[narrator] John Ackroyd left a trail of devastation in his wake.
They know him,
what he did to Kaye Turner,
to Rachanda.
And now, 80 miles to the west,
on Highway 20,
he is on the move to new hunting grounds.
[George] I never got anything more
than "John Ackroyd's gonna start reporting to your shop,
and you can't tell anybody why he's here."
But Rachanda having disappeared
under very weird circumstances,
everybody were starting to then get
pretty concerned about John being around.
They were all saying the same thing,
"Why is he here?"
But the police want him
somewhere where they can monitor his behaviors.
[laughs] I thought, "This is the most stupid thing I ever heard."
He was made, what they call, a roving field mechanic.
He could be driving 130 miles a day,
and you're gonna monitor him?
Give me a break.
There were weeks on in
that I never even saw him.
He was on the road.
He was gone.
And John wasn't stupid.
He knew why he was there.
He was just like, "Yeah, go ahead.
Try and catch me."
[Kim] Lebanon and Sweet Home are 13 miles apart.
It's a big straight stretch of nothing.
We call it The Narrows.
There is nothing to do in Lebanon,
literally nothing,
except for go to Shari's.
That was a hangout on Highway 20.
I mean, that was the thing to do.
It was someplace to go.
It was a safe place to go.
We could just laugh and be ourselves
and spend time together.
[Kim] We played CB tag,
talked on the CB radios.
All the cars had CB radios.
You could talk to somebody in another car,
kind of, like, a moving cell phone
but attached to your car.
[Ruth] Kind of like a chat room,
just randomly talking to people.
We'd get on there and say their CB handle.
Mine was Okey-1.
Say, "Hey, Okey-1, are you out there?"
I'd say, "Hi, I'm Lady Know-It-All."
That was my handle, Lady Know-It-All.
Because I knew everything.
Speed Demon, Speed Wagon.
Bunny.
Night Rider.
General Public, GP.
I don't know why she called herself that.
It's so weird.
[Ruth] And that's when, at Shari's,
I first met John Ackroyd.
[Kim] When he introduced himself,
he said, "I'm The Pervert."
That was his CB radio handle.
The Pervert.
And immediately,
phew, something goes off in my brain
and I'm like, "Why would you say that so loud
in front of a bunch of women?"
Right?
"There's something up with this guy."
I knew that there was something not right.
People would say, "Give him a chance.
Give him a chance."
"Oh, you're always so suspicious of people."
I'm like, "Yeah.
No fooling.
This guy says he's The Pervert."
But after that, he didn't talk to any of us, really.
The only people he really ever talked to
were Melissa and Sheila.
They were just kids.
Both were really cute girls.
They were funny.
They were normal teenage girls,
laughing and joking.
You would've thought they were sisters.
You know that song, "Girls Just Like To Have Fun"?
That reminds me of Melissa.
Yeah.
She just wanted to have fun.
Just so full of life
-and she bounced into a room. -Oh, yeah.
She didn't walk into a room.
She was just bouncing all the time, you know?
-A lot of energy. [laughs] -[Steve] Yeah.
[Ruth] She was like,
a little bit of country
and a little bit of rock and roll.
When two teenage girls sometimes get together,
you know, they start being a little rebellious.
[Kim] I don't think either one of them had
a real structured upbringing.
Not that I'm saying anything negative about their parents.
I just think that, um...
there wasn't structure,
so they were all over the place.
They didn't have a nickel.
So they... they couldn't buy food.
They couldn't buy drinks.
They didn't have anything.
We'd be at Shari's,
and one of them would whisper in my ear,
"Will you take us to your house
so we can take a shower?
Or can you take us to your house
so we can put on makeup?"
I don't want people to have the misconception
that Melissa and Sheila were bad.
They weren't out looking for trouble.
They were looking to get their needs met.
Melissa, especially, that's what I think
she needed most, food, shelter,
love, companionship
from somebody who cared.
That's how Ackroyd would, you know,
get her to pay attention to him.
[Ruth] He was, like, obsessed with her.
But once he got her attention, then he became possessive.
[Kim] He never bought anything for Sheila, only Melissa.
And he would buy her nachos,
and he would, like, lean over against her,
put his hand on her leg, you know.
