Walter Thomas Ackerson was 16 when he disappeared after leaving the Angell Job Corps campus in Yachats, Oregon. He had moved there from Puyallup, Washington, to pursue a GED and training in the culinary arts. Regular calls to his mother and grandmother stopped after March 20, 1990. On March 24 Walter left campus without permission with three older students and hitchhiked about 25 miles to Nye Beach in Newport. That day he was last seen; the three companions returned to the campus the next day without him, saying he had been heavily intoxicated and vanished while standing on a bluff above the beach.

Family members say the Job Corps initially treated Walter as a runaway and there was a delay in reporting him missing, which increased the family’s frustration. A later account by one of the men who had been with Walter on March 24 says Walter was beaten and his body thrown from the Yaquina Bay Bridge; it is unclear whether he was alive when he was thrown and his remains have not been recovered. Does anyone have memories of Walter, the Angell Job Corps community in 1990, or the stretch of coast near Nye Beach that could help fill gaps in the timeline?