Going West: True Crime - Highway 20 Killer // 117

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Between the late 1970’s to the early 1990’s, a monster invaded a main highway across Oregon and committed multiple crimes against in his wake. Although his name was always known, he was always somehow one step ahead of police and continued to get away with murder. But as time went on and fresh eyes viewed the case files, investigators finally pursued justice for numerous victims. This is the story of, Rachanda Pickle, Kaye Turner, Marlene Gabrielson, Melissa Sanders, Shiela Swan, and potentially many others. This is also the story of John Ackroyd, also know as The Highway 20 Killer. *BONUS EPISODES* patreon.com/goingwestpodcast *CASE SOURCES* https://projects.oregonlive.com/ghostsofhighway20/stories-annotated.pdf https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/206340289/john-arthur-ackroyd https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2018/12/pers-qa-murder-conviction-didnt-disqualify-john-ackroyd-from-pers-pension.html https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/171981794/kaye-jean-turner https://charleyproject.org/case/rachanda-lea-pickle https://www.reddit.com/r/serialkillers/comments/id745p/john_ackroyd_as_a_possibility_for_the_attack_on/ ( https://www.reddit.com/r/serialkillers/comments/id745p/john_ackroyd_as_a_possibility_for_the_attack_on/ ) Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is going on True Crime fans, I'm your host Teef and I'm your other host Daphne, and you're listening to Going West. This felt like a really good time to cover this case that was actually suggested by At Murder Knits on Instagram, also known as Tabitha. Thank you, Tabitha. We were on Highway 20 this past week. Yeah, we were. We're on a little road trip, and we were like,

oh, this is kind of weird. We're covering this case, and we're driving down this highway for many hours. Yes, it's a very, very long stretch of highway. Yeah, so it felt appropriate to cover it this week and I also just want to mention, we really appreciate everybody who sends us case recommendations. So again, thank you Tabitha. And sometimes we either forget to note if you did recommend a case or we find it again later.

So if we don't say your name and you did recommend a case where so sorry and we didn't do it on purpose. But please don't come for us. But we appreciate all of you so much, so thank you and thank you to everybody for tuning in today. I also wanted to let you guys know that we just dropped our spring summer merch collection. So really fun, we have some awesome new hoodies, we have this really amazing sage colored hoodie, we have a pink hoodie, we have a phone case that I'm obsessed with and I'm using right now.

Water bottles, beach towels, tote bags. My, the tote bag I love, I've been using it when I go grocery shopping. So check it all out. Head on over to goingwestpod.com, hit the shop tab and enjoy. And we actually have a fanny pack for all of you guys who like to sport

and rock the fanny pack. Yeah, we gotta, we gotta tell this stuff. So go check it out all of you guys who like to sport and rock the Fanny Pack. Yeah, we got a ton of stuff. So go check it out, hope you guys love it, hope you guys enjoy rocking going west and again, thanks for tuning in. Alright guys, this is episode 117 of going west, so let's get into it. Thank you. Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, a monster invaded the main highway across Oregon and committed multiple crimes against women in his weight. Although his name was always known, he was always somehow one step ahead of police and continued to get away with murder. But as time went on and fresh eyes viewed the case files, investigators finally pursued

justice for numerous victims. This is the story of Richandah Pickle, K Turner, Marlene Gabrielson, and potentially many others. This is also the story of John Acroid, also known as the Highway 20 Killer. John Arthur Acroid was born on October 3, 1949 to parents Rosalie and Ivan Acroid in Sweet Home Oregon, which is a small, kind of blue collar logging town of, well, in 1949 when John was born, around 3,500 people. And it's often referred to as the Getaway to the Santheum playground because the South Santheum River runs through Sweethome, and it's very close to various lakes along with the Cascade Mountains.

So lots of gorgeous nature over there. Sweethome sits on Highway 20, which as you can probably already tell is a big part of this story. It's an incredibly long highway that stretches from coast to coast, so it goes from Oregon all the way to Massachusetts and passes straight across through 12 states. But since this story takes place in Oregon, I'll also mention that Highway 20 begins in Newport, so on the coast intersecting the 101 Freeway, and goes east through the middle of the state, so through Corvallis, Sweet Home, Sisters, Bend, Burns, and then off into Idaho, etc. John

had one older sister and one younger sister, and his father Ivan worked as a maintenance worker, while his mother Rosalie worked in the administrative office of the local police department. other Rosalie worked in the administrative office of the local police department. John definitely wasn't the best student, and he was actually known to have been in special education classes due to this. This mixed with him being very much a loner type. He was bullied in school and didn't have many friends at all. And as John creeped into his teen years, he began committing petty crimes which landed him in trouble with the law when he was accused of theft at the age of 16. He avoided a felony charge by enlisting in the US Army where he worked as a mechanic in

