Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / "Lost Women of Highway 20" Spotlights Horror Along Oregon Road

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"Lost Women of Highway 20" Spotlights Horror Along Oregon Road · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to close your eyes for a second.
• 0:02
  Well unless you are driving right now, in which case
• 0:04
  definitely do not do that.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, please keep your eyes on the road, right.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: But if you are somewhere safe, just imagine you are
• 0:11
  behind the wheel, You're an Oregon.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: You've just left the coast exactly.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: You're leaving Newport maybe where the air is really thick
• 0:19
  with that heavy, that salty Pacific fog. You turn onto
• 0:24
  US Highway twenty and you just head east.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: It is a transition that feels almost cinematic, honestly. You
• 0:31
  leave the gray Ocean behind and suddenly you are climbing.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the air gets thinner, sharper.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: You know, you're moving into the coast range, dropping into
• 0:39
  the valley and then hitting the real ascent into the
• 0:42
  Cascade Mountains.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: And it is arguably one of the most stunning drives
• 0:45
  in the country. You've got these towering Douglas Firs that
• 0:49
  act almost like a cathedral ceiling over the road.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: In the winter, it's literally a snow.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Globe, it totally is. And in the summer it's this
• 0:56
  incredibly lush green tunnel. To kind of drive you on
• 1:00
  postcards or Instagram reels. Today it is the.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: Absolute archetype of the Pacific Northwest. It's rugged, it's wild,
• 1:08
  it's beautiful. But there is this concept in environmental psychology
• 1:12
  called dual landscapes.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Dual landscapes, right, It.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: Means a place can be esthetically breathtaking and at the
• 1:18
  very exact same time functionally.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Terrifying depending on your vulnerability.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Exactly depending on who you are and who is out
• 1:25
  there with you.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: And that is exactly where we are going today for
• 1:28
  our deep dive. We are peeling back that pretty postcard
• 1:31
  to look at the ghosts of Highway twenty.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Because while this road passes through charming little towns like
• 1:36
  Sweet Home and Sisters.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Places where you stop to buy fudge and look at antiques.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, those cozy spots, but this specific stretch from the
• 1:44
  coast all the way up to the high desert pass
• 1:47
  at Santium Junction, it wasn't just a scenic highway. It
• 1:51
  served as a hunting ground.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: We aren't just telling a ghost story today though. This
• 1:55
  isn't some campfire tale to give you the creeps. We
• 1:57
  are unpacking a massive systemic fail.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: We are looking at how one man, a state employee
• 2:03
  no less, operated with near impunity for decades.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: And our deep dive today is heavily based on the
• 2:10
  really incredible Ghosts of Highway twenty project by The Oregonian, which.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: Is absolutely Pulitzer caliber investigative reporting, by the way, oh.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: One hundred percent, and also the Investigation Discovery docuseries that
• 2:22
  was narrated by Octavia Spencer. So our mission for this
• 2:25
  deep dive is to understand the actual mechanism of the crime.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: How does a predator hide in plain sight for that long, right?
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: And when we say plain sight, I mean he was
• 2:35
  the literal guy you were supposed to trust.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: That is the core tension of this entire case. If
• 2:40
  you just look at this as a standard true crime story,
• 2:43
  you completely must the point. This is a profound case
• 2:47
  study in bureaucratic blindness.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: It really is.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: It is about jurisdictional silos, which is honestly just a
• 2:53
  fancy way of saying that the police and County A
• 2:55
  were absolutely not docu to the police in Canny Bee.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: And it's about the psychology of a predator who uses
• 3:00
  his profession as the ultimate camouflage exactly. So the antagonist
• 3:04
  here is John Arthur Ackroyd, and I actually want to
• 3:07
  stop right here and address a major stereotype.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: We all have the drifter's stereotype.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Right when we think of a highway serial killer, we
• 3:15
  have this script in our heads, don't we. We picture
• 3:17
  a drifter, a transient guy in a rusted out van
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  with out of state.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: Plates, unshaven, sketchy looking. We picture the ultimate outsider, because
• 3:27
  evolutionarily speaking, we are wired to fear the stranger. We
• 3:31
  fear the person who doesn't belong to our tribe.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: But Acrid was the complete opposite of that. He was
• 3:36
  the ultimate insider.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: He was a mechanic for the organ Department of Transportation ODOT.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: He drove the bright orange truck, he wore the official uniform,
• 3:45
  he had those flashing yellow lights on top of his rig.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: And that inversion of expectations is what makes this so
• 3:51
  uniquely disturbing. He wasn't the person you ran from on
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  a dark road. He was the person you ran to
• 3:56
  exactly if your car broke down on the snowy pass
• 4:00
  in the middle of nowhere in nineteen seventy eight, seeing
• 4:02
  John Ackroyd pull up meant salvation.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: So here's our roadmap for the deep dive.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: Today.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: We are going to walk through the timeline of his
• 4:09
  victims Marlene k Rachanda, Melissa Sheila, because they absolutely deserve
• 4:14
  to be more than just footnotes in his story.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: Their stories are the crucial evidence of the system failing right.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: So alongside their stories, we really need to break down
• 4:23
  the specific failures that kept him free.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: We need to talk about the geography itself, the limited
• 4:28
  technology of the nineteen seventies and eighties, and the dogged
• 4:32
  journalism that finally accomplished what the legal system just couldn't do.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Let's start with the stage itself, then the highway and
• 4:38
  the mechanic. We talked about the beauty of the road,
• 4:41
  but let's talk about the isolation.