She would get sour cream on her face
and he'd wipe it off and then lick it on his...
Blech.
Just weird stuff, you know?
Always trying to touch her.
So I said to Melissa,
"It seems creepy,
like he's wanting something more from you."
And she goes, "Tut, oh, Kim, he's like my dad."
But you could just tell by the way he groomed Melissa
that he had done this before.
[narrator] Finally, people see John
for the monster he truly is.
Soon, others will join the fight to stop him.
[newscaster] Thirty-six-year-old Bill Hanlon
was recently appointed
to the office of Jefferson County DA
by Governor Neil Goldschmidt.
[Neil] When I took over the office,
my secretary had a... had a note,
"Call Linn County district attorney."
So I called him up.
He says, "Hey, have you heard...
Ever heard of John Ackroyd?"
And I said, "Yeah, John Ackroyd killed Kaye Turner,
but nobody could prove it."
And he said, "Well, his stepdaughter disappeared,
and we're having a meeting tomorrow in Sweet Home PD,
and we'd like you to come
and bring everything you know about John Ackroyd."
[sucks teeth] That's where it all started for me.
[Will] I was just a new detective.
I was the baby, the rookie, you know, the gofer guy.
I says, "What can I do to help?"
My lieutenant, he says,
"Keep track of them case files for us
and we'll let you know if we need any help."
But I realize that none of those reports
had ever been gathered into one place.
They were scattered around in different agencies.
But from the reports that I read,
they reached a point in Kaye Turner case
where they were sure that Ackroyd's the guy.
But John had an alibi.
[Noelle] John Ackroyd was with his friend,
and hunting partner, Roger Dale Beck.
Roger Beck was married to my dad's sister, Pam.
John, my dad and Pam grew up together.
[Will] Pam told the cops
that John and Roger were at home
and attested to the certain hours that they were there.
She alibied them.
[Jennifer] Roger could get mean and violent.
And when he got drunk, he would be even worse.
[Will] We heard that Pam divorced Roger,
and she had moved to California.
An ex-wife not covering for some dirtbag anymore
is really a great source of information.
So I went to California,
walked up to her front door,
knocked on the door.
And there were two things that really surprised me.
She told me, "I knew you were coming," and...
"I lied like hell back then."
[Will] There's some times you run across events
that, kind of, lead you to believe
that you're right in the middle,
right at the center.
When I talked to Pam,
yeah, that was one of those times.
She was telling me
that she had lied for John and Roger.
At the time of the disappearance of Kaye Turner,
they had come in with blood on them,
and they made statements to her
about accidentally killing a jogger.
I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up
as I spoke with her,
because I realized at that point
that the hunch I had
had worked out the way it should.
I came back to Oregon and I met with Bill Hanlon.
[Bill] That was the turning point in the case.
She told us that they were talking about knives and guns,
and they had blood all over 'em
and how to get rid of the evidence.
At that point, Roger Beck wasn't a suspect at all.
So that refocused the case on two defendants.
At that point, things really got busy.
From then on, it was like,
"Go back to California, ask this and this and this.
See if you can find out more about this."
Let's go find that truck.
Where's the evidence at now?"
[Bill] Ackroyd was roaming around our county.
And if we weren't successful,
we could continue to find
dead women around our county
for the rest of Ackroyd's life.
So we had to make sure we did it right.
If we lost, we could've never prosecuted that again.
Double jeopardy means you can't be held accountable
for a crime twice.
Prosecution has one shot at you.
That's why I was willing to work evenings and weekends
for all those years.
That's why Mark dedicated so much time.
I became the local volunteer deputy of Camp Sherman.
It's a labor of love.
You don't get paid.
We never wanna give up on solving a case.
[narrator] The detectives know their time is running out.
And in May, 1992, it does.
[Ruth] Melissa came to me one day
and she said, "I'm going camping with my family,
and it should be lots of fun,
and I get to take Sheila with me.
I'm gonna put on my bathing suit
and I'm gonna try to work on my tan."
-We rented five camp spots over at the coast... -Mmm-hmm.
...for a family reunion.
We had that all week,
fishing and crabbing,
making clam chowder.