Germany, Korea, and Thailand after graduating from Sweet Home High School in 1968. But it wasn't too long before John went AWOL and was caught trying to sell stolen goods in marijuana. Before he was discharged, he had a son named Donald in June of 1971, but unfortunately we couldn't find any information about this other than the fact that John was 22 at the time. Once he was out of the military in the 1970s, John returned to Oregon where he began working as a state employee for the Oregon Department of Transportation, a beautiful 20-year-old Native American woman named Marlene Gabriel Sin was at the

sister's rodeo in the very quaint western town of Sisters Oregon, which is just outside a bend. Oh, we love sisters, such a cute little town. Love sisters. If you guys haven't been, you should go. And if you don't know what it looks like, you should look up sisters. It's very, very charming. So Marlene and her husband had driven there earlier that day from Lebanon, which was also

on Highway 20 and roughly a two hour drive away, to camp, attend the rodeo, and just have some fun since they hadn't been out since before their three-month-old daughter had been born. That evening, they sat around a fire with a bunch of their friends and drink beers and were having a great time. But later on in the evening, Marlene's husband said that he wanted to go off with some of his friends, which would leave Marlene behind. She didn't want him to do that, so they got into an argument and by the end of it, Marlene

decided that she just wanted to go home and be with the baby. She obviously hadn't been planning to go home that night and since she had enjoyed a few beers, she was under the influence and couldn't drive herself home. So just after midnight, she kind of stormed out of the campground and tried to hitch a ride from someone on Highway 20, which remember was very popular thing to do in the 70s. But it being dark and rural road, the passing cars were very few and far between, so she headed back to camp. But as Marlene was approaching the campsite, a guy who had noticed she was looking for a ride told her that his friend John Acroid could give

her one. And although she didn't know this guy, she felt it was credible enough, and like Daphne said, people kind of hitchhiked a lot back in the 70s so Marlene really didn't have any concerns about it. Moments later she jumped into John's truck between him and the stranger who had offered the ride and they took off. But shortly after the other man got out of the car and he did this by putting his hand out of the window and using the outdoor handle since there was no indoor passenger handle. Marlene noticed this in the moment, but since she was a bit drunk, she didn't fully process that fact.

And before the man closed the door, he rolled up the window. As Marlene started to put the puzzle pieces together that she was being trapped in a stranger's truck, she also noticed a rifle in the back and a hunting knife next to John's seat. But in her days' den-tired state, she drifted off to sleep, just hoping that she would wake up safely at home. About an hour later, Marlene woke up to the pain of her head hitting the frame of the truck's door while John pulled her by her ankles out of the truck. She remembers John ripping her clothes off completely, using his hunting knife while he told her that she was going to do what he said, and then he raped her out there in the woods where absolutely no one could hear or see what was happening.

Afterwards, John apparently just stated that he didn't know what to do with her, and Marlene pleaded for her life saying that she had a baby and she just wanted to go home. Because in that moment, Marlene says that she couldn't put her clothes back on since they'd been totally ripped and she was basically in the middle of nowhere. So she couldn't imagine being naked trying to hitch another ride after something so traumatic had just been done to her. So John grabbed a pair of old plaid pants from his truck and had her put them on before they both got into his truck and drove the remaining hour to her mother-in-law's house in Lebanon.

And Merlin got smart here because she wanted to make sure that she could identify him later, so she acted almost as if she liked him and asked for his phone number, which he gave to her and she wrote on a pack of cigarettes. And John had the audacity to say he wanted to see her again. And Marlene just tried really hard to play along before getting into Lebanon, and this is really smart actually because he easily could have killed her, you know, or done away with her. Right, exactly. He said he didn. We're done away with her. Right exactly. He said he didn't know what to do with her now.

Right. But by acting like she was kind of like, okay, this is fine. You know, unfortunately, it's what she had to do to survive the situation. And so when John dropped her off, she ran into her mother-in-law's house, balling, and explained her what had happened. And Marlene made sure not to shower before she could get a rape kit done that same night. So she really had to think here. The really shitty thing here is that police were definitely not on Marlene's side. She

told her side of things and the rape kit did prove that she had vaginal swelling and tearing along with male DNA, but John told police that Marlene had come onto him and seduced him. The hospital had noted that Marlene had scratches on her back as well as bruises on her legs and back, but this didn't seem to be enough proof for police. They asked both Marlene and John to take a polygraph test, which they agreed to, and these were conducted within a few weeks of the assault. The police sergeant concluded that Marlene lied during her test, but he didn't explain why this was so in the report.