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  Speaker 2: It's hard to overstate.
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  Speaker 1: Reading the descriptions of the logging spurs off Highway twenty
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  it honestly gave me chills.
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  Speaker 2: You really have to understand the infrastructure of that specific
• 4:53
  area back then. This is not just the standard interstate
• 4:57
  with a wide shoulder and rest stops. It is flanked
• 5:00
  by deep, incredibly dense wilderness.
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  Speaker 1: And shooting off the main paved road are these spurs.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: Right, gravel logging roads that wind for miles and miles
• 5:09
  back into the thick timber.
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  Speaker 1: And most people driving through on a road trip wouldn't
• 5:12
  even notice them. They just look like tiny gaps in
• 5:14
  the trees.
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  Speaker 2: They are completely invisible to the tourist. But to a
• 5:18
  local and very specifically to an Odioto mechanic whose job
• 5:21
  it is to maintain the area, they are a network.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: John Ackroy didn't just know the highway. He knew the capillaries,
• 5:28
  that's a great way to put it.
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  Speaker 2: And he had the master keys to the gates that
• 5:32
  blocked off a lot of these private or state owned
• 5:35
  logging roads.
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  Speaker 1: That detail about the keys is just terrifying to me
• 5:39
  because it implies ownership of this space.
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  Speaker 2: It implies that he could take someone to places where
• 5:44
  no state trooper or local police patrol would ever ever follow.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: And consider the communications landscape of the time too. I mean, today,
• 5:52
  if you see something weird, you snap a photo with
• 5:55
  your phone, you upload it, you text a friend, you
• 5:57
  have GPS.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy eight, if you're radiator blue on Santium Pass,
• 6:02
  you were in a complete black hole.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: You were arguably as isolated as someone on the dark
• 6:07
  side of the moon.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: And the police were isolated from each other too. This
• 6:11
  single road weaves through Lynn County, Jefferson County and Doshoots County.
• 6:16
  Back then, these departments operated on a completely different radio frequency.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: They couldn't even talk to each other if they tried, no, and.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: They certainly didn't have a shared digital database. A missing
• 6:26
  person report filed in Lynn County literally sat in a
• 6:30
  metal filing cabinet in Lynn County. It did not automatically
• 6:35
  ping the sheriff sitting a few miles away in Jefferson County.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: So you have physical isolation for the victim and this
• 6:40
  profound informational isolation for the investigators. It is the perfect
• 6:45
  storm for a predator.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: And sitting right in the center of that storm is
• 6:49
  John Ackroyd.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Let's look at his background. Born in October nineteen forty nine,
• 6:53
  hired by the State Highway Department in nineteen seventy seven.
• 6:56
  He really fits the profile of the functional psychopath, doesn't he.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: He does, and we should break that down because his
• 7:02
  coworkers absolutely did not think he was a monster. They
• 7:05
  actually called him a good old.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Boy, which is the ultimate mask.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: It's a banality of evil, to quote Hanna Arnt. We
• 7:11
  constantly expect monsters to look like monsters who want them
• 7:13
  to be raving lunatics. So we can spot them easily.
• 7:16
  But ackroy was quiet. He was helpful around the shop.
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  Speaker 1: He was the guy who could fix the transmission on
• 7:20
  the heavy snowplow when no one else could.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: He was reliable, he showed up to work.
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  Speaker 1: And he had the uniform. I really want to dig
• 7:27
  into that authority bias you mentioned in our notes earlier.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: It is such a powerful psychological shortcut. We are socialized
• 7:34
  literally from kindergarten to trust. The uniform, yeah, firefighter, police officer,
• 7:39
  municipal worker.
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  Speaker 1: The uniform signals that this person has been vetted exactly.
