Transcript
Speaker: The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker: This is True Crime XS.
Speaker: I had a piece of true crime news I wanted to put on the front end of this. This was kind of mainstream, but then I looked at it and I was like, I don't know that people will know these other places.
Speaker: And this is a brief piece of true crime news, but it did send me down a rabbit hole, so I wanted to tell people about it in case you just want a rabbit hole. I know that, like... Spring breaks are going to be coming up and then Memorial Day. And, you know, if you're like me, sometimes on the weekends, you have some extra time.
Speaker: This one is definitely not the case itself, but sort of like how we get to the case itself. Do you ever follow international cases of missing people and how they like start to try and create like NamUs type campaigns?
Speaker: Possibly. Possibly. i was um I was prepping for the case we're going to talk about today, and this article had come up and I had saved it. And I was like, I want to get more into this. This comes from CBS News on March 20th, 2025.
Speaker: It's, I think, a staff writer, so I don't have like a good name to attach to it and give credit to. It's pretty brief, but I think it was like literally part of the evening news.
Speaker: The title of it from the World News section said, Transcontinental Cold Case Solved, as victim dubbed, Woman in the Chicken Coop is Identified.
Speaker: You heard about this? have not. So it says, A campaign to solve unexplained cold cases marks its first transcontinental success on Thursday with the police agency Interpol saying,
Speaker: reporting it has identified a Paraguayan woman found hanged in Spain in 2018. All right.
Speaker: This is about to get like geographically complicated. So Interpol, for those of you who don't know, is a police agency that's sort of short for international police.
Speaker: They're based out of France.
Speaker: We now have a woman from Paraguay found hanged in Spain in 2018. She has been unidentified since then.
Speaker: This France-based agency issues a statement and they say they have identified it as a 33-year-old victim who will no longer be known as the woman in the chicken coop. And I'm going to butcher her name, and I apologize.
Speaker: I will spell what I butchered. Her name appears to be Inoa Izaga Ibieta Lima. think you did good.
Speaker: That's A-I-N-O-H-A, right? Inoa, something to that effect. Izaga, I-Z-A-G-A.
Speaker: Ibieta, I-B-I-E-T-A, Lima, L-I-M-A. According to this statement that they give to CBS News, it says this discovery is marked as the first successful transcontinental identification in what's known as the Interpol Identify Me campaign.
Speaker: And that's the rabbit hole people can go now. They have a campaign right now where they're attempting to identify 40 more women who have been found dead in six different European countries over the past 40 years.
Speaker: So Interpol has been putting out information about these unidentified victims in order to try and give them their names back. So police said,
Speaker: That identification would mean they no longer have to identify the victim in public statements by their distinguishing features, such as the woman with the flower tattoo or the woman with the artificial nails.
Speaker: Other names have included the locations where their remains were discovered, the body in the canal or the woman in the suitcase. According to CBS, Mississauga's brother had reported her missing in 2019.
Speaker: He told investigators that in 2013, she had left Paraguay and she was headed to Spain. She was found hanged on a farm in Garona, northeastern Spain in August of 2018.
Speaker: but there was nothing with her or on her body to identify her. The farm's inhabitants and neighbors in the area did not know who she was or where she had come from.
Speaker: So after the launch of the first round of the Interpol appeal to the public in 2023, they were able to start investigating her case and Paraguayan authorities in March of 2025 announced they had matched her fingerprints to their records. So they're able to get the fingerprints from the police in Garona, Spain through Interpol to match them to records they had on the woman in Paraguay.
Speaker: The actual first success here out of the identify me campaign was in November, 2023. Authorities were able to identify Rita Roberts who is a British woman who had been found murdered in Antwerp, Belgium in 1992.
Speaker: Her relatives saw the public campaign for Identify Me, and they recognized one of her tattoos. ah The Interpol Secretary General, Valdese Urquiza, said in the statement that the campaign was about restoring ah dignity to victims and giving a voice to those affected by tragedy.
Speaker: And they made sure to point out in this statement that the Identify Me campaign, which if you want to go check it out, um it's a black notice on the Interpol website. And you can get there by going to interpol.int.
