{"id":1888,"date":"2019-08-27T07:03:01","date_gmt":"2019-08-27T07:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/08\/27\/chasing-ghosts-that-will-forever-haunt\/"},"modified":"2024-10-19T15:59:49","modified_gmt":"2024-10-19T15:59:49","slug":"chasing-ghosts-that-will-forever-haunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/08\/27\/chasing-ghosts-that-will-forever-haunt\/","title":{"rendered":"Chasing ghosts that will forever haunt"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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The image is stark, hypnotic: a road, framed by towering pines, bathed in the blue light of late night or early dawn. The curve of a guardrail and a pickup truck\u2019s headlights blur in the mist. Superimposed over the scene is a brief message:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Over two decades, four women disappeared and one was raped off the same stretch of road in rural Oregon.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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Their stories have another connection: One man is linked to all five crimes.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This spectral photograph opens \u201cGhosts of Highway 20,\u201d<\/a> a stunning multimedia narrative series published last December by The Oregonian\/OregonianLive. It was produced by senior staff writer Noelle Crombie, videographer Dave Killen and photographer Beth Nakamura,  who worked side-by-side for nearly two years \u2014  an unusual arrangement given the buyouts and layoffs that have hollowed out America\u2019s  newsrooms, including those in Oregon.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Theirs is a cold-case mystery that began with a tip about a possible serial killer. It ended with a gripping five-part, 7,000 word narrative, a gallery of haunting photos and a heartbreaking documentary that leave no doubt about the guilt of a serial killer, but precious little solace for his victims.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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From a writer\u2019s perspective, the story behind the story is almost as fascinating. In late 2016, then-director of news Therese Bottomly was presented a freelance story about a retired prosecutor who ran every Christmas Eve in memory of a murdered jogger whose killer he helped put behind bars for life. In passing, the piece mentioned that the killer might have been involved in other murders. His name was John Arthur Ackroyd, who would join the ranks of Ted Bundy, \u201cGreen River Killer\u201d Gary Ridgway, and other notorious predators who have trolled the Pacific Northwest for vulnerable and marginalized women.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cIt was just a hell of a story. And it had not been told,\u201d said Bottomly, now the Oregonian\u2019s editor. \u201cWe went back in our clips. One of the best investigative reporters in the state had written episodically about it, but nobody had put it all together. And this guy basically got away with it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The freelancer\u2019s anniversary story, she realized, opened the door to more; he agreed to take a substantial kill fee so The Oregonian could pursue that more complicated piece. Crombie was just wrapping up a four-year stint on the cannabis beat she had created when Bottomly called her into her office and told her about the case. Bottomly teamed up Crombie with Killen and Nakamura to run the mystery to ground.The Oregonian went to court to open a sealed case, revealing for the first time that Ackroyd had entered a no-contest plea in the murder of his 13-year-old stepdaughter.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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They tracked down Marlene Gabrielsen, who easily could have been the killer\u2019s first victim but managed to escape after Ackroyd brutally raped her in 1977. The police didn\u2019t believe Gabrielsen\u2019s accusation at the time and her case, which bookends the series, is an example of justice long overdue in the #MeToo era.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The reporting team pored over thousands of police reports and court records, interviewed dozens of witnesses, survivors and investigators and traveled out of state to confront a critical source who hadn\u2019t responded to their requests for information.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In the end, they identified four victims who investigators believe died by Ackroyd\u2019s hands, and documented a history of police and prosecutorial incompetence that allowed Ackroyd to go on a killing spree for two decades. Investigators believe he killed an unknown number of other victims whose remains are scattered off Highway 20, a two-lane road that crosses central Oregon west-to-east, often disappearing into the shadowy maw of dense evergreen forests.Five women\u2019s stories forged the chronological spine of \u201cGhosts of Highway 20.\u201d The highway is a character in its own right, a through-line that takes the reader on a journey as full of twists and turns as the blacktop.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Crombie\u2019s lean prose, set off by stretches of staccato dialogue between investigators and their elusive suspect, relentlessly draws the reader into the mystery and misery behind Ackroyd\u2019s killing spree. But the story can\u2019t be fully appreciated without viewing Killen\u2019s gripping documentary<\/a>; so far its YouTube views top 847,000 hits and 22.6 million minutes of viewing time, Bottomly said.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The story, photos and documentary took home five Northwest Regional Emmys, the Bruce Baer Award for Oregon\u2019s best investigative reporting, and was a finalist for the Scripps Howard multimedia journalism award. The project won the integrated storytelling award from the national Society of Features Journalism, while The National Women\u2019s Coalition Against Violence & Exploitation awarded it the National Journalism Impact Award. It also won best special section in the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association\u2019s annual awards.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Seven months after it ran, Crombie continues to receive emails and letters from readers grateful that these forgotten women have been remembered.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cYou were able,\u201d one wrote, \u201c to give voice to so many people who have largely gone unheard (until now). It seems clear that for many of those involved, including most importantly the victims and their families, the system (and to a larger extent society) failed them. These are heartbreaking stories of isolation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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We asked Crombie to tell us about the process of producing the project, and the emotional toll it took, and then to help us annotate the reporting and writing of \u201cGhosts of Highway 20.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Each of the multimedia elements in powerful in its own right. Can you describe the collaboration between you, Dave Killen and Beth Nakamura?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Dave Killen was the video editor and genius behind the documentary series that accompanied the stories and Beth Nakamura was the gifted photojournalist whose work captured the subjects and remote landscape where these crimes took place. We spent countless hours together on this project. Both were present for almost every interview.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Our partnership was the project\u2019s secret ingredient. Marlene Gabrielsen, who survived her encounter with John Ackroyd, told us at one point how Ackroyd had dragged her from his truck. She talked about how it was late spring. She remembered looking up to see small flowers in bloom. It was a poignant detail in a horrifying account. On one of our many reporting trips along Highway 20, the three of us tracked down the approximate location of the attack based on Marlene\u2019s account and police reports. Dave worked the drone and Beth wandered off alone to look for a way to capture what Marlene saw that early morning 40 years ago.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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So while I did the interviews, reporting and wrote the stories, their work helped elevate the project into something pretty special.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The subject matter is horrific. How did it affect you? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It was a real weight. You felt a tremendous obligation to the victims and their loved ones in telling this story. There were days when we were depleted after doing interviews or looking at these files and crime scene photos. We coped with it in our own ways, but we relied on each other. We were in the car a lot, a lot of very long road trips. And a lot of time in the woods together and that bonded us to one another.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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How many documents did you compile?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Several thousand when all was said and done. I made paper copies of everything. I hired a high school student to come in and Bates stamp them. I put them in binders and then entered them in a spreadsheet. This took months of work. I tell new reporters not to do what I did; it\u2019s a ridiculously inefficient way of amassing documents for a big project like this. But it works for me.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What was your greatest writing challenge?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Narrative is not typically what I\u2019ve done. I was punching way above my weight from the start. That was something that kept me up at night, having to describe this landscape, these small towns, how to breathe life into people who died a long time ago, these investigations that were very old. To do that in a way that was going to keep a reader\u2019s interest through five installments was herculean.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In your Emmy acceptance speech, you singled out your editor, Margaret Haberman. \u201cAnyone who is reporter,\u201d you said, \u201cknows that a good editor is hard to come by. When you have one you really hang tight to them.\u201d What role did she play? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It was essential. Margaret runs a very busy team that does all breaking news, all crime and justice coverage and enterprise. She cleared the way for me to be able to do this on a day-to-day basis. It meant losing me in the rotation. She always made the project a priority and didn\u2019t make me feel like, Oh, God, I\u2019m not contributing or my colleagues are having to pick up the slack. In fact, when she didn\u2019t feel I was doing enough on the project, she made that clear. She\u2019s an extremely meticulous editor who was always pushing me for the extra detail, to make the extra call. If we said we really needed to go to California, she said yes. She understood how ambitious we were trying to be and was really supportive of that.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What allowed you to finally crack open a story that had been lost for 40 years?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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We encountered a lot of resistance from sources in the county that investigated the disappearance of Ackroyd\u2019s stepdaughter. He was the main suspect, but the case had vanished from local news reports even though her disappearance triggered one of the largest search efforts in the county\u2019s history. The case went cold. I kept approaching the local cops, detectives, some quite elderly, retired. There was a tremendous amount of secrecy. The district attorney said he was unable to talk about it \u2014  something was prohibiting him. There was something really hinky about it. Then Ackroyd died and I approached folks again. This time, the DA says come on down and I met with him and his chief deputy and they basically walked me through the grand jury presentation. I was so bewildered by this \u2014 I was unclear where this was going \u2014 and then he said, \u201cAnd when he entered his plea.\u201d You can hear me echo him on my recorder, \u2018When he entered his plea?\u2019 I was so stunned that (Ackroyd) had done that, a no contest plea, and that there was no record of that in the court system. Now we knew that he was definitively linked to this little girl\u2019s case. It was shocking.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Besides the journalism awards, what was the reaction?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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On a personal level, after the project ran, the Northwest Film Center hosted a free screening of the documentary. There were 300 people there and Marlene Gabrielsen came. At the end, we took questions from the audience and I introduced Marlene. She got this sustained ovation from the audience. I was taken aback by how much emotion and support there was for Marlene in the room. This is a woman who has suffered in silence, alone, for decades, and here she was getting this kind of delayed justice. It was moving and unexpected.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The annotation:<\/strong>\u00a0Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Crombie\u2019s responses in blue. <\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This is the area where Marlene Gabrielsen was raped off Highway 20 by John Ackroyd. “I remember it was beautiful because it was all green and little flowers blooming, little tiny ones. First thing I thought of was: How can you be hurt in this kind of beauty?” Beth Nakamura \/ The Oregonian\/OregonLive<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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Ghosts of Highway 20<\/a><\/h2>\n\nStory by Noelle Crombie<\/strong>
\nPhotography by Beth Nakamura<\/strong>
\nVideo by Dave Killen<\/strong>
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\nTHE OREGONIAN | OREGONLIVE
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\n<\/a>How and why did you decide on the title?<\/span>It was pure serendipity. Early on in the project videographer Dave Killen and photographer Beth Nakamura were riding together on Highway 20 on one of our many reporting trips. I was riding in another car with a couple of investigators. Killen had Lucinda Williams\u2019 \u201cThe Ghosts of Highway 20\u201d<\/a> among the songs on his phone and it just happened to come on as the two of them drove through a particularly fog-socked stretch of the highway. They were floored and practically burst out of the car when I saw them an hour later. We began the process of securing the rights to use the song in the project immediately. The song has a haunting quality. Her lyrics \u2014 \u201cIf you were from here, you would fear me\/To the death along with the ghost of highway 20\u201d \u2014 seemed a perfect match for our story. Lucinda agreed to let us use her song in our documentary series and it seemed like the most fitting title for the whole project. It evokes the lives taken and the enduring sense of loss and imperfect justice felt by the ones left behind. Plus it offers a powerful sense of place. All were important to our approach. (Editor’s note: Here is a Twitter thread Killen wrote<\/a> about hearing that song during the reporting trip.)<\/span><\/span>
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\nTrigger warning:<\/em><\/strong> This story includes details of a rape. If you have experienced sexual violence and need support, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE. Resources and contacts also are listed at the end of the story.<\/em>
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\n<\/a>Why did you include a trigger warning at the top of the story?<\/span>Laura Trujillo\u2019s piece about her mother\u2019s suicide<\/a> published in USA Today in November, around the time our series was in high production mode. Several of us had read Laura\u2019s story and were struck by her inclusion of a trigger warning. It was a thoughtful touch on a story that could be difficult for some readers. We believed such a warning might be valuable for some of our readers given the sexual abuse and violence throughout the series.<\/span><\/span>\n

PART 1 OF 5<\/h3>\nKaye Turner vanished 40 years ago while running along an empty road in a rustic central Oregon retreat. She was kidnapped and killed, her remains dumped in the deep woods.
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\nThen Rachanda Pickle went missing from the desolate highway compound where she lived, never to be seen again. She was 13.
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\nIt wasn\u2019t long before teenagers Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson disappeared from a camping trip to the coast. Their bodies were found off a logging spur.<\/a>Your lead is a classic roundup that focuses on several people or events. Why did you open the series this way?<\/span>I burned through so many leads before landing on this one. Most of what I came up with centered on Ackroyd. For a long time, the lead was a scene from his cell immediately after his death. But none of these seemed to work. The focus seemed wrong. So I shifted to the women he encountered. This let us quickly introduce the five women we write about but also put them first in the mind of the reader. Our overarching purpose was to hold their rapist\/killer accountable in public for the first time. They had to be named first \u2014 it should be a shock to the conscience that women were vanishing like this and someone was getting away with it.<\/span><\/span>
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\nIt now appears their killer was the same man. The breadth of his crimes has never been revealed until now.