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  Speaker 2: It signals that the state has approved this person to
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  be in a position of public trust. So some random
• 7:50
  guy in a dirty teacher pulls over while you are hitchhiking,
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  Your defenses naturally go up.
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  Speaker 1: You assess the threat, you keep your hand on the
• 7:57
  door handle, right.
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: But if an odio mechanic pulls over in a state.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Trust, your brain just says official.
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  Speaker 2: Your cortisol drops, you lower your guard. You think, thank god,
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  a professional is here. And Akroyd deeply understood that dynamic.
• 8:10
  He used the state's credibility to buy his victim's trust.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to our second section. The precedent. This
• 8:17
  is the story of Marlene Gabrielson, And honestly, this part
• 8:21
  of the research made me so incredibly angry.
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  Speaker 2: Because it is the ultimate what if moment of this
• 8:26
  entire tragedy.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: It is the sliding door moment where everything could have stopped,
• 8:31
  the future victims could have been saved. Take us back
• 8:34
  to nineteen seventy seven, late spring. Marlene is twenty years old.
• 8:40
  She's a Native American mother living in Lebanon, Oregon.
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  Speaker 2: The context of her situation is really crucial here. She
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  had gone to a rodeo in Sisters, which is over
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  the mountains. She ended up getting into a fight with
• 8:52
  her husband there and just decided to leave.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: She needed to get back home to her kids in Lebanon,
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  so she started hitchhiking.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: Now, a modern listener hearing this might immediately think hitchhiking,
• 9:04
  that's crazy, why would she do that?
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  Speaker 1: Right, But we really have to view this through the
• 9:08
  lens of nineteen seventy seven rural Oregon.
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  Speaker 2: It was incredibly common transit. It wasn't just for counterculture
• 9:14
  kids on an adventure. It was literally how working class
• 9:17
  people got from point A to point B if they
• 9:19
  didn't have access to a vehicle.
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  Speaker 1: So she is standing on the side of the highway
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  and Akroyd pulls over in his big state truck.
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  Speaker 2: He offers her a ride, but of course he doesn't
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  take her home to Lebanon.
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  Speaker 1: No, he turns off onto one of those gravel logging
• 9:31
  spurs we just talked about.
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  Speaker 2: He drives deep into the woods, far away from the road.
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  He pulls a knife on her. He sexually assaults her.
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  He threatens to kill her if she makes a sound
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  or tells anyone. It is a violently terrifying, protracted ordeal.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: But Marlene is incredible. She survives.
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  Speaker 2: She fought back and survived.
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  Speaker 1: She manages to escape him. The details and the reports
• 9:53
  are just harrowing, but she gets out of those woods
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  and then she does exactly what society tells victims to do.
• 10:00
  She goes straight to the police in Lebanon.
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  Speaker 2: She did everything right, everything, She reported it immediately while
• 10:06
  the trauma was fresh. She identified the man. She even
• 10:09
  identified the specific ODT truck number.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: So the police bring John Ackroyd in for questioning, and
• 10:15
  he doesn't even deny picking her up.
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  Speaker 2: Right, He couldn't deny it. His official worklogs put him
• 10:20
  right in that area at that exact time. But he
• 10:23
  was incredibly manipulative. He spun a narrative.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: He admitted to the sexual contact.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Yes, but he claimed it was entirely consensual. He claimed
• 10:30
  that she propositioned him to pay for the ride.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: And the police, I mean, they just bought it. They
• 10:35
  just dismissed a violent kidnapping case.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: They dropped it. They didn't even file formal charges against him.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: I just can't wrap my head around that. You have
• 10:42
  a traumatized young woman, you have a weapon involved a kidnapping.
• 10:46
  Why on earth does a mechanic get to just walk
• 10:49
  away and go back to work.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: It is a devastating convergence of three very distinct systemic biases,
• 10:56
  and we really need to name them clearly.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Let's do it.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: First, there was a massive bias against hitchhikers. There was
• 11:02
  this prevailing attitude and law enforcement back then that if
• 11:06
  a woman was hitchhiking, she was essentially asking for trouble,
• 11:09
  or that she had loose morals.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: Which is classic textbook victim blaming totally.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Second, there was racial bias. Marlene was Native American and
• 11:18
  in a predominantly white, very rural county in nineteen seventy seven,
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  her word was simply tragically given less weight than that
• 11:25
  of a white male state employee.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: It's sickening. And what was the third factor?
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: The good old boy network. We mentioned it earlier, but
• 11:32
  this is a very real, documented sociological phenomenon in small towns.
• 11:36
  The local police likely knew Acroid.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Personally, or they knew his supervisor at odot Right.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: Or they drank coffee the exact same diner every morning.
