About this episode

This episode explores the chilling history of the Highway 20 murders in Oregon, focusing on the predator John Arthur Ackroyd and his victims.

Along Oregon’s remote Highway 20, the road itself feels haunted: from the late 1970s into the early 1990s, a string of women and girls were abducted, raped, murdered, or simply erased along this lonely stretch of asphalt, while the same man’s name kept surfacing and somehow slipping away again. Only years later, after dogged reporters pieced together cold cases and families’ grief in the “Ghosts of Highway 20” investigation, did the picture sharpen around highway worker John Arthur Ackroyd, a predator who turned his job into a hunting ground and whose victims include a jogger taken from her morning run, a 13‑year‑old stepdaughter who vanished from home, and “lost women” the courts never fully accounted for.

People in this episode

Host: Georgia Marie

Topics covered

• true crime
• serial killers
• unsolved cases
• abduction
• murder
• investigation

Keywords

• Highway 20
• Oregon murders
• John Arthur Ackroyd
• true crime
• abduction
• serial killer
• cold cases

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Oregon, Highway 20

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