But that day when they came in and said,
"Oh, we're going camping,"
The Perv was there.
And he said,
"Oh, where are you camping at?"
And they said,
"Oh, we don't know exactly where we're camping at
but somewhere in Newport."
And he says, "Well, I'm throwing a party in Newport on Saturday night."
So they were gonna go camping, right?
And he's gonna miraculously throw a party in Newport
on this Saturday night.
And I remember telling Melissa and Sheila,
"Do not hook up with The Perv."
They were like, "Why would we do that?"
But I could tell on Melissa's face
that something was up.
And I said, "Melissa, I'm not kidding."
[Steve] Melissa and Sheila
were supposed to spend the whole weekend there,
but I don't...
You know how teenage girls are.
They're just... Ants in their pants.
"Gotta go, gotta go."
And I guess they were at the phonebooth
at the campsite,
calling everybody they can think of
to come and get 'em or get a ride back to Sweet Home.
[Ruth] It was like two weeks after
when I first heard that they never showed back up.
[Kim] We just figured they ran away
'cause let's be honest,
they were always running around.
So we just figured they ran away, they'll be back.
They'll show up.
[Steve] Melissa would call.
She would call and let us know where she was.
And when she come up missing that time,
no calls, nothing.
Melissa's parents, they knew something was wrong,
so did Sheila's parents.
Sheila's parents said she'd always call.
The police said, "Well, why didn't you call us sooner?"
"Well, because it's not abnormal for her to go,
but it's abnormal for her not to call."
And the police just put it on the back-burner.
-[Barb] Her parents called repeatedly. -[Steve] Yeah.
But they felt ignored,
-like the police wasn't taking anything seriously. -Yeah.
They were viewed as runaways by the police.
They asked a couple of questions
over couple of people
and then it was like, "Mmm, we ain't nothing to go on."
[Noelle] In the case of Kaye Turner,
there was no smoking gun,
there was no forensic evidence,
but there were little bits and pieces
that added to the circumstantial evidence
linking Ackroyd to the crime.
Eventually we felt like we had enough
to charge John Ackroyd.
So we wanted to talk to the judge.
And he said, "That's not strong enough for the grand jury."
So we backed up and... [inhales sharply]
...got together again.
And that's when the US Fish and Wildlife Lab got involved.
They had a new high-tech forensic lab.
So we took down Kaye's clothes.
And it took them a long time
but they found a lot of great stuff.
They determined that the tears in the shirt
were a stab wound.
They found lead fragments on her shirt
that they determined were shots or bullet holes.
He knew we were after him.
But he was more than happy
to get the news media story.
They're trying to tie me in because I went down...
We went out there at morning and poached a deer.
[reporter] Would you be willing to take a lie detector test
if questions we asked you about Kaye Turner's murder?
Already did.
[reporter] How'd it go?
I don't know. That was 14 years ago.
And with all the stuff that went down about that,
I don't think if I ever found another body in the woods
that I'd say anything about it.
He is depicting this as wild coincidences,
and these are misfortunes that have befallen him.
John talked about the wounds on Kaye Turner's body
when he had found her in February.
[Bill] And then we found this forensic anthropologist
who was able to testify for us
that Ackroyd's description of that scene
had to have been within two or three days of
the moment that he killed her.
[reporter] What do you think of the charges
against you, Mr. Ackroyd?
I don't know all of 'em.
[newscaster] Ackroyd and another man, Roger Beck,
are charged with kidnapping, raping
and killing Kaye Turner.
[Byron] Everybody knew about my sister.
It's the most exciting thing
that's happened in that town in a while,
you know, that's front page.
I started getting tormented at school and stuff,
you know, bullied and picked on.
"I heard your stepdad killed your sister."
When my mom and I would be alone,
I'd ask my mom,
"You think John could've done it?"
And she'd get upset.
She'd get upset, you know,
how dare I even ask that question?
And then, I think, one of the last times when I asked my mom,
"Do you think John could do it?" And she...
I think she was cooking breakfast,
and she threw down the spatula and she's like,
"I don't know, Byron, you tell me.
Did John do it?
'Cause I want to know, too."
[Kim] Somebody said, "Did you see The Perv?"