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\nJohn Arthur Ackroyd was a longtime state highway mechanic whose route along U.S. 20 wound through some of Oregon\u2019s most spectacular scenery from the Cascade foothills to the coast.
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\nFrom the outside, Ackroyd seemed to lead an ordinary life: Raised in small-town Oregon, he hunted and fished, held a steady job and married a woman with a couple of young kids.
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\nBut detectives long suspected Ackroyd preyed on women who disappeared along or around Highway 20 from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. They could prove only a single case \u2014 Turner\u2019s 1978 murder. The rest haunted investigators who had pursued him through the years.
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\nThey were still after him when Ackroyd died alone in his prison cell two years ago. <\/a>You shift now to the killer. Structurally, what was your intention?<\/span>In a 7,000-word series, it\u2019s important at the start to clearly establish who and what readers will encounter as they stay with an unfolding narrative. You aim to anticipate the next question they\u2019ll have. So here: Who\u2019s responsible for this carnage? Ackroyd obviously is the catalyst of destruction. We needed to say that. And to explain why this story has currency and impact today.<\/span><\/span>
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\nBy then, The Oregonian\/OregonLive also was investigating Ackroyd.
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\nWe interviewed key witnesses and reviewed thousands of pages of police and court records, some of them previously secret, to hold Ackroyd accountable and give some measure of justice to the women he attacked.
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\nWe went back to 1977.
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\nThat\u2019s when Ackroyd picked up a woman from the side of the road, dragged her into the woods and raped her. The young mother managed to survive.
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\nShe was his first known victim.
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\nIf police had believed her, she might have been his last. <\/a>Do you consider this your nut graph?<\/span>The nut graf is: One woman was raped, four others disappeared. One man committed all the crimes and he is held responsible for the first time here. This is a kicker to the intro and sets up the only survivor\u2019s story that immediately follows \u2014 but it surely is the series\u2019 emotional center of gravity: The dismissal of Marlene\u2019s account by police had tragic consequences.<\/span><\/span>
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\n Marlene Gabrielsen was John Ackroyd’s first known victim, and the one who survived. He picked her up 41 years ago at a campground outside Sisters, Oregon.[\/caption]
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\nIt was Marlene Gabrielsen’s first night away from her baby girl.<\/a>I would imagine there were several possible structures for the series. Why did choose to organize by chronologically, by victim? Were other approaches considered?<\/span>This story is complicated and confusing. The conference room where we met to discuss this story features a wall-sized whiteboard. In our meetings early on, I filled every square inch of the board with dates, victims, themes, etc. We had multiple victims across a large swath of rural Oregon and crimes that covered a long period of time. We sought ways to simplify and streamline. It made sense to make Highway 20 a central theme and to tell the story chronologically, using the highway as a guide.<\/span><\/span>
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\nShe hadn\u2019t been out since her daughter was born three months earlier. It was late spring. She and her husband planned to spend a night at the Sisters Rodeo. Marlene found a friend to care for her baby, pumped breast milk and wrote out a napping schedule.
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\nThat day, she tied her hair back and pulled on her green Levi\u2019s. She wore the buckskin boots her husband bought her even though the couple couldn\u2019t afford them.
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\n\u201cMommy loves you too much,\u201d she whispered to her daughter, asleep in a bassinet. \u201cBe a good girl.\u201d <\/a>The details throughout are extraordinarily vivid. How did you find out she tied her hair back and that the couple couldn\u2019t afford the buckskin boots she wore, and what she told her daughter?<\/span>At one point, Kelley Benham French<\/a> was a consultant on the series. She read some drafts early on. I had some of these details from my initial interviews with Marlene, but Kelley pressed me to go back for more, to really flesh out that evening in detail. So I went back to Marlene and slow-walked her through her preparations for going out that night. She was patient as I drilled down into the particulars of what she wore, her hairstyle and what it was like to leave her baby girl behind for the night.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe couple drove about 90 miles from their home in Lebanon and set up camp near the rodeo grounds. They sat around the fire drinking beer. Later that night, Marlene and her husband argued when he said he wanted to head off with a couple of friends.
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\nMarlene, then 20, got up to leave. She wanted to go home to her baby.
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\nIt was dark, around midnight. She was looking for a ride and wandered out of the campground onto Highway 20, the route that leads through the heart of Sisters, back then little more than a dusty outpost amid pine forests in central Oregon. <\/a>Most of your sentences are short and simple; subject-verb-object, short sentences, short paragraphs. Why? Now and then, like here, you use complex sentences. Why the shift?<\/span>I wanted the story to be easy on the reader. There was so much information to move through. I looked for ways to make that as seamless as possible. My editors advised me at one point to look for ways to mix things up with more complex sentences and longer graphs. It\u2019s a combination of rhythm \u2014 the variety is more interesting \u2014 and simply finding ways to weave in the necessary details of who, what, when, where and why without overwhelming readers.<\/span><\/span>
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\nShe returned to the campground, where a stranger said his buddy, John Ackroyd, could give her a lift. Marlene had hitchhiked plenty and didn\u2019t think twice as she squeezed into the front seat between the men.
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\nAs the truck motored west, the man in the passenger seat wanted out. Marlene, dizzy from alcohol, watched as he reached through the open window to unlatch the door from the outside. He rolled up the window and slammed the door.
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\nMarlene glimpsed a .22-caliber rifle on a rack in the cab and a hunting knife stuck in the lid of an old coffee can near the driver\u2019s seat.
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\nShe was alone with Ackroyd, a big man who reeked of sweat and freshly cut wood.<\/a>Sense of smell is so evocative, yet writers rarely take advantage of its power. Was it important to use it here? Why?<\/span>I asked Marlene to describe what she saw and smelled when Ackroyd yanked her from the truck. I asked her about his clothing. She talked about how she thought he was a logger or someone who made a living in the woods. Her description provided a distinct sense of place. I wanted the reader to feel rooted in that time and place.<\/span><\/span>
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\nA thought skittered\u00a0<\/a>Great verb choice!<\/span><\/span> across her mind as she drifted to sleep: The inside door handle was gone.
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\nShe was trapped.
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\nMarlene was still asleep when, about an hour into the drive, Ackroyd turned off Highway 20 and onto an old wagon road.
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\nShe woke to find his fingers squeezed tight around her legs as he dragged her out of the truck. Her head slammed into the door frame. She gasped.
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\nShe felt the cool blade of Ackroyd\u2019s hunting knife against her neck.
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\n\u201cYou\u2019re going to do what I tell you,\u201d Ackroyd said, speaking for the first time, his low, raspy voice laced with a bit of a drawl.
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\nHe ripped off her jeans with such force, the pants split from the waist to the ankle along the inseam. He sliced off her boots and her underwear and threw her to the ground.<\/a>You don\u2019t describe the rape, instead skipping over graphic details. What lay behind that decision?<\/span>I\u2019m not sure what the reader gains from reading a detailed description of a rape. The details surrounding the assault are terrifying enough.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAfter the rape, Ackroyd slapped the knife against his grimy jeans held up by orange suspenders. Marlene slowly stood, wearing only her T-shirt and jacket.
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\nHe glanced around the dark woods.
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\n\u201cYou could take me home,\u201d she said.
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\n\u201cI don\u2019t know if I want to do that.\u201d
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\n\u201cI have a baby that\u2019s not even a year old,\u201d she pleaded. \u201cPlease take me home.\u201d
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\nAckroyd considered her for a long moment, then reached into the back of the truck and held out a dingy pair of plaid pants. Marlene put them on, holding tight to the waist to keep them from slipping off.
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\nThey climbed back into the truck and continued west on Highway 20.
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\nHe made a brief stop at the house he shared with his mother in Sweet Home, his hometown. He went inside to get a soda and use the bathroom.
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\nMarlene waited in the truck, afraid to move. She\u2019d need evidence so police could find him later. She couldn\u2019t see the house number from the truck.
\n
\nWhen he returned, she asked for his phone number to help identify him but also to make him think she liked him. She wrote it down on a pack of cigarettes.
\n
\n\u201cMaybe we can see each other again,\u201d Ackroyd said.
\n
\nHe drove another 12 miles down the road and stopped in front of her mother-in-law\u2019s house in Lebanon, where she\u2019d asked him to drop her off.
\n
\nMarlene flew out of the pickup, a blur moving toward the house. He drove off as she banged frantically on the door. She clung to her boots, which she\u2019d grabbed from the clearing. Her hair was matted with sticks and dirt.
\n
\n\u201cOh my God,\u201d her mother-in-law said, opening the door. \u201cWhat happened?\u201d
\n
\n\u201cCall the police,\u201d Marlene said.<\/a>How did you reconstruct the details included in this long section about Marlene\u2019s rape and the aftermath?<\/span>Some of these details were included in police reports. For instance, Ackroyd told police he drove to his mother\u2019s house after raping Marlene. The dialogue and scene-setting details \u2014 how Ackroyd tapped his leg with his knife, for instance \u2014 came from interviews with Marlene. Trauma had seared these details into her memory.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nAckroyd told police that Marlene had seduced him in the front seat of his dirty truck.
\n
\nHe said he gave her a pair of pants because she had torn hers while taking them off.
\n
\nHis mother told a detective that she\u2019d peeked out the window that night and seen Marlene in the front seat of her son\u2019s truck. She said her son was shy around women.
\n
\nThe other man in the truck told police that Ackroyd wasn\u2019t the violent type and the woman was drunk.
\n
\nInvestigators talked to Marlene\u2019s mother-in-law, too. She recalled how Marlene had arrived at her house, sobbing, saying something terrible had happened.
\n
\nShe handed police a brown paper bag with clothes Marlene wore on the night of the attack. At the hospital, an officer noted scratches on Marlene\u2019s back. A doctor identified bruising on her back, legs and knee.
\n
\nStill, police seemed skeptical.<\/a>Why do you suppose that was the case?<\/span>The reports don\u2019t shed light on why they doubted her. Marlene suspects it was rooted in their bias against Native Americans. She had been drinking and her husband was known to local cops in their small town. She thinks those factors played a role in their handling of the investigation. Also, Ackroyd was a local guy whose mother worked at the police department as an office worker. That may have also played a role in their response. The police detective who originally investigated the rape was long dead, so we couldn\u2019t ask him. The sheriff declined to comment last year and has since retired.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nMarlene and Ackroyd agreed to be polygraphed.
\n
\nA couple of weeks later, Marlene sat in the back of an unmarked police car as two officers drove her to the lie detector test. They led her into a small room with a desk. An examiner asked a series of questions: Did she tell the truth about being raped? Did she feel she\u2019d been raped? Was there a question she was afraid to answer?
\n
\nA sergeant\u2019s conclusion went into a typed report, which was placed in a file: Marlene was lying. He offered no explanation.
\n
\nCops asked Ackroyd four questions.
\n
\n\u201cDid the girl ask you to pull over and have some fun?\u201d
\n
\nYes, he said.
\n
\nThe others: Did you force her to have sex at knifepoint? Did you have a knife in your hand when you had sex? Did you tear off her bra?
\n
\nNo, said Ackroyd.
\n
\nNo deception detected, the polygraph examiner determined.
\n
\nWhat followed likely altered the path of Ackroyd\u2019s life, along with those of at least five young women and everyone who loved them.
\n
\nThe district attorney delivered his decision on whether to prosecute. It was a single handwritten sentence.
\n
\nAckroyd would face no charges.
\n
\nMore than two years later, another set of investigators went looking for the police report detailing Marlene\u2019s account. <\/a>What triggered the new investigation?<\/span>At this point in the story, I didn\u2019t want to reveal too much about why the cops were taking another look at Marlene\u2019s rape. They were there because they were investigating the killing of Kaye Turner, the woman who is the subject of Day 2. For now, I just want the reader to know something triggered their interest in what happened to Marlene and leave it at that. Kaye\u2019s killing serves as the cliffhanger at the end of Day 1.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nA state police sergeant and a lieutenant from a local sheriff\u2019s office tracked down Marlene at home. She recounted the attack in detail, how the man cut off her underwear and boots. She\u2019d hung onto the damaged boots and showed them to the men.