When John's polygraph test was done, the polygraph examiner determined that he was not lying. And to top it all off, the police did question the stranger who had briefly been in the car with John and Marlene, and he said that Marlene was drunk and he didn't know John to be violent, so he said John must have been telling the truth. So with that, the police stopped pursuing the charges against John for rape. And we'll touch more on this story a little bit later, but you kinda have to wonder how many other women he had done this to before Marlene since he had the broken passenger handle

because that's such a move. And as many of us know, Ted Bundy did the same thing. Yeah, I mean, these guys think smart. They think, how am I gonna get away with this? How can I trap somebody in my vehicle? I mean, they think these things through before they do them, most for the most part. The following year in 1978, 35-year-old K. Turner lived in Eugene, Oregon with her husband,

Noel Turner, and K, previously known as K. Gray, was born in Montana on August 8, 1943, but was raised as an only child in Southern Oregon by her parents Catherine and Fred. While living in Eugene, Kay worked for Planned Parenthood before transferring to a local public health agency where she worked as a manager. But in her free time, she loved running as well as just being active outdoors in general, and she lived in the perfect place to do that. So Kay had competed in marathons and even climbed Mount Washington in New Hampshire, which is known to be the most dangerous small mountain in the world due to its extremely high wind velocity. During the Christmas holiday in 1978,

Kay, her husband Noll, and some of their friends all headed off to Camp Sherman, which is an idyllic little community with a campground and lodging retreat right on the Metoleus River off Highway 20 in Oregon. It's a perfect place to kind of relax in the summer with a dip in the river and picnic with a view, or a beautiful, maybe even snowy holiday vacation in the charming cabins amongst the many ponderosa pine trees.

Upon the group's arrival, they made a beautiful, hearty meal in the cabin and sang Christmas carols together. So it was kind of proving to be a homey and happy holiday break together. But on the morning of December 24th, Christmas Eve in 1978, Kay headed out for her usual morning run amongst the crisp winter air. She had asked the others if they wanted to join, but since no one was up for it, she happily headed out by herself at about 8.15am, promising to be back within the hour. However, two hours later, she still wasn't back, so her husband really started to worry.

So at about 10am, Noel got into the couple's car and began driving around the area looking for her, but to no avail. At that point, he was really worried, especially since they were in an area that she wasn't familiar with. So he called police to explain what was going on. Luckily, they took this one seriously. And a big reason why they did was because of a gruesome attempted murder that it occurred a few miles outside of Camp Sherman just one year prior. Little detour, this story is believed to have possibly been connected to the Highway 20 Killer, but it's never been confirmed.

It's known as the Klein Falls Axe Attack since it happened at Klein Falls State Park in DeShoots County, Oregon. The story goes that in the summer of 1977, a 19-year-old woman named Terry Gents and her roommate, 20-year-old Avery Goldman, wanted to take a summer cycling trip after a long school year at Yale University. Terry was from Illinois and Avery was from Massachusetts, but both had been attending Yale in Connecticut and thought a bike ride across the United States via the Trans-American Trail would be exciting. Their bike ride ended in Astoria, Oregon, which is the small coastal town actually where

the goonies was filmed nearly a decade later. So once they got there, the two young women headed back east and stopped in Redmond, Oregon, which is just north of Bend, to camp overnight along the river on the night of June 22nd. Although this area is incredibly gorgeous, both Terria and Avra individually had a creepy suspicion and instinct that someone was watching them. And we've all kind of had this feeling throughout our lives, and it's a very terrifying one. I think we went into this and our other show The Dark Parts. We did.

Yeah, which is on hiatus, but it's like a real thing that you can feel that. Yeah, you can sense somebody watching you. So when they told each other this, they only became more concerned, but they went to sleep anyway since they didn't see anything. At about 11.30pm, they both woke up when a truck drove up to their campsite, which was very concerning since again, they had biked their alone. They eased up a bit thinking that it was just some mistaken teenagers, but then suddenly,

the truck drove into their campsite and over their tent crushing 19-year-old Terry's body beneath it. After driving over the tent a man got out of the truck and struck Avera in the head with an axe six times. Then he moved over to Terry who had been crushed by the truck and as he lifted his arms to bring the axe down on her, she pleaded for her life and told him to take anything that he wanted, but to leave them alone. And get this, Terry actually caught the axe in her hands, right over her heart before the man withdrew the axe and then got into his truck and drove away. Meanwhile, being run over by the truck had broken both of Terry's arms, as well as one of her legs, multiple ribs, and her collarbone, as well as one of her legs, multiple ribs,

