Portland, Ore. ? Retired homicide detective Garry Davis was watching television last week when he heard a name Ward Weaver that sent chills down his spine.

The name took Davis back to a summer day in 1982 in Oroville, Calif., when he spent hours digging with a partner to uncover the body of Barbara Levoy. The 23-year-old’s decomposed corpse was buried under a concrete slab in the backyard of Ward Weaver Jr.

Twenty years later, the focus is on a different Ward Weaver the convicted serial killer’s eldest son, Ward Weaver III. After months of searching, the FBI last weekend uncovered the bodies of two missing girls in the back yard of a home where the younger Weaver lived in Oregon City. One was buried under a concrete pad.

Lawyers and detectives who prosecuted the elder Weaver say they see chilling similarities between the crimes of the man now on California’s death row and the crimes police believe were recently committed by his 39-year-old son.

The younger Weaver, who was jailed Aug. 13 on charges of raping his son’s girlfriend, has not been charged in the deaths of 12-year-old Ashley Pond and 13-year-old Miranda Gaddis, two neighbor girls who were friends of his daughter. Officials are seeking an indictment.

“Our parents are our teachers, and Ward Weaver III had a horrible teacher in his father,” said Glenn Johnson, a retired Kern County, Calif., homicide detective who testified at the elder Weaver’s trial.

The younger Weaver was barely 20 when he moved to Bakersfield to watch his father’s six-month trial for the brutal murder of Levoy and her fiance, 18-year-old Air Force cadet Robert Radford, said Ron Shumaker, who prosecuted the case.

The elder Weaver was a long-haul trucker who spent days on the road, running loads up and down the West Coast’s Interstate 5 corridor.

On Feb. 5, 1981, Weaver Jr. picked up a young couple whose car had broken down along the highway, according to court records.

After a few miles, he asked Radford to help him adjust the load in his truckbed, then beat him to death with a metal pipe.

Weaver Jr. later told police he returned to the truck cab and drove through the night, stopping along the highway to repeatedly rape Levoy. A day later, he strangled her and later buried her in his Oroville backyard, then poured a cement slab over the grave.

He told his wife he poured the cement slab so she wouldn’t get her feet wet when she hung laundry out to dry.

In the months before Ashley and Miranda disappeared, the younger Weaver befriended them when they were at his house with his daughter, Mallori.

In a July interview, the younger Weaver told The Associated Press that he had developed a close relationship with Ashley because of problems she had at home. He said Ashley lived at his house for about five months.

When Ashley disappeared on Jan. 9, followed by Miranda on March 8, the younger Weaver called his half-brother in Shosone, Idaho, saying the FBI was unfairly fingering him because of their father’s dark past.

Rodney Weaver said he was shocked to learn his older brother had put in a concrete slab after the girls disappeared even though Weaver III assured him it was for a hot tub.

“That blew me away,” Rodney Weaver said. “I was thinking to myself, ‘What are you doing?’ If they’re anywhere, that’s where they’d be.”

And one was.

Last Sunday, days after a 911 call from Weaver III’s son, the FBI cracked the suspicious slab to find Ashley’s body beneath it. The day before, they had discovered Miranda’s body in a cardboard box on the floor of a nearby shed.

Retired detectives Davis and Johnson, meanwhile believe the elder Weaver may be connected to 26 unsolved disappearances of hitchhikers along his trucking route.