INFAMOUS: Highway 20

Over several decades, women and girls have encountered a monster whose full reign of terror might not even be fully known. He hunted his own backyard, the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, and there could be victims out there that have yet to be discovered.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ashley Flowers?

  When you're out in nature, you learn to trust your instincts. You pay attention to the trail, your surroundings, and you stay alert to protect yourself from harm. But what if the biggest threat isn't the environment at all? On Park Predators, host Delia Diambra explores true crime cases that happen in national parks and remote wildernesses, the places we usually think of as safe and peaceful. Each episode reveals what happened and how much more there is beneath the surface. Listen to Park Predators now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  And I'm Britt.

• 0:35Ashley Flowers?

  And the story I have for you today is about the women and girls whose lives were cut short after encountering a monster whose full reign of terror might not even be fully known. He hunted in his own backyard, the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. And there could be victims out there that have yet to be discovered. This is the story of the mysteries of Highway 20.

• 1:33Ashley Flowers?

  It's around 10 a.m. when Noel Turner realizes his 35-year-old wife Kay hasn't returned from her run. Now, she had left around 8 a.m. and planned to be gone for about an hour, but to make it home for breakfast. Well, that's now come and gone, times two, and Noel is getting a little worried. So he hops in his truck to see if he can go find her, probably just hoping that she maybe sprained an ankle or got lost or something. Because though she's an avid runner, she is kind of in unfamiliar terrain right now. Because this is Sunday, Christmas Eve, actually, of 1978. And Noel and Kay are vacationing in this remote area of Oregon called Camp Sherman, which is right off of this big main road known as Highway 20. And they took this little trip as a holiday getaway with some friends,

• 2:18Ashley Flowers?

  exchanging gifts, sitting by the fire, like singing carols. It was supposed to be this magical time, like doing all the Christmasy things. But that wouldn't stop Kay from getting her workout in. Again, avid runner. And what should have been Kay's time to recharge and clear her head is quickly becoming now her family and friends' nightmare because there is no sign of Kay as her husband is driving around everywhere. And by 1:30, Noel is thoroughly panicked, enough that now he needs to call police. So Noel and others are eager to get searching right away, but they're told by police to wait, which is just, at this point, burning precious daylight hours in their minds. So eventually sheriff deputies arrive and they, along with the locals and the Turners'

• 3:02Ashley Flowers?

  friends, finally do start searching for Kay. Even when it gets dark, they search through the night, but there isn't a single sign of her, not even on Christmas Day or the day after, despite the searches getting bigger and bigger. Like, these are extensive land searching.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  And I assume they've talked to all the friends and stuff and we're sure she actually even made it on the run? Like, nothing happened to her, wherever it is they're all staying?

• 3:27Ashley Flowers?

  Yeah, according to Noel Crombie, who wrote extensively about this for The Oregonian, Kay even asked one of their friends to go jogging with her, but they declined. And they do eventually find a couple of witnesses, this pair of highway workers who, like, they talked to separately. They were, like, said they saw her, again, separately, like, running solo in the morning that she vanished. So she went on the run. Everything seemed fine. And they must not have seemed all that suspicious or suspicious at all because police didn't seem to dig deeper into either of these, like, highway worker guys. And there's something else that they didn't dig deeper into either. This one, to me, is far more baffling. So on day three, this is December 26, the deputy in charge of the search gets a radio

• 4:10Ashley Flowers?

  call from a couple of trackers who had been helping authorities out. And they tell the deputy that they've discovered two sets of frozen footprints in this clearing over by the woods.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Like, near where she was seen running?

• 4:23Ashley Flowers?

  I don't know, it sounds like it was close. I'm not totally clear on exactly where this was, but according to these trackers, one set of prints could have been from Kay's running shoes. They knew that she'd been wearing this specific type of Nike shoe, ones with like the old school waffle sole that we know. But the other set of prints appeared to be from a larger shoe. And so, right away, it's clear that these are not the prints of two people out for a stroll in the woods. More alarmingly, the trackers say it seems like there was some kind of struggle and that the larger person dragged away the smaller person.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Did they follow these prints?

• 4:56Ashley Flowers?

  They did, but then it got dark and they couldn't go any further, which is something that to me, like, you follow up on after.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:04Ashley Flowers?

  But it seems like this deputy didn't believe them or he didn't seem as interested because that appears to be as far as this went.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  How does it even happen? This is like the best and kind of the only lead that they have.

• 5:17Ashley Flowers?

  I don't know. I mean, maybe authorities did look further into it and there's just no record or reporting of it. And maybe there wasn't anything more to learn or they decided they weren't like from the people or Kay, whatever. But I don't know. I feel like we should have at least closed the loop on that.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:32Ashley Flowers?

