New York 1993 Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community

The last time Dusty Wood saw his sister, she was singing 9 to 5 by Dolly Parton. Just singing around the house on a Wednesday afternoon in August, the way she always did. Loud, unselfconscious, completely absorbed in it. She was 12 years old and she loved Dolly Parton the way 12-year-olds love things they love completely and without apology.

 She had been singing all morning. The family had gone shopping. They had come home. They were just hanging around the house the way you do in the country on a summer afternoon when school hasn’t started yet and there’s nowhere particular to be. Sara had plans though. She was going to ride her bike to Vacation Bible School at the church where her father was the pastor, just about a mile down the road.

She had gone a hundred times. She picked up her pink and white 10-speed, her display board, her church songbook, the papers from her morning classes. She called to her brother on her way out the door. “See you later.” Dusty didn’t think anything of it. You don’t. It’s just what someone says when they leave.

“See you later.” The kind of thing a family says to each other so many times across a life that you stop hearing it as a sentence and it just becomes the sound of someone going and coming back. She never made it back home. Sara Ann Wood was 12 years old. She was riding her bicycle home from her father’s church on August 18th, 1993, less than a mile from her front door, when a man in a pickup truck pulled over on Hackadam Road and got out. He had a knife.

 He threatened her. He put her in the truck. He drove north toward the Adirondack Mountains. Her bicycle was found that evening, hidden in the brush off the side of the road. Her display board and her church papers were scattered nearby. She had been 4/10 of a mile from her house. Lewis Lent has been in prison since 1994.

He has given investigators multiple descriptions of where he buried Sara. Every one of them has led search teams to empty ground. He is 74 years old. He is serving consecutive life sentences and Sara Ann Wood has never been found. Welcome to Cold Case Unlocked. This case has a convicted killer, a guilty plea and a father who spent the rest of his life searching the forests of Upstate New York on his hands and knees.

 It does not have an ending. Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from. We read everyone. New here? Hit like and subscribe. It keeps us digging. Now, back to Frankfort. Her name was Sara Ann Wood, born March 4th, 1981 in Central New York. 12 years old, 5 feet tall, 96 pounds.

 Curly brown hair, blue eyes, freckles across her face. Her brother Dusty described her as exuberant, excited to be alive, every photograph a big beaming smile and those bright blue eyes. Not a person in the background, someone who stuck out. She was loud, dramatic, funny. Her teacher Nancy Waldeck said she would just giggle all the time and get the whole class laughing and she’d have to turn around to compose herself before she could go on.

 She loved dancing and poetry and Dolly Parton. She had a giving personality, her brother said. The kind of person who could light up a room without meaning to. Her father, Bob, was the pastor at Norwich Corners Church, a small rural church on Roberts Road in Frankfort, New York. A man of deep faith who had built a quiet life for his family in a part of the country where quiet lives were possible.

 Her mother, Francis, her brother Dusty, 16 that summer, a senior in high school. They lived in the country on Hackadorn Road in a place where children could ride their bikes down the road to church and nobody thought twice about it. Nothing had ever given them a reason to think twice about it. That Wednesday morning the family had gone shopping together and come home and just been a family.

Sara had been singing around the house all day. She picked up her bike in the afternoon, called goodbye to Dusty, and pedaled toward her father’s church. She stayed for her class. She gathered her things, the display board, the songbook, the Bible school materials. She started home.

 The church was less than a mile from the house. She was last seen at approximately 2:30 in the afternoon riding up a steep hill on Hackadam Road, 4/10 of a mile from her front door. She was wearing a pink T-shirt with the words “Guess Who” across the front, turquoise shorts, and brown sandals. Those colors, pink and turquoise, would eventually become something people wore in her memory.

 30 years later, they still do. A neighbor discovered her bicycle that evening hidden in the brush several hundred feet off Hackadam Road leaning against a tree. Her display board and papers were scattered in the grass nearby. There had been no struggle visible on the road, no screaming that anyone remembered.

