Lewis S. Lent Jr. was a janitor and handyman from North Adams, in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, who pleaded guilty to killing two 12-year-old children in two states. Jimmy Bernardo disappeared outside a Pittsfield cinema in October 1990 and was found dead in the woods of central New York a month later. Sara Anne Wood vanished on her bicycle near her home in Herkimer County, New York, in August 1993. Neither case had a suspect until January 7, 1994, when Lent tried to force another 12-year-old girl into a pickup truck on a Pittsfield street. She escaped, a passer-by noted part of the license plate, and police had Lent in custody the same day.
Under questioning, Lent confessed to both killings and described what prosecutors later called a "master plan" to abduct children and keep them hidden. He drew a map to the place where he said he had buried Sara, in the Adirondack Mountains. Searchers dug through frozen ground there for weeks and found nothing. He pleaded guilty to Jimmy's murder in Massachusetts in 1996 and to Sara's kidnapping and murder in New York later that year, and he received life without parole and 25 years to life. In 2013 he confessed to a third killing, of 16-year-old Jamie Lusher, in exchange for a promise that he would not be prosecuted for it. Sara's remains, and Jamie's, have never been found, and police in New York, Massachusetts and Vermont were still searching in 2023 and 2024.
Little about Lent's early life is on the record in reliable sources. Reports agree that he was 43 when he was arrested in January 1994, and Fox News reported in 2023 that the place in New York where Jimmy Bernardo's body was found was near Lent's childhood home. The Berkshire Eagle, in a 2011 survey of Pittsfield's criminal history, described him as a high school dropout who had drifted. A man who had known him in high school told Newsweek in 1994 that Lent was one of those people who are "just kind of there."
Religion was a large part of how others saw him. His family told reporters after his arrest that he was an ordained minister in the Church of Christ, United Press International reported, and that he was kind and helpful. CBS News reported in 2024 that he studied the Bible and had worked as a traveling minister, and The Boston Globe recalled in 2024 that police in 1994 had described him as a self-proclaimed evangelical minister who often quoted Scripture. His only known record before 1994, according to CBS News, was for bad and forged checks.
In the early 1990s, Lent lived in a second-floor apartment on Hudson Street in North Adams, the Eagle reported, and worked as the janitor at a cinema on Route 20 in Pittsfield. CBS News put his time there at about six years and reported that children called him "the Big Brother." Neighbors told Newsweek he was quiet and helpful; one recalled him stopping to help people with broken-down cars, and said he carried a gun at his side. He also did odd jobs for Phil Shallies, a blind man in Lanesborough, between Pittsfield and North Adams, and helped him rebuild a basement over about two years around 1992, in exchange for work on his van, according to The Berkshire Eagle. By 1994 the press described him as an out-of-work handyman.
James Bernardo, known as Jimmy, was 12 and lived in Pittsfield. The public record says little else about him; his family has kept its grief private. When a Pittsfield author contacted his father about a book on the case in 2023, the Eagle reported, he declined to talk about it. In his memory, motorcyclists in Pittsfield hold an annual Jimmy Bernardo Memorial Ride to help survivors of child abuse; CBS6 Albany reported on the 23rd such ride.
On October 22, 1990, Jimmy ate dinner and went to a mall on Route 20 to ride bicycles with a friend, according to the facts set out by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1995. He was last seen at 5:25 p.m. CBS News reported that he was last seen outside the Pittsfield Plaza Cinema Center and that his parents called police that evening. His bicycle was found in Silver Lake in Pittsfield on November 18.
Three days later, on November 21, 1990, a hunter found Jimmy's body tied to a tree in a wooded area of Newfield, New York, about five miles south of Ithaca. Experts put the date of death between October 22 and October 30. News reports have given the distance from Pittsfield as about 200 or 250 miles. For more than three years no one was charged.
The account of what happened comes from Lent's own statement to a New York State Police investigator in January 1994, as summarized by the Supreme Judicial Court. He said he saw Jimmy near the West Pittsfield Plaza theater and offered him five dollars to help move chairs. He then controlled the boy with a knife, bound him, and drove him to his apartment, where he held him overnight and assaulted him. He told the investigator that it was at that point that he knew the boy "had to die." The next morning he drove Jimmy to Newfield and strangled him with a rope.
Sara Anne Wood was 12 and lived with her parents, Robert (Bob) and Frances Wood, and her brother, Dusty, then 16, in the rural hills of Herkimer County south of Utica. Her father was pastor of the Norwich Corners Church; wire and magazine reports in 1994 described him as a Presbyterian minister. She attended school in the Sauquoit Valley Central School District.