and her collarbone, and a crushed one of her lungs. But somehow, Terry was able to make her way onto a nearby road to flag down some drivers, who happened to be two teenagers, who stopped to help the two young women, and within minutes, the police arrived to the scene while Terry and Avera were taken to St. Charles Medical Center in Ben. So, I mean, this is just an insane story. This guy drives up to the campsite, runs these two young girls over. So scary, like, oh my god, could you imagine?

Yeah, and then comes at them with a fucking axe, like, insane. Yeah, and also Avera had to undergo a nine-hour brain operation due to being struck with an axe, six times in her head. So her injuries were very severe, but she survived and made a full recovery. That's badass. Honestly, she is tough as nails. Yeah, it's insane. And because of the brain trauma, she wasn't able to remember the attack at all, so it

was up to Terry to try to identify their attacker. And since it was nighttime outdoors, all she really kind of saw of the guy that he looked like a young cowboy. So this attacker was originally thought to have been a 17 year old kid named Richard Dam, as well as potentially a later convicted child rapist and murderer named Richard Wayne Godwin, but no one was ever convicted of this crime. And eventually for whatever reason, the files and evidence were lost in the case. But Terry Gents wrote a book called Peace of Paradise regarding the attack.

So you should definitely read that if you want to learn more. I'm going to order it because this whole story, like I had a hard time not delving more into this case because it's so interesting Yeah, I definitely want to read that book too. Yeah, so a lot of people do think that it was John Acroid who you know At this point in his life looked like a young cowboy based on the clothes he wore in being in his late 20s But no evidence has led to his conviction on this so because because the Klein Falls Axe attack was never solved, the local police were horrified to hear that Kay Turner had disappeared while running, so they jumped right on this. The only person who reported seeing Kay Turner while she was running was an Oregon Highway

worker named Thomas Hanna. He was returning home from a night shift and he noticed her jogging south on the highway alone. He also happened to notice another highway worker driving on the road as well, and that other worker was John Acroid. So when police questioned him, he said that he did see her running that morning while he was going hunting with his friend Roger Beck, but didn't go to police. And this made no sense to investigators because John had also admitted to seeing her missing

person's poster, so him not coming forward to say that he had seen her was a bit odd. John said that he had gotten off work at 6.30am and passed through Camp Sherman to hunt coyotes. And while driving through the camp, he passed the blonde runner. But since K was nowhere to be found, they didn't really have anything on him, so they kinda just had to give up on John and continue their search efforts for Kay. And actually, they had strong suspicions about Kay's husband Nole being involved in whatever happened to her, because at the time Kay disappeared, she was believed to have been having affairs with two different men. So police wondered if maybe

Noll had found out about them and went after Kay himself. Two days after Kay went missing, a professional tracker came across Kay's Nike footprints near where she had been running, as well as a set of footprints that appeared to be from a large man, and the two sets intertwined and set the scene that there was a scuffle. Then, the Nike footprints stopped, and drag marks continued on with the large man's footprints still in motion beside them. About eight months later, John Acroid went into the camp Sherman store and told the clerk that he had found a body while hunting rabbits.

When John went into the camp Sherman's store to report seeing a body, the clerk recognized him. He had come into the store multiple times since Kay went missing, and on one occasion, she had even caught John fondling himself to an explicit magazine inside the store. God, that's so John, disgusting fucker. magazine inside the store. When the police arrived, John Acroid showed them over to where he believed Kay's body was. And a couple of things stood out right off the bat. First of all, this area wasn't good for rabbit hunting. Secondly, the remains were bones and a bit of cloth covered by brush, so how did John

even notice them? Especially since the workers had previously spent countless hours searching that very area for the remains. And lastly, why did he assume that they were Kays remains? All that was found was her lower jawbone and yellow shorts along with a small scrap of a blue pullover and a small part of a heel from a Nike shoe. And a year later, a hunter actually found K's skull in the same area in which John had found the jawbone. Yeah, it was about a half a mile away,

so more remains of hers were eventually found. Yeah, and I think they found some blonde hair as well. Yes, it was in like a bird's nest, tangled with twigs, and it was like a hunk of her blonde hair. So after this, John was looked at as the main suspect in case murder. Obviously. And going back for a second, the evening that Marlene Gabrielson had been sexually assaulted, she was wearing greenly vise and some buckskin boots that her husband had just bought for