Speaker: So that's interpol.int slash What you can do, but with the words, what you can do, there's a dash between the words. So it's what dash you dash can dash do.
Speaker: Just W-H-A-T-Y-O-U-C-A-N-D-O with a dash between the words slash identify dash me. I-D-E-N-T-I-F-Y dash me.
Speaker: So it's a black notice on the site. And the black notice for Interpol is they are asking police worldwide to give up any information they can about potential matches to these unidentified bodies.
Speaker: And they have a YouTube channel. They have multiple photos. They have a really well done map. um and they have cases by year. ah They have items found with the women, and they have a lot of their tattoos.
Speaker: I'm going to go ahead and tell you guys now, there are quite a few photos on here that some people ah may find disturbing. There's a lot of, but they've they've done it in ah in a pretty um respectful manner, but there are some photos of of deceased people on here.
Speaker: And this interpol.end website with the what you can do, identify me, is a project where they're trying to internationally identify these people. And I think, you know, if you're if you're wanting to get into something true crime, but like you're just not interested in like all the things you've heard about or all the cases that people talk about.
Speaker: um on different podcasts and YouTube channels and the mainstream media. This is a great project to go on and dig through. um it's there's forty There's actually more than 45 cases when i when I went on the website, but they've started to stamp some of them identified, and they're still worth reading about, the ones that they've identified.
Speaker: But they have 45 open cases right now, and they identify them, and it it just says operation, and they give them like a a simple ah name.
Speaker: Like one of the ones I picked up on was BEO4. ah The nickname for that case was the woman in the Scheldt, like S-C-H-E-L-D-T. um There's several...
Speaker: different ways that they identify them there, uh, kind of by country, by number, and then by a prominent feature of the case. But it's a, it's a nice deep dive into something that like potentially you could know something about because we don't know where these women necessarily came from.
Speaker: Um, and while we've had inter country cases solved before because of the identify me project, uh, this one that we're talking about today briefly is, um, it's the first transcontinental one, meaning,
Speaker: She's on two completely separate continents in terms of where she is and where she was last known to be. i thought that was worth mentioning as a piece of true crime news.
Speaker: Yeah, it's ah it's a pretty sad story. um I'm glad that they were able to get her name back to her. Do you have any idea if there was foul play? um They have not gone that way. gut on this case says i I think they're gently indicating that it's probably a ah suicide. Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know that all of these are even going to be murders. There's at least one that when I went through it, I went, Oh, that's an accident. And she's just not local. Um, so they're not able to identify her, but she was like the victim of, uh, having been hit by a car in a larger accident.
Speaker: he And I always wonder, like, in this case, I don't know for sure. I don't know how I feel about, um, like if she, let's say she disposed of, um, she didn't take anything with her to identify herself.
Speaker: And then she went somewhere where she didn't know anybody, i guess. And then I'm like, well, if they wanted to not be known. But, you know, at the end of the day, they're gone and their family deserves to know is how I look at it. Right. Right.
Speaker: Even if there's not foul play in these cases, in my opinion, like how they end up in like true crime realm is like they need public assistance. Right. to determine who they were. And sometimes that's sort of what resolves the case completely. i know the identification is not necessarily indicative of a crime, but like I have seen cases that look one way and have an unidentified victim.
Speaker: And then when you go back around to it, it turns out that like the outcome they thought it was is unlikely. Right. and after they identify them, they're able to go, okay, well, that actually might not be an accident. That might be a homicide.
Speaker: Right, exactly. And um I would say, like... A lot of times, well, what I found that you may have seen differently, but typically if they're looking at a murder, they like say you know foul play is suspected.
Speaker: great yeah It's not necessarily going to be a case where they say ah the victim ah the unidentified person was believed to have committed suicide right because that's not very dignified.
Speaker: um In some cases. And so, and you know, they don't know. Right. So anyway, I am glad that they identified her. I think that it is ah now this was a fingerprint match, right? Correct. It was. And I feel like ah there was a lot of creative and hard ah work done by identify with,
Speaker: And you know obviously a long time coming, sort of, as far as everything advancing like it has. But I'm really glad that they were able to do that. And it looked like she was probably in contact with her brother up until 2018.
