More remains found under shed

Investigators focus on saws, DNA test

SMITHFIELD -- Robin Clark wanted to move out of the remote farmhouse she and her boyfriend shared with Louise and Bobby Pollard. She'd even borrowed her mother's pickup. But she told Alisia Vega, a childhood friend, that she dreaded returning to the house alone.

Clark begged Vega to go with her, her friend recalled Monday. Vega couldn't.

The last time anyone saw Clark was Aug. 4, 1997. She was 17.

On Monday, pathologists tried to figure out whether body parts buried beneath the floorboards of a house near Selma are those of Clark, who grew up in Wake County, and her boyfriend, Ceasar Ruvalcava Ortiz, said Sheriff Steve Bizzell. Investigators found a second batch of dismembered human remains and two power saws in a freezer buried under a shed.

On Monday afternoon, Robert Bruce Pollard and Cecilia Louise Pollard, a relative of Clark's, faced a judge on charges that he killed Ruvalcava and she kept the secret more than eight years.

Louise Pollard, 34, pale and hunched, tiptoed into a Johnston County courtroom to hear the charge against her and ask for a lawyer. A gray sweatshirt swallowed her frail frame, and her hand trembled as she placed it on a Bible to swear she was poor enough to need an appointed attorney. She sobbed and choked on her words when a judge asked whether she understood the charge.

Bobby Pollard, 34, her husband of more than a dozen years, had his turn next. Thin and fair, the construction worker nodded as the judge advised him of his right not to speak about his case before he got an attorney. His grandmother, Bertha McGovern, cried out loud when she saw him and shouted she loved him as a deputy escorted him back to jail.

At the house, deputies carried out furniture and stacked the pieces beneath a carport. They pulled plastic bags of remains from beneath the wooden floor on Saturday; late Sunday, they dug up a chest freezer buried beneath a shed behind the house. A chain saw and a reciprocating saw -- a power tool that mimics the action of a handsaw -- were also in the freezer, Bizzell said.

The state medical examiner is trying to match X-rays and DNA from Clark and Ruvalcava to the remains. They were also trying to see whether the saw blades match marks on the body parts, Bizzell said.

Daughters died young

The Pollards know what it is to mourn early death.

In 1993, when they lived in a mobile home in Holly Springs in Wake County, their baby girls burned to death. Louise Pollard, then 21, had been napping at one end of the home when a fire broke out, officials said then. She couldn't reach Nicole, 2, and Heather, 9 months.

"After she lost her kids, she just went downhill," Vega said. "Her mental state was just awful."

The Pollards withdrew to Johnston County, where they settled on a tract of land tucked between a tangle of oak trees and a soybean field. No other house could be seen; a muddy path a half-mile long leads from Lizzie Mill Road to their home.

In 1997, the Pollards took in Clark and her boyfriend there, friends and authorities say. The two women were close; Louise's grandfather was Robin's father.

Clark and Ruvalcava, whose family is from Santa Catarina, near Monterrey, Mexico, had been dating a few years, said Debbie Paige, a family friend. Clark's sister introduced the two. By August 1997, Clark had dropped out of school; she and Ruvalcava made plans to move into a place of their own. That August, the couple put down a deposit and first month's rent on an apartment, Paige said.

The apartment stayed empty. The truck Clark had borrowed turned up in South Carolina, abandoned in woods just over the state line, Bizzell said. Clark's father, Bob Clark, filed a missing person report with the Wake sheriff. Clark's mother told Paige that she'd hired a private detective to look for her.