 One moment she was on her bicycle heading home. The next moment the bicycle was in the bushes and Sara was gone. Bob Wood was up on that road all night and the night after. “The first night, of course, I was up on the road all night, out in the woods all night,” he said. “The second day, I was on the road all night watching.” His church became a state police command post within hours.

 By the following morning, the search had expanded statewide. By the end of the week, it was national. Hundreds of officers, National Guardsmen, volunteers by the thousands. They searched over 600 square miles of central New York. Every field, every wooded edge, every drainage ditch. A rescue center was established in New Hartford.

 Millions of missing posters went out. Sara did not come home. January 7th, 1994, 7:10 in the morning, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Rebecca Savarese was 12 years old walking her usual route to Notre Dame Middle School through downtown Pittsfield when a man came up beside her on a busy intersection. He had a gun. He had a firm grip on her backpack.

 He told her to get in his truck. Rebecca said she needed to sit for a moment. She faked an asthma attack. She slipped out of her backpack and she ran straight down West Street toward the nearest adult she could see, a man snowblowing the sidewalk in front of a building. A witness at the intersection had watched what he thought was a father and daughter arguing.

 When the girl ran, he realized what it actually was. He memorized part of the license plate. He tried to follow the truck. Investigators traced the plate to a 43-year-old handyman and former movie theater janitor from North Adams, Massachusetts named Lewis Lent. Police found him that afternoon at the home of friends eating a tuna sandwich. They brought him in.

 He denied knowing anything about Rebecca Savarese. Then they searched his truck and found Rebecca’s backpack, a gun, duct tape, a clothesline rope. What investigators later described as his snatch kit, the kit he carried with him specifically for abductions. He had a system. He had been doing this for years.

 He confessed to the attempted abduction of Rebecca. Then he kept talking. He told them he had a plan, a master plan prosecutors would call it. He told investigators he had planned to abduct children and had constructed a hidden space inside his apartment. He told them his crimes were the work of an alter ego, a personality named Steven, his own middle name, who he said was possessed by demons.

 He was, he told investigators, a self-proclaimed evangelical minister who quoted scripture. His neighbors in North Adams described him as quiet, kind, always willing to help. One neighbor remembered him always around with a broken-down car and a youngster or a blind friend helping fix it. Another remembered a gun holstered to his side.

 He told them about Jimmy Bernardo, 12 years old from Pittsfield, who had gone missing at a local movie theater in October 1990, where Lent worked as a janitor. Lent told them he had held Jimmy overnight and then driven him to a wooded area in New York and strangled him. Hunters found Jimmy’s body weeks after he disappeared.

 Then investigators asked about Sara Anne Wood. He told them he had been driving on Hackadam Road on August 18th when he spotted a girl walking alongside her bicycle up a steep hill. He stopped. He threatened her with a knife. He got her into his truck. He drove north. He took her into the Adirondack Mountains. He assaulted her and later told investigators how it led to her death before lowering her in a shallow grave near Raquette Lake.

 He drew investigators a map. Within days, 300 state police officers and National Guardsmen were in the Adirondacks. 30 below zero temperatures, waist-high snow. They could only stay outside for 20 minutes at a time before rotating back inside. They had shovels, ground-penetrating radar, a Swiss mountain dog.

 The FBI shipped sonar equipment to the site. Bob Wood was there. Dusty was there. He had been a senior in high school 5 months earlier when his sister said, “See you later.” Now he was standing in the Adirondacks in January digging in the snow. 53 days they searched near Raquette Lake. They found nothing.

 Lewis Lent was convicted of the attempted abduction of Rebecca Savarese in January 1995 and sentenced to 17 to 20 years in prison. On June 3rd, 1996, the day before his trial was set to begin for Jimmy Bernardo’s murder, he changed his plea. Guilty. Life without parole. On October 16th, 1996, he pleaded guilty in Herkimer County, New York to the abduction and murder of Sara Anne Wood.

He was sentenced to 25 years to life, to run consecutively with his Massachusetts sentence. He described the location of Sarah’s grave again during sentencing. Investigators searched again, nothing. He gave another location, another search, nothing. Each time searches arrived at the spot he described, they found only empty ground and trees.