Speaker: twenty eighteen And he reported her missing. And then when the identification was just made recently, right, in 2025? Yeah. Yeah. yeah Yeah, and like so he had basically, according to this little blurb here, he had dropped off in sight of her, but still had contact with her.
Speaker: um He didn't see her after 2013 when she left Paraguay, but she they had had some communications. And then 2018, suddenly didn't. Right, and so by 2019, he had reported her missing, right? Correct.
Speaker: But I think he just reported her missing to the Paraguayan authorities. Even more specifically than that, he reported her missing to the local authorities, to him, who, like, it slowly kind of worked its way up to get to their version of, like, the national police, the FBI kind of thing.
Speaker: Right. So it took some diligence, but you know for him, i'm I'm glad that he's going to be able to have closure on that. I guess. I mean, like I think that's sort of a double-edged sword. like He does know what happened to her now, so he's not wondering, but I still think it's pretty... um I think it would be pretty difficult to...
Speaker: think about that and know that like, you know, your sister's been there this whole time. it's seven years, between almost seven years, of six and a half years between the time her body is found and, uh, the case kind of being resolved.
Speaker: Um, I, I could be wrong. There could be some indicators of of foul play and maybe that's why they're playing this close. I do think they're, uh, I think they're indicating that she, she was potentially a a suicide.
Speaker: oh And now that they know who she is, they can find out any other relevant information as to what was going on in her life at that point in time. Yeah. Yeah. and so I wanted to bring that in for our true crime news for today. I found that interesting. I found it to be a really cool rabbit hole to go down.
Speaker: um I've been wanting to connect cold cases in the U.S. that way. um And I know that's an an unidentified case. person's campaign. So it's kind of like what NamUs and NCMEC and some of the others do.
Speaker: um I've been wanting to connect specifically cold cases where I've had a couple ideas of how to do this, but I think it would be cool to have the ability for people to put up a case on like a website like WebSleuths that ultimately it becomes sort of a mapping site, like what they've been done here at Interpol and for it to aggregate cold cases around the u S in this type of format, at least, you know, I don't, I didn't want to limit it to unidentified bodies cause that's kind of done already.
Speaker: But I do think unsolved murders being, undertaken in that way while a rather massive feat to do it um i think that would be a great direction for true crime resources to go in where they started to put unsolved murders from places that aren't necessarily linked all together there's a lot of them the united states has quite a few unsolved murders so right and somebody holds the key everything right Yeah, yeah. Like, as it's interesting. There are very few cases that just can't be solved at all. They do exist.
Speaker: But um for the most part, as long as the perpetrator and and potential witnesses are alive, you know, you could you could solve a lot of cases um if you could figure out how to aggregate all of that. And I think with that's one of those things that I think AI will be able to help us do down the road to um pull facts together.
Speaker: for comparison. And if we start to aggregate that information, although i don't 100% know how you would do that, I do think it can be done.
Speaker: um You know, we do quite a bit of aggregating through the Department of Justice with programs like NamUs. ah VICAP is another place that you could potentially aggregate more information.
Speaker: um So i I think about that all the time. Like, how would you do it? And I think that would be a cool project as well to make like an identify me campaign that's more of a solve me campaign that maybe just started focusing on the United States unsolved cases.
Speaker: ah The problem is like there are many cases out there that the jurisdictional authorities, whoever they may be, whether it's a sheriff's office or local police or state police or even the federal police,
Speaker: don't necessarily want to give up the case files. You would need them to make an effective solution, I guess. Yeah, but maybe as AI evolves, they could...
Speaker: they could find some sort of balance where even like AI could decide what they really can't let go of right? Yeah. um I don't, I don't personally, I feel like the old adage about, you know, holding back something in a case, I feel like it's sort of irrelevant um and now.
Speaker: that's probably true. But no, I think they still do it, but I don't feel like officers should have to give over, or investigators should have to give over case files that are, like, actively being investigated. Like, you know, somebody's working on it every single day, because I do think that could impede the investigation.
Speaker: but We're talking about, I feel like you're talking about cases that like nobody's even looked at like for a long time. And if all you need is somebody fresh eyes to go over the information and you're automatically at least going to get some new leads from somebody else looking at it.