  Especially if they're not related at all. That doesn't happen, so we're here left guessing. And as more days pass without any sign of Kay, police start looking inward a little more, examining Kay's life to see if there would be any reason for her to leave on her own. According to the limited docu-series Lost Women of Highway 20, when investigators look at her and her husband's life back in Eugene, Oregon, where they live, they discover this calendar that belonged to Kay at her office. And in it, there is evidence to suggest that she had actually been seeing people outside of her marriage. And at the time that police are learning this, this is news to Noel, who they obviously like ask about this. And they know or like believe that he's not lying about not knowing

• 6:16Ashley Flowers?

  because they do end up asking him to take a polygraph about this and he ends up passing. But he does admit that he knew Kay wasn't happy in their marriage. And we can assume police looked more into any possible affairs that Kay was having, but there's nothing in the source material to suggest that Kay did take off with someone. And again, they have witnesses like putting her out running. So logistically, like,

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:39Ashley Flowers?

  that might not even make sense, right? Like, you're not going to be like putting on your running shoes.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  While you're on vacation with your husband to like,

• 6:45Ashley Flowers?

  And then decide mid-run, right.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:47Ashley Flowers?

  So before they knew it, it was spring and then summer. And it takes a full eight months before the first sign of Kay pops up. And in a really chilling way. So one day in August, the owner of this little general store in Camp Sherman is just like going about their usual day when this local guy rolls in. Now, the guy is known to her, the owner, but not in the best way. He had been in a couple of times and really skeeved her out when she caught him touching himself in the store while looking at some adult magazines. So like, the second she sees him walk in, she's like, oh, hell no. And she goes into the back and gets her husband. When he comes out, the guy tells him he found some clothes while he was out rabbit hunting

• 7:30Ashley Flowers?

  that he thinks might belong to that missing jogger from back at Christmas. And so he asked the shop owner if there is some kind of reward, which there was, like a thousand dollar reward at the time. But the shop owner is all kinds of suspicious of his story because he knows at the time there are no rabbits in the area. But before this guy can wise up, the shop owner phones police and is like, hey, you probably should get here and like, don't waste any time. Get here now. And if police aren't tripping over themselves to get to the general store already, they are when the store owner calls them back because since he'd hung up with them, the guy has said something else. He admits that he might have been the last person to see Kay Turner alive.

• 8:15Ashley Flowers?

  Now, it's unclear exactly when authorities put two and two together, but they soon realized that this local, this stranger who might have stumbled across Kay's clothes, isn't some random guy. They already knew him. They had interviewed him early in the investigation. His name is John Ackroyd, and he was one of the highway workers who admitted to seeing Kay running the day she disappeared.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  I mean, they're suspicious and then...

• 8:42Ashley Flowers?

  There's this. Right. So they go meet John, and he leads police out into the woods about a mile and a half from Camp Sherman, where they find several pieces of clothing. There is a yellow pair of shorts, underwear, a broken watch, Nike running shoes. And then there among the clothing, they find a lower jawbone with teeth still intact.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 9:06Ashley Flowers?

  And sure enough, a medical examiner will later confirm those teeth belonged to Kay.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Did they find the rest of her?

• 9:13Ashley Flowers?

  Uh-uh, not at the time. So, I mean, it has been in this area, her body, I mean, in the elements for like some eight months now. Like you've got critters to deal with. I mean, a perfect example is one of the officers actually who's on the scene, they notice a piece of Kay's blonde hair like tangled up in a bird's nest. So-

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Evidence is literally flying away.

• 9:32Ashley Flowers?

  Scattered everywhere. But even though they won't be able to determine how she died, just based on the little that they have and the way that her remains were left, they do find clues as to when. So Kay's broken watch reads 9:27, December 24th. It's a mechanical watch, not digital, just to be clear. And the stem had been knocked out, so like it stopped the time. Though there's like some conflicting reporting that maybe it read 9:05. But either way, if it was AM, that means that it would have broken about an hour or so into her dog that morning, right around the time Noel was expecting her to be home. So now that they know Kay's fate, they bring their first and only person of interest

• 10:15Ashley Flowers?

  in for questioning. And John tells police, much like he did the store owners, that he was just hunting rabbits with his dog when he stumbled across the remains, the clothes, whatever. And police are also suspicious of this because, again, there wasn't a lot of rabbits in this area. So they asked John if he's willing to take a polygraph, which he agrees to. He ends up failing, but he still denies any involvement in Kay's death. But here's the thing, his story does begin to shift.

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• 11:32Speaker 01

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• 11:38Ashley Flowers?

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• 12:23Ashley Flowers?

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• 12:52Ashley Flowers?

  So initially, when John told police he saw Kay running on the day she disappeared, there had been nothing else to that story. Well, now, all this time later, he says, "Actually, I stopped and talked to Kay." Now, it's nothing wild. He just like, "We exchanged holiday pleasantries," or whatever. But it's significant enough, like enough of a change, to make everybody be on high alert. So police ask him if he ever touched Kay, because that was one of the polygraph questions he failed. And yet again, all of a sudden, the story shifts. He says, "Well, yeah, no, I did touch Kay." But he says bizarrely that he touched her in February.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Two months after her disappearance.

• 13:31Ashley Flowers?