\n
\nThe investigators left.
\n
\nThey noted in their report how the original officers had failed to pursue the rape case even though physical evidence corroborated Marlene\u2019s account.
\n
\nBut the rape allegation wasn\u2019t their priority that day. They were investigating the killing of a young woman on an isolated stretch of road outside Sisters.
\n
\nThe area was about a half-hour drive from where Marlene was raped.
\n
\nThe suspect: John Ackroyd.


\nNEXT: Runner on a winter road<\/strong><\/a>\n

PART 2 OF 5<\/h3>\nKaye Turner threw on a T-shirt, long-sleeved pullover and yellow shorts, then laced up her Nikes.
\n
\nShe stepped into the sunshine, the frosty air heavy with the scent of ponderosa pine. It was the day before Christmas. Her Timex wristwatch read about 8:15 a.m. <\/a>This detail is so specific. Where did it and the other information about Kaye\u2019s run come from?<\/span>Police and court records. The Turner case file filed a metal file cabinet and was a reporter\u2019s dream as far as narrative details. Cops did a thorough timeline of Kaye\u2019s morning so that detail came from those records. The lead prosecutor has a formidable memory and kept meticulous notes that were part of the case file. Among the files were details from grand jury testimony, which included precise accounts of Kaye\u2019s state of mind and the days and hours before and after her disappearance.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nShe planned an 8-mile run. She\u2019d be back in an hour, in time for breakfast.
\n
\nKaye and husband, Noel, had joined friends on a holiday getaway at Camp Sherman, a vacation and fly-fishing retreat along the pristine Metolius River off Highway 20 with a two-room school, country store and 200 year-round residents. The friends shared a meal the night before, then sang carols. Christmas presents Noel bought for his wife were wrapped and in the car.
\n
\nThe Turners lived in Eugene, where Kaye, 35, had worked at Planned Parenthood and then as a manager at a local public health agency. Raised in southern Oregon, she was an only child who remained close to her parents and had recently returned from a visit. Before she left, she had slipped into her father\u2019s workshop in the garage, writing \u201cHi Dad, I love you, Kaye\u201d in neat cursive on a yellow legal pad for him to find later.
\n
\nEarlier in the year, she\u2019d finished a marathon, run two half-marathons and climbed Mount Washington and Three Fingered Jack.
\n
\nThe general store in Camp Sherman, Oregon, where John Ackroyd showed up to report he had discovered some clothing in the woods that might’ve belonged to Kaye Turner, whose disappearance in 1978 caused a stir that lingered for years in this small vacation community just off Highway 20.
\nAckroyd was later charged with Kaye’s murder — the only killing he was ever prosecuted for.[\/caption]
\n
\nShe talked about her plans to run in Camp Sherman, inviting a friend to join her that morning. The woman demurred. Kaye headed out alone, her feet pounding a two-lane camp road tinged red from volcanic ash.
\n
\nShe hadn\u2019t been out long when a state highway worker named Thomas Hanna spotted her, running south, alone. Hanna was returning to his place in Camp Sherman after working the night shift.
\n
\nHe saw another highway worker driving through Camp Sherman that morning.
\n
\nIt was John Ackroyd.
\n
\nBy 10 a.m., Kaye hadn\u2019t returned.
\n
\nNoel Turner drove through Camp Sherman to look for his wife. Finding no sign of her, he panicked and called police.
\n
\nThe memory of an infamous crime, one year earlier, was still fresh in central Oregon. A stranger had driven his pickup over two young women as they slept at Cline Falls State Park, less than an hour southeast of Camp Sherman. Armed with an ax or hatchet, he attacked the women, both students at Yale University. They were critically wounded but survived. No one was ever charged. <\/a>You use just 67 words to effectively condense the details of a crime that must have been full of detail. Was the passage longer and, if so,\u00a0 how did you revise it?<\/span>During the course of my reporting, I heard several references to this infamous Cline Falls attack, which took place around the time of Marlene\u2019s rape and Kaye\u2019s murder. It was a sensational crime that remains unsolved. One of the victims, Terri Jentz, wrote a book<\/a> about what happened and her search for her assailant. I read the book while reporting this story and we made a trip to Cline Falls park during one of our trips to central Oregon. I knew all along I wanted to make a passing reference to this crime because it was such a horrible act that touched on some of the same themes as Ackroyd\u2019s crimes. But I had to keep it tight so I tried to convey the crime and its horror as succinctly as possible.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nNow, a woman had gone missing, triggering a massive search that made headlines clear to Portland: \u201cHusband fears kidnap: Turner searchers losing hope,\u201d one read in The Oregonian four days later.
\n
\nAckroyd\u2019s name emerged early on. Hanna told police he\u2019d seen both the highway worker and the runner in Camp Sherman that morning.
\n
\nAckroyd had indeed come across Kaye but didn\u2019t go to police, even though he saw posters with her picture at the nearby Santiam Junction highway compound, where he lived. He mentioned it only after a pair of state police troopers approached him a couple of weeks later.
\n
\nThen 29, Ackroyd had worked for the highway department for nearly a year. He was raised in Sweet Home, a modest logging town along Highway 20. <\/a>Constant references make Highway 20 a\u00a0 character in its own right? Was that a conscious decision?<\/span>Yes, we saw Highway 20 as its own theme and character. It provided readers with a sense of place but also helped propel the story along.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nHe was the only son of an office worker at the local police department and a maintenance man. He was the middle child between two sisters.
\n
\nAckroyd earned low grades in school; his high school diploma was marked \u201cspecial education.\u201d He was a loner, bullied and beaten by classmates.
\n
\nAccused of felony theft as a teen, he opted to enlist in the Army and was stationed in Korea, Thailand and Germany, where he worked as a mechanic. Overseas, he was investigated for selling marijuana and going AWOL. He was caught trying to steal equipment and supplies.
\n
\nHe showed signs of a disturbed mind. An acquaintance told a detective how he once watched in horror as Ackroyd, then a young man, hacked up puppies using a machete, saying the dogs were his and nobody else could have them. Later, Ackroyd would drive back roads, shooting squirrels and cutting off their tails.
\n
\nOnce home from the Army, he got a state job, where he earned generally positive reviews, though supervisors noted his occasional laziness and frequent time off.
\n
\nBurly and barrel-chested, Ackroyd favored jeans and blue work shirts from the local Sears.
\n
\nHis work meant long hours alone on Highway 20, the route that bisects Oregon from east to west. His stretch of it twisted through Bend, logging towns, Corvallis and on to the coast. Even today parts of the road are so narrow and quiet the highway has the feel of a country lane. <\/a>Structurally, why did you decide to break here for a biography of Ackroyd?<\/span>By this point, it was time to flesh him out. Who was this guy and what made him tick? I relied on hundreds of pages of transcripts from police interviews with Ackroyd for some of these details. I had his work, schooling and military records. I spoke with his coworkers and friends. Police had done extensive interviews with his supervisors and friends as well. I built this profile from those various sources.<\/span> <\/span>
\n
\nBack then, if traffic was light and his window was rolled down, Ackroyd would have heard the South Santiam River rushing alongside the highway as he headed west out of Sweet Home. <\/a>\u201cWould\u201d is a conditional verb indicating the consequence of an imagined event or situation. How can you say with certainty that he would have heard the river?<\/span>I knew from his coworkers that his truck likely didn\u2019t have AC. On one of our reporting trips along Highway 20, I spent the ride focused on the road, what he would have seen from his truck. I heard the river on one of those trips and took the liberty of saying he would have heard it too if his windows were rolled down.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nHe knew how to navigate the hills and hairpin turns during winter, when fierce storms swept through the Cascades.
\n
\nAckroyd knew, too, the dirt spurs that led off the highway and into the forest.
\n
\nIt was on one of them that he\u2019d raped Marlene Gabrielsen a year before Kaye Turner disappeared.
\n
\nAckroyd\u2019s first statement to investigators on the Turner case was spare.
\n
\nHe was based in Santiam Junction, about 25 miles from Camp Sherman, and said he\u2019d gotten off work at 6:30 a.m. A while later, he drove through the camp, planning to hunt coyotes. <\/a>Why don\u2019t you quote directly from his statement?<\/span>The report was a summary of what he told police. It\u2019s not a transcript. I had to rely on their description of what he said.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nHe passed by a runner, he told police.
\n
\nDetectives didn\u2019t dwell on the highway worker. Instead, they focused on Kaye\u2019s husband and possible ties between Kaye\u2019s disappearance and extramarital relationships she had with two men at the time. Her calendar at work noted recent liaisons with the men.
\n
\nThe day after Christmas, experienced trackers who\u2019d joined the search made a disturbing discovery in a clearing near the area where Ackroyd saw Kaye.
\n
\nThe trackers noticed two sets of footprints preserved in the frozen ground. One resembled the waffle soles of Kaye\u2019s Nikes. They mingled with another set that belonged to what appeared to be a large man.
\n
\nThe markings indicated a scuffle.
\n
\nThe larger person had dragged the smaller person away.
\n
\nLocal police didn\u2019t put much stock in the accuracy of the trackers\u2019 findings. The men were told to drop it.
\n
\nEight months later, one day in August, Ackroyd walked into the Camp Sherman Store. <\/a>You handle time very effectively, jumping from minute to minute, day to day, month to month and year to year, eliding what came between without the reader feeling a sense of having missed something. What lay behind this approach?<\/span>This is a messy story that jumps around in time. My goal all along was to limit reader confusion. I tried to give quick references to time to guide without distracting the reader.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nHe was anxious and beaded with sweat even though the afternoon heat had faded.
\n
\nThe shopkeeper, Christine Weston, recognized him. He\u2019d stopped by a half-dozen times since Kaye had gone missing. One of those visits stood out: She\u2019d discovered him fondling himself while looking at Oui, an explicit men\u2019s magazine sold at the store. Disgusted, Weston went to find her husband, but Ackroyd was gone by the time the couple returned to confront him.
\n
\nThat late summer day, Ackroyd headed straight for Weston.
\n
\nHe announced that he\u2019d found Kaye\u2019s remains in the nearby woods while hunting rabbits with his dog, though as a seasoned hunter, he must have known the area was an unlikely choice for spotting rabbits.
\n
\n\u201cI\u2019m in real trouble,\u201d he confided. \u201cI was the last one to see her alive.\u201d
\n
\nAlarmed, Weston went to get her husband, who called state police.
\n
\nAckroyd led investigators into the brush, about a half-mile off the road where Kaye had gone running the previous winter.
\n
\nHow odd, they thought. A hunter would likely overlook the bits of cloth and bone as nothing more than trash and animal carcasses. What had led Ackroyd to conclude the items in the ponderosa pine thicket were Kaye\u2019s?
\n
\nForensic experts and search-and-rescue workers spent nearly a week looking for her remains. They found her lower jawbone and yellow shorts. A scrap from her blue pullover, her underwear and a remnant of the heel from one of her Nikes. They found the other sneaker, mostly intact. Kaye\u2019s gold Timex watch with the vinyl band was there, too. Something, likely a struggle, had knocked out the stem, stopping the watch.
\n
\nThe time and date stood still: 9:27 a.m. on Dec. 24. <\/a>You mentioned the watch earlier. Why?<\/span> I wanted to pick up the watch detail again because we first saw Kaye wearing the watch as she heads on a run and now the watch is a detail in her killing. Police photos showed her watch in the woods near where her partial remains were found. The time had stopped. The watch played a key role in helping to pin down when she was killed. It was so essential to the chronology that the cash-strapped county that tried Ackroyd years later flew in a Timex exec from the East Coast to testify about the watch and its timekeeping. It was one of those details I tucked away knowing I\u2019d use it somewhere. Plus, in an era of smartphones, a Timex wrist watch gives readers the sense that this crime happened in another era.<\/span> <\/span>
\n
\nAs investigators scoured the woods for clues, a state police trooper rested against a tree. He glanced skyward.
\n
\nHigh in the lush canopy, he noticed a bird\u2019s nest perched on a branch.
\n
\nSomething was tangled in the twigs and sticks.
\n
\nIt was Kaye\u2019s blond hair.
\n
\nAckroyd became the prime suspect in Kaye\u2019s abduction and murder.
\n
\nInvestigators\u2019 suspicions deepened as his story began to shift.
\n
\nInitially, he told police he\u2019d passed Kaye without stopping. Now he admitted he\u2019d not only stopped but also had spoken with her.