Speaker: Not to mention, you might actually get more than that, right? And then depending on what else is available in the case, you could ah you know you're going to want to do like you know DNA ah corroboration if you actually have a suspect, if possible.
Speaker: So I think that there'll be a balance. um AI, though, i I think it'll be used more for a shell of like, yeah this is the way the investigation should go.
Speaker: Because at least right now, most of the AI sources we have available, like we're not at the point yet where they're a hundred percent accurate. Right. yeah And a lot of times without any sort of logical train of anything,
Speaker: I could see where it would spit out results that are nonsensical and could cause big problems. yeah So it's going to end up being a shell of like, this is how you should investigate this. And this is the information I have. And it's still all going to have to be verified, but it's no different than when, you know, dial up Google was a thing or dial up Yahoo. I mean, it just evolved. Right. Yeah. i I think it'll be, once we get to the point where we can recognize,
Speaker: what they call the hallucinations, which is where AI makes mistakes and whatever it spits out is not quite real. um I think once that is controllable, we will be able to um we'll be able to look a lot more at how to use it for unidentified persons effectively, for unsolved murders effectively. I do think you know there will come a time where the the hindsight of everything will become important.
Speaker: And i think we're starting to see some of that. And this is not AI based. um I, I saw an update in, in a case recently, and I kind of wanted to make,
Speaker: ah a starting point for a couple different things. One of them is like this suspected serial killer that I've gotten multiple emails over the years to do something on him. Today we're going to, we're going to touch on him. I don't know that this is going to be necessarily a series in order because I have over the next few episodes, I have several things I want to accomplish.
Speaker: um But I wanted to to to at least start this direction ah because of how this killer is kind of of linked to a couple of cases. and We know he's a killer. The question of whether he's a serial killer comes up.
Speaker: And I had pulled a CBS News article, and I think you actually said that there was some media on this recently, right? Was that a recent episode you were talking about you were going to check out?
Speaker: Yes, it was in September of, ah I believe it was first aired in September 2024. Okay. It's interesting because I didn't realize there was a lot of media until I like started looking into this case.
Speaker: We're going to... look into this guy more, but we're going to start with a really interesting story from March 16th, 2025. ah From what I can tell, it was written up by a guy named Chris Young, ah Ritson for CBS News. It was sort of ah put on the wire and multiple outlets picked it up, which is what caught my attention.
Speaker: The title of it was How a 12-Year-Old Massachusetts Girl Who Escaped a Serial Killer Likely Saved the Lives of Others. And that ties into a missing persons murder case.
Speaker: ah So I thought we would cover those to start out down this path. And the article starts off January 7th, 1994. It started off like every typical winter morning for Rebecca Becky Savarisi of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
Speaker: There was snow on the ground. It was bitterly cold. And the 12-year-old was walking to school. Around 7.10 a.m. at one of the busiest intersections in town, a man came up beside her.
Speaker: He had a mustache, but he didn't shave, and he seemed like a nerd to me, says Becky. The stranger quickly pulled out a gun and held it up against her. Okay, we've talked about these crimes before and the fact that stranger abductions are rare, right?
Speaker: um They are ah now, especially, yes. and stranger abductions of a child are like the rarest of the rare way for a child to go missing.
Speaker: Right. And ah to be clear, don't know what line I want to draw here, but I guess my point would be like, ah Becky was walking around, right? Correct. was out in the world. Okay. Okay.
Speaker: It's seven o'clock in the morning. She's walking around. She says this gunman threatens her. He says, do everything I say and everything will be fine. Then he started to point her towards his truck.
Speaker: So he's got a gun on her. He's pointing her towards her truck. She's 12 years old. He tells her to get in and she says, no. She says, I didn't care if he shot me. I just knew that I was not getting into that truck.
Speaker: So Becky comes up with this idea in the story that she tells shortly after this is that she fakes an asthma attack. She explains, can I sit down? Can I sit down just a minute?
Speaker: She's trying to take her backpack off. She's trying to get away. He is trying to grab her now and physically abduct her. He gets a hold of her backpack and then she runs.
Speaker: So the gunman jumps into his truck and he speeds off.
