Oregon City Memorial Honors Child Murder Victims

September 23, 2013

Throughout the years since her son, Rob, was murdered, Mary Elledge has dreamed of establishing a place of healing and remembrance.

This week, her dream becomes a reality.

Elledge, leader of the Portland Area Chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, says a memorial built with $400,000 in cash and in-kind donations "will be a beautiful place for anyone who has lost a loved one or child due to homicide."

The Oregon/Washington Memorial Wall, tucked amid towering conifers in a corner of Oregon City's Mountain View Cemetery, will be the first of its kind in the Pacific Northwest and the eighth in the nation.

A public dedication ceremony today, coinciding with the National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims, will feature a reading of the victims' names, a release of butterflies and keynote speaker Dan Levey, executive director of Parents of Murdered Children. Attending, in addition to the families and friends of victims, will public officials and representatives of social service agencies, law enforcement and the judicial system.

The memorial sits across from the Veterans Memorial in the northwest corner of Oregon City's pioneer cemetery. It consists of a lighted circular wall that encloses basalt columns, a spiral stone path, benches and a continual waterfall spilling over stonework.

On a clear day, you can see Mount Hood from the site, and the parklike setting provides a tranquil feeling Elledge says. "When you sit down, the falling water helps wash away your tears."

Freestanding basalt columns feature carved quotations about loss and remembrance, and names of murder victims from Oregon and Washington are etched into polished granite. Some of the dead are well-known, such as Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis, Oregon City girls killed 10 years ago by Ward Francis Weaver III. Others are names that barely made the news.

The drive to establish the memorial picked up momentum after the disappearances of Pond, 12, and Gaddis, 13, whose bodies were recovered at a home rented by Weaver on Beavercreek Road in Oregon City. The case evoked strong support for the victims' families, as well as soul-searching by a community that wondered whether it had failed to provide an adequate safety net. Elledge gives Oregon City credit for providing a place for the memorial and "really going out of their way to help make it happen."

For Elledge, the memorial represents a measure of closure.

In 1986, her 21-year-old son's decomposed body was discovered in a shallow grave near Viola, west of Estacada. He had been bludgeoned to death. Three young men subsequently were convicted.

She knows that the pain of losing a child never ends, but she hopes the memorial will help temper grief with remembrance.

"You can't resolve a homicide," Elledge says. "But it helps to know that there are other people who feel the way you feel and understand what you're going through. .. It helps you get to a new normal."

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The memorial for murdered children at Mountain View Cemetery in Oregon City. (Photo courtesy Portland Area Chapter of Parents of Murdered Children)

OREGON CITY, Ore. - This Wednesday, those touched by the murder of a loved one will pause to reflect and remember the people they have lost to violence.
September 25 is a National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims and at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oregon City, it will also be a day to mark something special.

In a corner of the cemetery that was once vacant, a memorial for murdered children is now complete and will be officially dedicated on Wednesday. It's the first such memorial in the Northwest and the eighth in the United States.
The project, spearheaded by the Greater Portland Area Chapter of Parents of Murdered Children has been four years in the making and includes the names of Washington and Oregon children who were killed. Many of the cases were high profile and the names (like Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis, for example) are recognizable. The memorial also recognizes those who died as the result of a DUII.

At last year's remembrance, Steve Doell, President of Crime Victims United, talked about how the pain of losing a loved one to murder never goes away. He lost his 12-year-old daughter to a killer two decades ago.
"This is a death, like it's been said before, like no other," he said in 2012. "Another human being took our loved one's life in a brutal, senseless act that can never be understood or explained."
Doell believes the only way for families to move on is to remember the joy and happiness that was brought into their lives, and not the violent act that took that from them.

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Beautiful!

Thanks for posting this Nite....I met Mary about 13 years ago. Shortly after Leah's death. She is the kindest, sweetest lady. It was through Mary that I met my dear friend Jen who also lost her daughter to murder. Jen and I became pretty good friends. I went to the NATIONAL POMC Convention in Irvine California in 07 I believe with Jen....was the best thing I had done for myself since Leah's death. I still receive the monthly POMC newsletters....the one I just got in the mail even has Leah's name in it since next month is her birth month. It's kind of strange.....I thought I had signed up for Leah's name to be put on the wall but that was during the Convention and I was really into the seminars and classes that I was attending there so maybe it did slip through my mind.

Side note.....Remember Wednesday is National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims!! Perhaps a special prayer that day??

Sept. 25, 2013


OREGON CITY, Ore. - There are simply no words.

Anguish, heartbreak, sadness, misery - they all barely scratch the surface. There is no way to describe what it feels like when someone you love is murdered.

You try to remember the good things they brought to your life, but it's hard to push away the memory of their last moments. You try to move on, but you are an empty shell of what you once were. You try to find peace, but realize it may never come.

"There is no going back," said Steve Doell, president of Crime Victims United. He lost his 12-year-old daughter two decades ago when a teenage boy who fantacized about killing a young girl intentionally ran her over. "The bell has rung and you can't unring the bell."

On Wednesday, Doell and many others who know the feelings all too well gathered at Mountain View Cemetery in Oregon City for a National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims, and to see the names of those they lost to murder on a new memorial.

The Oregon/Washington Memorial Wall, spearheaded by the Greater Portland Area Chapter of Parents of Murdered Children (POMC), has been four years in the making. The memorial, which lists young murder victims, is the first such memorial in the Northwest and the eighth in the United States.

There are hundreds of names on the wall. Many, like Ashley Marie Pond and Miranda Diane Gaddis, are from high profile cases.
Family and friends crowded around the memorial on Wednesday to see their loved one's name and also to find the type of understanding that can only come from those who have been through the same pain. Their stories are different, yet the same - someone they loved was taken from them much too early.

"It wasn't their time," Mary Elledge, POMC's Portland Chapter Leader, told everyone. Elledge's 21-year-old son, Rob, was brutally killed in 1986. He was bludgeoned to death and his body was found in a shallow grave near Estacada. Three men were later convicted of his murder. "It wasn't an accident. And it was not an act of God - it was an act of evil. And by us standing up together, it shows that we are not all thinking like them."

"When murder occurs, it hurts more than just the victim," said Wade McGilvra, who lost his girlfriend in 1981 when a gunman opened fire inside the Oregon Museum Tavern in Salem. "Its horror splashes onto everyone - the victim's family, friends, as well as the community. Murder is darker than death and so is the road to surviving."
McGilvra shared his story at the cemetery on Wednesday, and also talked to KATU Investigator Bob Heye earlier this week, about surviving Oregon's first modern-day mass shooting.

It wasn't easy for McGilvra, Elledge, Doell and everyone else who has had a loved one killed to revisit their pain on Wednesday.
Emotions came back to the surface - there were those who cried, there were those who didn't cry but whose pain was evident on their face and there were those who simply remained solemn.


The feeling in the air was palpable - so much emotion, so much pain, so much grief. There is no way to describe the raw hurt that this group of people, who never wanted to be part of this club, feels.
There are simply no words.
But perhaps some of the words on the memorial can help us understand at least a little.
"Murder devours innocent lives with a cruelty that is absent of reason, absent of values, and absent of compassion. Murder breaks all the sacred rules, knows no fairness, and can never be undone or compensated. The aftermath of murder takes us straight through hell where we stand eye to eye with the evil that hides behind the human race." - Carrie M. Freitag, Margaret J. Kerouac
"Your loved one's murder will test everything in you - your love, your strength, your faith, your values, your peace and your beliefs. May this test become testimony to all that is good in you, all that is good in the world and all that is good in the heavens." - Carrie M. Freitag, Margaret J. Kerouac