  She goes missing in December, right. And take a seat, buckle up, because the ride is shifting again. Now he tells police that he actually found her body first in February, so not in August. And he says he didn't report discovering her remains because he was afraid that he might get accused of killing her. And when he found her in February, he like touched her arm or something.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  And what exactly does he think is going to happen now?

• 13:56Ashley Flowers?

  Britt, the red flags on this guy are like piled so high you can't see over them. And it doesn't get any better. John claims that when he found Kay's body in February, she was nude and partially covered in snow. And he said it looked like her throat had been cut and that she was also shot in the chest.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  So he's giving pretty precise details that, I don't know, maybe only the killer would know?

• 14:19Ashley Flowers?

  Yeah, specific. But still, even though this is super weird, police can't prove that John is the killer. Because even though he's giving this weird, specific story, they can't prove that that is a right story or a wrong story either way, because they have no physical evidence to work with. And to complicate things, John sort of has an alibi. He says that he spent most of Christmas Eve with a buddy named Roger Dale Beck.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Was this the other highway worker witness?

• 14:47Ashley Flowers?

  No, these are two totally different guys. Again, John and that other guy weren't even together when they saw Kay. I don't even know if they like worked together, but like two separate things. Anyways, so this Roger guy confirms that he was with John, but it's unclear if he was with him before or after John would have seen Kay. We just know that he says he went hunting with John at some point that afternoon, and then nothing weird stood out to him. Certainly nothing that would suggest to him that like his hunting buddy had killed a woman or was planning to kill a woman. And Roger's wife, this woman named Pam, she kind of chimes in at some point, giving both of these guys alibis, saying that they were at their house most of the morning.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  But John can't be there or with them right when he sees Kay, which he's already admitted to like a couple of times. That feels like the only window that really matters here.

• 15:36Ashley Flowers?

  Yes, and I'd love to drill in on that, but by this point, John has wised up and he now gets a lawyer. So no more talking, and the police have to let him walk. That doesn't mean that they stop digging into him. They learn that in 1977, the year before Kay disappeared, a woman named Marlene Gabrielson told police that John had sexually assaulted her after he picked her up when she was hitchhiking along Highway 20.

• 16:02Ashley Flowers?

  And her story is horrifying. She said that she fell asleep in the car on the way home and she woke up to John dragging her out of his truck by her legs. And she said that he ripped off her pants, even cut her underwear and boots off with a knife and then sexually assaulted her. At some point later, she said John seemed to contemplate what to do next with her. Like, it sounds like he was concerned about letting her go, but she pleaded with him, pointing out that she had a new baby. John relented, gave her a pair of his pants to wear, and they just resumed their drive. And despite everything that she had just gone through, before John finally dropped her off, Marlene convinced him to give her his phone number by pretending that she liked him.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Marlene's a smart cookie.

• 16:47Ashley Flowers?

  Very. And she's not doing this just so he thinks everything's fine. She's doing it so she can identify him later. Like, she wanted to see John punished for what he did to her. And I can only assume police used that number to track John down after she'd gone to the hospital and had done a sexual assault kit. So they had brought John in for questioning at that time. But this is where Marlene's tragic story got even more tragic and infuriating. John told police that Marlene came on to him. And despite the bruises and the scratches that Marlene suffered, and everything else she did to prove her story, to basically hand them the evidence they need on a silver platter, because he

• 17:29Ashley Flowers?

  said it wasn't a sexual assault, they believed him, and he was never prosecuted.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Unbelievable.

• 17:36Ashley Flowers?

  Even worse, the police seemed to suggest that maybe it was Marlene's fault. They questioned her drug use, her drinking, if she was being flirty with John, maybe coming on to him sexually. In Lost Women of Highway 20, Marlene talks about how police made her feel like a liar.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Was there ever a polygraph for John then? Because I feel like we would have learned he was a liar like a year earlier.

• 18:01Ashley Flowers?

  But they did. And somehow, he passed, which probably just helped fuel the police's belief that Marlene was lying. And it also points to the thing we've said so many times, like, there are flaws, there are problems with this kind of testing. And there are problems with not believing victims. Like, that has very big, very real, life-threatening consequences. And the police are learning that.

• 18:24Ashley Flowers?

  But even if they see that incident in a whole new light now, it doesn't change the fact that they still don't have anything to tie him to Kay's murder. And so her case starts to go cold. According to the Oregon Journal, in October, they end up finding Kay's skull about three quarters of a mile from where her clothes and her lower jawbone were found. But again, it doesn't give them much of anything. The investigators don't glean anything new from this. So all Kay's husband and her friends can do is wait. And that wait becomes excruciatingly long. I mean, over a decade passes. And in that time, letting John Ackroyd slip through their fingers

• 19:07Ashley Flowers?

  has dire consequences once again. This time, it's mid-morning on July 11, 1990, when a 911 dispatcher with the Lynn County Sheriff's Office gets a call from a concerned mother named Linda. She tells them that her 13-year-old daughter, Rochanda Pickle, is missing, has been since the day before. And she is worried sick, is sure something is wrong. And it's now been 24 hours, so she's calling to make the report. Linda says that she thought she needed to wait the 24 hours to report her daughter missing. And it has to break her heart when the dispatcher corrects her and tells her that, like, in the cases of children, that's not true. But they're here now. So the dispatcher starts asking questions. Who was the last to see her daughter? Linda tells them that it was her stepfather.

