Highway 20: The Pervert’s Trail of Disappearances

In this episode of “This Podcast Is Not Real”, we follow the dark trail of John Akroy, a man long suspected of terrorizing Oregon’s Highway 20 from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

Akroy was eventually convicted of the murder of Kay Turner, but questions remain about how many lives he truly destroyed. His own stepdaughter, Randa Pickle, vanished without a trace, and two teenagers, Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson, also disappeared along the same stretch of road. Despite repeated suspicions and damning testimonies, Akroy slipped through the cracks of justice for years, aided by weak evidence, shifting witness accounts, and police negligence — even after earlier allegations of sexual assault.

We revisit these haunting cases, the chilling possibility of other unsolved disappearances tied to Akroy, and how his legacy of violence still casts a shadow over Oregon’s backroads.