• 11:45
  He was seen as one of us. Marlene, being from
• 11:48
  out of town and native American, was viewed as an outsider,
• 11:51
  a troublemaker. So the system instinctively circled the wagons to
• 11:55
  protect the insider.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: And the consequence of that specific decision is just devastating,
• 12:00
  because if they had prosecuted him in nineteen seventy seven,
• 12:03
  if they had just done their jobs and listened to Marlene,
• 12:06
  the rest of this timeline simply does not happen.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: That is the profound tragedy of this deep dive. But
• 12:13
  consider what that dismissal actually taught Ackroyd. He was an
• 12:16
  incredibly dangerous learning moment for him.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: It validated his entire method.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: It taught him that his state badge and his orange
• 12:22
  truck were an actual functional shield. He learned that he
• 12:25
  could target vulnerable women and even if he messed up
• 12:28
  and got caught, he could literally just talk his way
• 12:31
  out of it with the cops.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: It didn't scare him straight at all. It emboldened him exactly,
• 12:35
  which leads us directly into the very next year, nineteen
• 12:38
  seventy eight. He is feeling untouchable, and now the victim
• 12:42
  profile shifts completely. He moves from an opportunistic target on
• 12:46
  the side of the highway to someone entirely different.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: This is the Kay Turner case, and the shift in
• 12:51
  his targeting is highly significant. We moved from a young,
• 12:55
  marginalized hitchhiker to a thirty five year old, affluent white
• 12:59
  woman vacationing in an exclusive resort area.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: It's Christmas Eve, nineteen seventy eight. Kay Turner is staying
• 13:06
  in Camp Sherman. For anyone listening who hasn't been there,
• 13:09
  Camp Sherman is basically idyllic, it really is. It's situated
• 13:13
  near the Metolius River. There are all these beautiful cabins.
• 13:15
  It is very quiet, very secluded, and considered extremely safe,
• 13:20
  or so everyone thought.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: Kay was an avid runner. She went out for a
• 13:24
  brisk morning jog, a very healthy athletic woman running in
• 13:27
  broad daylight, and she just vanishes, And.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: Once again, Akroyd is physically right there at the scene.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: He was a witness in the file, or rather he
• 13:35
  purposefully put himself there as a witness. Another highway worker,
• 13:39
  a guy named Thomas Hannah, actually saw Akroyd loitering in
• 13:42
  the area.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: That morning and when Hanna asked him what he was
• 13:45
  doing out there, what did Dakroid say?
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: He said he was hunting coyotes.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Hunting coyotes on Christmas Eve morning while he is supposedly
• 13:52
  on shift for the state.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: I know it sounds totally absurd to us now, but
• 13:56
  again you have to factor in the local culture. Hunting
• 13:59
  was so ubique is in that region that it was
• 14:01
  just a flimsy enough excuse to not be immediately arresting
• 14:04
  to another local guy.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: But the police investigation failed here for a totally different
• 14:09
  reason than it did with Marlene, didn't.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: It It did with Marlene, they actively ignored the victim.
• 14:16
  With Kay Turner, the failure was about who they desperately
• 14:19
  wanted to blame.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Tunnel vision exactly.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: In criminology, it's a known pitfall. Statistically speaking, when a
• 14:26
  married woman is murdered, it is most often the partner,
• 14:29
  the husband. So the local police focused intensely, almost exclusively,
• 14:34
  on Kay's husband, Noel Turner.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Now, Noel had a bit of a messy personal life, right,
• 14:39
  There were some contexts the cops latched onto.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: There were rumors of extramarital affairs. The marriage definitely wasn't perfect,
• 14:45
  and the police just grabbed onto that narrative and would
• 14:47
  not let go. They grilled Noel relentlessly. They tore his
• 14:51
  private life completely apart.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: They were so convinced that the husband did it that
• 14:55
  they developed massive blinders to everything else.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: They stopped looking for other possibilities.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: Meanwhile, the actual serial predator is just He's just working
• 15:03
  his daily shift on the highway.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: He is right there in their files. Ackroyd was interviewed, yes,
• 15:09
  because he was seen in the area, But because the
• 15:11
  investigators were hunting so hard for evidence against the husband,
• 15:15
  they accepted Acroid's alibi without really stress testing it at all.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: How did he build that alibi?