\n
\nOver time, Ackroyd added incriminating details to his account. In one stunning development, he revealed that he\u2019d seen Kaye\u2019s decomposing remains two months after her disappearance but never thought to call police. He said her body was lying in the same wooded area where scraps of her clothing and bits of bone were found.
\n
\nHer breast had been punctured by a bullet, he said, and her throat was slashed. He claimed he\u2019d reached down to touch the slain woman\u2019s arm and hair.
\n
\nThe gruesome details implicated Ackroyd and suggested to investigators that he\u2019d returned to Camp Sherman weeks after the killing to check on Kaye\u2019s remains.
\n
\nAckroyd disclosed yet another curious detail: He hadn\u2019t been alone on Christmas Eve morning.
\n
\nHe said he was with his friend and hunting companion, Roger Dale Beck. The men at first said they\u2019d hunted coyotes but later changed their stories to say they were poaching deer.
\n
\nDespite all the tantalizing coincidences and Ackroyd\u2019s apparent eagerness to place himself at the scene of the crime, investigators could find no physical evidence definitively linking him to the killing. He steadfastly maintained his innocence, admitting only that he had seen Kaye that morning and found her remains.
\n
\nThen a confession by a convicted murderer sidetracked detectives before they determined he was lying. <\/a>I know from watching Dave Killen\u2019s powerful documentary that much of what you summarize in the story, especially people\u2019s voices, appears there instead of the print narrative.\u00a0 Without the film, do you think you would use more voices?<\/span>Yes, you\u2019re right. Some of the most important sources never appear in the print component of this project. I sought to write a driving narrative that relied on detail, dialogue and description with a bedrock of reporting and research. It felt clunky to me to stop and quote a source. I knew those important voices would have their say in the video so it liberated me to write with more authority. I produced a separate online version of the story with more than 150 footnotes showing the interviews and records that supported crucial passages.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nEventually, the investigation stalled. Ackroyd returned to the periphery.
\n
\nIt seems remarkable in hindsight that he managed to elude police despite such compelling circumstantial evidence and his rape a year earlier of another woman off Highway 20.
\n
\nYet Ackroyd went on working for the state, responding to broken down cars, clearing wrecks and fixing state rigs along the highway, alone.
\n
\nHe married a local woman named Linda and they lived with her young kids, Byron and Rachanda.
\n
\nBeck left Oregon. He was convicted of a sex crime in Minnesota, served seven months in prison, and moved to California.
\n
\nKaye Turner\u2019s killing became a faded memory. Her case remained unsolved. Detectives moved on.
\n
\nThen Rachanda Pickle, Ackroyd\u2019s 13-year-old stepdaughter, disappeared. <\/a>Several parts conclude with a cliffhanger, effectively designed to keep the reader reading. How did you decide on these and did they form part of the narrative strategy?<\/span>My editors, Therese Bottomly and Margaret Haberman, told me over and over to think about scenes and to identify cliffhangers. When I outlined each day\u2019s story, I focused on cliffhangers, kickers and which scenes could propel the narrative.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nNEXT: Home alone, then gone<\/strong><\/a>\n

PART 3 OF 5<\/h3>\nRachanda Pickle\u2019s stepfather could turn angry in a flash.
\n
\nOnce, when a clock fell off a shelf, he beat her with a homemade paddle. When it snapped, he smacked her repeatedly with his open hand. At other times, friends saw her with a black eye and a wound from where he\u2019d ripped out a patch of her hair. <\/a>What was your source for this description of Ackroyd\u2019s temper?<\/span>Interviews with Rachanda Pickle\u2019s brother, Byron, and one of her childhood friends. My footnotes for this passage: Oregonian interview with Byron Pickle: \u201cThey had paddles. We were smacked by paddles and a lot of people who are are like, \u2018Oh big deal, a paddle.\u2019 No, there was paddles that were designed with holes drilled in them and stuff and they would brag about it helps cuts through the air and you get a harder spanking.\u201d Ackroyd was \u201cvery predominant in discipline. \u2026 If I put 50 dollars on a gamble that there wasn\u2019t punishment in a week I would lose that 50 dollars.\u201d \u2026 \u201cWhen John snapped, it was scary. I remember him spanking her over one of those old school windup alarm clocks and it got broke and he was trying to fix it in and stuff and him and mom were talking about it and they were both getting heated…mom said to line them up and spank them until (one confesses) \u2026 They were getting ready to line us up. My sister was denying it. \u2026 She admitted it could have been her. That beating she got was over, over the top. It was scary. My mom was yelling at John to stop. It was scary. He was using a paddle at that time. They were thin slats of wood. It took a lot of force to break them. That\u2019s when it got broken, over her rear. Then he started swinging at her with his hand.\u201d<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nShe was 13.
\n
\nThe family lived at the state highway division compound at Santiam Junction, where U.S. 20 and Oregon 22 meet. Stockpiles of cinder rock towered near the buildings inside the complex. Plows stood ready to rumble onto the mountain pass during winter storms. It was a 30-minute drive to the nearest store for milk. <\/a>How do you know how long it took?<\/span>Google says its about a half-hour to Sisters, the nearest town where the family would have bought groceries. I checked that with Byron, Rachanda\u2019s brother. It seemed like decent shorthand for conveying the remoteness of this area.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nA dozen or so work crews called the junction home. Few kids lived there and the ones who did weren\u2019t Rachanda\u2019s age.
\n
\nJohn Ackroyd had an unusual arrangement with Rachanda\u2019s mother, Linda. The couple married in the mid-1980s but divorced after a year. They continued to live together, though, raising Linda’s two kids, Rachanda and her older brother, Byron.
\n
\n\nRachanda was a good kid, helping around the house and taking care not to stray far. She rode her bike in the lane just outside the door and took a bus to grade school in Sweet Home. She listened to pop stars Debbie Gibson and Wilson Phillips in her bedroom and teased her brother, who was her protector and playground companion.
\n
\nHer family called her Channy.
\n
\nTo some, she seemed lost, almost invisible. When parent conferences rolled around, no one showed up.
\n
\nIn fifth grade, something shifted. She seemed withdrawn and tired. In class, she counted down the minutes, a sense of dread rising as the end of the school day approached.
\n
\nShe confided in two girls who were sisters. She cried as she told one of them that she was terrified of returning to the junction alone. She asked if she could sleep over. One time, she made a scene when it was time to go. Another time, they snuck her into their bedroom closet.
\n
\nThe sisters knew why she was afraid. <\/a>Was it difficult to have to summarize so much of the story when your reporting had turned up more than enough details to dramatize the action?<\/span>Yes and it was something I struggled with. But these are long stories and I didn\u2019t want to lose readers, so it was a question of using scenes and descriptions that were most telling. My editor tells me I usually write with economy and directness, so it was also more of my natural style to hone and hone some more.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nAckroyd was molesting Rachanda.
\n
\nOn the morning of July 10, Rachanda was awake early to help her mother get ready for the day. She French-braided her mom\u2019s hair, then settled on the couch to watch cartoons in her pajamas.
\n
\nLinda and John Ackroyd left for work, she as a housekeeper at Black Butte Ranch, a resort community about 30 minutes away, and he as a highway mechanic. They weren\u2019t expected back until afternoon.
\n
\nHer mother left behind a short list of chores. Load the dishwasher. Vacuum the house. Take hot dogs out of the freezer.
\n
\nLater that morning, the door to the house opened unexpectedly.
\n
\nJohn Ackroyd was back.
\n
\nRachanda was never seen again.
\n
\nAckroyd spun the same story from then on.
\n
\nHe dropped off Linda at the resort and continued east on Highway 20 to the state maintenance shop in Bend. He\u2019d planned to fix snowplows but decided to take the day off after learning parts hadn\u2019t arrived, a claim that baffled his supervisor, who said there was plenty of work to keep Ackroyd busy.
\n
\nHe said he returned home to find his stepdaughter under a blanket on the couch. The television was on. The family\u2019s kittens were curled up on the girl\u2019s lap, he said.
\n
\nHe claimed he invited her to join him on a drive to photograph deer on back roads near the junction.
\n
\nRachanda declined, citing the chores her mother expected her to finish, he said. Then he said he left.
\n
\nBy his account, Rachanda was gone when he returned a couple of hours later.
\n
\nAckroyd did little to look for her and later picked up Linda from work.
\n
\nWhen the couple pulled into the compound that evening, Rachanda wasn\u2019t hanging around outside like she had the day before.
\n
\nThe home showed no signs of foul play. Rachanda\u2019s green nightgown was on her bedroom floor. Her mother noticed the girl\u2019s hairbrush, makeup and earrings were still there. The dishes weren\u2019t in the dishwasher and the floor wasn\u2019t vacuumed.
\n
\nThe girl who was good about leaving notes if she headed out to play Nintendo at a neighbor\u2019s house hadn\u2019t left one.
\n
\nThe couple ate; then they had sex, significant because they almost never did. Ackroyd\u2019s low libido was the source of such open conflict that Linda\u2019s teenage son, Byron, knew of their troubles. <\/a>The language of the story is spare and lean. How much was revision involved in accomplishing this?<\/span>A spare style is my natural tendency. The editing and revisions were often focused on fleshing out an idea and switching up styles so it wasn\u2019t all spare and lean if that makes sense.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n\u201cIt was great,\u201d Ackroyd would later tell detectives.
\n
\n\u201cWhere is she?\u201d Linda asked Ackroyd as darkness enveloped the highway compound. \u201cYou should know. You were here with her.\u201d
\n
\nHe said he didn\u2019t know. He told Linda to wait until the next day to call police.
\n
\nIn the morning, she dialed 911.
\n
\nShe was calm as she told the dispatcher that her daughter, a homebody, had gone missing. When the dispatcher asked why she hadn\u2019t called sooner, Linda said she assumed she had to wait 24 hours to report a missing person.
\n
\n\u201cNo,\u201d the bewildered dispatcher said, \u201cthat\u2019s not true, not with children.\u201d <\/a>How were you able to describe the dispatcher as \u201cbewildered?<\/span>I can hear her bafflement on the 911 audio, which I\u2019ve listened to over and over. At first, she\u2019s just taking the info from Linda Ackroyd. Then Linda tells her that Rachanda has been gone for 24 hours and the dispatcher stumbles a bit. She clearly is trying to process why a mother would wait so long to report that her child has disappeared from a remote highway compound.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe dispatcher asked: \u201cWho was the last person that saw her, do you know?\u201d
\n
\nLinda\u2019s reply was matter of fact.
\n
\n\u201cHer stepdad.\u201d
\n
\nPolice swarmed the highway compound.
\n
\nWord that Ackroyd\u2019s stepdaughter had vanished spread quickly to neighboring Jefferson County, where Kaye Turner had been killed more than a decade earlier.
\n
\nBill Hanlon, the district attorney in Jefferson County, wasn\u2019t surprised when the call came from a prosecutor in Linn County, where Ackroyd lived.
\n
\n\u201cEver heard of John Ackroyd?\u201d
\n
\nHanlon, who\u2019d spent his career practicing law in rural Oregon, knew of Ackroyd from reading a slim three-ring binder stashed in a cardboard box left behind by his predecessor.
\n
\nHe\u2019d pored over Ackroyd\u2019s police interviews from 1979 when the highway worker admitted he was the last person to see Kaye Turner. He knew it was Ackroyd who had eventually led police to her remains.
\n
\nThe DA knew Ackroyd had changed his story and admitted he had talked to Kaye the morning he encountered her on a run.
\n
\nSure, he knew of Ackroyd.
\n
\n\u201cJohn Ackroyd killed Kaye Turner,\u201d he replied. <\/a>This time you use a direct quote? Why?<\/span>I like how direct, clean and certain Hanlon\u2019s quote is here. It lets the reader know that this could be an important turning point in the story.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe next day, Hanlon hopped in a car with a Jefferson County deputy for a briefing on the search for Rachanda. The men drove by Santiam Junction, slowing as they passed the eastern edge of the highway compound where Ackroyd\u2019s manufactured home backed up to the woods.
\n
\nThere was Ackroyd, standing at the back of his Ford pickup. He was painting the tailgate.
\n
\nCovering his tracks, thought Hanlon.
\n
\nThis time, the DA \u2014 and the cops who believed Ackroyd had gotten away with Kaye Turner\u2019s killing \u2014 were determined to get the highway worker off the street for good.