her. And these were the items that John had slit all the way open that night. Marlene actually kept these items, and two years after the assault, when Kay had been murdered and they were investigating it, detectives asked Marlene to recount the details of the assault, and she did, because now they're looking at John, and they see, oh, he was accused of rape, let's talk to Marlene. And that's when she showed them her ripped boots and jeans, and the investigators were completely confused as to why the original investigators on the case

didn't charge John Acroid with rape. Because as far as they were concerned, all the evidence pointed to it, and this just strengthened the investigators' case that John Acroid was capable of such violence against Kay Turner. And to incriminate himself even further, during an interview with police, he said that he came across Kay's remains two months after her disappearance and the same spot it was when he showed it to police, but that he never called the police at the time. Like why?

So why would you do that? That doesn't make any sense. No, he's just spieling BS. Yeah, so John said that he noticed that she had a bullet in her chest and her throat had been slashed. Although to investigators, it appeared that he had been returning to the scene of his own crime,

John maintained his innocence. And unfortunately, there was no evidence directly linking him to the case, so they couldn't charge him with the crime and the case eventually went cold. So 29-year-old John Acroid carried on with his life and married a woman named Linda Pickle, a few years later in the mid-1980s. And by the time she and John got married, Linda had already had two kids with a man named

Stephen, a young girl named Rachanda and her older brother Byron. John was known by acquaintances to be extremely troubled. You know, if we asked you what the sign of a future serial killer was, you'd probably say that at some point, usually as a kid, they brutally killed animals. Well, that's what John did. As awful as it is to even imagine, while John was in his 20s, Stephen Pickle, who again was Rachanda and Byron Pickle's biological father, once watched in absolute disgust and

disbelief, as John used a machete to kill multiple puppies while stating that they were all his and nobody else's. According to Rachanda and Byron's cousin Jennifer, it didn't stop there. In an interview with the Oregonian, she stated, he got off on really scary movies and scaring us kids all the time. He thought it was funny. He would take us out target practicing with the guns

and shooting squirrels, cutting their tails off. That's mean. I wouldn't do it now, but back then, it was a game. And John was the kind of guy who kept rewinding scenes in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th when women were being brutally murdered while everyone else was horrified. Like he was that guy who wanted to keep watching it. Yeah, this guy is an absolute psycho. First of all, you chopped up puppies with a machete, psycho.

Second of all, you cut off squirrels' tails. I mean, it's not like you're going out there and hunting squirrels or hunting these animals. It was for fun. Yeah, you're going out there to literally brutalize animals. Yeah, and that tells us a lot about who John is. John was also known to be very abusive, and Byron has come out since to explain the type of physical abuse that he and his sister Rachanda suffered at the hands of John while they

were young. Whenever John Acroid was upset about something completely unrelated to them, he would take it out on his stepkids using homemade paddles or his hands. In the summer of 1990, Rachanda Pickle, who often went by Channie, was 13 years old and Byron was 14. Rachanda's friends had known by this point that she was afraid of something at home. Sometimes they would see her with a black eye and on one occasion, Rachanda showed up to

school without her hair done which was pretty unusual. When her friends got a closer look, they noticed that she had a chunk of hair ripped out of her head, all done by John. At this point, John and Linda had gotten divorced, but they still lived with each other and Linda's two children. But the neglect of Rachanda and Byron was very clear to their friends and even teachers. When a parent teacher conference would come up, neither John Acroid nor the biological parents,

Steven and Linda would show up. In interviews with Byron from 2018 with the Oregonian, he doesn't really seem to blame his mom, but he does point out that she knew the abuse was happening, and only sometimes tried to stop it. Meanwhile, in interviews with Linda, she acts as though John was not abusive. And on top of this, Rachanda's good friend Michelle believed that John had been sexually assaulting Rachanda regularly as well. Because on one occasion, Rachanda confided in her about what John was doing and that she was scared, and neither of them knew what to do about it.

Tuesday, July 10, 1990, was a hot summer day in Santhium Junction, Oregon at the Pickle and Acroid House, and Rachanda was watching cartoons on TV while her mother Linda was getting ready for work. Before she left, Rachanda French braided Linda's hair, and with that, she was off to her housekeeping job at Blackbutte Ranch, which is a lodging resort very close to Camp Sherman, and it's about 30 minutes from their house. John Acroix took her to work and then went to work himself, driving up Highway 20, and later stated that he came home during his work break and asked

Rachanda if she wanted to go out on a ride with him. But she said she didn't because she had chores to do, so he allegedly left the house at about 10 a.m. Then at 12.45 p.m. John said he returned home and Rachanda was gone. He told Linda and Linda's ex-steevon, and also mentioned that you couldn't report a child missing for 24 hours.