• 19:52Ashley Flowers?

  And of course, Britt, do you want to take a wild guess at who her stepfather was?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  It's fucking John Ackroyd, isn't it?

• 19:59Ashley Flowers?

  It is fucking John Ackroyd. For the second time, John is about to become the main suspect in a disappearance. Now, John had married Linda in the mid-'80s, but divorced soon after. Despite this, though, it sounds like they stayed together anyway. And according to Noelle's piece in The Oregonian, they are living together in 1990 and raising Linda's children from her previous relationship, Rochanda and her brother Byron. Now, home for them was this remote community known as Santiam Junction, which is where Highway 20, Oregon Route 126, and Oregon Route 22, like, all intersect. There's all these big highways. John worked as a highway mechanic, so it made sense for the family to live in this,

• 20:42Ashley Flowers?

  what essentially was like a compound where other highway workers lived as well.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  And how far was this from Camp Sherman?

• 20:48Ashley Flowers?

  About 30 minutes. So, police descend on this area. They bring in massive like, search resources to find Rachanda. And it's clear that police, early on, think that she didn't just run away. Like, nothing in her room was missing. None of her close friends had any idea where she was. And Rachanda wasn't known to just wander off into the woods. In the Lost Women of Highway 20 doc, her brother Byron points to the fact that she was actually scared to go into the woods alone. And Linda tells police that the last time she saw her daughter was the morning of the 10th, so the day before. Rachanda was up early, even helped Linda do her hair. And before Linda left for work, she gave her daughter a list of chores to do that day. But then when Linda got home,

• 21:33Ashley Flowers?

  no chores had been done, and Rachanda wasn't there. And if she went somewhere, she would usually leave a note. "That's not there either."

• 21:41Speaker 01

  So what's John's story through all this?

• 21:43Ashley Flowers?

  Well, he said that he dropped Linda off at work that morning, and then he went to go work in Bend, Oregon. John is still a mechanic for the state at that point. But he says that when he got there, he found that some parts that he was waiting for, like, didn't come in, so he ended up just taking the day off.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  So he's off of work the day she disappears?

• 22:02Ashley Flowers?

  Correct. Even more than that, supervisors of his would later say that there was no reason for him to take off, like, just because whatever parts weren't there. Like, there's plenty of other work that he could have been doing that day.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  So he was off, but he was supposed to be at work?

• 22:16Ashley Flowers?

  Yes.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Then where was he?

• 22:17Ashley Flowers?

  Home. He tells police that when he got home, Rachanda was there. He saw her on the couch watching cartoons. He asked her if she wanted to take pictures of deer on some, like, backroads or something, but she didn't want to go with him because she's a teenage girl and that sounds awful.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:33Ashley Flowers?

  So he says he left to go take pictures on his own, noticed Rachanda wasn't home. By the time he got back, he said, when he noticed she wasn't there, he like, looked around a little bit, then he left to go pick Linda up from work. And then when they got home together, Rachando still wasn't home. Now, in a moment that would eventually feel like deja vu for some, John is adamant that he's got nothing to do with Rachanda's disappearance. While John does help search for his stepdaughter, I mean, he kind of leads the charge, actually. He's also saying things right and left that are just big, like WTF moments. Like, at one point, John tells police that on the night that Rachanda disappeared, he and Linda had sex, despite, you know, like, her daughter being missing?

• 23:17Ashley Flowers?

  He even tells police it was great sex, like, he makes sure to say that. And he said it was notable because John has, he tells them, a low libido. So it's unusual that they even have sex.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Listen, I don't want to take an especially deep dive into the mind of sexual predators, but I have to wonder, like, if he did do something to Rachanda, he could have kind of gotten off on it. Like, the knowledge of what he did would kind of carry through and arouse him later.

• 23:44Ashley Flowers?

  Which would be fucked, like, in so many words. Like, they kind of point to that in the doc, like, how messed up it would be for you to have, like, a libido in this situation, when you normally don't. And then to want to have sex with this woman whose young daughter is newly missing. Like, that day, like, I don't know.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:03Ashley Flowers?

  So John's interview with the police, and like, a lot of things with John, it only gets more troubling from there. At one point, John theorizes how someone could have done something to Rachanda. He talks about how someone could have knocked her out with a punch, could have tied her up or used a knife to threaten her, and that her size and weight would have made it easy for someone to carry her away. And police soon find evidence that could suggest that these aren't just theories.

• 24:37Ashley Flowers?

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• 25:20Ashley Flowers?

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• 25:50Ashley Flowers?

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• 27:03Ashley Flowers?