Speaker: Becky runs into a man who is clearing the snow off of a sidewalk, and that man calls the police. At about the same time this happened, a witness has called in with three digits from the license plate of the truck that was speeding away.
Speaker: And police learn that a 43-year-old handyman and former movie theater janitor had been driving that truck. His name is Louis Lent.
Speaker: Have you ever heard of Louis before? Not before today, no. So Louis, he's one of those people that is sort of suggested as a serial killer. He gets mentioned to me a lot in emails that come in, like, have you ever heard of him? What do you think of him? And I had started to look into him about three years ago.
Speaker: um i think he's still alive now. um I know he was alive when I started digging into him. ah He's an interesting character.
Speaker: So Lewis denies knowing what has happened to Becky Savarisi, but he does end up eventually confessing that he was trying to abduct her. According to police who search his truck, and this comes from the statement of a New York state police detective named Reese Trean, they found...
Speaker: Becky's backpack and in the truck with it, they found a gun and what they described as a snatch kit. Uh, I would describe this as a part of a kill kit.
Speaker: But there's, and and like, it's not always that like, it's the intent, by the way. It's not always that they have these things that they tend to lean towards it actually being some kind of kit.
Speaker: But specifically, Restreen says they found duct tape in a clothesline and he felt like this was a kidnapping or abducting or a snatch kit that Louis Lent had with him.
Speaker: ah After he's arrested for the attempted abduction of Becky Savarisi,
Speaker: people start to wonder if it's possible he was responsible for abducting other children. And that's sort of where we get to the story for today.
Speaker: This case is interesting to me because i have had a lot of conflicting information over the years of whether a predator will abduct both children male and female, boy and girl, children.
Speaker: um Have you ever come to any conclusions on that? i think the i I think that they will. um I think that it is... So we're talking about somebody that who... They're looking to abduct... It's not... They're not pe prepubescent, but they're also not like adults.
Speaker: Okay, so it's like the in-between? yeah Okay, and so... ah I think that
Speaker: they will abduct whoever they have the opportunity to. That's sort of where I land. Because that those types of ah predators are hunting and different things have to line up, right? Yeah.
Speaker: As far as like, because um but like you said about Becky, like he's trying to take her off the street, right? Right. Now, granted, it seems like he might have been getting a little ahead of himself because there was witnesses, right? Yes.
Speaker: And i do think though that,
Speaker: It's more of an opportunity-based crime. So it would be whomever whomever they come across that, it would work, right? Yeah.
Speaker: The way that this sort of goes is, and how we land here, is back in August of 1993, a 12-year-old girl went missing up in Litchfield, New York.
Speaker: ah For background on her, she's born March 4th of 1981. She's the youngest of three kids born to Robert and Francis Wood. Her dad is a pastor at Norwich Corners Presbyterian Church, which is in a very rural community um called Sequoia.
Speaker: Is that the way that you say that word? Correct. um New York. So this is going to be up in... i think it's going to be like a ah suburb outside of the town of Paris, New York, um up in Oneida County.
Speaker: And it's it's a really tiny neighborhood that sits along the Sakwut Creek. And that is a ah ah little offshoot of the Mohawk River.
Speaker: She lived there with her siblings, Dusty and Nikki, who at the time of her disappearance, if I'm reading everything correctly, Sarah Ann Wood is going to be 12 years old.
Speaker: Dusty Wood is going to be 17. And Nikki is going to be 14. fourteen And, you know, they live a completely normal ah life in a little house off Hackadam Road in Sackwood, and they go to church with their family.
Speaker: ah The descriptions of her across the internet are pretty typical. Her brother talks about her frequently um as being a smart kid, ah being into church. She was lively. She likes music.
Speaker: ah The immediate aftermath after her abduction, a lot of people from her elementary school talk about her, um including a teacher says she was just the happiest little girl um and that she remembers her giggling all the time, that she would get everyone laughing,
Speaker: And to the teacher, Nancy Wildick, remembered turning around and thinking, OK, I've got to stop laughing at everything that's coming out of this little girl's mouth. On August 18, 1993, she was riding her bicycle up a hill close to her home and headed into Frankfurt, New York, which would be close to the church.
