





Story by Noelle Crombie

Photography by Beth Nakamura

Video by Dave Killen

THE OREGONIAN | OREGONLIVE

PART 5 OF 5





J ohn 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.

He 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.

All these years later, the Turner trial would be the first step in bringing the killer to justice.

“This day,” prosecutor Bill Hanlon told jurors, “has been long in coming.”

For 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’s drive across the high desert from where Kaye had disappeared.

Ackroyd, 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.

He 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.

Ackroyd’s explanations of his encounter with her never added up, but detectives found no physical evidence directly tying him to the killing.

They filed it away, unsolved.

Then Ackroyd’s teenage stepdaughter disappeared and a new group of investigators reopened Kaye’s case. Two more young women disappeared about a month before Ackroyd was arrested and charged in Kaye’s death.