  In the back of John's truck, police find a rope with Rachanda's hair and blood. Some blood is also found on the doorstep of his truck. And I don't think these are massive amounts of blood, just like tiny drops, but blood nonetheless.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  I mean, at least they have some physical evidence this time.

• 27:23Ashley Flowers?

  Not so fast. John claims that Rachanda used the rope to play with like some kittens or something. So he is like, maybe that's how her hair got on it. He doesn't know how the blood would have gotten there, but you know, kids be kids, basically. Like, he's like, you know how they are. And he kind of just like throws up her hands. No explanation is a good explanation to him. Like, and it might not be a good explanation, but it isn't proof, again, of anything to these police officers. Obviously, John is front and center, but there is a brief period where police do look at Rachanda's biological father, Steve, as a possible suspect, too. You see, Rachanda had just returned from visiting him. In fact, her brother Byron was still visiting him when she went missing.

• 28:07Ashley Flowers?

  And without going into too much detail, Steve didn't sound like Father of the Year by any means. But the problem is Steve lived five hours away, so police are confident that he wasn't in the area at the time she disappeared. So even though they kind of go down this other path, they pretty quickly are right back looking at John.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And are they bringing Kay up at all when he's in the hop seat for Rachanda?

• 28:28Ashley Flowers?

  I don't know how much they actually grill him on Kay, but I think they're at least aware of it, even though there's probably been a ton of turnover in, I mean, it's been like a decade. And even though Kay disappeared in another county, it sounds like the DA of that county was monitoring the search for Rachanda. I think there's like maybe some hope that if they can't get him on Kay, that they'll get him on Rachanda. So, I mean, they're definitely connecting the dots. But outside of law enforcement, there were others who were less quick to judge John. Byron talks about how his mom would get upset when he would ask about John's possible involvement. In a Statesman Journal article published not long after Rachanda goes missing,

• 29:11Ashley Flowers?

  Linda publicly talks about how she is concerned about the focus on John. Now, why she's responding this way? I don't know. According to the Lost Women of Highway 20 doc, Rachanda showed signs, apparently, of physical abuse, and according to her friends, sexual abuse at the hands of John. Like, I guess Rachanda and her friends would talk about it sometimes. Like, some of them were dealing with similar things at home. And according to her friends, she did tell another adult, but when she did, nothing happened. And then she was scared that, like, she was gonna get in trouble or something was gonna happen because she told someone.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  That feels like it could be a motive for John to do something, though. Like, if he knew that she talked and hadn't been listened to the first time, or if he was afraid that maybe she would again?

• 29:56Ashley Flowers?

  Right, which makes it very convenient timing for Rachanda to just disappear. And despite one of the most extensive searches in Lynn County history, police do not find her. So now, authorities have two cold cases tied to John Ackroyd. But in the fall of 1991, an investigator looking back into Kay's case has an idea. He discovers that Roger Dale Beck, so the guy that was supposedly with John on Christmas Eve, he found out that he had gotten divorced from his wife, Pam. And this detective, he is willing to place a bet that now that maybe alliances have changed, stories might change as well.

• 30:38Ashley Flowers?

  So he tracks down Pam, who is now living in California. He shows up at her house, knocks on her door, and when she answers and finds out who this guy is, it takes almost no convincing at all for Pam to come clean. All those years ago, she had straight up lied about Roger and John. Pam tells the detective that Roger and John went out to poach deer on Christmas Eve morning, but they didn't return to the house until the next day. And when they did, they had blood on them. And it wasn't just like a little drop or stain here and there. Pam literally had to dispose of Roger's jeans and shirt. It was so bad. And they didn't even try to pass it off as deer blood.

• 31:20Ashley Flowers?

  They had told Pam that they had accidentally mistaken Kay for a deer and shot her. And they were going to need Pam to basically be their alibi. If police ever came around asking questions, she needed to tell them that they got home around noon. Eventually, Roger even admits to her that even that like bullshitting hunting accident story wasn't real. He told her that Kay had been sexually assaulted and shot. And Roger had threatened to do the same to Pam, which is probably why she lied for him. I mean, she was terrified. But with Pam's new information, Kay's case starts ramping back up. But the police are in a race against time at this point. They know John is still out there and could strike again.

• 32:02Ashley Flowers?

  Though, according to the Oregonian, at this time, John's basically been booted out of Santiam Junction. The people weren't comfortable with him being there. So he got moved, I assume by his supervisors, or maybe like he chose to leave, I don't know. But he is still at the same job, working as a mechanic for the state highway department. So like, your tax dollars hard at work, folks. So he's apparently not living with Linda anymore and is staying with his mother in Sweet Home, where he grew up. But he's working out of a town called Corvallis. And Corvallis, unfortunately, is a, well, unfortunately for the people there at the time, is a thriving little college town. And while it sounds like authorities plan to keep tabs on him, I'm not sure that's as easy as it sounds.

• 32:46Ashley Flowers?