Her brother has described her as exuberant, cheerful, loud and dramatic, a girl who "stuck out" and who was "giving." She loved Dolly Parton. The last time Dusty saw her, he told CBS News, she was singing a Dolly Parton song at the front door.
On the afternoon of August 18, 1993, Sara rode her pink and white mountain bike to the church, about a mile from home, where Vacation Bible School was being held. She was last seen at about 2:30 p.m. on Hacadam Road, on her way home, WAMC reported. Reports name the place variously as Frankfort, Litchfield, Norwich Corners and Sauquoit; New York State Police and Spectrum News locate it on Hacadam Road in Sauquoit.
When she did not come home, her family went looking. A neighbor found her bicycle hidden in brush less than half a mile from the house, and a coloring book and crayons were found with it. Trooper Timothy Blaise reached the scene at about 6 p.m. No one reported seeing a truck or a child being taken. The church became a State Police command post, and the search grew into one of the largest for a missing child at the time, CBS News reported. Frances Wood made a public plea: "I just want my daughter back."
Lead detective Frank Lawrence told CBS News that investigators first cleared the family and then questioned known and suspected sex offenders. Volunteers working from the Sara Anne Wood Rescue Center distributed about 4 million posters, Newsweek reported, and residents tied pink and turquoise ribbons to trees, the colors Sara had been wearing. Months passed without an answer.
On the morning of Friday, January 7, 1994, a 12-year-old seventh grader was walking to Notre Dame Middle School in Pittsfield, wearing a backpack and listening to music on a portable CD player. At about 7:10 a.m., near a busy intersection, a man came up beside her, showed her a gun and told her to do everything he said and everything would be all right. He steered her toward a pickup truck and ordered her to get in.
She refused. She told CBS News years later that she knew she was not going to get into that truck whatever happened. She said she needed to sit down because she was having an asthma attack. As she began to take off her backpack, he grabbed it, and she slipped out of the straps and ran to a man clearing snow from a sidewalk, who called police. Her mother had taught her to fight back, and a police officer had warned her school about strangers the year before. The man drove off with her backpack.
A driver stopped at a traffic light had seen the struggle. He followed the truck and called police with a description and part of the plate number. Pittsfield Detective Owen Boyington, who had gone to Lanesborough to share the description, saw a matching truck on a side road as he was leaving town, the Eagle reported. It belonged to Phil Shallies, who had lent it to Lent. Lent agreed to go back to Pittsfield to give a statement. The girl and the eyewitness each picked him out of a photo array, and she later picked him out of a lineup.
In Lent's van, parked in the same driveway, police found a loaded revolver and the girl's backpack, according to the Massachusetts Appeals Court. The Supreme Judicial Court listed duct tape, a knife, a gun, a child's sunglasses and candy among the items found in the van. CBS News reported that the kit he carried, which he called his "snatch kit," also held clothesline rope. The girl has been publicly identified in the press, but she was a child when she was attacked, and she is not named here.
Lent first denied any involvement. He then signed a statement admitting that he had tried to force the girl into the truck, the Appeals Court recorded, and described a "master plan" to take girls he thought of as "vulnerable victims" and keep them in boxes he was building in his bedroom. Police found construction in his bedroom that matched his description. CBS News described it as a partly built wooden partition, and Lent called the hidden space a "coffin." In court in 1995 a New York State Police officer testified that Lent was building a secret room beneath his house, UPI reported.
The link to Sara Anne Wood came through the police teletype. Al Pylman, then a State Police major in charge of the Wood case, told Spectrum News in 2015 that one of his investigators had read a teletype from Pittsfield about a girl who matched. New York investigators came to question Lent. Over the next two to three days, by different accounts, he confessed to abducting and killing both Jimmy Bernardo and Sara Anne Wood. CBS News reported that he knew details about Sara's case that had not been made public, including that her bicycle chain was broken.
He also told police that he suffered from "multiple personalities," the Deseret News reported, and that he stalked young children. Over the years he described blackouts, flashing lights and a voice he named Stephen, his middle name, according to the Associated Press, and he once said the blackouts dated from an encounter with aliens in Virginia in 1974. The Boston Globe reported in 2024 that he had blamed his crimes on an alter ego "possessed by demons." David F. Capeless, then an assistant district attorney in Berkshire County, later told the Eagle that Lent "was not a man with delusions or fantasies."