Speaker: She's last seen it at approximately 2.30 p.m., and she was carrying a display board, vacation Bible school literature, and a church songbook.
Speaker: So the if I'm looking at all this correctly, I believe this is like the end of summer, so it's right ahead of school starting back. The location of her final sighting is less than a half a mile away from her house.
Speaker: At the time of the sighting, she was riding her bicycle.
Speaker: According to later reports and some information we're going to get, she had actually gotten off of her bicycle and was walking along the road, carrying these items and pushing the bike at the same time.
Speaker: At the time of her disappearance, she was wearing a pink t-shirt with the words, guess who, embroidered on the front. She had turquoise blue shirts shorts on. ah She was wearing brown sandals and her prescription eyeglasses.
Speaker: And that's, you know, it's interesting. i only remember pictures of her without the eyeglasses. I don't remember ever seeing one of her um having the glasses on.
Speaker: ah But you've seen some more media recently. Have you seen? I never saw her with the glasses on, but um she had them on when she was taken. yeah So by 4 o'clock in the afternoon, um her parents and her family said,
Speaker: started to look for her. She's reported missing um a little later than that. And by all reports, ah several hundred state troopers and local EMS and volunteer firefighters are involved in searching a lot of terrain.
Speaker: um This is around her house, around potential destination of the church, and along the road where she would have been traveling on her bike. Her family themselves, um they're pursuing all the things they can think of to try and find her.
Speaker: They're also conducting their own searches in the neighborhood. They're going door to door ah They have organized ah printing and distributing ah missing persons flyers with Sarah's pictures on it.
Speaker: um Her bicycle is found, and this is always one of those things, like you and I, We'll sometimes get really obsessed with cases that have ah someone on a bicycle, particularly with children on a bicycle.
Speaker: Like, was it found? um Because that can be a thing where, in my mind, you kind of you have to rule out somebody accidentally hit them and then tried to cover it up.
Speaker: And that's a very different crime than a kid being ah abducted, and in my opinion. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Her bicycle is found off the road, leaning up against a tree.
Speaker: And a search of this area reveals her coloring book, her crayons, all close by the bicycle.
Speaker: Investigators pretty quickly determine that this is not a situation that is an accident where someone has hit her with a car. Instead, they believe this is a true child abduction.
Speaker: and that she has been grabbed, her bicycle has been put up against the tree, and she has been essentially snatched and put into a car to be taken away from this area.
Speaker: This widens the search area because the minute the vehicle gets involved, the boundaries of like where this child could be, by the minute, rapidly expand by miles.
Speaker: There is an extensive search for Sarah. They look at multiple areas of interest. For five days straight, the state police, all these firefighters, and forest rangers put in a huge ground-level search effort to try and find her.
Speaker: There are multiple public appeals in the local newspaper and in the local news for any information leading to Sarah's whereabouts and her safe return.
Speaker: But she's not found. No real clues are found as to where she might have been. And by the end of the week, the news coverage is extensive.
Speaker: And the public outcry surrounding her disappearance is galvanizing in upstate New York. The efforts to find her generate a lot of media attention. This is a young white girl in the ninety s More than 1,000 leads are received on the tip lines.
Speaker: They are either quickly ruled out as being not untenable or they're pursued. And a public reward is announced up to $150,000 her safe return.
Speaker: As many small towns and communities do, the members of the public come out in droves and they are assisting the search in every way possible.
Speaker: They are ah providing resources, including food and other refreshments and places to stay for volunteers and investigators. They start to put out teal ribbons.
Speaker: So, When I look at them, I think they're representing the color of her shorts. She has these little turquoise shorts shorts on. And the teal ribbon is not that different from what the shorts are she was believed to have been wearing.
Speaker: Yeah, that's what Right. right So within two weeks, because of this vehicle involvement, the effort to find Sarah and recover her has expanded to statewide and and quickly to nationwide.
Speaker: um They actually make an improvised headquarters, they being the family and the local authorities, in New Hartford, New York, called the Rescue Sarah Center.
Speaker: They distribute thousands of missing posts persons posters. um Updates about Sarah are broadcast on 48 Hours and on America's Most Wanted.
Speaker: And nothing is found. So for years... Sarah Wood is just missing.