\n
\nAckroyd didn\u2019t seem bothered that Rachanda was gone and spoke about his missing stepdaughter in a way no panicked parent ever would. He rattled off the girl\u2019s weight and bra size but couldn\u2019t remember her birthday.
\n
\nHe thought she was pretty, he said, and noticed that she\u2019d begun to develop.
\n
\nOver the course of the investigation, he acted strangely. He appeared to become sexually aroused when shown a pair of pants that police had found in the woods and initially suspected belonged to Rachanda.
\n
\nHe basked in attention from police. He even pretended to aid in the fruitless search for the girl.
\n
\nAckroyd\u2019s grim speculation about the harm that had likely come to Rachanda echoed gory stories like the ones he\u2019d replay over and over in \u201cFriday the 13th\u201d and \u201cTexas Chainsaw Massacre.\u201d
\n
\nOnce, he invited neighbors over to watch horror movies, becoming so animated over scenes of women being chopped up that he\u2019d hit rewind again and again. His friends became sick at the sight and left.
\n
\nHe wondered aloud if Rachanda had been dumped and buried in the woods or threatened with a knife, tied up and gagged, her body rolled in plastic.
\n
\nMaybe it was the girl\u2019s development, he told police, that drew a predator to the junction.
\n
\n\u201cSomebody could have just come in,\u201d he said, \u201cknocked her over the head, throw her over the shoulders and just walk out without anybody seeing her. \u2026 Maybe they just walked in, seen an opportunity and grasped at it.\u201d
\n
\nThe officers assigned to interrogate Ackroyd were direct:
\n
\nThe highway worker had hurt Rachanda, stuffed her into a garbage bag and hauled her away, Linn County Sheriff\u2019s Detective Jim Salsbery said during one of their interviews. His partner, Detective Will McAnulty, sat nearby. The men spent hours talking to Ackroyd.
\n
\nBy now, investigators knew who they were dealing with. Ackroyd would recycle the same stories. They kept their exasperation in check, rarely raising their voices as they combed fine details for any new revelation.
\n
\nFor a man suspected of murder, Ackroyd was impassive under intense grilling by Salsbery and McAnulty.
\n
\nOccasionally, Ackroyd would reach for one of the Fireball candies he carried in his pocket. <\/a>This is a such a powerful, almost poetic detail. What was your reaction when you discovered it? Did you assume readers would know what a Fireball is?<\/span>Like Kaye\u2019s watch and her hair in the bird\u2019s nest, this Fireball detail is one I knew I would use. A cop once mentioned to me that Ackroyd always had a bunch of these candies in his pocket and would pop them into his mouth during interrogations. It was a great detail that I needed to work into the story. I wasn\u2019t sure what to call it. A cinnamon candy? I asked my colleagues if they thought readers would know about Fireballs and the consensus was yes.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n\u201cYou know,\u201d he said, \u201cboth of you sitting there pointing your fingers at me, and I didn\u2019t do nothing.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cDidn\u2019t do anything to Kaye Jean Turner?\u201d McAnulty asked, his voice cool.
\n
\n\u201cNo.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cDidn\u2019t do anything to Channy?\u201d the cop pressed.
\n
\n\u201cNo.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cDidn\u2019t do anything to anybody else?\u201d
\n
\n\u201cNo, what do you think I am?\u201d Ackroyd said, his voice rising in rare agitation. \u201cA sadistic killer goes around killing people, taking girls off somewhere? \u2026 I did not do nothing. At the wrong place at the right time.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cA bunch of times,\u201d McAnulty said.
\n
\n\u201cTwice,\u201d Ackroyd snapped.
\n
\n\u201cTwice that we know of,\u201d said McAnulty.
\n
\nWasn\u2019t it strange that he was the last person to see Kaye and Rachanda alive?
\n
\n\u201cYou could win the lottery four or five times before something like that would happen,\u201d Salsbery said.
\n
\nThe interview sputtered to a halt. Within months, without a body or physical evidence implicating Ackroyd, so did the investigation.
\n
\nBut they knew Ackroyd was a killer. They had to get him.
\n
\nThey returned to Kaye Turner.
\n
\nDetectives dug into Kaye\u2019s killing once more and soon stumbled on their biggest breakthrough. <\/a>Did you have any models in mind, any that you studied before or as you were writing?<\/span>I did not have any models in mind. I read “In Cold Blood\u201d<\/a> and watched “The Keepers\u201d<\/a> while working on this series. But neither served as models.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nIt started when a supervisor in the Linn County Sheriff\u2019s Office assigned McAnulty to organize press clippings from the early days of the investigation. It was the kind of menial task you might give a rookie detective. McAnulty, who\u2019d been promoted to detective just 10 days earlier, dutifully examined old newspaper articles and reports.
\n
\nHe read about how Ackroyd had been with an old hunting buddy on the morning of Kaye\u2019s killing.
\n
\nThat friend was Roger Dale Beck. Beck and his wife lived in a trailer not far from Camp Sherman, where Kaye had disappeared. His wife, Pam, said the two men were around the trailer for most of the morning, which helped give Ackroyd an alibi.
\n
\nHe read about how Ackroyd had been with an old hunting buddy on the morning of Kaye\u2019s killing.
\n
\nThe couple had since divorced and Pam had moved to California.
\n
\nMcAnulty wondered if an ex-wife might see the events of the distant past in a different light.
\n
\nHe talked his boss into letting him drive 750 miles to California to find out.
\n
\nBy then, Beck\u2019s ex-wife had lost touch with Ackroyd but remained fond of him. The two had history that extended to childhood. When she was 12, Ackroyd tattooed his initials on her arm. Two years later, at age 14, she married Beck.
\n
\nTime had fogged her memory, but on one point she was clear: The men ordered her to lie if police asked where they were that morning.
\n
\n\u201cI lied like hell back then,\u201d she told McAnulty. <\/a>Why did Pam Ramirez lie when first interviewed by the cops?<\/span>She was married to one suspect and romantically involved with the other. But those relationships shifted over time. Her husband was abusive and she drifted from Ackroyd. When cops went back to her years later, she apparently felt more at ease talking about what really happened.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe truth, she said, was this:
\n
\nOn Christmas Eve morning, Ackroyd showed up at the house. The men ate and left to poach deer, not returning until the next day, she said. Their clothes were spattered with so much blood that she got rid of Beck\u2019s jeans and shirt.
\n
\nLater, the men told her that they\u2019d mistaken Kaye for a deer and fatally shot her.
\n
\nOver time, the story took on even darker tones.
\n
\nKaye had been raped and shot, Beck told Pam. She said he threatened to \u201cdo to me exactly what they did to Kaye Turner.\u201d
\n
\nBy early 1992, investigators were closing in on Ackroyd. <\/a>Did you and your colleagues ever worry whether readers would care about cases that happened so many years before?<\/span>We worried about this constantly. So we had to make clear to the reader why we were telling these stories. Why do these victims matter now? They matter because some of their stories have never been told. Their connections to Ackroyd were never made public. And Marlene was the victim of police malpractice, which had lethal consequences.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nHe\u2019d returned to Sweet Home to live with his mother and split for good with Linda. After Rachanda\u2019s disappearance, Ackroyd was transferred out of Santiam Junction, where his connection to the case and his behavior made women uncomfortable.
\n
\nAckroyd worked out of Corvallis and continued to roam the highway.
\n
\nSometime after he moved, Ackroyd was in his truck with the daughter of an old friend. She spotted two young women she knew. Ackroyd stopped. She introduced the women to him and they climbed in.
\n
\nMelissa Sanders was 17 and from Sweet Home. Sheila Swanson was 19 and from nearby Lebanon.
\n
\nThey were restless and broke, living an itinerant existence, drinking too much and keeping dangerous company.
\n
\nMost nights, the pair could be found at Shari\u2019s in Lebanon, where teens and adults gathered to talk on CB radios and drink coffee.
\n
\nAckroyd, too, hung out there. He was drawn to Melissa and Sheila, making a point to chat them up.
\n
\nAt the same time, a dozen investigators working the Turner case seized on Ackroyd\u2019s shifting accounts. They pressed him again and again about his interactions with Kaye.
\n
\nCops went to search a storage unit Ackroyd had rented the year before, only to find he\u2019d cleared it out days earlier.
\n
\nAckroyd was a prime suspect and he knew it. A grand jury would hear the case.
\n
\nHis arrest was imminent. <\/a>The style of the series is elliptical in that it leaves out information, such as dialogue, names of source and other details. How and why did you settle on that approach?<\/span>I was working with a massive amount of information, a long span of years and a huge slice of Oregon geography. It made sense to strip it down. I wanted to absorb all of the material I had collected and then tell the story with authority. It\u2019s also a newspaper story, not a book. We gobbled up newsroom resources and space online and in the paper, but there\u2019s a limit \u2014 and that\u2019s the reality of the job and format. I also was liberated by knowing the companion photos and video would fill in many of the details in a different way. The project was a true collaboration.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nWithin weeks, Melissa and Sheila were dead.
\n

\nNEXT: Just looking for a ride home<\/strong><\/a>\n

PART 4 OF 5<\/h3>\nMelissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson made their final call from a pay phone in the dark, the sound of the Pacific Ocean churning in the background. <\/a>An ominous lead. How did you settle on this entry point to their story?<\/span>On one reporting trip to the Oregon Coast, I walked the campground and stood in the area where the women made their final call. I tried to picture this scene. The idea of two young women standing in the dark in a woodsy campground steps from the Pacific Ocean heightened their vulnerability. I wanted the reader to grasp the precarious position these women were at the time they disappeared.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe two friends had gone camping with Melissa\u2019s family at Beverly Beach State Park, a windswept strand of sand and headlands on the central Oregon coast. The restive pair quickly grew bored and wanted their boyfriends to pick them up. When the men turned them down, Melissa and Sheila said they\u2019d hitchhike instead.
\n
\nThe teenagers had met six months earlier. They grew up in small towns about 90 minutes inland on Highway 20 and shared a history infused with drugs and alcohol.
\n
\nThey were scrappy and streetwise high school dropouts. Sheila often slept away from home but stayed in touch with her mother. Melissa had a turbulent life, too. She once showed up at Sheila\u2019s with bruises on her face and asked if she could stay.
\n
\nThe two spent evenings at a Shari\u2019s restaurant along Highway 20, where they hung around with other teens and locals, including a state mechanic named John Ackroyd.
\n
\nBy then, Ackroyd was a suspected killer who had frustrated police for more than a decade. He had raped a young woman, led detectives to a runner\u2019s remains off an isolated road in central Oregon and was the last person to see his stepdaughter alive.
\n
\nVulnerable and adrift, Melissa and Sheila knew nothing of Ackroyd\u2019s sinister background when he entered their lives.
\n
\nSheila, then 19, was the older of the two but seemed younger. She carried her baby book as a reminder of a time when she was happy. She often wore a black leather jacket that her parents paid for on installments.
\n
\nAt 17, Melissa was tough-talking and independent. The spring camping trip to Newport was supposed to mean time with family, but she and Sheila took off the first chance they got.
\n
\nMelissa\u2019s parents awoke to find the young women gone, their tent empty. They assumed the two had gotten a ride from friends.
\n
\nWhen the family returned to Sweet Home later that week, Melissa wasn\u2019t there. Her father waited a few more days before calling police, then the FBI. Word reached police in Lebanon, Sheila\u2019s hometown, that she, too, hadn\u2019t shown up.
\n
\nLocal cops tracked down Sheila\u2019s mother. She\u2019d gone around town hanging missing posters but hadn\u2019t called police.
\n
\nWhat they didn\u2019t know: The teens likely were already dead.
\n
\nAround that time, Marvin Laront was working the graveyard shift at the state highway shop in Sweet Home. Ackroyd would park his personal truck there before taking a state rig to work in Corvallis. <\/a>How did you track down Laront? Was it easy to get him to talk to you?<\/span>I think I just ran him through one of our databases. He was willing to talk. He seemed almost relieved to be able to talk about what he\u2019d seen.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nLaront and a coworker sat on seats salvaged from old vans, talking about the night ahead. They\u2019d noticed that Ackroyd\u2019s truck was still parked outside and his work rig wasn\u2019t there. That meant he was on the road unusually late.
\n
\nThe men heard a truck pull into the yard.
\n
\nStrange hour for company, they thought.
\n
\nIt was Ackroyd.
\n
\nHis shirtsleeves were rolled up. Dried blood covered his arms and hands.
\n
\n\u201cWhat the heck happened to you?\u201d Laront asked.
