Sara Anne Wood was a 12-year-old girl who disappeared on a quiet road near her Frankfort, New York, home in August 1993. Lewis Lent, a janitor from Massachusetts, confessed to kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and killing Sara, but he refused to say where he buried her body.

Lent had also plead guilty to the 1990 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Pittsfield, Massachusetts native Jimmy Bernardo. Lent abducted Jimmy from the Pittsfield movie theater where he worked as a janitor. He was sentenced to life without parole for the Bernardo murder and sentenced to 25 years to life for the Wood murder.

He is currently in prison in Massachusetts. Lent is also suspected in a number of other child kidnapping cases. Lent recanted his confession and refuses to disclose the location of Sara's body. Lent has said that he can't say where her body is because she is not buried alone. It has been speculated that Lent did not act alone and that his accomplice(s) are still at large.

Lewis Lent Jr.

The event that brought accused serial-child-killer Lewis Lent to the attention of authorities and the world was a January 7, 1994, attack on then 12-year-old Rebecca Savarese. It was early on a Friday morning in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, when Lent menaced the girl with a gun and tried to force her into his borrowed pickup truck. She pretended to be suddenly out of breath, fooling him for a crucial moment. She ran, shrugging out of her backpack when he grabbed for her, leaving it and him behind. When another man appeared to help her, Lent gave up the chase and drove away.

On Thursday, January 12, 1995, Lewis Lent, Jr., was convicted of several charges in relation to that attack. They were kidnapping, larceny, assault with a dangerous weapon and assault and battery. Becky testified against him at the trial and identified him in court.

Police arrested Lent after they found the truck with the backpack and loaded gun inside. The truck's owner was blind and told police he often loaned it to Lent. It was during three days of interrogation after the arrest that the real revelations came out: Lent confessed to murdering two children. He claimed that he was subject to blackouts and memory lapses. (In one Associated Press report he blamed this on a 1974 close encounter with UFO occupants in Virginia.) Predictably, his lawyers used this to argue that police coerced their mentally unbalanced client into confessing. A judge ruled otherwise, however, and allowed most of his statements to be admitted into evidence.

One of the alleged victims was 12-year-old James Bernardo, who disappeared at a Pittsfield, Massachusetts movie theater on October 22, 1990. Lent worked at the theater at the time but was not considered a suspect. According to Lent's confession, he encountered Jimmy Bernardo outside the theater and used a hunting knife and death threats to force him to come along. Back at his apartment, he taped the boy to a bed, cut his clothes off and assaulted him. The next morning, he killed him by hanging. He claimed it was his intent to kill Jimmy Bernardo all along.

Jimmy's nude body was found in Newfield, New York, far away from the place where he was abducted, but only a short distance from Lewis Lent's childhood home. Lent's frequent trips to visit his family in New York allegedly figured in the next case: The August 18, 1993, disappearance of 12-year-old Sara Anne Wood of Frankfort, New York. Sara vanished while riding her bicycle home from church. The bike and some papers were found by the road less than a mile from her home.

According to Lent's confession, he was driving his van along back roads with the specific intent of finding a child to molest and kill, when he came across Sara Wood. He used a hunting knife to force her into the van, then used tape to bind her hands. He drove her farther upstate, into the Adirondack mountains where he raped her and clubbed her to death with a heavy tree branch. He buried her body using tools brought along for that purpose. He told police, "I didn't check to see if she was breathing because I don't like to touch dead bodies."

Reportedly, Lent drew police a map to the area where Sara is buried, but despite two massive searches - One in the dead of winter under brutal conditions, the other after the spring thaw - her body has never been found.

Lent has been charged with killing Sara, but with only the confession to use against him, there is some doubt as to how effectively he can be prosecuted. His lawyers barred any attempts to bring him to New York to improve on his map or expand on his confession.

Attempts have been made to link Lent to other cases. For a time, a fifty member task force, composed of FBI agents and members of several New York and Massachusetts police agencies, followed any and all possible leads to establish if Lent was involved in other child disappearances or murders. They followed his movements throughout his life and exchanged information with other police agencies around the country. They were unable to develop any links to the point where charges could be filed against him. After being slowly reduced in size, the task force was disbanded in the summer of 1994, though some of the individual agencies involved have continued to investigate.

Despite police suspicions, Lent has only been charged in two murders and has not been tried or convicted in either of those. So, though he has been branded a serial killer, the possibility exists that he is not one. Still, some observations about his reported mental processes and alleged methods can be made.