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: He got a friend of his, a guy named Roger
• 15:22
  dale Beck, to lie for him. That corroborated Akroyd's timeline.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: And because that convenient lie cleared the mechanic and allowed
• 15:31
  the detectives to focus all their energy right back onto
• 15:33
  the husband. They just swallowed it.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: It is textbook confirmation bias. They wanted Noel Turner to
• 15:39
  be guilty, so they completely ignored the massive red flags
• 15:42
  waving around the ODEOT mechanic who just happened to be
• 15:45
  hunting coyotes on Christmas Eve where a woman vanished.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: It took months for them to even find her body.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: She was finally found deep in the woods. She had
• 15:53
  been shot and raped, but even with the body recovered,
• 15:55
  the case essentially went cold. It took fourteen years until
• 15:59
  nineteen ninety two for anyone to make an arrest.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Fourteen years, you really have to pause and think about that.
• 16:06
  That is an absolute lifetime. Think about what happened during
• 16:09
  those fourteen years. Akroyd is still driving the state truck.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: He's still patrolling the exact same.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Roads, still carrying the keys to the gates.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: And that fourteen year delay is the direct, undeniable result
• 16:21
  of that investigative tunnel vision. When they finally did arrest
• 16:24
  him in nineteen ninety two, it wasn't because of some
• 16:27
  magical new DNA breakthrough that suddenly solved it.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: No, it was just basic police work that should have
• 16:32
  been done in nineteen seventy eight.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: Exactly, Cold case detectives finally took a step back, Yeah,
• 16:37
  looked at the entire file objectively and said, wait, this
• 16:39
  acroid story makes absolutely no sense, and this guy, Roger
• 16:42
  dale Beck is clearly lying to us.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: They finally applied real pressure to the alibi and it
• 16:47
  just crumbled instantly.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: Right in nineteen ninety three, there was finally a trial.
• 16:51
  Ackroyd tried to pin the murder entirely on Beck. Beck
• 16:54
  tried to pin it entirely on Akroyd. It was the
• 16:57
  classic prisoner's dilemma playing out in court, and the outcome
• 17:00
  Ackroyd was convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to five
• 17:03
  life terms. Beck was convicted separately for his role.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: So justice served finally.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: Legal justice eventually, yes, right, But we have to recognize
• 17:13
  that delayed justice is incredibly dangerous justice because while the
• 17:17
  police were completely fixated on the wrong man for a
• 17:20
  decade and a half, Ackroyd did not stop hunting.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the most difficult part of this
• 17:25
  deep dive Section four. This is the hardest part to stomach,
• 17:29
  because we aren't talking about strangers out on the lonely
• 17:32
  Highway anymore. We are talking about the horror inside his
• 17:35
  own home.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: The Richanda pickle case.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: It's nineteen ninety, so we are two full years before
• 17:40
  he is finally arrested for the K Turner murder. Ackroyd
• 17:44
  is still working for ODOT. He is living at the
• 17:46
  Santiam Junction compound. Can you describe that location for us,
• 17:51
  because calling it a compound sounds pretty intense.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: It is an ODOT maintenance station, but it includes actual
• 17:56
  state provided housing for the highway workers so they can
• 17:59
  be on site to keep the mountain passes clear during
• 18:02
  massive winter storm.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: It's at a major intersection right, yes.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: The intersection of Highay twenty, Highway twenty two and Highwi
• 18:08
  Won twenty six. But despite being an intersection, it is deep,
• 18:11
  deep in the mountains.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: In the winter, it is literally buried under feet of snow.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: You are miles and miles away from the nearest actual town.
• 18:19
  It is essentially an island of isolation, and.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: Living out there on this island with him is his
• 18:24
  wife Linda and her children, including her thirteen year old
• 18:28
  daughter Richanda.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Channey, as her family called her. The source material we
• 18:32
  reviewed paints an absolute nightmare scenario in that house. This
• 18:36
  was not a happy, blended family. There were dark reports
• 18:38
  of abuse. Richanda was visibly terrified of her stepfather.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: There is one specific detail in the reporting that is
• 18:45
  just heartbreaking. She explicitly begged her mother not to leave
• 18:49
  her alone in the house with him.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: That is the ultimate red flag, a child explicitly telling
• 18:54
  a parent I am not safe with this person.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: On July tenth, nineteen ninety, Linda has to leave for work,
• 19:00
  Akroyd is home, and when Linda returns to the compound
• 19:03
  later that day, which on is just gone.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: And Ackroyd immediately plays the confused, concerned parent routine. He says,
• 19:10
  I don't know. She must have run away while I
• 19:12
  was out.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: But the details were all wrong from the start.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: Completely wrong. Ackroyd knew things he absolutely shouldn't have known
• 19:18
  if he wasn't involved. For instance, he knew exactly what
• 19:21
  she was wearing when she vanished, down to the highly
• 19:24
  specific details of her underwear, which.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: Is a deeply, deeply suspicious thing for a stepfather to
• 19:29
  note about a thirteen year old who supposedly just ran.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: Away right, and his timeline of when he was allegedly
• 19:35
  home versus when he claimed he was out driving around
• 19:38
  searching for her. It didn't match the mileage tracked on
• 19:41
  his state vehicle.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: There was a massive search effort for her, hundreds of people,
• 19:46
  tracker dogs, helicopters in the air.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: But remember the specific terrain out there at Santiem Junction.
