What I love about Octavia Spencer's production direction of "The Lost Women of Highway 20" is that she intentionally spotlighted all the missed opport
What I love about Octavia Spencer’s production direction of “The Lost Women of Highway 20” is that she intentionally spotlighted all the missed opportunities, when people chose not to listen to women and girls, rather than the traditional true-crime model of depicting a violent man as “prolific.”
When we call violent men “prolific offenders,” are we telling the whole story or leaving out the women and girls nobody listened to?
There is something deeply troubling about the way we tell stories about men who repeatedly rape, assault, abduct, and murder women.
We hear that a man was a prolific serial killer. A prolific rapist. A criminal mastermind who managed to evade authorities for years, sometimes decades. Documentaries explain how he operated, how he selected victims, and how long it took investigators to finally catch him.
And somewhere in that story, almost as an afterthought, we learn that women had already reported him.
Women had spoken. Girls had tried to tell somebody. There were complaints, allegations, frightening encounters, and sometimes documented crimes that should have received serious attention.
Yet the violence continued.
I am TIRED of hearing how prolific these men were without hearing an equally thorough account of how many opportunities there were to stop them.
Because sometimes the story is not simply that a dangerous man was exceptionally good at hiding. Sometimes the story is that women and girls were not believed, protected, or valued enough for somebody to act.
1. 🔎 The Word “Prolific” Can Hide an Entire History of Failure
When a documentary describes a violent man as prolific, the word usually refers to the number of crimes he committed.
But numbers alone cannot explain how those crimes continued.
A man who commits one murder without leaving enough evidence to identify him presents one kind of investigative challenge. A man who has been reported for sexual assault, threatened women, or attracted repeated complaints before committing further violence presents another.
Both men are responsible for their crimes. But the second history requires us to examine the response to the warnings.
How many times did somebody have a chance to intervene? What evidence was available? Was it properly investigated? Were there women whose experiences were treated as unimportant because they survived?
Those questions belong in the story, too.
2. 🛣️ The Lost Women of Highway 20: A History That Should Trouble Us
The Investigation Discovery documentary Lost Women of Highway 20 examines disappearances, murders, and sexual violence connected to a stretch of Oregon highway.
One of the central figures is John Arthur Ackroyd, a highway worker whose history became connected to several terrible crimes against women and girls.
In 1977, Marlene Gabrielsen reported that Ackroyd had raped her. He was not prosecuted for that reported assault. The following year, Kaye Turner was murdered. Years later, Ackroyd’s 13-year-old stepdaughter, Rachanda Pickle, disappeared. In 1992, Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson disappeared and were later found murdered.
Ackroyd was eventually convicted of Turner’s murder and entered a no-contest plea in Pickle’s murder. He remained a suspect in other killings, but suspicion should not be confused with a criminal conviction.
The documentary leaves us with a difficult question.
What might have happened differently if Marlene Gabrielsen’s report had received the investigative attention it deserved?
We cannot honestly say that a different response would certainly have prevented every later crime. We can say that her report deserved a serious investigation regardless of what happened afterward.
And we can ask why that response was not there. Watch the series and …..how many times they (judges, law enforcement, etc) let him get away to murder again is infuriating. Or, it should be.
Meanwhile, Black women are beaten and murdered by law enforcement…Black men are beaten and murdered by law enforcement….over a traffic stop. Judges accosting Black women for talking “too loudly” while seeking a protective order.
But those serial murderers are just too crafty to be caught? Are they though?
Risk Doesn’t Rise by Accident—What Happens When Care is Uneven for Black Women – WE Survive Abuse
3. 📢 Women Should Not Have to Die Before Their Warnings Become Valuable
There is a terrible pattern in the way some women are treated before and after a violent man’s crimes become widely known.
Before his arrest, a woman may be dismissed as unreliable, confused, vindictive, dramatic, or simply mistaken.
After his crimes are exposed, that same woman’s experience may suddenly become valuable evidence of his long history of violence.
PATTERN TO RECOGNIZE
Before the public knows he is dangerous → Her account is questioned or ignored.
After his crimes are exposed → Her account becomes part of the explanation of how dangerous he was.
Look at what has happened. The woman’s credibility appears to increase only after other people have suffered.
But she was worthy of being heard the first time.
She did not need another woman to die to make her own experience serious.
4. ⚖️ Reporting a Crime Is Not the Same as Receiving Protection
We tell women to report sexual assault. We encourage girls to tell trusted adults when somebody violates them. We advise women to document threats, preserve evidence, and contact authorities.
Those are reasonable recommendations. But they are not guarantees.
Reporting is the beginning of a process. What happens next depends on people, policies, investigative practices, resources, and decisions that the woman making the report may have little power to control.
MYTH: If a woman reports a dangerous man, the system will take care of the rest.
REALITY: A report can be mishandled, dismissed, inadequately investigated, or left without sufficient follow-up. Even a serious investigation may not produce enough evidence for prosecution.
There is also a difference between being unable to establish a crime and failing to investigate it properly.
Women deserve to know that difference. So does the public.
When we ask why women do not report, we should be willing to examine what happened to women who did.
5. 🚩 A Man’s History of Sexual Violence Should Never Be Treated as Background Noise
Sexual violence is sometimes discussed as though it belongs in a separate category from other forms of serious violence.
A man is accused of rape, stalking, coercion, or voyeurism, and the conduct may be minimized because nobody was murdered. A woman survives an attack, and the public may underestimate the danger she faced.
But sexual violence is already serious violence.
Some men who commit repeated or escalating crimes demonstrate patterns of coercion, entitlement, threats, and disregard for another person’s bodily autonomy. Those behaviors deserve attention on their own terms, not only when they later appear in the history of a murderer.