The following day and notably hours past the 24 hour mark, Rachanda's mom called the police, who were incredibly confused why she hadn't called them sooner. Linda said that she figured Rachanda was at her friends, but then she checked with the friend the night before and she wasn't there. So again, the 911 operator was confused why she didn't call the police then. And Linda non-shelently stated that she thought that she had to wait 24 hours to report a child missing, to which the operator told her

that was absolutely not true for children, you know, there's no time limit, and in fact, the sooner the better. That's so interesting that John kind of manipulated the situation, saying, oh, well, you can't report or missing until 24 hours. And at the same time, though, they didn't question it. They weren't like, well, I'm just gonna call because I need to know where my daughter is. It was just, they just went along with it, so... Yeah, and I mean, if you're a parent, like, I mean, I'm not trying to blame Linda but it's like I mean your daughter's missing yeah it's it didn't seem like anybody was really taking it all that seriously but she's 13 so when police arrived to the home they looked around the house and noticed that the chores Rachanda had been assigned to do that day hadn't been done and nothing was missing from a room. Then they gathered statements from everyone in the house to try and put the puzzle pieces

together. That's when they found out that John had been the last person to see her, and that the couple had a normal night and didn't look much for Rachanda. The only thing that wasn't very normal about that evening was that John and Linda had sex, which they apparently almost never did as John had a very low libido, but for whatever reason, the very day that Rachanda disappeared, he was in the mood. At this point, investigators were a re-reviewing K-Turner's case, who at this point had been

murdered over 11 years earlier with no resolution, and they started connecting the dots that John was behind all of this, even recant his disappearance. When they went back to John's house, they found him touching up his truck's tailgate with paint, which was slightly suspicious to them, that maybe John was covering his tracks in some way by doing this. And really quick, it's interesting watching interviews of Linda because she seems a bit off and I don't want to be judgmental or say the wrong thing, but I will say that she states in a very nonchalant way that she doesn't know if John had anything to do with Rechandis' disappearance, whereas Rechandis' brother Byron, who appears to constantly be on the

brink of tears in the interviews, seems very sure of it and seems to be very protective of his little sister and whatever happened to her. And I think the difference in the way they talk about what happened is very telling, and it made me wonder how present Linda was with her kids, and then we can look back at the fact that she didn't report Rechanda missing for over 24 hours, like that seems really questionable. And not in the sense that she was involved, just that she wasn't being as adamant about finding Rachanda as you would hope a parent would be.

And I also remember Byron saying that he regrets not trying to get him and Rachanda into the foster system so they could have a better life. So it's just very sad because these kids clearly were not properly cared for at all. Yeah, and I mean, just to touch on this briefly, and not to offend anybody, but, you know, Linda and John had sex the night that Richanda went missing. And it's like, there's a missing child out there doesn't really seem like that's an opportune moment to,

you know, be in the bedroom like that. And they also weren't married at that point in case anyone's confused. So I guess since they were still living together, they had some kind of relations, but they weren't married. And it's funny because in an interview, Linda points that out and she says, you know, why are you having sex when there's a kid missing? And it's like, well, that's your kid.

And you had sex too. So again, like not trying to be super judgmental. I just, it's something that we both notice while we're watching the interviews that kind of like makes you feel uncomfortable that like this isn't a good situation. Yeah, I mean, we may be off base here but it was definitely uncomfortable.

And I think it's fair to point this out because Byron does too. And he was a kid in the house as well, so he knows what happened, so I gotta just go with him. Also, John didn't appear to be concerned about Rechanda being missing in any way, says police, says Byron, says actually Linda later on, and he seemed to know some questionable information about his stepdaughter like her bra size, but didn't even know when her birthday was. He even shared with police that he thought Rachanda was pretty, and that he noticed that at 13, she was starting to develop.

Ew, God ew. It gets worse. Police even noticed that John was becoming aroused just having this conversation, which of course made your red flag for them. John said that because Richanda was becoming developed, she probably caught the eye of a predator who may have knocked her over the head through her over their shoulder, rolled her body in plastic, and buried her in the woods. So that's a pretty specific theory. Yeah, oh my god, it's like you're retelling the crime. It will exactly. It's like the police were like, wait, what?