Speaker: But with this incident with Becky, we get a lot of information about what happened to Sarah.
Speaker: ah The way they summarize this, if you go hunting for um information about Sarah Wood's case, is in 1996, a 45-year-old janitor named Louis Stephen Lent Jr. of North Adams, Massachusetts, was formally charged with Sarah's abduction and murder.
Speaker: Lint had been arrested and convicted of attempting to abduct a 12-year-old girl named Becky Savarisi at gunpoint in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on January 7, 1994. That abduction failed when the child feigned an asthma attack as he attempted to drag her by her backpack into his truck.
Speaker: Um... The witnesses to this who followed Len's truck from a distance were able to note part of his license plate, which they then relayed to the police.
Speaker: And the search of the vehicle, which revealed the duct tape that we talked about, a loaded revolver, a pair of child sunglasses, candy, um a knife, and ah essentially ah Becky's backpack.
Speaker: That lends them to searching his home. And a search of his home, which was in a place called Lanesboro, Massachusetts, it's a little town.
Speaker: I think today they probably have about 5,000 people in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Well, a search of this home reveals this intricate private chamber that was sort of under construction beneath Lent's house.
Speaker: And he confessed that he was constructing this area in his home specifically for the sole purpose of restraining and abusing future victims i pulled up a document that is from his appellate documents well you know what i'm going to veer off from sarah for just a second and talk about this in this document the commonwealth versus lewis linton jr we're looking at essentially a may 10th 1999 court argument and this is before the massachusetts court of appeals
Speaker: It says, at the trial of an indictment for larceny from a person, the evidence was sufficient to warrant the defendant's conviction, where there was evidence that the defendant took the victim's property with the intent to deprive her of it permanently.
Speaker: That's how they opened this appellate document. At the trial of an indictment for kidnapping, the evidence was sufficient for the jury reasonably to infer that the defendant forcibly confined the victim against her will,
Speaker: And the indictment was not effective for the omission of a word where it clearly and unequivocally informed the defendant of the nature and elements of the crime with which he's charged. The trial of indictments, including an indictment for kidnapping,
Speaker: the judge here properly allowed in evidence testimony about a defendant's master plan concerning young girls whom he intended to kidnap, where that evidence was relevant to the specific intent of the charge crime charged.
Speaker: So we're kind of picking up in the middle of something, but the reason we're doing that is this master plan that appears to involve this chamber. In 1994, in ninety ninety four Indictments are found in return to the Superior Court in Massachusetts. Three of them come back on January 20th, 1994.
Speaker: One of them comes back on December 7th, 1994. And the cases are tried before Daniel Ford, who is going to be the the district, I mean, the Superior Court judge at the time.
Speaker: And there is a attorney on both sides of this. They've referenced them here. um The bottom line is the defendant is the subject of four indictments, including ah kidnapping, armed robbery, and assault with a dangerous weapon, as well as assault and battery.
Speaker: At the trial that he has, the armed robbery indictment was submitted to the jury on only so much of the indictment as charging him with larceny from the person. When this all rolls through, the jury returns guilty verdicts on all these indictments.
Speaker: On appeal, the defendant raises several issues, and he claims that the evidence with regard to the larceny from the person and the kidnapping indictments were sufficient to warrant the jury returning guilty verdicts on those indictments.
Speaker: But the defendant challenges introduction of evidence that disclosed his, quote, master plan concerning young girls whom he intended to kidnap. At the time, they give um Becky...
Speaker: ah so So the name that's in these documents, if you come across them, is Rose. So on January 7th, 1994, a 12-year-old girl named Rose left her home shortly after 7 a.m.
Speaker: She was walking to Notre Dame Middle School in downtown Pittsburgh, where she was in the seventh grade. She was carrying a backpack with straps over the shoulders, and she was listening to a portable compact disc player with headphones at full volume.
Speaker: So she's got loud music on. She had intended to walk down West Street to a railroad underpass and then to cross to the opposite side of the street near the Big Y supermarket.
Speaker: From there, she would walk to North Street, where her school was located. This is Notre Dame Middle School. While she was proceeding along West Street, She was approached from behind by a man that she would later identify as the defendant.