This does not mean every person accused of a sexual offense will become a killer. It means we should stop treating sexual harm as a minor warning simply because the victim survived.
A woman’s survival is not evidence that what happened to her was harmless.
6. 🧩 Stop Telling Us Only How Clever He Was. Tell Us What Investigators Knew.
True-crime storytelling often spends considerable time examining a perpetrator’s methods.
We learn his routines, disguises, vehicles, habits, and movements. We hear about his ability to appear ordinary while committing extraordinary harm.
There is room for examining those facts. But an account that concentrates almost entirely on the perpetrator’s cleverness can leave audiences with a distorted understanding of WHY he really remained free.
LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE
| The familiar crime story | The fuller investigation |
|---|---|
| How did he evade capture? | What evidence was available, and when? |
| How many women did he attack? | How many women reported him? |
| How did he avoid suspicion? | Were earlier complaints investigated? |
| Why did it take so long to catch him? | Which delays were unavoidable, and which were preventable? |
| What finally brought him down? | What could have interrupted the violence sooner? |
I want both histories.
I want to know what the perpetrator did. And I want to know what happened when women tried to tell somebody what he had done.
Because those are not competing stories. They are parts of the same history.
7. 🗣️ A Woman’s Credibility Should Not Depend on Whether She Becomes a Murder Victim
There is something especially cruel about the way a murdered woman’s life can become more publicly credible than the life she lived while asking for help.
After her death, people may discover that she was afraid. That she had told somebody. That she had described threatening behavior or reported an assault.
Suddenly, those earlier statements become haunting details in a documentary.
But what if we treated women’s accounts with seriousness while they were still alive to benefit from the response?
TRANSLATION: We should not require the worst possible outcome before deciding that an earlier warning deserved attention.
Taking a woman seriously does not mean abandoning evidence, fairness, or due process. It means recording her account accurately, investigating what can be investigated, and refusing to substitute stereotypes about women for actual investigative work.
Women should not have to be perfect witnesses to deserve competent investigations.
And girls should not have to speak like adults before adults recognize that they may be in danger.
8. 🏛️ Institutional Accountability Does Not Excuse the Perpetrator
Whenever we discuss failures in law enforcement, schools, families, workplaces, or other institutions, somebody may object that the perpetrator alone committed the crimes.
Of course he is responsible for choosing violence.
But recognizing his responsibility does not mean every other decision becomes irrelevant.
If authorities received a credible report and failed to follow reasonable investigative procedures, that deserves examination. If evidence was overlooked, complaints were improperly closed, or women were dismissed because of prejudice, those failures deserve accountability.
The questions are not complicated.
What did the institution know? When did it know? What could it reasonably have done? What did it actually do?
A perpetrator’s guilt and an institution’s failure can exist in the same story.
We should be capable of examining both.
9. 📺 True Crime Has an Obligation to Tell the Women’s Side of the Timeline
Imagine a documentary that begins not with the discovery of a body, but with the first known report of sexual violence.
Imagine investigators and journalists walking viewers through the history of complaints, witness statements, evidence, missed connections, and institutional responses.
Not to create a false impression that every later crime could have been predicted, but to establish what was actually known before the public learned the full extent of the violence.
Imagine giving as much attention to the women who survived as to the man who harmed them.
That would be a different kind of true-crime storytelling.
One that does not depend on making a violent man fascinating.
One that asks whether we are learning anything useful about prevention.
And one that recognizes that women who spoke up were not merely supporting characters in the history of a criminal.
They were people trying to live.
10. 🌿 We Cannot Prevent Violence While Refusing to Examine the Cost of Dismissal
Every time a violent man’s history becomes public, we have an opportunity to learn something.
Not every crime is predictable. Not every accusation can be substantiated. Not every investigative failure means a later murder could have been prevented.
But those realities should make us more careful in examining the evidence, not less willing to ask difficult questions.
If a woman reported an assault, find out what happened to her report. If investigators missed a connection, examine why. If an institution failed to follow its own procedures, identify the failure and determine whether anything changed.
And if a woman tried repeatedly to obtain help, do not reduce her efforts to a few seconds of heartbreaking television.
Her efforts deserve a place in the official history, not merely in the emotional aftermath.
Prevention requires us to study what happened before the violence escalated, while there were still possibilities for intervention.
The Truth We Need to Reclaim
I am tired of hearing about prolific violent men as though their long histories are always evidence of extraordinary criminal genius.
Sometimes they escaped detection because the evidence was genuinely difficult to find. Sometimes investigators worked diligently with limited information and still could not identify the person responsible.
And sometimes women told somebody.
Sometimes girls told somebody.
Sometimes the information was there, but the response was not.
We owe those women more than a retrospective acknowledgment that they were right to be afraid. We owe them the truth about what happened when they tried to obtain help.
I want us to become as interested in the women who warned us as we have been in the men who harmed them.
I want us to examine institutional decisions with the same determination we bring to examining criminal behavior. I want our documentaries, news reports, and public conversations to recognize that a woman’s account of sexual violence deserves attention before another crime makes it impossible to ignore.
Because women and girls are not simply witnesses to the histories of violent men.
They are human beings whose safety, dignity, and lives deserve protection in their own right.
We have spent decades counting how many times certain men got away with violence.
Now let us count how many times women and girls tried to tell us, what happened when they did, and how many opportunities we had to listen.
And then let us do something with what we learn.
When Respect Becomes Language Control: Who Decides What Women Are Allowed to Say? – WE Survive Abuse
Risk Doesn’t Rise by Accident—What Happens When Care is Uneven for Black Women – WE Survive Abuse
⚖️So If Robin Fought. Sierah Shouldn’t Have Had To. – WE Survive Abuse