error: OpenSSL library not found. When I do have openssl installed and libssl.so located in /usr/local/lib

Question

I'm trying to compile ncrack on a ubuntu 16.04

to get all dependencies I installed opensll 1.1.0h from source, I keep getting this error when I run ./configure of ncrack

checking OpenSSL header version... 1010008f (OpenSSL 1.1.0h  27 Mar 2018)
checking OpenSSL library version... not found
configure: error: OpenSSL library not found.
configure: error: ./configure failed for opensshlib

solutions I already tried:

• reinstalling openssl
• apt install libssl-dev
• ldconfig after add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf
• ./configure --with-openssl=/usr/local --with-libopenssh=/usr/local
• I tried another ubuntu 16.06 box and it compiles, why does this fail?

If you want to check ncrack source code and configure.ac files, they are all at https://github.com/nmap/ncrack