\n
\n\u201cRan into a deer,\u201d Ackroyd said. \u201cI had to gut him out.\u201d
\n
\nLaront asked what Ackroyd had done with the carcass.
\n
\n\u201cThrew him into the brush,\u201d he said.
\n
\nBewildered by the explanation, the men watched as Ackroyd washed up. Then he left for home. <\/a>This time you dramatize the action instead of summarizing it. Why?<\/span>This is a dramatic scene \u2014 Ackroyd walks into the Sweet Home shop spattered with blood and offers a strange explanation. I knew this would be an essential scene. It\u2019s damning circumstantial evidence linking Ackroyd to the deaths of these two women, Melissa and Sheila. I was able to reconstruct this scene based on a detailed interview with Marvin Laront<\/span>.<\/span>
\n
\nLater, they mentioned the bizarre encounter to a foreman, but the anecdote never made it past shop gossip.
\n
\nLaront didn\u2019t think of it again until that fall when he heard the news on the radio. Hunters had found the bodies of two young women who had vanished during a camping trip on the coast. They\u2019d been dumped off the highway along Ackroyd\u2019s route from the coast to Sweet Home. Sheila\u2019s ankles were bound with leggings. Her sneakers and socks were still on her feet.
\n
\nA used rivet was discovered near her body. Investigators suspected the rivet \u2014 a quick fix used in field repairs \u2014 had fallen out of the pocket of her attacker.
\n
\nParts of Melissa\u2019s body were gone, probably dragged away by animals. She was nude. <\/a>Was the use of such sickening details debated before the story ran? What was the justification to go ahead and use them in a \u201cfamily newspaper?\u201d<\/span>Pretty much all the details of the attacks and deaths are sickening in the series. It\u2019s ugly to describe and imagine these killings. We talked all along about how graphic to be. These particular details are important as circumstantial evidence. They show similarities with the other attacks \u2014 off the highway in the woods, restraints or some sort of overpowering, abuse and then stashing the women\u2019s bodies out of the way, leaving them for the elements and animals to destroy. It\u2019s definitely hard to read but written, I hope it\u2019s seen, with deliberation and circumspection.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe medical examiner speculated that the young women had been strangled, but the condition of their remains made it difficult to determine a cause of death for either.
\n
\nLaront remembered the night when a bloodied Ackroyd came into the shop. It was earlier in the year, though he couldn\u2019t recall the date.
\n
\n\u201cWait a minute,\u201d Laront thought, \u201chow come he is coming back so late at night?
\n
\n\u201cHow come he had all this blood on his hands?\u201d
\n
\nMelissa and Sheila vanished as police closed in on Ackroyd in the killing of Kaye Turner, who had disappeared 14 years earlier on a backroad near Highway 20.
\n
\nWeeks after the teens disappeared, Ackroyd was finally arrested for Kaye\u2019s murder and booked into the Jefferson County jail in Madras. Detectives wondered if he took a chance to kill again before his arrest.
\n
\nKaye had been an avid runner with deep ties to Eugene, where she worked as a manager at a local public health agency. On Christmas Eve morning in 1978, she went out for a run in Camp Sherman, where she, her husband and friends planned to spend the holiday.
\n
\nShe encountered Ackroyd and his hunting partner on a deserted road. Months later, the highway worker led police to the wooded area where scraps of her clothing and her jawbone were found.
\n
\nAckroyd dodged the accusations at the time, but police revived Kaye\u2019s case in 1990 amid an unsuccessful investigation to solve the disappearance of Rachanda Pickle, Ackroyd\u2019s 13-year-old stepdaughter.
\n
\nNow, two years after Rachanda went missing without a trace from the family home, the young women who left a camping trip were dead. Within days of the discovery of Melissa and Sheila\u2019s bodies, police zeroed in once again on the highway worker.
\n
\nEven before hunters had stumbled upon the teens\u2019 remains, Ackroyd told a friend: \u201cThey are assuming it\u2019s me.\u201d
\n
\nPolice scoured his work truck. One detective took time to sketch Ackroyd\u2019s loose connections to Melissa and Sheila — how he and the teenagers knew some of the same people in Sweet Home, his hometown.
\n
\nWhile recordings from his earlier police interrogations on the Kaye Turner and Rachanda Pickle cases filled hours of tape, Ackroyd was silent on Melissa and Sheila. <\/a>Did you have to listen to them to be able to write that sentence?<\/span>I listened to them all, some multiple times.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nA detective reached out to request an interview. This time Ackroyd\u2019s lawyer responded. The answer was no.
\n
\nJust as before, police turned up no physical evidence linking him to Melissa and Sheila.
\n
\nAckroyd was one of many leads they pursued. The teens had managed to build a sordid social circle in their young lives, so investigators had plenty of violent men to consider. Police at one point speculated that Melissa\u2019s alleged theft of glassware from a local meth cook might have gotten them killed.
\n
\nNone of it went anywhere.
\n
\nTwo decades passed.
\n
\nSheila\u2019s parents had died, leaving her younger brother to carry on alone with his grief. Melissa\u2019s mother died, too. Her father, Richard Sanders, kept her jewelry box, which looked like a miniature china cabinet, under a counter in the old trailer where he lived outside Sweet Home.
\n
\nMelissa and Sheila joined a list of girls last heard from or seen late at night in coastal Lincoln County. In all, five teens disappeared on or around highways in the county from 1984 through 1995.
\n
\nTheir cases lingered in the community\u2019s collective memory, and the local district attorney decided to reopen them in 2012, eager to identify potential suspects. <\/a>Why after two decades?<\/span>I think the local DA wanted to take another look at this cluster of unsolved cases involving young women, and Melissa and Sheila were among them.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe unglamorous task fell to Ron Benson, an investigator for the district attorney, and Linda Snow, a retired legal assistant. They complemented each other: Benson, a veteran cop who\u2019d had a hand in investigating some of Lincoln County\u2019s most memorable and notorious crimes, and Snow, a quick study with an impressive memory and a knack for spinning a mountain of clues into theories.
\n
\nThey met once a week in Benson\u2019s office to dive into thousands of pages of old files, spending hours devouring details about the case.
\n
\nWhat had the original investigators overlooked?
\n
\nA lawyer from central Oregon heard the cases had been reopened and called with a suggestion: Take a look at an old highway worker named John Ackroyd. <\/a>It\u2019s amazing how much serendipity plays a role in this story, isn\u2019t it?<\/span>Yes! But it\u2019s worth noting that it took many years for this particular serendipity to play out. It\u2019s a testament to taking a second or third look with fresh eyes and newer forensic techniques at old crimes. It\u2019s also a testament to the human need to find answers and how these disappearances and Ackroyd himself affected people who knew there had to be a connection.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nBenson made a four-hour trek to a courthouse three counties away, where a metal filing cabinet held Kaye Turner\u2019s case. Snow worked the phones, digging up numbers for highway workers, many of them long retired.
\n
\nOver time, the two made painstaking progress. They located the woman who had introduced Melissa and Sheila to Ackroyd. She told them how Ackroyd had once offered the young women a ride.
\n
\nThe anecdote revealed that Ackroyd knew Melissa and Sheila and that the young women were comfortable enough with him to climb into his truck.
\n
\nOthers told the investigators that Ackroyd started hanging around the Shari\u2019s in Lebanon after he met the teens. It was there that witnesses heard Ackroyd try to lure Melissa and Sheila to a party he said he\u2019d planned to host in Newport — just down the road from where they would be camping.
\n
\nOld coworkers told Benson and Snow how they\u2019d seen Ackroyd around a highway project near a gravel logging road off Highway 20. It wasn\u2019t far from where the teens\u2019 remains were found. Ackroyd was spotted there at least three times after they went missing.
\n
\nThe investigators sifted through the evidence collected from the woods where hunters came across Melissa and Sheila\u2019s bodies. There was the rivet found near Sheila and a beaded seat cushion used at the time in cars and trucks.
\n
\nHighway workers told them the rivet was a common part they carried on the job. And a seat cover, they said, could have been in Ackroyd\u2019s state rig. Some workers used them to keep cool in summer months.
\n
\nA whiteboard went up in Benson\u2019s office. <\/a>Why did you decide to use Benson and\u00a0 Snow as a vehicle to transmit all this background?<\/span>The series linked Melissa and Sheila\u2019s disappearances to Ackroyd for the first time. Their deaths exposed Ackroyd as a serial killer and raised the possibility of other killings. The cold case investigation was current and provided real-time detective work that was an aspect of the story that we hadn\u2019t yet explored. Most of the narrative was constructed looking back. This was looking forward. And narratively, the detectives and their work showed connections among all the cases.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nHe drew an orange grid, each column dedicated to a victim assaulted or killed, likely by Ackroyd.
\n
\nFirst: Marlene Gabrielsen, raped in 1977.
\n
\nKaye Turner was killed in 1978, followed by Ackroyd\u2019s stepdaughter, Rachanda, in 1990.
\n
\nThen Melissa and Sheila in 1992.
\n
\nThe two investigators crowded Benson\u2019s office with more whiteboards, scribbling fine points from each case. They looked for similarities \u2014 how none of the victims had been buried, for example. Ackroyd had once speculated to police that his stepdaughter might not have been buried either. Her body had never been found.
\n
\nAnd then there was Ackroyd\u2019s eerie talk of hunting. He told police he was poaching when Kaye was killed. He said he\u2019d gone to photograph wildlife when Rachanda went missing. His excuse for his bloody arms and hands around the time Melissa and Sheila vanished was that he\u2019d just gutted a roadkill deer.
\n
\nThey wrote down his habit of taking time off around the disappearances, as he\u2019d done with Kaye and Rachanda. He took off a couple days the week Melissa and Sheila had gone camping.
\n
\nLate in the investigation, they heard the strange tale from a few of the old highway workers about Ackroyd\u2019s bloody arms. The story was secondhand and not in any of the police reports.
\n
\nToo good to be true, Snow thought. But what if the case turned on that clue?
\n
\nBenson and Snow set out to find the men who had the strange encounter with Ackroyd. Highway worker after highway worker said they weren\u2019t there that night, they couldn\u2019t vouch that it had happened.
\n
\nThen one finally offered: Try a woman who worked at the Sweet Home shop back then.
\n
\nIt took weeks \u2014 the woman had changed her name since the early 1990s \u2014 but she remembered the men and their names.
\n
\nThe investigators called Marvin Laront. His voice came through the speaker. He recalled the blood, Ackroyd\u2019s unlikely story and the odd timing. In a separate call, his old coworker told the same story.
\n
\nOf course they remembered. How could they forget?
\n
\nThe investigators glanced at each other, stunned by the damning account all these years later.
\n
\nIt was as close to a breakthrough as they\u2019d get.
\n
\nFour years after they started, Benson and Snow had strung together enough evidence to take the double murder to a grand jury.
\n
\nTheir theory:
\n
\nMelissa and Sheila had waited until dawn to leave the family\u2019s campsite. They began walking along U.S. 101, covering more than six miles to the turnoff to Highway 20, then headed east. Ackroyd, going to Newport for work that day, encountered the teenagers somewhere along the highway and offered them a lift, just as he had in the past. This time, he drove them up a logging road and into the woods.
\n
\nThe body count tied to Ackroyd was now up to four. <\/a>You end this section by withholding what happened with the grand jury. Why?<\/span>The state didn\u2019t take the case to a grand jury. They simply felt they had enough. It was my way of saying the state felt they had enough to prove this case and that\u2019s as close as this case would get to justice.<\/span><\/span>
\n

\nNEXT: Who was John Ackroyd?<\/strong><\/a>\n

PART 5 OF 5<\/h3>\nJohn Ackroyd had nothing left to say when he finally went on trial for abducting Kaye Turner 15 years earlier as she was out for a winter run along a backwoods road off Highway 20.
\n
\nHe had done all his talking to investigators during hours of interrogations after Kaye vanished. Those contradictions, discrepancies and outright lies had led him to this moment.
\n
\nAll these years later, the Turner trial would be the first step in bringing the killer to justice.
\n
\n\u201cThis day,\u201d prosecutor Bill Hanlon told jurors, \u201chas been long in coming.\u201d
\n
\nFor more than a month in late 1993, Ackroyd sat impassively in a courtroom at the historic Jefferson County Courthouse in downtown Madras, about an hour\u2019s drive across the high desert from where Kaye had disappeared.