 In 2013, Lent confessed to a third murder, 16-year-old Jamie Lusher of Westfield, Massachusetts, who had left his home on a bicycle in November 1992 and was never seen again. Investigators searched a pond in Beckett, Massachusetts, where Lent said he had disposed of the body. 88 acres, 58 ft deep in places.

 They found nothing. Lent had given Jamie’s family the same thing he gave Sarah’s, a location, a map, empty ground. In 2023, 30 years after Sarah disappeared, New York State Police received new information through follow-up interviews with Lent and dispatched more than 80 officers to 29 acres of forest near the Dome Hiking Trail in Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest.

 They searched for 3 days. They found nothing. In June 2024, investigators cut up sections of concrete walkway in the basement of a property in Lanesborough, Massachusetts, that Lent had frequented in the early 1990s. They found nothing. Detective Frank Lawrence, who has worked the case for decades, has said of Lent directly, “I think he knows exactly where she is.

Lent knows. He has always known. What he has chosen to do with that knowledge across 30 years is make investigators search, really search, on hands and knees in the snow with shovels and dogs and sonar equipment, and find nothing. He draws maps to empty places. He describes locations that match nothing on the ground.

 He gives the details of a man who was there and withholds the one detail that would close the case. He does it from inside a prison cell in Massachusetts, served three meals a day, and he has been doing it for 30 years. Bob Wood did not do it from inside a prison cell. Bob Wood did it from outside in the weather with his own body.

 In the first days after Sara disappeared, he was up on Hackettam Road every night watching. When the state police took over his church as a command post, he organized volunteers and encouraged people and prayed. When the search stalled, he didn’t go home. He established the Sara Ann Wood Rescue Center in New Hartford, a clearinghouse for missing children posters that eventually distributed millions of images of missing kids across the country.

In 1995, he and several other men got on bicycles and rode 500 miles from Utica to Washington, D.C. to raise awareness for missing children, arriving on National Missing Children’s Day to a crowd that included an entire sixth-grade class singing a song they had written for Sara’s team. He turned that ride into an annual event.

Thousands of riders eventually participated each year wearing turquoise and pink, the colors Sara was wearing when she was taken, stopping at schools along the way to talk to children about what to do if a stranger approaches, doing the one thing he could still do, which was make sure what happened on Hackettam Road on August 18th, 1993 didn’t happen to anyone else’s child if he could help it. Bob Wood died in 2021.

He never found her. Sara Ann Wood, born March 4th, 1981, 12 years old, curly brown hair, blue eyes, freckles. She was exuberant, excited to be alive, her brother said. Every photograph, a beaming smile. She was funny and loud and dramatic, and she loved Dolly Parton with everything a 12-year-old has. She was singing around the house on the last morning of her life.

 She picked up her bike and her church papers and called to her brother on the way out the door. See you later. She was 4/10 of a mile from home when a man pulled over. Her bicycle was found leaning against a tree in the brush off Hackadam Road that same evening. The display board she had been carrying for her Bible school class was in the grass nearby.

 Those are the only physical objects associated with Sara Anne Wood that have ever been recovered. Her father spent the rest of his life looking for the rest of her. He didn’t find her. He died looking. Lewis Lent is 74 years old. He is at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution. He has never said where Sara is, not really, not truthfully, not in any description that has led to anything but empty ground and snow. Investigators believe he knows.

They have believed it for 30 years. They are still asking. If you are ever in the Adirondacks, near Raquette Lake, near Blue Mountain Lake, off Route 28, and you come across something that doesn’t belong in the woods, something that seems wrong, something that makes you stop and look twice, call it in.

 The New York State Police tip line for this case is still open. The number is 1-800-Call-WSP. 30 years of searches have not found Sara Anne Wood. A hiker, a hunter, someone who knows something and has been waiting for the right moment to say it. That person might still be out there. If you know anything, say it now.

 Bob Wood is gone. He spent his whole life trying to bring his daughter home. The least we can do is keep looking. If this case stayed with you, drop a comment. Tell us which moment hit hardest. Hit like, subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next one.