By 10 a.m., Kaye hadn’t returned.

Noel Turner drove through Camp Sherman to look for his wife. Finding no sign of her, he panicked and called police.

The 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.

Now, a woman had gone missing, triggering a massive search that made headlines clear to Portland: “Husband fears kidnap: Turner searchers losing hope,” one read in The Oregonian four days later.

Ackroyd’s name emerged early on. Hanna told police he’d seen both the highway worker and the runner in Camp Sherman that morning.

Ackroyd had indeed come across Kaye but didn’t 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.

Then 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. He 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.

Ackroyd earned low grades in school; his high school diploma was marked “special education.” He was a loner, bullied and beaten by classmates.

Accused 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.

He 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.

Once 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. Burly and barrel-chested, Ackroyd favored jeans and blue work shirts from the local Sears.

His 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.

Back 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. He knew how to navigate the hills and hairpin turns during winter, when fierce storms swept through the Cascades.

Ackroyd knew, too, the dirt spurs that led off the highway and into the forest.

It was on one of them that he’d raped Marlene Gabrielsen a year before Kaye Turner disappeared.