\n
\nAckroyd, an opportunist who preyed on women, had worked for more than a decade as a state mechanic along the last 170 miles of Highway 20 from the Cascade foothills to the coast.
\n
\nHe eluded police even as their suspicions about him deepened. He had already raped a young mother by the time he happened upon Kaye the day before Christmas in 1978.
\n
\nAckroyd\u2019s explanations of his encounter with her never added up, but detectives found no physical evidence directly tying him to the killing.
\n
\nThey filed it away, unsolved.
\n
\nThen Ackroyd\u2019s teenage stepdaughter disappeared and a new group of investigators reopened Kaye\u2019s case. Two more young women disappeared about a month before Ackroyd was arrested and charged in Kaye\u2019s death.
\n
\nThe murder trial made headlines around the state. Kaye\u2019s mother attended, but her father, shattered by the loss of his only child, didn\u2019t live long enough to see the case come to a close.
\n
\nThe jurors listened attentively and scribbled notes. They didn\u2019t hear from Ackroyd, who had decided not to testify. But they heard about forensic testing on Kaye\u2019s clothing. The testing, unavailable at the time of her killing, showed she\u2019d been shot and stabbed. Prosecutors said she also had been raped.
\n
\nAmong the witnesses was a young woman who was running in Camp Sherman on the same day as Kaye. It turned out that Jane Morris had an earlier brush with Ackroyd as well, months before Kaye went missing.
\n
\nJane, then 24, was on her bicycle, headed home from a waitressing job when she noticed Ackroyd standing near his pickup parked along the side of the road in Camp Sherman. He pointed a handgun at her and ordered her to stop.
\n
\nJane\u2019s heart raced as she crouched over her handlebars and sped toward the nearby country store, listening for the sound of the truck behind her.
\n
\nIn the courtroom, she turned to face Ackroyd. It was the first time she\u2019d seen him since that summer morning. For a moment, she considered how lucky she had been to escape unharmed. <\/a>Did you discover Jane Morris in the trial transcript? How did you locate her?<\/span>Court and police files contained several references to Jane. I found her through Nexis, I think. She answered right away and was willing to tell me about her experience so the three of us headed to Salem to interview her.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe trial came to a close and Ackroyd, dressed in cowboy boots, jeans and a studded belt with \u201cJohn\u201d in silver letters,<\/a>Great details, especially the belt. Source?<\/span>A report from the trial in the Bend (OR) Bulletin.<\/span><\/span>sat and waited to hear his fate.
\n
\nIt took the jury just four hours.
\n
\nGuilty. <\/a>What sources did you rely on to reconstruct the events of your trial?<\/span>The prosecutor, Bill Hanlon, and newspaper accounts.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nEven with the verdict, investigators would never really know what unfolded the morning Kaye died.
\n
\nAckroyd had offered his hunting buddy, Roger Dale Beck, as his alibi, but another jury found Beck guilty of murder in the Turner case, too. Beck had bragged to family members about killing Kaye. Both men received life sentences.
\n
\nYet neither man confessed to police. Kaye\u2019s final hours remained a mystery.
\n
\nAt one point before the trials, investigators had returned to Camp Sherman to re-enact theories of what had happened.
\n
\nA young deputy played Kaye. In scene after scene, over a couple of long days as the Christmas holiday approached, the investigators playing Ackroyd and Beck would snatch her off the road. Sometimes they would drive away and turn back to get her. In other scenes, Beck grabbed her as Ackroyd looked on.
\n
\nThe deputy ran at a steady pace, the thrum of the truck approaching her from behind. She thought of how Kaye must have felt, the air so cold she could see her breath.
\n
\nShe fought back in every scene, but they all ended the same.
\n
\nThen it was time to go. Will McAnulty, one of the detectives, suggested they run through the scene one more time. For Kaye.
\n
\nAgain, the investigator playing Ackroyd tried to grab the woman, only this time she wrestled the gun from his grip and pretended to fire a single fatal shot to his heart.
\n
\nThe killer was dead. The cops cheered. <\/a>You could, I assume, have used sources to describe this scene.\u00a0 Why did you decide to tell it in the omniscient third person as you do so much of the story?<\/span>I relied on interviews with a detective and the woman deputy to reconstruct this scene. This scene has a cinematic quality \u2014 cops gathering on an empty road days before Christmas reenacting an abduction using a woman deputy and then deciding to give the story their own happy ending. I knew I wanted to use this somewhere in this series. It moved around a bit until it landed here. It\u2019s got humanity and poignancy but it also lets readers know that ultimately some questions about the Turner murder were never answered.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nJust like with Kaye, detectives would never know what had happened to Ackroyd\u2019s stepdaughter, Rachanda Pickle.
\n
\nThe girl, 13 years old, had never been found. She went missing in 1990 — 12 years after Kaye\u2019s killing and just down the highway.
\n
\nThe prime suspect all along, Ackroyd wasn\u2019t charged in the case. <\/a>Was there ever a concern about libeling Ackroyd before he died and rendered the question moot?<\/span>I don\u2019t think we talked about that because he died so early in my reporting.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nHis story about inviting the girl to photograph wildlife that morning never made sense to Rachanda\u2019s family and friends. He seemed to relish gruesome speculation about what harm had come to her. Though investigators were certain he was behind her disappearance, they couldn\u2019t prove it.
\n
\nThe girl\u2019s mother eventually moved to California and remarried. Linda Ackroyd, who now goes by the last name Monville, says she doesn\u2019t know if Ackroyd molested her daughter. She denies that he beat her kids.
\n
\nRachanda\u2019s brother struggled to cope with the loss of his sister. The detectives who handled her disappearance retired. Then, two decades later, in 2010, another detective picked up the file.
\n
\nMike Harmon, a longtime investigator with the Linn County Sheriff\u2019s Office, worried Ackroyd had a shot at parole. <\/a>If you had to characterize the way the system worked in the Rachanda Pickle case, what words would you use?<\/span>I would describe it as unsatisfying and extraordinary. Unsatisfying because he pleaded no contest but his sentence was suspended as part of the plea so he was never formally convicted and his plea deal didn\u2019t require him to reveal what he\u2019d done with Rachanda. Extraordinary because the court sealed the plea and effectively silenced Rachanda\u2019s brother. The process compounded his grief.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nHarmon wondered if time had softened the old highway worker. Was he ready to talk?
\n
\nThe cop arranged to meet with the killer at Oregon\u2019s maximum-security prison in Salem in the fall of 2012.
\n
\nHarmon\u2019s manner was low-key and friendly as he tried to gauge Ackroyd\u2019s interest in pursuing parole. Ackroyd wasn\u2019t sure. He had diabetes and a bad heart. He worried he\u2019d become a burden for his family.
\n
\nHarmon kept the tone conversational as he directed Ackroyd back to Rachanda. He took out an envelope of old photos of Ackroyd, his pickups and Santiam Junction — all from the original police file. Ackroyd, now 63, went over the timeline of the day Rachanda disappeared, spinning the same old lies.
\n
\nHarmon tried to nudge Ackroyd. He got creative: What if cops and prison officials arranged for Ackroyd to share a Christmas or Thanksgiving meal with his family on the outside? Would he give up the body?
\n
\nAckroyd wasn\u2019t interested.
\n
\nHarmon was more direct when he returned to the prison a second time.
\n
\n\u201cI work for Channy,\u201d he told Ackroyd. \u201cSomething bad happened to her. The prosecution is going to progress in this.\u201d
\n
\nAckroyd was in no mood to talk this time.
\n
\n\u201cI am totally innocent,\u201d he said, his breathing labored, \u201cand I\u2019ll say that until the day I die.\u201d <\/a>How were you able to describe his breathing? Why was it important to do so?<\/span>I can hear him on the recording that the detective made. He struggles to breathe and it\u2019s clear he takes time to move around. I wanted to show that at this point Ackroyd was a very sick man.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nHarmon thought back to the handful of cases from the 1970s that remained unsolved: the bodies or clothes of women and one young man found in the isolated wilderness of Linn County, not far from Highway 20, the route Ackroyd spent years traveling for the state.
\n
\nTwo were Jane Does. Another, a young woman from Lebanon named Elizabeth Mussler who disappeared when she was 22, was discovered in a shallow grave.
\n
\nTwo more teens disappeared but their bodies never turned up.
\n
\nKaren Lee, 15, and Rodney Grissom, 14, were friends. They ran away from home with plans to make it to California.
\n
\nTheir final call in the spring of 1977 came from a pay phone in Lebanon. Later, Karen\u2019s jeans, pages of her journal and the blouse she\u2019d sewn for a school project were found off a logging road.
\n
\nHer jeans appeared to have been cut. The clue bore a chilling similarity to two of Ackroyd\u2019s earlier assaults: Rape victim Marlene Gabrielsen\u2019s boots and underwear were sliced and so was the waistband on Kaye Turner\u2019s yellow jogging shorts.
\n
\nKaren\u2019s mother, Violet Gillmore, long believed Ackroyd was behind her daughter\u2019s disappearance. Gillmore knew Ackroyd had abducted a runner near Highway 20. She also knew he was from Sweet Home, not far from where Karen had used the pay phone to call a friend in the Midwest, just one year before Kaye Turner died.
\n
\n\u201cOur ride is here,\u201d Karen told her friend. \u201cI have to go.\u201d <\/a>Do investigators believe Ackroyd was responsible for these unsolved deaths?<\/span>Some suspect he was but no evidence links him to these cases.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nShe was never heard from again.
\n
\nKaren\u2019s case and the others from that era were all but forgotten. No evidence, physical or otherwise, ever linked Ackroyd to any of them, but their timing and proximity to Highway 20 prompted investigators to wonder if the mechanic had a hand in them.
\n
\nIn prison that day with Ackroyd, the detective took one last shot.
\n
\n\u201cWhat about the other ones?\u201d he asked.
\n
\n\u201cWhat other ones?\u201d said Ackroyd.
\n
\n\u201cThe other ones.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cWhat you talking about?\u201d
\n
\n\u201cTalking about some other people that are dead up in that area.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cOh,\u201d said Ackroyd, \u201cnow you’re trying to lay some others on me?\u201d
\n
\n\u201cNo, I’m just asking you,\u201d the detective said. \u201cI’m just asking you.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cI have never killed anybody in my life,\u201d Ackroyd said. \u201cI thought about it, but I never done it.\u201d
\n
\nHarmon returned to Rachanda.
\n
\n\u201cSo you don\u2019t know where she\u2019s at,\u201d he asked. \u201cIs that what you\u2019re saying?
\n
\n\u201cI wish I knew,\u201d Ackroyd answered.
\n
\n\u201cOh, I think you do,\u201d Harmon said softly.
\n
\nAckroyd heaved his body out of the chair.
\n
\n\u201cIf you change your mind and want to show me,\u201d Harmon called out, \u201clet me know.\u201d
\n
\nThe aging killer headed to the door and returned to his cell. <\/a>This is another of the few times when we read extended dialogue, a hallmark of classic narrative. What was your source and why did you use it when so many other times you chose to paraphrase speech?<\/span>This is a crucial moment where Ackroyd is confronted with one of these crimes, in this case Rachanda\u2019s disappearance. I have the audio of this conversation. It\u2019s dramatic and I wanted to draw it out for the reader. I wanted the reader to hear Ackroyd\u2019s reaction when confronted with the detective\u2019s suspicions.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n
\nIt was the last time any cop talked to Ackroyd.
\n
\nA few months later, in 2013, the Linn County district attorney took Rachanda\u2019s case to grand jurors.
\n
\nProsecutors didn\u2019t have a body. And Harmon hadn\u2019t uncovered any physical evidence linking Ackroyd to Rachanda\u2019s disappearance. But, worried about the possibility of parole in the Turner case, they took their chances.
\n
\nEnough time had passed to conclude Rachanda was dead. A Forest Service ranger\u2019s account of seeing Ackroyd that day in a sno-park near Santiam Junction — hours later than Ackroyd claimed — blew a hole in the highway worker\u2019s alibi.
\n
\nAnd, most significantly, the teen\u2019s friends confirmed what investigators had long suspected: Ackroyd had been sexually abusing the girl before she vanished.
\n
\nThe circumstantial case rested on a basic theory: It was unlikely that anyone but Ackroyd, now a convicted killer, had harmed the girl.
\n
\nThe grand jury returned an indictment on a single count: murder.
\n
\nAnother Oregon courthouse provided the backdrop for Ackroyd\u2019s second prosecution. Rachanda\u2019s mother, Linda, didn\u2019t make the trip and the girl\u2019s father wasn\u2019t around.