  John's like a roving mechanic. That means that he is constantly moving up and down Highway 20. But in all of that moving, John does have some usual haunts. He becomes this like known commodity at this one particular place called Sherry's Diner along Highway 20 in Lebanon, Oregon. And there, this is wild to me, all the regulars there knew him by his CB radio handle, The Pervert.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, his handle was?

• 33:14Ashley Flowers?

  The Pervert. I know. And this guy is either the unluckiest man alive, or every girl and every woman who crosses his path is the unlucky one. Because in 1992, John finds himself right in the center of another missing persons case. Actually, this time, the case of two young women. It's a pair of best friends, 17-year-old Melissa Sanders and 19-year-old Sheila Swanson.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Wait, wait. Those names sound really familiar.

• 33:46Ashley Flowers?

  Because we talked about them before.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  In the Kelly Disney episode, right? Like, it's been a while.

• 33:50Ashley Flowers?

  It is. I'll link to that episode in the show notes for people to have a little bit of a refresher. But here, we can actually dive even deeper into the details of their cases. So according to The Lost Women of Highway 20, both girls hung out at Sherry's Diner, and they knew the pervert. He would buy food for Melissa, and he was there one of the last days the girls were ever seen, when they had come in and told everyone that they were gonna go on a camping trip in Newport, which is like along the Oregon coast.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  So John knew where they were going to be?

• 34:23Ashley Flowers?

  He did. And he even mentioned to the girls that he might be in the same area. Now, the girls' tent ends up being found over that way, empty. But the girls are never seen alive again. I don't know how much authorities looking into Kay's case really know about this new case yet. Part of giving him the boot out of town meant that it was harder to keep tabs on what was happening in the communities that he was living in, ones that he was working in, socializing in. And it being the 90s, information wasn't exactly super accessible between jurisdictions. So while investigators in one part of the state are looking for their two teens, investigators in another are running a parallel path, trying to reignite the Kay Turner investigation.

• 35:09Ashley Flowers?

  According to the doc, the US Fish and Wildlife had a new high-tech lab, basically. So Kay's clothes are sent off for forensic testing. And soon enough, the results come back with some very interesting finds. The first is that the waistband of Kay's shorts appeared to have been cut or sliced. Some sources say that her underwear were cut off, too.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Which is like the sexual assault that they let John go on.

• 35:35Ashley Flowers?

  On Marlene.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Marlene, yeah.

• 35:37Ashley Flowers?

  Also, tears in Kay's shirt appear to be from stab wounds. And lead fragments on the shirt indicate that she was shot. So that lines up, at least somewhat closely, with what John had told investigators about, like, the appearance of Kay's body when he claimed to have found her in February.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  And it lines up with what Pam said.

• 35:56Ashley Flowers?

  Yes. So if John couldn't feel the net kind of slowly closing in on him, he is about to. On May 31, 1992, police actually arrest, not John, but his friend Roger, for the murder of Kay Turner.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Why Roger and not John?

• 36:13Ashley Flowers?

  Good question. There is no clear answer that I have seen reported on. So I'm not sure if it was just because they had Pam really pinning Roger for it.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  That was like a stronger connection?

• 36:24Ashley Flowers?

  Maybe they were also hoping that Roger would flip on John, so they wanted him in custody first. I don't know. But not arresting John first, or at least at the same time, could have caused valuable evidence to be lost. Because a little over a week later, police discover that a storage unit that John had rented was completely cleared out the evening of the 31st. So the exact day that Roger was arrested.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  No, that's not suspicious at all, Ashley. What are you talking about?

• 36:51Ashley Flowers?

  I know. They...

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Do they know what was in the unit at all?

• 36:54Ashley Flowers?

  They don't. And unfortunately for them, the unit's been like... They never will. I mean, it's been, like, swept up. Someone else had moved in right after. I know they tried to, like, send someone into the crime lab to check the unit out, but there's like, there's nothing in the source material about what, if anything, they find. So I'm assuming it was nothing. Either way, again, they lost their opportunity for that. But it's game over for John almost two weeks after Roger's arrest. So on June 12, that's when John is finally arrested. And this means that Kay's family might finally see some justice all these years later. And two other families might not have to wait nearly as long because almost four months after his arrest. So now we're in October. This is October 10th.

• 37:36Ashley Flowers?

  Some hunters come across the bodies of Melissa and Sheila, a few miles off of Highway 20.

• 37:44Ashley Flowers?

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• 38:28Ashley Flowers?

  And it's $1 a day. So if price was ever stopping you before, you're officially out of excuses. Remove the guesswork with Ladder and get a real coach in your ear telling you exactly what to do for every workout. No thinking, everything planned for you. If you have an iPhone, head to ladder.fit/crimejunkie and take a quick quiz to find your perfect Ladder plan. Use my link and get a free seven day trial with no credit card and $10 off your first month if you join. Remember being a kid around the holidays and anytime you would ask for something, mom would always say, wait until the holidays. Well, with Mint Mobile's holiday deal, there's no waiting. Right now, this second, all of their plans are $15 a month.

