraveling of her young life.
When Ashley got over the shock of learning David Pond was not her father, she began to have regular weekend visits with Wesley Roettger, the man that science and an Oregon court had determined was her biological father, Wesley Roettger.
Unfortunately, these regular visits turned out not to be healthy for Ashley, and when her father demanded sex from her on Christmas Eve 2000, Ashley had had as much of the…