• 19:52
  We are talking about jagged lava fields, incredibly dense underbrush,
• 19:57
  deep treacherous ravines.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Akroyd I knew that land better than the search and
• 20:02
  rescue teams did.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: He knew every hidden crevice. If he wanted to hide
• 20:05
  something out there, it stayed hidden. They searched for weeks
• 20:08
  and found absolutely.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: Nothing, and for years nothing happened. Legally, he wasn't charged
• 20:12
  with her disappearance. Why is that? With all those suspicions,
• 20:16
  why no charges?
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: This is where the k Turner timeline intersects and complicates things.
• 20:21
  By the time investigators finally built a strong enough circumstantial
• 20:25
  case for Rachanda's murder, Ackroyd was already sitting in prison
• 20:29
  serving his five life sentences for kay Turner.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: H So it became a resource issue for the state.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: Exactly prosecutors faced a really grim choice. Do we spend
• 20:39
  hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to try a man
• 20:42
  for murder who is already guaranteed to die in prison.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: So Richanda basically just became a cold.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: File on a shelf until twenty thirteen, that is when
• 20:51
  Lynn County finally decided to bring formal charges against him
• 20:55
  for her death. But they didn't end up going to trial.
• 20:57
  They made a.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: Deal what the experts call the devil's bargain.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: Yes, Akrod agreed to plead no contest to Richanda's murder.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: For the listener who might not be super familiar with
• 21:07
  legal terminology, what does no contests actually mean in this context?
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: It basically means I am not openly admitting that I
• 21:13
  committed the crime, but I formally acknowledged that the state
• 21:16
  has enough evidence to convict me if we went to trial.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: But legally it counts as a conviction.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: Right for sentencing purposes, it carries the exact same weight
• 21:24
  as a guilty.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: Please, So why would the prosecutors accept that? Why not
• 21:27
  drag them into a courtroom and force him to look
• 21:29
  the family in the eye and say guilty.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: It was a very calculated strategic move by the state.
• 21:34
  They wanted to ensure, beyond any shadow of a doubt,
• 21:38
  that he never ever got an opportunity for parole. By
• 21:42
  officially adding the conviction for Richanda's murder to his record,
• 21:45
  it effectively locked the prison door and threw away the
• 21:49
  key forever. It guarantee he would die behind bars.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: But there was a terrible cost to that efficiency.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: The cost was the whole truth. The plea deal did
• 21:57
  not require him to allocate, meaning he didn't have to
• 22:00
  sit down and describe the timeline of the crime. And crucially,
• 22:04
  it did not require him to reveal where he hid,
• 22:06
  which on his remains.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: So he stays in prison, but the family never gets
• 22:10
  her back to give her a proper burial.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: He took the exact location of her body to his grave.
• 22:15
  It is a very hollow kind of justice. It served
• 22:18
  the safety of the general public, but it utterly failed
• 22:21
  the emotional needs of her mother and her siblings.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: And if that timeline wasn't infuriating enough, we have to
• 22:26
  talk about nineteen ninety two again. This brings us to
• 22:29
  section five, the final spree, because this is happening months
• 22:33
  before his arrest for the kay Turner case. He is
• 22:37
  actively under suspicion, detectives are visibly sniffing around his past.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: And yet yet he strikes again. He feels invincible. This
• 22:46
  is the case of the Coastal teens Melissa Sanders who
• 22:49
  was seventeen and Sheila Swanson, who was nineteen.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: They were just camping at Beverly Beach State Park over
• 22:54
  near the.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: Coast, regular teenagers on a trip. They got a little
• 22:58
  bored at the campsite, went to use a public payphone
• 23:00
  to call their boyfriends back home, and then they decided
• 23:03
  to hitchhike back to the valley, specifically to the Sweet
• 23:06
  Home area.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: And the connection here is not random. Akroid actually knew them.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: He did. He was a regular at a Shurre's restaurant
• 23:12
  where these two girls hung out all the time. He
• 23:15
  had bought them coffee before he knew their names. He
• 23:18
  had casually groomed them in a sense, establishing himself as
• 23:22
  a friendly local guy.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: So when he pulled over on the highway, it wasn't
• 23:25
  just some anonymous state worker offering a ride. It was
• 23:27
  John from Shurrey's exactly.