Lent gave police a sketch of a remote spot near Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks, about 100 miles north of Albany, where he said he had buried Sara. By January 12, 1994, crews were searching a snow-covered site three miles south of State Route 28 and told reporters they hoped to find her within two days, UPI reported. Sara's father said he believed his daughter was dead. FBI radar equipment was brought in, the Deseret News reported, and Newsweek counted 165 police officers, National Guard members and volunteers in the field, working with a search dog and ground-penetrating radar.
Conditions were severe. A former State Police major recalled temperatures of 40 below zero. Crews used floodlights through the night and moved from heavy machinery to shovels and their hands to sift the soil. CBS News reported that the search went on for more than 50 days in deep snow before it was halted. Sara was not found.
Police also looked at whether Lent could be connected to other children. Investigators and FBI agents retraced his movements over the previous decade for links to about a dozen missing children, Newsweek reported, and police said he might be responsible for up to six other disappearances, according to UPI. A task force looking at child murders from Maine to Florida examined him. No further charge resulted.
Lent was arraigned on January 10, 1994, on charges of kidnapping, armed robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon over the January 7 attack, and pleaded not guilty, CBS News reported. On February 14, 1994, a Berkshire County grand jury indicted him for the kidnapping and murder of Jimmy Bernardo.
Lent's lawyers challenged the murder indictment on a point of jurisdiction. Jimmy had died in New York, and the defense argued that Massachusetts could prosecute a death in another state only if conduct in Massachusetts was the direct, or proximate, cause. Superior Court Judge Daniel A. Ford denied the motion to dismiss and reported the question to the appeals courts, and the Supreme Judicial Court took the case directly. In Commonwealth v. Lent, decided July 17, 1995, the court held that the statute required only that the death would not have happened "but for" violence or injury inflicted in Massachusetts. Because Lent had controlled the boy with a knife and assaulted him in Pittsfield, and had said that he decided then that the boy had to die, the Commonwealth could try him for murder. The order denying the motion was affirmed.
The case over the January 1994 attack came to trial first, before a Berkshire County Superior Court jury. The girl testified that she had feigned an asthma attack and slipped out of her backpack as he tried to force her into his pickup. After a four-day trial and about five hours of deliberation, the jury returned guilty verdicts late on Thursday, January 12, 1995. The judge had sent the armed robbery count to the jury only as larceny from the person, and Lent was convicted of kidnapping, larceny from the person, assault with a dangerous weapon, and assault and battery. On January 13 he was sentenced to 17 to 20 years, to be served at the state's maximum security prison at Walpole. By then, UPI reported, he had recanted his confessions and claimed that police had coerced them.
Lent appealed. He argued that he had not intended to steal the backpack when he grabbed it, that a failed attempt to put the girl in the truck was not "confinement," that the indictment was defective, and that the jury should not have heard about the master plan. The Massachusetts Appeals Court rejected each point on May 10, 1999. It held that showing a gun, pulling her jacket and holding her backpack was a restraint on her movement, and that the plan was relevant to his intent. The convictions were affirmed.
Lent's lawyers argued in the Bernardo case that he was not mentally competent to stand trial because of a brain disorder they did not specify, the Associated Press reported; prosecution psychologists said he was faking mental illness. On June 3, 1996, the day before his murder trial was due to begin, he pleaded guilty to Jimmy Bernardo's murder, according to CBS News, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The Berkshire Eagle and the Berkshire district attorney's office also give 1996 as the year of the plea.
Days later, on June 7, 1996, Lent was brought to Herkimer County wearing a bulletproof vest to face charges in Sara's case. On October 16 he was expected to plead guilty but entered a plea of not guilty instead; CBS News reported that he changed his mind after seeing members of the public, including Sara's family, in the courtroom. On October 25, 1996, he pleaded guilty to her kidnapping and murder. He still would not say where her body was.
On April 11, 1997, he was sentenced to 25 years to life. He said nothing at the hearing about where he had buried her, CBS News reported, and he was returned to Massachusetts to serve his life sentence. The New York term waits behind it. Herkimer County District Attorney Jeffrey Carpenter told Fox News in 2023 that bringing Lent back to New York was his main goal: "Every day he's in Massachusetts is another day that he doesn't serve any time for Sara's death."
Lent has remained in the Massachusetts prison system since. Reports have placed him at the Walpole maximum security prison (1995), at Bridgewater (2013) and the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater (2018), and at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Concord (2011, 2013 and 2023).
New York investigators never stopped visiting him. New York State Police detectives Reece Treen and John Fallon went to see him about 20 times, CBS News reported, and he told them about blackouts and an evil alter ego he called Steven. In 2023 the head of the State Police Major Crimes Unit, Senior Investigator Dennis Dougherty, told the Rome Sentinel that a member of the unit visited Lent several times a year, that he appeared healthy, and that he said he wanted to resolve the case but could not explain what was holding him back. The State Police consulted FBI behavioral specialists to try to understand him. Carpenter said: "I believe he knows." He added that Lent "may never" tell.