And I'm like, "No."
They're like, "That's the guy that murdered that girl."
And I'm like, "What?
What do you mean?"
So that's when I found out
John Ackroyd and The Perv were the same person.
[narrator] At last, after decades,
the monster has been caught.
But he leaves one final heartbreak
for his pursuers to find.
[Steve] It was just five months
after the girls went missing when they found the bodies.
That was devastating.
You know, you wonder how much they suffered.
How could I have helped her?
How could I have stopped it?
This whole thing still...
I mean, it hurts and it angers me
after all this time.
And I just... [sighs]
It's sad and I'm never gonna be at peace with it
because it's not okay.
I have nightmares to this day.
I can hear her voice calling to me.
And it's hard.
Sorry.
It's affected me my whole life, as a mom.
I mean, their moms will never be the same.
[Mark] I knew exactly that it was him.
It fit all the patterns.
He worked on that route.
[Will] So I went and talked to the Lincoln County
and said, "Hey, you really need to take a look at this cat,
he's done this and this and this and we're at this point in our investigation."
And you can't say, "Hey, now, listen damn it, this is the only way.
We're right, you're wrong."
It doesn't work that way.
[narrator] Two more women, eternally silenced.
Will the monster ever be stopped?
Will they finally trap him?
[Bill speaking]
[Bill] One of the most significant moments was when we played
the interview that Ackroyd did.
He told this TV guy, he said, "Yeah, they know who killed Kaye."
[interviewer] What's his name?
Roger.
[interviewer] Roger?
I think Beck.
[interviewer] Friend of your?
Not really. He's a friend of friends of mine.
It's his best friend, you know.
His ex-wife and Ackroyd had been main squeeze in high school.
It just shows that he was just totally [bleep].
Totally trying to avoid any culpability.
Good evening, it's October the 5th, a Tuesday, 1993. I'm Mike Smith.
And I'm Carrie Gilman. John Ackroyd is accused of killing Kaye Jean Turner
almost 15 years ago, as Turner was jogging on Christmas eve in Camp Sherman.
This afternoon both prosecution and defense gave their closing arguments,
and now, will await a verdict.
[Mark] His job is to put doubt in the mind of the jury.
And if he can create enough doubt, they'll find him not guilty.
[Bill] I didn't watch the jury.
When they walked in, I didn't have any indication from them what they were gonna do.
If we weren't successful,
he was gonna kill other women.
A jury tonight has reached its decision in the trial of John Arthur Ackroyd.
Ackroyd was convicted this evening of killing Kaye Jean Turner.
Another man charged into the death of Turner will have a separate trial,
beginning on April 18th.
He buried himself.
His lies throughout all the way to the end,
all of those lies just... just aggregated to bury him.
[newscaster] Kaye's husband Noel Turner thought the sense of relief
would be much greater than it is.
You know, I feel like justice has been served.
But it's not like the total weight's off your back.
I mean, maybe it's just gonna be there.
Mom got off the phone and stuff and I was, like, "What's up?"
And she's, like, "John got convicted of the murder of Kaye Turner."
I'm like, "Whoa."
'Cause at that time that's when I'm starting to, kind of, shift.
Like, "I don't think this guy is innocent."
My mom was trying to justify it.
When we talked with her and tell her that we thought John was probably responsible
for Rachanda's death.
She would get on board with it then drift back to whatever her basic default was,
supporting John or just doing what he said.
I don't think it took very much for John Ackroyd to control Linda Ackroyd.
[narrator] For 20 years, Ackroyd rots in prison.
20 years, questions go unanswered.
John Ackroyd had been in prison for, you know, several years.
We get word there was some possibility that he would get paroled.
They say, "In cold cases, time is your friend."
People's opinions change.
I was hoping I would go talk to John and he would have a change of heart.
[Mike speaking]
How can I get John Arthur Ackroyd to actually talk to me
without giving me a line of crap?
It was getting close to Christmas time.
I proposed to him, "How about you tell me where she is,
we find her, you take us there,
and we'll let you have Christmas dinner with your family?"
[John speaking]
[Mike speaking]
-[John speaking] -[Mike speaking]
[John speaking]
[Mike speaking]
[John speaking]
He just, he wouldn't take the bait, if you will.