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: The familiarity was the trap.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: There's a detail in the investigative report about this specific
• 23:35
  case that honestly gave me nightmares, the smoking gun incident
• 23:39
  at the Odeo t Shop.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: It is the kind of detail you expect to see
• 23:42
  in a slasher movie, not a police report. Akroyd arise
• 23:46
  late to the Sweet Home Highway maintenance shop for his shift.
• 23:50
  He walks through the doors and his arms, his actual
• 23:53
  physical arms, all the way up to the elbows, are
• 23:56
  completely covered in dried blood.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Covered in blood walking into a gun building, and his
• 24:01
  coworkers are just standing around watching this.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: He casually claimed he had just gutted a deer. He
• 24:06
  told them he either hit a deer on the way
• 24:08
  in or found one recently hit and decided to clean
• 24:10
  it right then and there.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: Now, even among avid hunters in rural Oregon, that is
• 24:15
  barely a plausible excuse for showing up to a mechanic
• 24:18
  shift soaked in blood.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: Right, It's weird, It is highly unprofessional. It definitely stuck
• 24:22
  in their minds as a bizarre event.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: But nobody picked up the phone to call nine to
• 24:25
  one one right then.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: They didn't. It is a textbook example of the bystander effect,
• 24:30
  heavily mixed with that good old boy trust we keep
• 24:33
  coming back.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: To you just desperately don't want to believe that the
• 24:36
  guy you share coffee with is a serial kill.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: Exactly, you actively choose the comfortable lie, Oh, Jon's just
• 24:43
  being a weird, messy hunter today, over the absolutely terrifying truth.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: When were Melissa and Sheila finally found.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: Hunters stumbled across their bodies later that year in October
• 24:54
  nineteen ninety two, And where were they found? On a
• 24:57
  remote logging skir off Highway twenty, the civic spur that
• 25:00
  was directly on Acroid's assigned warkrout.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: So you have the dried blood at the shop, the
• 25:05
  personal connection from the diner, the exact location of the
• 25:08
  body is the timeline of his shift.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: Investigators built a massive, very compelling, circumstantial case against him.
• 25:14
  It was strong, But here is the ultimate frustration of
• 25:18
  the legal system. Acro died in prison in twenty sixteen
• 25:21
  before the state could formally charge him for these two
• 25:23
  specific murders.
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: So legally speaking, on paper, those cases are still unresolved.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: Technically, yes, but the Ghost of Highway twenty investigative project
• 25:32
  makes it abundantly crystal clear he is the only logical,
• 25:36
  viable suspect it's.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: A clear pattern. That is what we're seeing across all
• 25:41
  these decades. It's not chaos, it's a calculated methodology.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. Let's synthesize that pattern for a moment. Yeah. He
• 25:48
  targeted the vulnerable, the hitchhikers, the isolated children. He used
• 25:53
  the vehicle, the brightly colored odot truck, as a psychological
• 25:58
  tool for access and trust. And then he used the environment,
• 26:02
  the deep, treacherous woods he knew better than anyone alive,
• 26:05
  as his disposals sinese.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: He literally turned his state profession into a weapon.
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: He weaponized public trust.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: And we should mention there are other ghosts out there too,
• 26:13
  It's not just the ones we have named.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: Yes, there is the case long known as the Swamp
• 26:18
  Mountain Dough for decades. This was just a file of
• 26:20
  unidentified remains found off Highway twenty near Sweet Home Way
• 26:24
  back in the mid seventies, but just recently in twenty
• 26:26
  twenty five, through advanced genetic genealogy and DNA technology, she
• 26:30
  was finally identified.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: Marion Vanetta Nagel in the quarter.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: Yes, and does her case link back to Acrod.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: The timeline fits perfectly with his early years on the road.
• 26:39
  The geography is an exact match. And then there are
• 26:42
  others Karen Lee and Rodney Grissom, a couple who went
• 26:45
  missing in nineteen seventy seven, Elizabeth Mussler missing in nineteen
• 26:49
  seventy seven.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: All of them vanished in that exact same highway corridor,
• 26:52
  all of them during Akroyd's tenure with ODOT.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: It's staggering. It really makes you realize that what we know,
• 26:58
  what we've discussed today is probably just the tiny tip
• 27:01
  of the Iceberg.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: Highway twenty is a graveyard, and for a very long time,
• 27:05
  nobody connected the dots because those dots were hidden in
• 27:08
  completely different county filing cabinets.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: Which perfectly brings us to our final section section seven.