But John maintained his innocence that he had nothing to do with Rechandia's disappearance, nor Kay's murder. But police couldn't get over how strange John acted and the fact that he was the last person to see both Rachanda and Kay. I can't look past these things. Months passed and Rachanda never returned home and no remains have ever been found.

So police worried that they weren't gonna be able to nail John on any of his crimes. Without Rachanda's body, the only way that they weren't going to be able to nail John on any of his crimes. Without Rachandas' body, the only way that they felt they could get John was by positively linking him to Kays Murder. And as they dug deeper into the case, they found something. Enter Roger Dale Beck. Roger was the man who John told police he had been hunting with on the morning of Kays Murder.

And his wife, Pam, had confirmed at the time that they had been out there together at some point that morning. But investigators wanted to question her again, especially since in 1990, Pam and Roger were now divorced. When investigators visited Pam at her home in California, she told them that she, quote, Lied like hell back then, and that Roger and John asked her to lie to police if they asked where they had been the morning of Kay's murder. Pam then told them the real story, that on Christmas Eve morning, remember when Kay went out

running alone, she, Roger and John Acroid ate breakfast together at Pam and Roger's trailer near Camp Sherman, and then the two men left and didn't return until the following day. And when they did, they were covered in blood, and that Pam helped them dispose of the clothes. The men told Pam that they had mistaken Kay for a deer and accidentally shot her. But then the men's story changed, and Roger later told his wife Pam that they had a raped Kay before they shot her, and that they do the same thing to her

if she told anyone. Investigators continued to gather more information against John, who by 1992 had officially broken things off with Linda and was living at his mother's house in sweet home and working the highways out of Corvallis Oregon. And that's when he met two young gals, 17-year-old Melissa Sanders, and 19-year-old Sheila Swanson. They lived nearby and John gave them a ride while his friend's daughter was in the car with him, so she confirmed that this happened. And

John then started hanging out at a restaurant called Sherries since both girls went there a lot. And John always made conversation with them. So it seemed like he was really into talking to these young girls. And by the way, I know it doesn't matter, but Sherries is like a chain restaurant here in the Pacific Northwest. They've got pie. So it being spring, Camping season had arrived in Oregon and Melissa Sanders' family planned a coastal camping trip in Newport at Beverly Beach State Park. Sheila had come along with her best friend's family, but they soon got bored and hoped their boyfriends would come pick them up, but then being all the way on the coast, the guys

didn't want to go out there. Then the girls decided to hitchhike, and by the way both Sheila and Melissa lived pretty wild young lives, so they were kind of bored with the family's time and they wanted to kind of get out and do their own thing. So they went to a pay phone to arrange a pickup and made a phone call, but who they called, no one knows. Although Melissa's parents knew that she and Sheila had left the night before to find something fun to do, they were surprised to wake up and discover that they weren't

in their tents, so they just assumed that they'd gone off with friends. But the girls never made it back to the campsite for the remaining days of the trip, and upon the family's return to their house in sweet home, Melissa wasn't there either. Since the girls were known to be kind of drifters, and their daughter was almost 18, her parents waited a couple more days before finally calling police to express their concerns. That's when they found that Sheila was missing too. Around this very same time, some of John Acroix co-workers had a very bizarre exchange with him. John had shown up to the shop where he parked his truck in the middle

of the night, and he had dried blood all over his arms and hands. The co-workers asked him what the hell it happened, and John explained that he had hit a deer, and had to gut him out. This was still a very strange explanation, but the men just kind of brushed it off and didn't really think of it again. That is, until months later, they discovered that the bodies of two young women had been found by hunters. Sheila and Melissa's bodies had been dumped off Highway 20 near Eddieville, and near their bodies was a rivet which is often used by mechanics,

that police felt had been dropped by their killer. A medical examiner determined that both of the young women had likely been strangled to death, but since animals had gotten to their bodies and they had appeared to have been there for months, their cause of death couldn't conclusively be determined. A few months before their bodies were found, John Acroid had finally been arrested for the murder of 35-year-old K Turner. Unfortunately, there was no physical evidence at the scene of Sheila and Melissa's murders, so police couldn't link John to the killings and he refused to speak on them at all.