So we wanted to bring John Arthur Ackroyd to trial on Rachanda's case.
My hope was that through plea negotiations,
that he would tell us where she was.
Walking up the stairs into the court room, my anxiety started going up.
I mean, there was once I thought, "Man, can I even do this?"
Do we take it to trial or do we allow John to plead it out?
This is kind of like, "What do I do? My mom ain't here and my dad's in prison."
The two people who should be here because this is their child.
You know, and I'm like, "What what is going to be the difference
if we get a conviction or if he pleads to this?" And they're like, "Nothing."
Ackroyd cut a deal with Linn County authorities to
enter a no-contest plea for Rachanda's death
in an exchange, he would not seek parole.
But as a part of the plea, he's not giving up the location of Byron's sister.
[Mike] I had two goals, Ackroyd would stay in prison.
And two, Byron will get justice. Then we would get Rachanda's body back.
And, I think for me,
it's kind of a failure.
Byron deserves a little bit of justice,
closure.
[Noelle] Ackroyd made the plea in open court,
but then the judge immediately signed an order to seal the records.
It was highly unusual, because pleas, typically, are a matter of public record.
Attorneys with extensive experience in Oregon's criminal courts
told The Oregonian that they've never heard of such a thing.
So it was extraordinary.
It protected Ackroyd to have it sealed?
Does it serve the prosecution?
I don't know.
[Byron] It took me a lot of years to actually get to the point where
I realized that John is the one that killed my sister.
'Cause you would have to admit that
someone that you cared about, someone that you thought loved you,
someone that you loved yourself, would do something that heinous and hurtful.
But hearing him actually plead no contest to the charges,
to me that was just every ounce of me knowing that John killed my sister.
If you were accused of murder, are you gonna take that no-contest plea?
No.
[narrator] John Ackroyd is guilty.
Kaye Turner's killer is behind bars.
But what about the other victims?
[narrator] Who will speak for those who have never been found,
who's deaths remain unsolved?
They were silenced in life.
Can they be heard now?
[Linda] I was retired from the DA's office,
and I missed a large portion of my job,
I read that the previous DA had opened up three cold cases.
And that he was forming a task force to investigate them.
And so in May of 2009, I said I would love to help your cold case task force.
We started looking into the Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson case.
What I wanted for Melissa and Sheila was to have someone held accountable.
I wanted to solve it for the girls and for their families and for the community.
I mean, this community has had this black cloud hanging over them of these murdered girls.
At the crime scene, Sheila and Melissa were found about 50 feet off of Hayes Creek road.
I'm thinking that the one body was over in this area,
and the other was about 50 feet away, just on the other side of that stump.
The medical examiner could not determine cause of death.
But he did note that there were several large fissures
in one of them's abdomen and one of them's chest area,
that could be indicative of a knife wound.
[Ron] They found near Sheila's body part of a rivet.
-The girls wouldn't have a rivet. -[Linda] Right.
Why would they have a rivet?
But a mechanic would.
One of the things they also found was a beaded seat cushion
and that was something almost all of the ODOT coworkers had
and that was missing out of Ackroyd's truck when it was searched.
Around the time the girls were reported missing,
one of the few ODOT workers that worked after hours.
-They couldn't say the exact time. -Right.
Somewhere between ten to midnight.
They heard the door bang.
And so they went out to see who it was.
And there was Ackroyd getting out of his truck,
and his arms are covered in dried blood from the tip of his fingers to his elbows,
on both arms.
[George] Wow, man, what happened to you?
You're afraid when you see something like that.
The first reaction is that they got hurt.
Second reaction from what they said, "That was way too much blood to be his."
And he told them, "You know, I was coming back from Newport,
and some guy had hit a deer and I helped him salvage some meat."
And they didn't think anything of it until John gets arrested
and they found the bodies in the area where John had been working.
[Linda] We were building a really good circumstantial case.
We really were gaining momentum
and moving forward.
And then all of a sudden,
Ackroyd dies.
I was really taken aback by that.
Because it kind of stopped what we were trying so hard to do.
We failed because he died, so we didn't get there fast enough, you know.