• 27:14
  Journalism as the engine of justice because the local police
• 27:18
  eventually got him for Kay Turner. Sure, but the full
• 27:21
  horrific picture, that comprehensive timeline came from reporters.
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: We have to give massive, massive credit to the team
• 27:28
  at the Oregonian Noel Crombie, Beth Nakamora, and Dave Killen.
• 27:31
  They launched the Ghosts of Highway twenty project in twenty eighteen.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: And this wasn't just them writing a recap of old
• 27:36
  news articles they were actively doing the deep investigation that
• 27:40
  the state had failed to do decades earlier.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: They fought tooth and nail in court to unseal suppressed
• 27:45
  documents that Rechanda Pickle plea deal we talked about. The
• 27:49
  public was never supposed to know those details. The state
• 27:52
  wanted it quiet. The journalists took them to court to
• 27:54
  get that file unsealed for the public.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: They connected the cases across those rigid county lines that
• 28:00
  police had treated as absolute borders.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: They stepped back and looked at the entire highway as
• 28:05
  a single crime scene. Journalism literally broke down the silos.
• 28:10
  They went out and interviewed the survivors, like Marlene, who
• 28:13
  had been completely ignored and dismissed for forty years.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: They gave her her voice back. They validated her immense
• 28:20
  trauma on a public stage.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: And that groundbreaking written work led directly to the id
• 28:25
  docuseries that premiered in November twenty twenty three.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Which brought the entire story to a massive national audience.
• 28:31
  And having someone like Octavia Spencer narrate it that really
• 28:34
  elevates the gravity of the subject matter. It signals to
• 28:37
  the viewer that these aren't just tawdry true crime tales
• 28:40
  for entertainment.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: Right These are stories of significant systemic human rights failures, and.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: The docusries really focuses its lens on the women, doesn't it.
• 28:49
  It is decidedly not the John Ackroyd show.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: That is such a crucial and welcome shift in modern
• 28:55
  true crime media. We are finally moving away from glorifying
• 28:58
  the supposed evil genius of the serial killer.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: And let's be very clear, Acroyd was not a genius.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: Not at all. He's a very mediocre man who was
• 29:06
  protected by a deeply broken system. The focus now rightfully
• 29:10
  is on the resilience of Narlene and the relentless fight
• 29:13
  of the victim's families to get answers.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: John Arthur Ackroyd died in twenty sixteen.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: December thirty of twenty sixteen. He died alone in his
• 29:20
  prison cell.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: He took so many secrets with him. He never gave
• 29:23
  up the burial locations.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: He refused to give those families that final piece of closure.
• 29:28
  But because of the journalism, he didn't escape being known
• 29:30
  for exactly what he was. He thought he could hide
• 29:33
  in the deep woods, and then later he thought he
• 29:35
  could hide in the silent anonymity of the prison system,
• 29:38
  but the truth eventually dug him out into the light.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: The ghosts of Highway twenty aren't just spooky stories to
• 29:43
  tell on a road trip. They are real women. Marlene, Kay, Richanda, Melissa, Sheila,
• 29:52
  Marian and.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: Their stories serve as a permanent reminder that our systems
• 29:56
  have cracks, and predators specifically look for those cracks to
• 30:00
  live in.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: I want to leave you the listener with a final
• 30:03
  thought today. It is something I have been mulling over
• 30:06
  constantly since I first read the source material for this
• 30:08
  deep dive.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: Let's hear it.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: We all rely on basic assumptions just to get through
• 30:13
  our daily lives. We assume the bridge we drive over
• 30:16
  isn't going to collapse. We assume the food we buy
• 30:18
  at the store isn't poisoned. And when we are stranded
• 30:21
  and we see a municipal worker or a police officer
• 30:24
  or a mechanic and a bright state truck, we assume safety.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: It's a heuristic, it's a necessary mental shortcut. We literally
• 30:32
  need to function.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: In society right but this story violently forces us to
• 30:36
  look at that specific assumption and ask how much of
• 30:39
  that safety is actually real, guaranteed safety and how much
• 30:42
  of it is just a comforting story we tell ourselves
• 30:44
  so we aren't too terrified to leave the house because
• 30:47
  from our lean for k for Achanda, that assumption of
• 30:50
  safety was the actual trap.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: That is a chilling reality check. It reminds us that
• 30:56
  authority is, at the end of the day, just a costume.
• 31:00
  Always have to look at the actual person inside the uniform.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: Next time you are out on a beautiful scenic drive
• 31:05
  and you see that lone maintenance truck parked on the
• 31:08
  side of the road, you might just look at it
• 31:10
  a little differently.
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: Stay safe out there.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: Thanks for taking the deep dive with us. We will
• 31:14
  see you next time.