And by that point, John was in custody, so he had the advice from his lawyer to keep quiet on Melissa and Sheila's case. And by the way, at this time, there was um... There was a lot of active highway serial killers in Oregon. There was, yeah, there was. And one of the names that actually popped up was a man named Bobby Jack Fowler who was an alcoholic who lived in Newport, Oregon. And so it's believed that he may have been involved in Melissa and Sheila's murder. They're not sure if it was him or John Acroid, but there was a case where a woman had escaped

from Bobby Jack Fowler's apartment naked. I mean, she had to jump through a second story window and there was a rope tied to her ankle. And I will say that one of the girls, I can't remember if it was Sheila or Melissa, but they had their ankles bound when their body was found. So when Heath mentioned that to me last night, it was like, wait, that kind of is more consistent

with Bobby Jack Fowler. Yeah, and I've always kind of wanted to cover his case because I feel like, I mean, they think that he was involved in a lot of different murders from, you know, British Columbia, all the way down to Oregon, along the coast, and all that. So it would be an interesting one to cover. It makes sense for Hammer guarding Melissa and Sheila's case because they were in Newport. So this could make sense, but then you're also like, well, they knew John Acroid. So it's scary to think that if they were killed by Bobby Jack Fowler, they also knew

another potential serial killer, John Acroid. Right. One of these two men were involved. Yeah. Which is so creepy. And also, the I-5 killer who we covered a few months back, he was active in the mid 70s as well. So at the same time that Kay Turner was murdered, but you know, he was in a different area. He was on the I-5, whereas John Ackroyd's on Highway 20.

But interestingly enough, the I-5 killer was grew up in Newport, or just outside of Newport. Yeah, it's just scary. There's a lot of them. I know, so many. So, John Acroid was found guilty of Kay Turner's murder, and in a separate trial, Roger Beck was also found guilty for the murder. Thanks to forensic testing that became available in the 1990s, prosecutors were able to determine what happened to Kay when she was murdered, and although John chose not to testify during the trial, a jury found him guilty thanks to the evidence that was presented. But sadly, John and Roger never admitted guilt for

what they had done. So Kay's mother actually wasn't able to see them take responsibility and explain what had happened the morning her daughter went for a run on Christmas Eve. While John was in prison, investigators worked tirelessly to figure out what had happened to 13-year-old Rechandapickle, but no one could figure out where her body was, so her case went cold and John sat in prison with a life sentence at the maximum security prison in Salem, Oregon. In 2010, so long after the original investigators on Richandah Pickles' case had retired, a new detective took a look at her file. In 2012, he decided to sit down with John Acroid and kind of see if he'd be willing to talk about the case and John agreed.

John explained that he wasn't too interested in attempting to appeal his case again because he had tried like I think it was four times, and he didn't really care about seeking parole because he had diabetes and heart condition anyway. And after asking him over and over again, John continued to deny any involvement in Rachanda's case and said that he never killed anyone, that he had thought about it, but he never acted on it. The detective was worried that John was going to seek parole, so he took a chance and brought Rachanda's case in front of a grand jury in hopes of convicting John for her murder, even though there was no body.

And you know, it being 20 years later, R Rachanda was at the very least presumed dead, so he had that. Thanks to a witness testifying that they had seen John Acroid, the day Rachanda went missing near their home, even though he had claimed he was out of the area, this really helped determine that John was lying about his alibi. Rachanda's old friends also testified that Rachanda had expressed to them that John was sexually abusing her, so this helped the case as well. And with that, John Acroid was indicted for Rachanda Pickle's murder.

In the fall of 2013, his trial began, and once again, John denied his involvement and pleaded no contest. He also agreed not to seek parole, meaning he would spend the rest of his years in prison. This didn't prove to be much longer, though, because just three years later, on December 30, 2016, John Acroid died at the age of 67 from heart disease. At the time of his death, investigators were also trying to connect John to the murders of Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson, but he died before they could pursue charges. Multiple other teenage girls are known to have disappeared near or from Highway 20 during that time that John Acroid actively worked those roads, and it's heavily believed that he's involved in other crimes. Since John is dead, it's believed that he took the knowledge of what really happened

to Rachanda Pickle, K Turner, Melissa Sanders, Sheila Swanson, and many others to his grave. For those interested in hearing more about this case, we highly recommend you check out Ghosts of Highway 20 by Noel Cromby for the Oregonian. It's an amazing and detailed write-up and gave us a lot of information for this case. And we included a link in our description where we always cite our sources. And in 2018, the Oregonian also released a five-part series on John Ackroyd's Crimes, with the same title, Ghost of Highway 20, which you can watch on YouTube, and that includes all the interviews.

So check it out. Thank you so much everybody for listening to this episode of Going West. Yes, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and next week we'll have an all new case for you guys to dive into. Remember, we do have merch. Spring Summer merch head on over to goingwestpod.com and hit the shop tab. We have a ton of great stuff over there, so check it out.

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