In 2013 Carpenter led an effort that took Lent out of prison for three days and more than 600 miles of driving, during which Lent guided investigators to places he linked to the abduction and the burial. Nothing was found. Carpenter told CBS News he concluded that Lent "absolutely knew where she was." In 2023 he called Lent a "psychopathic child murderer" who wanted to keep Sara's presence to himself, and said he suspected, while calling it speculation, that other children might be buried with her.
James Lusher, known as Jamie, was 16 and lived with his family on Holyoke Road in Westfield, in western Massachusetts. He was slightly built, and CBS News reported that he had disabilities. His sister, Jennifer Nowak, said he loved riding bikes, dogs, playing in the woods and getting dirty, and she called him "a little spark that if you didn't catch it right you missed something awesome." On November 6, 1992, he set out on a new bicycle for his grandmother's house in nearby Blandford and was never seen again. His bike was found days later; authorities drained a pond near the spot without finding him.
Westfield Police Captain Michael McCabe and State Police Lieutenant Stephen Griffin had questioned Lent about Jamie several times over the years. About a month before the July 2013 announcement, Lent gave them what officials called a step-by-step account of the boy's last journey and said he had put the body in Greenwater Pond in Becket, an 88-acre pond up to 58 feet deep beside Route 20. He did so on condition that he would not be prosecuted. Hampden District Attorney Mark G. Mastroianni, who announced the confession at Westfield South Middle School on July 15, 2013, said investigators had verified the details and that, since Lent was already serving life without parole, he would not be charged if the information proved accurate.
Divers searched the pond for three days and found nothing. Lent later recanted, CBS News reported. Jamie's father, James Lusher, said he still looked twice at every teenage boy with black hair on a bike: "My closure is finding my son." Jamie's killing has never been tried, and Lent stands convicted of no crime against him.
The searches did not end. In May 2015, Massachusetts and New York police searched the Glen area at the base of Mount Greylock in Adams. State Police spokesman David Procopio said Lent was suspected of homicides in both states for which the victims' remains had never been found.
On June 19, 2023, New York and Vermont State Police searched woods on White Oaks Road on the Williamstown and Pownal line without saying why. That November, citing new information from follow-up interviews, the New York State Police Major Crimes Unit returned with more than 80 officers, forest rangers and dog teams and searched about 29 acres near the Dome hiking trail in the Green Mountain National Forest in Pownal, Vermont, from November 11 to November 16. CBS News reported that Detective Treen had matched the area to landmarks Lent had described. Nothing was found.
On June 18, 2024, investigators from both states went back to the Lanesborough house where Lent had been found in 1994 and spent about 12 hours searching the grounds and the basement he had helped build. A dog alerted on a corner of the concrete floor, and investigators cut into it with the owner's consent, but found only drainage stones. The Berkshire district attorney's office said no additional evidence was recovered and that the search was part of an ongoing effort to solve cases of missing children.
Sara's family turned its search into a lasting effort for other children. Bob Wood founded the Sara Anne Wood Rescue Center to get missing-child posters out quickly. On May 25, 1995, National Missing Children's Day, he and a small group of cyclists, including Dusty, arrived at the U.S. Capitol after riding from upstate New York. The ride became annual, and in 1996 the rescue center became the Mohawk Valley office of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's New York branch. By 2019, NCMEC reported, its poster program had distributed more than 10.5 million posters of 11,012 children, of whom 7,524 had been recovered.
The Ride for Missing Children is now the New York branch's largest fundraiser, run in several cities, and riders stop at schools along the way to talk about safety. NCMEC says the ride's jersey honors the teal and pink that Sara wore on the day she disappeared. The ride went out again on June 5, 2026, with nearly 150 cyclists in the Mohawk Valley. Carpenter said in 2023 that parenting in Herkimer County "changed dramatically" after Sara was taken. Dusty Wood told CBS News in 2024 that he no longer dwells on anger and is "waiting for the day I see Sara in heaven."
CBS's "48 Hours" interviewed the girl who escaped in 1994 and returned to the case in "The Unending Search for Sara Anne Wood," the premiere of its 2024 season on September 21, 2024, with correspondent Erin Moriarty and interviews with Dusty Wood and State Police investigators. Margery B. Metzger, a retired Pittsfield social worker, published Hidden Demons: Evil Visits A Small New England Town, an account of the Pittsfield investigation, in 2023.