We just didn't get there fast enough.
The thing that was the most disturbing was that Sheila and Melissa go missing
the night of May 3rd, 1992.
John Ackroyd is arrested on June 12th, 1992.
They came so close to missing him.
[Mark] When the two young girls died,
I felt like we failed.
Completely.
Because we left the guy on the street,
and he did it again.
[Linda] In order to be considered a serial killer, you have to have killed
three or more people.
So finding out that John Ackroyd murdered Sheila and Melissa,
put him in that category.
There were a cluster of disappearances that occurred in the late 70's
off of Highway-20.
John Ackroyd started working for the Oregon Department of Transportation
in January 1978.
In his position as an ODOT driver, I'm sure he's coming across women who were stranded
and need road-side assistance.
And they would trust him. I mean, he's a state worker, driving a state truck.
They're out on the side of the road, you know, probably
in the middle of the night, who else were they gonna trust to get them to a safe place?
It's just
an eerie thing to think about a serial killer roaming up and down Highway-20
in a state truck, abducting and murdering women.
I wonder how many more women are murdered and missing that we just don't know about,
because of all the years that he was driving up and down that highway.
[Mike] Melissa and Sheila, they were found on Highway-20 towards the coast.
So,
we'll go over here,
a little bit farther up,
one of the unidentified skeletons we have is Swamp Mountain Doe.
We don't know her story.
Because we don't know who she is. We know she was under 30.
Then you go up the road about 10 miles and that's where Snow Creek Doe was found,
which is another skeletal remains.
And this area here, is where Elizabeth Mussler was found
at Thistle Creek Boat Ramp.
[Linda] Mussler lived in the Jolly Roger Apartments on Highway-20.
John Ackroyd's younger sister lived in that same apartment complex.
So one day, she leaves her apartment and she's standing in the parking lot
waiting for her dad to pick her up to take her to an eye appointment,
and she's never seen again.
[Mike] Another few miles was Karen Lee and Rodney Grissom.
They were two, I think, runaways.
They were last seen in Sweet Home.
Karen Lee was talking on the phone and she said, "I gotta go, my ride's here."
Logging crew found clothing in 1978, that belonged to Karen.
And then about four years later, just about a 1/4-mile away,
that's where Rodney's clothing and some other articles were found.
These are victims whose either their possessions or their remains were found
in the same, kind of, broad swath off of Highway-20, where Ackroyd would've worked
and lived and hunted and fished.
These are the areas that he knew very well. So these cases have long been, kind of,
associated with John Ackroyd.
You know, in the case of Kaye, her case was solved,
and ended with a conviction of two men who killed her,
and they went to prison for a long period of time.
But that wasn't the case for the other people.
It certainly wasn't the case for Rachanda,
whose case was sealed and received no attention from the press.
And it definitely wasn't the case either for Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson,
who were overlooked in life as they were in death.
Their families were with none of whatever healing may come from a trial.
It wasn't the case for Marlene,
who's report of a rape just sat in a file drawer for years.
She suffered quietly,
never being able to find any kind of peace or healing, being ignored by a system.
And the cost for that was
extraordinary for other women he would encounter.
So this is actually about what happens when you ignore women.
[Marlene] If they would've believed one iota of my story,
this would never have ever happened, ever.
Those poor women would still be alive.
I took my own power back, I had too. No one else was gonna give it to me.
I want women to know that they don't have to cower back down.
Stay strong.
Stand your ground.
We give life.
We should be a force to be reckoned with.
When people say, "The best days of your life are when you get married
and have your children," they're not joking, man.
Greatest moments in time.
And to know that my sister didn't get that opportunity,
is very difficult.
I knew when I had kids, it was gonna be way different.
[Michelle] Just thinking about that day,
like what Rachanda might have had to go through,
it was preventable.
Well, listen to your children.
If a child comes to you and they're telling you something's happening,
just go look, just go investigate, just talk to them.
I will take care of my children, I will take care of any child around me.
And I will fight for them.
I would fight for them until I absolutely have no breath left in me.
If Rachanda was able to be a mama, she would've done the same thing.
Her children would've been the most loved and well-cared for.
She would've broke the cycle.
Because we broke the cycle.