• 39:11Ashley Flowers?

  Mint Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right with premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can even bring your current phone and your number. Choose from three, six, or 12-month plans and say goodbye to a monthly bill. It's so easy. Sign up online and get premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. So what are you waiting for? To get your new wireless plan for 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com/crimejunkie. That's mintmobile.com/crimejunkie. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/crimejunkie. Limited time offer upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months.

• 39:56Ashley Flowers?

  Plan required, $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabyte may slow when network is busy. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 40:11Ashley Flowers?

  According to Noel Crombie's reporting, the medical examiner thinks that the girls were most likely strangled, though there are some conflicting sources that say they were stabbed. Either way, like Kay, the conditions of the bodies make it difficult to determine precisely what happened. And like Kay, there's zero forensic evidence. The only possible piece of evidence police do find at the scene is this like little rivet near one of the bodies and some kind of beaded seat cushion. The speculation being that the rivet, which is like this little screw, it could be something that John like would have been using in his work. And the seat cushion is something

• 40:52Ashley Flowers?

  that highway workers often had in their trucks to keep them cool in the summer. So John's truck is searched. He didn't have one of these cushions in it, so maybe that one was his, but it was impossible to determine at the time. And John, who is now in custody, isn't talking. So while police try to connect some of the dots between the girls and John, ultimately, it is this all-too-familiar song. There is no physical evidence connecting John to the girls' murders. Now, sometime later, a coworker of John's would claim that around the time that the girls disappeared, John came into work late one night, and his arms and his hands were covered in dry blood. John claimed to have hit a deer and then gutted it,

• 41:36Ashley Flowers?

  but this guy, I guess, didn't even really believe his story then.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Did he go to police with the story?

• 41:41Ashley Flowers?

  If he did, it wasn't until later, like certainly not then. It sounds like he maybe mentioned the story to his boss, but then it just kind of like stayed work gossip at the time. And then after the news about Melissa and Sheila's bodies being found, like I think this guy began to wonder if there was a connection to this story. But again, a little unclear about like when he went to the police or the press or whatever. So in September of 1993, John goes on trial for Kay's murder. And according to the Statesman Journal, people like Roger's wife Pam testify against him. They also find more witnesses to corroborate what a predator, the quote, "pervert" is. A woman named Jane Morris testifies that one day in 1978, like months before Kay's disappearance,

• 42:25Ashley Flowers?

  she encountered John while she was riding a bike along a road in Camp Sherman. And she says that John pointed a gun at her, attempted to get her to stop, but thankfully she didn't. And then one of the more critical testimonies comes from a forensic anthropologist who tells the jury that the only way John could have seen wounds, like the type of wounds he described seeing on Kay, was if he saw them in the first few days after Kay died. So him saying even that he saw her in February, not August.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Even that separation wasn't enough to actually make sense.

• 42:59Ashley Flowers?

  It doesn't make sense. They're like, there is no way he could describe the cuts, the like the shot, whatever, unless it happened within like days.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  So goodbye, John.

• 43:07Ashley Flowers?

  Yep. On October 6, 1993, just a few days shy of the one year anniversary of Melissa and Sheila's bodies being discovered, over three years after his stepdaughter, Rachanda, vanished, and over 14 years after police are pointed to Kay's remains, that is when John Ackroyd is found guilty of Kay Turner's murder. According to an article in the Oregonian, he is sentenced to life with a 20-year minimum, which is the maximum under the law when that crime was committed. Over a month later, Roger Beck is also found guilty, and he receives the same sentence. Authorities seem to believe that Roger was only involved in Kay's murder.

• 43:49Ashley Flowers?

  And so they really focus their sole attention on John for answers in those cases for Melissa and Sheila, and of course, Rachanda, whose case has continued to make headlines occasionally during this time. But even though it's making headlines, police aren't much further along on that case. But they do keep coming back to her file, year after year. They even get desperate enough to ask John to help. In the fall of 2012, an investigator with the Lynn County Sheriff's Office visits John in prison, hoping maybe he's finally ready to talk or open up and provide some kind of answers to the questions that have surely haunted the people that he once called family. But despite the investigator's best efforts, John is not giving up his ghosts.

• 44:33Ashley Flowers?

  According to the Oregonian, he continues to spill the same lies he did in the beginning. And it sounds like this is the last time any investigator speaks with John. By 2013, there is some concern that John could eventually get out on parole. So despite only having circumstantial evidence, and as we've mentioned, like zero body, prosecutors do bring Richanda's case to a grand jury as sort of like a hail Mary. And the prosecution does have a solid pitch to throw. Like, logic dictates that John is probably the one who could have done this. He was the last one to have seen her alive.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Opportunity.

• 45:11Ashley Flowers?

  There was accusations of him sexually abusing her.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Which gives motive.

• 45:15Ashley Flowers?