Proven by his own guilty pleas, and final: the murder of Jimmy Bernardo (Massachusetts) and the kidnapping and murder of Sara Anne Wood (New York). Proven by a jury verdict, affirmed on appeal: kidnapping and related counts over the January 7, 1994, attack.
Confessed, never tried: the 1992 killing of Jamie Lusher. Lent gave the information under an agreement not to prosecute, investigators said they had verified details, no remains were found, and he later recanted. A 2023 Fox News report said prosecutors could not build a strong enough case; the 2013 announcements said the decision was part of the agreement.
Recanted: Lent withdrew his 1994 confessions before his 1995 trial, saying police had coerced him, and later withdrew his account of Sara's burial place. He pleaded guilty in both murder cases afterward.
Where Sara is buried: Lent's map led to Raquette Lake, off Route 28; other reports place his description near Blue Mountain Lake or off a logging road. Detective Treen told CBS News that the Adirondack account could not be true, because Lent cashed a check in Pittsfield at 6:18 p.m. on the day Sara disappeared, too late for him to have taken her, buried her in the Adirondacks and returned. Later searches in Massachusetts and Vermont have not found her either.
Other cases: police said in 1994 that Lent was a suspect in at least six killings or disappearances from New England to Florida, and investigators have examined him in other Massachusetts cases and, according to The Boston Globe, in Florida. Carpenter has speculated that other children may be buried with Sara. No other killing has been charged against him, and none of these suspicions has been proved.
Details that vary between sources: the year of the Bernardo plea (1996 in CBS News, The Berkshire Eagle and the Berkshire district attorney; some summaries give 1995); the year of the Wood plea (October 1996 in CBS News and Fox News; 1997, the year of sentencing, in some Eagle reports); the color of the pickup (black in UPI and the Eagle, blue in Newsweek); whether the hidden space was in his bedroom or beneath the house; the place where Jimmy's body was found (Newfield, according to the court; one AP report says Newfane); and the length of his interrogation (two or three days).
Date not recorded: Lent grows up, reportedly near Newfield, New York.
1974: the year Lent later gave for an alien encounter in Virginia that he said caused his blackouts.
Early 1990s: lives in North Adams, Massachusetts; works as janitor at a Pittsfield cinema on Route 20.
October 22, 1990: Jimmy Bernardo, 12, is last seen in Pittsfield at 5:25 p.m.
November 18, 1990: Jimmy's bicycle is found in Silver Lake, Pittsfield.
November 21, 1990: a hunter finds Jimmy's body in Newfield, New York.
November 6, 1992: Jamie Lusher, 16, disappears on a bike ride in Westfield, Massachusetts.
August 18, 1993: Sara Anne Wood, 12, is last seen on Hacadam Road in Herkimer County, New York.
January 7, 1994: a 12-year-old girl escapes Lent in Pittsfield; he is found in Lanesborough and arrested.
January 1994: Lent confesses to killing Jimmy and Sara and draws a map to Raquette Lake; a winter search finds nothing.
January 10, 1994: arraigned on kidnapping, armed robbery and assault charges.
February 14, 1994: indicted for the kidnapping and murder of Jimmy Bernardo.
January 12, 1995: convicted by a jury over the 1994 attack; sentenced January 13 to 17 to 20 years.
May 25, 1995: Bob Wood's first ride for missing children reaches the U.S. Capitol.
July 17, 1995: Supreme Judicial Court rules Massachusetts can try him for Jimmy's murder.
1996: the Sara Anne Wood Rescue Center becomes the Mohawk Valley office of NCMEC's New York branch.
June 3, 1996: pleads guilty to Jimmy's murder; life without parole.
October 25, 1996: pleads guilty in Herkimer County to Sara's kidnapping and murder.
April 11, 1997: sentenced to 25 years to life; returned to Massachusetts.
May 10, 1999: Appeals Court affirms the 1995 convictions.
About a month before July 15, 2013: confesses to killing Jamie Lusher under a non-prosecution agreement.
July 15, 2013: confession announced; Greenwater Pond searched without result. Lent is taken on a three-day trip in New York; nothing is found.
May 2015: search at Mount Greylock in Adams.
June and November 2023: searches in Williamstown and Pownal, Vermont.
June 18, 2024: search of the Lanesborough property.
September 21, 2024: "48 Hours" broadcasts "The Unending Search for Sara Anne Wood."
March 16, 2025: CBS News reports him in prison in Massachusetts.
June 5, 2026: the Ride for Missing Children rides again in the Mohawk Valley.