\n
\nThe responsibility of speaking for Rachanda rested with her brother, Byron Pickle, then 37. The district attorney asked Byron if he supported a plea deal or if he wanted Ackroyd to stand trial.
\n
\nIf a jury acquitted Ackroyd, it could clear the way for him to seek parole.
\n
\nByron needed a moment to think.
\n
\nHe and his wife walked out of the county courthouse, where he paced and wept. He hadn\u2019t told his wife the full story of Rachanda\u2019s life and how he remained tormented that he hadn\u2019t hugged his kid sister the last time he saw her.
\n
\nTheir childhoods had been nightmarish under Ackroyd\u2019s roof. Byron recalled regular beatings. Rachanda was so uneasy living at Santiam Junction that she routinely brought a change of clothes to school hoping to stay with friends. Though Ackroyd offered their mother stability, the teens dreamed of the day they could leave home for good. <\/a>This is heartbreaking. How did it affect you and your colleagues?<\/span>Reporting on this series was emotionally grueling. Dave, Beth and I spent a lot of time deep in the woods where these women were assaulted, killed and abandoned. We talked to grieving loved ones. We spent time with Marlene, the lone survivor. We felt and processed their profound grief. Secondary trauma from reporting stories like this is real. But the work of discovery keeps you going \u2014 as well as the realization (maybe anxiety) that you must make a fair and supportable case and do justice to the time involved, the expense and most of all, the material. We relied on each other for support. We talked about this stuff pretty much nonstop at work and when we hung out together outside of work. I moved my desk next to Dave\u2019s. We bounced ideas off each other and checked facts. The three of us had a favorite restaurant on the road. Dave listened to a lot of Bruce Springsteen.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nNow the district attorney could use his sister\u2019s death to keep Ackroyd from hurting anyone else.
\n
\n\u201cI am not going to gamble this guy getting away with it,\u201d Byron thought.
\n
\nAnd so the case reached a quiet end in the fall of 2013. <\/a>The story reaches its powerful chronological conclusion. Did you use an outline or timeline to keep things straight in this convoluted case?<\/span>I used a massive spreadsheet for reference. It is a very convoluted story with a blizzard of facts, dates, people, incidents, etc. Organization, extensive footnoting and a decent system for records that involved seven three-ring binders helped me keep it all straight. Plus reading it aloud again and again \u2014 and producing a condensed online timeline \u2014 helped uncover themes and discrepancies.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nAckroyd shuffled into the courtroom, where Byron sat in the gallery clutching a photograph of his sister. His wife sat by his side. Harmon, the investigator who spent hours interviewing Ackroyd, was there, too.
\n
\nAckroyd entered a no contest plea to his stepdaughter\u2019s murder. He wouldn\u2019t admit to killing the girl, but he wouldn\u2019t deny it either. In exchange, he agreed never to seek parole.
\n
\nThe extraordinary arrangement meant Ackroyd would die in prison.
\n
\nAs for what happened to Rachanda\u2019s body, Ackroyd gave no clue.
\n
\nThe hearing lasted about seven minutes. When it concluded, the judge sealed the court records. The reason for concealing the documents and who insisted on secrecy have been lost to time. <\/a>Do you or any of the detectives have any suspicions why it was sealed?<\/span>I spent considerable time trying to answer this very question. I never got a clear answer about why it was sealed or who made that request. The judge didn\u2019t remember the circumstances and the lawyers for each side pointed fingers at one another.\u00a0 There was nothing in the record that showed where this request came from or why it had been sought.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nFor years, only those in the room would know what had happened.
\n
\nThree years later, by the end of 2016, the two investigators who had carefully stitched together a case against Ackroyd for the killings of Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson considered the work done. They believed Ackroyd picked up the teenagers sometime after they walked away from a family camping trip on the coast.
\n
\nThe district attorney said they had enough to take the case to a grand jury. But Ackroyd was already serving a life sentence. A new prosecution would be too expensive.
\n
\nCase closed.
\n
\nIn late December, as the case wrapped up, the investigators read the news: Ackroyd was dead. The cause: heart disease.
\n
\nThe state police detective assigned to investigate the killer\u2019s death found Ackroyd on the floor of his cell, his sleep apnea machine still whirring and the breathing tube stuck in his throat, left over from last-ditch efforts to save him. His false teeth had been knocked to the floor.
\n
\nThe state had continued to pay out Ackroyd\u2019s $3,624 monthly public employee pension even while he was in prison. He stuffed his cell with food from the prison commissary — dozens of packages of processed meats and cheese, candy bars and beans. He was beset with chronic health problems and hadn\u2019t left his cell much. His confidants were a pair of child molesters serving long prison sentences.
\n
\nThat morning, the detective looked around the disheveled cell and surveyed what was left: Ackroyd\u2019s stash of food, a cane and his prison-issued clothes.
\n
\nFor decades, investigators wanted peace for Rachanda, the lonely girl who was unhappy and out of place at the highway compound.
\n
\nHad Ackroyd left a note telling them where to find her?
\n
\nThere was nothing.\n

\n

EPILOGUE<\/h3>\n\nThis is a messy story with loose ends and unanswered questions.
\n
\nIt doesn\u2019t conclude with a dramatic trial in a packed courtroom. There were no somber words from the bench about justice served, no deathbed confessions. <\/a>Is this the theme of the story?<\/span>I don\u2019t know that it\u2019s the theme. It was my way of acknowledging to the reader that this has been an epic tale that won\u2019t have a Hollywood ending.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThere was no chance to give Rachanda a proper burial. Kaye\u2019s remains sat forgotten in the Jefferson County Courthouse until three years ago when court staff came across them. They were turned over to her husband and cremated.
\n
\nMystery still shrouds much of what happened during Ackroyd\u2019s final encounters with his victims, and that\u2019s not likely to change. In that way, the story feels unresolved. <\/a>This section could perhaps have served as a nut graf, placed much higher in the story. Why did you write it and place it here?<\/span>We had a lot of discussion about the ending. Actually, the beginning and the ending were the most rewritten parts of the series, as we knew they would be. The beginning because you have to engage and explain but not overpromise, all the while getting the tone right. The ending because you want to leave readers with a meaningful and hopefully memorable coda, the lasting impression. The two camps on the ending: Stop at Ackroyd\u2019s death with a scene of a cop looking around the killer\u2019s cell for a confession but finding nothing. Pretty bleak. Or go back to the people left behind, particularly Marlene, who had lived to tell her story and felt heard for the first time. We chose to go with the legacy of the investigation.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nMaybe that\u2019s why these are the cases that stuck with investigators.
\n
\nLike Mark Foster, one of the cops who worked on the Kaye Turner investigation. He returned to duty last year as a volunteer deputy with the Jefferson County Sheriff\u2019s Office. He spent Christmas patrolling Camp Sherman, quietly marking Kaye\u2019s disappearance decades earlier.
\n
\nAnd Bill Hanlon, the prosecutor who helped put Ackroyd away. He runs in Kaye\u2019s memory every Christmas Eve.
\n
\nTwo of the victims\u2019 brothers have quietly suffered for years.
\n
\nToday, both men insist they should have done more to protect Sheila Swanson and Rachanda Pickle from a killer.
\n
\nOnce in a while, Bart Swanson makes his way to the isolated logging road where Sheila\u2019s body was found just feet from her friend, Melissa Sanders. He lies down in the dirt and stares up: Is this what his sister saw before she died?
\n
\nRachanda\u2019s brother, Byron, still sees her so clearly, her sweet features framed by brown hair. Her face and name are tattooed onto his left bicep, a memorial to the aunt his children never knew. The last time the two saw each other, Rachanda was in the backseat of a Chevy Blazer headed home. <\/a>How did you decide which characters to include in the epilogue?<\/span>These are key characters in this story. There was stuff I wanted to say about them that didn\u2019t really fit in elsewhere so this seemed like a good spot for that. A father himself now, Byron gets a catch in his voice when he talks about it.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nKaye\u2019s husband Noel remarried. He’s a grandfather now. Though they had grown apart in their marriage, he remembers Kaye with fondness. She was a bright and witty woman who seemed destined to live a full life. <\/a>Was it difficult to learn about Kaye Turner\u2019s husband since her murder?<\/span>At the beginning of my reporting, I wrote a letter to Noel Turner, the husband of Kaye Turner who had disappeared on the Christmastime run. I asked him for an interview. He didn\u2019t respond. Months later, I wrote him another letter. I wanted him to know that the reporting was continuing and that a story would likely appear sometime in the coming months. Again, he didn\u2019t respond. I understood how painful it could be to have us revisit this traumatic time in his life so I respected his decision. But as we approached publication, Therese (Bottomly) said I needed to connect with Noel. She wanted to make sure he knew what was coming. So Dave and I drove a couple hours south to the Turner home \u2014 Noel had remarried in the years after Kaye\u2019s death \u2014 and knocked on the door. Sandy Turner, Noel\u2019s wife, answered and greeted us warmly. She invited us in and we waited for Noel to return from running an errand. When he got home, I explained the purpose of our visit, what the series would report and how it would include details about his wife\u2019s killing that would be upsetting. He listened quietly and wept. He said very little that day but thanked us for making the trip. A few days later, I received a handwritten letter from Noel. In it, he thanked me for telling the stories of Ackroyd\u2019s other victims. \u201cThese are important stories to be told,\u201d he wrote.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThen there\u2019s Ackroyd\u2019s first known victim.
\n
\nMarlene Gabrielsen is the one who got away.
\n
\nIn 1977, she told police that Ackroyd had raped her and they didn\u2019t believe her.
\n
\nMarlene Gabrielsen was raped by John Ackroyd in 1978. She was 20 at the time. Despite having a rape kit showing evidence of the assault, her story was disbelieved by authorities. Had police believed her, none of the subsequent murders committed by Ackroyd would likely have occurred.[\/caption]
\n
\nShe lives in Hillsboro with her husband. They raised three kids. She went on to work at a local bank.
\n
\nShe didn\u2019t talk much about what had happened. Why bother? No one listened all those years ago.
\n
\nThen she agreed to tell her story.
\n
\nOver the course of hours of interviews with The Oregonian\/OregonLive, she unburdened herself of every ugly detail.
\n
\nShe was at turns enraged and guilt-stricken. She had tried to warn police about Ackroyd.
\n
\nNow Kaye, Rachanda, Melissa and Sheila are dead.
\n
\nVictims of sexual assault often ask to remain anonymous. They don’t want the stigma and the shame associated with these crimes.
\n
\nMarlene K. Gabrielsen wants you to remember her name.
\n
\nShe told the truth all along.
\n
\nIt\u2019s 41 years too late, but finally she is believed. <\/a>Why did you choose to end the narrative with Marlene Gabrielson?<\/span>Marlene started this series and it seemed fitting to end with her. I knew from the time I\u2019d spent with her that she\u2019s a strong person, and Day 1 of this series didn\u2019t capture that. Ending with her in this way allowed me to highlight her resilience. I also wanted to touch on the idea that this story served as a form of justice for Marlene. She\u2019s finally believed and there\u2019s satisfaction that comes with that. Seemed like the most hopeful note on which to end a series that didn\u2019t offer much light.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe Oregonian\/OregonLive\u2019s five-part series on John Ackroyd details crimes that include sexual abuse, rape and murder. If you have experienced sexual violence and need support, please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE. The Oregon Department of Justice has <\/em>additional information and resources<\/em><\/a> for survivors of sexual violence. <\/em><\/a>The story also features an annotated version using footnotes identifying all your sources? Why did you go to this trouble?<\/span>The annotated version that ran online was a much shorter version of my own footnoted drafts of this story. Those footnotes helped me sleep at night. Kelley Benham French read one of those footnoted drafts and suggested that we publish them all. She saw it as a way of letting readers know how much work went into this series. At a time when journalists\u2019 credibility is under assault, extensive footnotes seemed like a compelling way to show our work. Margaret (Haberman) agreed and suggested that we pare them down to a manageable number for publication. So instead of hundreds of footnotes, we ran about 150 in a separate version of the story that also links to original source material.<\/span><\/span>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Ghosts of Highway 20:” Through serendipity, creativity and care, a newspaper in Oregon finds answers 40 years after police and courts failed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[13],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-chip-scanlan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nChasing ghosts that will forever haunt - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/08\/27\/chasing-ghosts-that-will-forever-haunt\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Chasing ghosts that will forever haunt - 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