  Oh, and by the way, he has now been convicted of Kate Turner's murder. So like, we've got this history here. And look, I'm all for due process, but we could kind of like probably know who did this. And apparently, the grand jury feels the same way because they indict John on a single count of murder. But indicting is different than prosecuting and convicting.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And can be a lot easier.

• 45:40Ashley Flowers?

  Right. So the prosecution, what they decide to do is they go to Richanda's family, specifically because they want to offer him a plea deal. They're like, listen, if we go to trial and he's acquitted, like, that's it. Like, it's over.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And he could go on to get parole.

• 45:55Ashley Flowers?

  Right. So in their minds, it's better to focus on like, they want to use this to focus on keeping him behind bars. And the family agrees. And John ends up entering a no contest plea. So he's not admitting fault, but he's not denying it either. And this outcome means that he can never be paroled. And while he receives some punishment for Rochanda, sadly, her body still hasn't been found. Like, that wasn't ever part of the deal that they made with him.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  What about Melissa and Sheila's cases? Did they ever bring anything against him there?

• 46:28Ashley Flowers?

  Ultimately, they decide not to. At this point, they say they're confident it is John who killed them. But John, at this point, is already serving a life sentence. Like, he's never getting out. So prosecutors decide not to proceed with that. Like, knowing he can never see the light of day has to be justice enough. Because that same year, John actually dies in prison. So they can never prosecute him, even in the future. And while some might think that that would bring this story to a close, there are still so many questions that remain unanswered, including if these are the only murders John committed.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  That's honestly what's been in the back of my mind this whole time. Has he ever been linked to any other cases?

• 47:09Ashley Flowers?

  Yeah, so the Oregonian flags, to date, five other people that have either gone missing from, or their remains have been found discovered in the general area off or around Highway 20 where John was known to operate. The first is a skull of a Jane Doe that they found in July of 1976.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Which predates Kay by like, two years?

• 47:33Ashley Flowers?

  It even predates, yeah, Marlene's sexual assault. The Oregonian calls this Jane Doe, I think they call her Swamp Mountain Doe. And they report that her skull was found a mile off Highway 20. She was believed to be, they think, younger than 35. And authorities found a leather coat, a belt, blue jeans, and a sandal with like, a white leather strap nearby that could have belonged to her. And then, in May of 1977, 15-year-old Karen Lee and 14-year-old Rodney Grissom went missing from the town of Lebanon. We know that John would have passed through there regularly. I mean, that's the same town where Sherry's Diner was located, where John would hang out in the 90s. It's where he encountered Melissa and Sheila. Karen and Rodney were never found,

• 48:17Ashley Flowers?

  but clothing and items of theirs were eventually found in the woods. And Karen's jeans appeared to be cut similarly to how John cut clothing off of Marlene and Kay. Now, what we learned about Karen and Rodney is that the two wanted to run away to California. And one of the teen's last phone calls to a friend indicated that they had found a ride, but who they were getting this ride from is unknown. Maybe John, maybe not. Then in August of 1977, 22-year-old Elizabeth Musler went missing, also from Lebanon. Her father was the last to see her downtown. In February of 1978, her body ended up being found in a shallow grave in the Thistle Creek area of Green Peter Reservoir.

• 49:02Ashley Flowers?

  And also in 1978, another skull of a Jane Doe was found by a logging crew in the woods near Snow Creek, which is like a quarter mile south of Highway 20.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Did they ever ask John about these other cases?

• 49:13Ashley Flowers?

  Sort of. I don't think he was asked in like great detail about these cases, but he was asked more broadly, like, hey, John, what about some of these like other cases in the area? He claimed he didn't know what they were talking about and he had nothing to do with anything. So at the end of the day, no other cases have been directly linked to John. It's all speculative at this point, but it shows that maybe this story isn't totally over. And while some of his victims' families can take some solace in the fact that this man will never harm anyone again, it's heartbreaking to think that there could still be other families who don't have or may not get the same answers. But it's never too late, and that's why we do this show.

• 49:58Ashley Flowers?

  So if anyone out there knows anything about these cases or about John Ackroyd and his life and his movements, please call the Lynn County Sheriff's Office tip line at 866-557-9988.

• 50:27Ashley Flowers?

  You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  And you can follow us on Instagram at @crimejunkiepodcast.

• 50:37Ashley Flowers?

  We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

• 51:14Ashley Flowers?

  Crime Junkie is an AudioChuck production. So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Growing up in a small town, I know how deeply a crime can shake a local community. And I know that what makes the headlines is rarely the full story. That's what Kylie Low explores on her show, Dark Down East. She digs into cases from Maine and New England using original reporting, archival records, and conversations with the people who knew them best. Each episode takes you inside the communities these stories shaped, and the families who never stop searching for answers. Listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  When the nights grow longer, the shadows start to stir. And that can only mean one thing. Full Body Chills is back. This season, step inside original tales where every doorway leads somewhere darker. Every stranger carries a secret, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. Each story takes you somewhere new, but be careful. You never know what might follow you home. So gather round, listen close, and stream Full Body Chills wherever you get your podcasts.