First, the style of his attacks compares interestingly with those of Westley Dodd. Dodd was executed at Walla Walla prison in Washington on January 15, 1993, for the murders of three little boys. Before his capture he recorded a diary of daily searches for victims, an obsessive quest for vulnerable children. In much the same way, it's said that, in his statement concerning Sara Wood's death, Lent described driving around back roads, specifically looking for a child to abduct. His alleged use of a weapon and restraints showed somewhat greater forethought than Dodd and could, possibly, be consistent with police suspicions that he could have killed other children. Dodd also kept one of his victims alive over night and hanged him in the morning.

An episode of 48 Hours that profiled Lent indicated that in the months immediately prior to his arrest he was acting oddly. He took to wearing dark sunglasses and the quality of his work at the movie theater declined so far that he was fired. Two days before the failed attempt to kidnap Becky Savarese he built a false wall in his apartment, creating a space that was large enough to keep a child prisoner. This is exactly what police claim he intended, though Lent apparently told a friend he was going to put in an aquarium.

Lent had a good reputation. He had few friends, but there were some who believed they knew him well. They thought of him as mild-mannered and goodhearted. He was helpful to friends and to the blind and kind to children. Police reported that, during interrogation, Lent wrote a letter of apology to Becky Savarese and appeared disturbed or upset when he talked about killing Jimmy Bernardo. This apparent contrition is extremely different from Westley Dodd's unemotional, barely believable claims that he loved children, or the obvious pleasure many convicted serial killers get from describing their crimes.

Lent was described as being friendly with local kids during the seven years he worked at the theater in Pittsfield. It was said that he often brought them with him when he went to the theater late at night to clean up. This friendly relationship with kids is reminiscent of the approach of the classic pedophile, who genuinely likes children and enjoys their company. Those molesters tend not to be violent, however. They are more likely to use persuasion or trickery to get what they want than a gun.

The story of Lewis Lent has at least two trials to go and much still to learn. What kind of man will he turn out to be?

Lent gets 25 to life for kidnapping, murder

South Coast Today

By William Kates, Associated Press writer

April 12, 1997

HERKIMER, N.Y. -- Robert and Frances Wood thought they would feel some peace to finally see Lewis Lent Jr. sent to jail for the kidnapping and murder of their daughter.

But the parents of Sara Anne Wood felt only pain yesterday at Mr. Lent's sentencing in Herkimer County Court. Mr. Lent walked out of court without telling where he buried Sara's body.

Judge Patrick Kirk sentenced the former janitor from North Adams, Mass., to 25 years to life in state prison.

Before handing down the sentence, Judge Kirk said he often wondered if he was capable of imposing the death penalty.

"You have answered that in the affirmative," Judge Kirk told Mr. Lent, who is not eligible for capital punishment.

The judge offered Mr. Lent a second chance to reveal Sara's whereabouts, but Mr. Lent's only words were yes or no answers to the judge's questions.

Sara, 12, disappeared in August 1993 while riding her bike to summer Bible school about a mile from her home in Norwich Corners, a rural community about 15 miles south of Utica. Her body has never been recovered, and prosecutors had hoped the 47-year-old Mr. Lent would reveal its location in exchange for a transfer to federal prison, which Mr. Lent had asked for.

The Woods tried a final time to persuade Mr. Lent to change his mind, using stories about their daughter and verses from the Bible to get him to repent.

"Whether you accept and repent or go to hell and damnation with Satan, that's your choice," said Robert Wood. "What you will do will have no effect on us, because we will be reunited with Sara in heaven."

While the Woods spoke, Mr. Lent stared vacantly ahead, nodding only when they repeated their belief that Sara was in heaven. He also grimaced, as if near tears, as Sara's mother recounted part of Mr. Lent's confession. Mrs. Wood detailed how Mr. Lent kidnapped Sara, forced her into the woods, struck her with a tree limb, and buried her in a shallow grave without ever checking to see if she was indeed dead.

Mrs. Wood then described her daughter, showing Mr. Lent photos of her, describing her love of dancing and poetry, and her faith in God.

She then told Mr. Lent: "This is probably a waste of time trying to express to you that she was a person. You are her murderer."

Mr. Lent will never actually get the chance to serve his New York sentence. He will be returned to Massachusetts, where he is serving life without parole for the 1990 slaying of 12-year-old Jimmy Bernardo in Pittsfield, Mass.

Mr. Lent was scheduled to be sentenced two months ago after he admitted last October to kidnapping and killing Sara. But at the insistence of Sara's parents, Judge Kirk agreed to a two-month delay in the hope that Mr. Lent would disclose the whereabouts of Sara's body.

Outside the courtroom, Mr. Lent's mother, Lois Wood, who sat across from Sara's parents as her son was sentenced, continued to claim her son was innocent, saying that he did not speak out because he was terrorized and tortured in jail.

"They sentenced an innocent man," Mr. Lent's mother said.