Speaker: He came to within an inch of her right side and walked at her pace. We've seen this recently in the Delphi video. Did you see the bridge video for that? Yeah. a She noticed that the defendant was speaking to her.
Speaker: She could not hear what he was saying because she had a high volume of music playing in her headphones from her discman. She took off her headphones and heard the defendant say,
Speaker: do everything I say and everything will be okay. Rose also saw that the defendant was pointing a gun at her and he said, do you see the gun I have? Rose saw it, became afraid, and out of fear, she continued to walk along West Street with the defendant.
Speaker: As they turned the corner onto North Street, the defendant switched positions from Rose's right side to her left, holding onto to the sleeve of her jacket as she did so. As they continued along North Street, the defendant said, do you see that truck over there?
Speaker: When Rose responded affirmatively, he told her to get into it, and she began to struggle with him as he pulled her toward the truck. And this is where she pretends to have an asthma attack. She asks the defendant if she can sit down and catch her breath.
Speaker: The defendant lets go of her jacket, places a hand on her backpack, which Rose then slips out of the straps of her backpack. She runs down North Street, leaving him standing, holding her backpack.
Speaker: An eyewitness, who we find out was a man, Stopped at a traffic light on the corner of West and North Streets, and he sees Rose struggling with the defendant and then running away.
Speaker: He also sees the defendant walk to a truck with something in his hand. The witness follows the truck for a short distance, drives into a gas station and calls the police. He gives a description of the truck and three numbers from the license plate, and based on these descriptions that are given by both Rose and the eyewitness, the police begin to search for the truck in Pittsfield and surrounding towns.
Speaker: The truck is located parked in a driveway in Lanesboro. Several people, including the defendant, are in the house where the truck is parked. The defendant told police that he had borrowed the truck the previous day from one of the occupants of the house and had returned it that morning.
Speaker: The defendant agrees to go to the Pittsfield Police Station to give a statement and to be photographed. The defendant's photograph is later included in a photo array viewed by Rose and the eyewitness in separate incidents.
Speaker: They both identify the defendant as the person who had confronted Rose earlier that day. Rose also selected the defendant out of the lineup as the person who assaulted her. a loaded revolver, Rose's backpack, and other items are subsequently discovered in the defendant's van, which is now parked in the driveway where the pickup truck was.
Speaker: So we he's not lying. He probably did borrow the pickup truck. After his arrest, the de defendant gave a series of statements denying involvement in the incident. However, he eventually signs a written statement, which he admits that he was trying to force Rose into this truck.
Speaker: When asked why he wanted to kidnap Rose, the defendant told the police he had a master plan. According to the officers that he spoke with, the defendant said that he was looking for 11 vulnerable victims, whom he described as girls who looked between the ages of 12 and 17, who were just beginning to develop and had long hair.
Speaker: In his bedroom, he had planned to build shelf-like boxes, like bunk beds with a small door he could close and secure, where he could keep these girls at all times so that he could take them out when he needed to use them for sex.
Speaker: the The defendant stated that his master plan was not yet complete, so to satisfy his sexual desires, he would pick up girls for quickies. And I'm going to pause there for a second.
Speaker: Because of all the things that you hear hear about different killers and predators, this is one of the weirdest things. I do not know why it's not talked about more.
Speaker: It is... um it's It's the tipping point where, at least in my mind, I'm like, oh, so we're not dealing with like a human, right?
Speaker: I don't think so. This guy's making... He's the epitome of evil. what that's That's what I think. like When I look at this, he's describing a morgue, basically.
Speaker: Well... Little beds, doors, and he's going to... coffins, basically. Yeah. But he wants to keep them alive, though. For sex. Exactly.
Speaker: Because, you know, um i don't know. um i can't get my my thinking quite there, right? Yeah. Because that's insane.
Speaker: And the guy's a loser to begin with. And ah he somehow feels entitled to this to not only having this fantasy, but trying to begin to act on it.
Speaker: Yeah, and like, so I'm torn on this. On the one hand, well, I'm not torn on the epitome of evil. Just the thought alone is enough for me to agree with the epitome of evil.
Speaker: But
Speaker: while it is an evil plan, and clearly it is from a disturbed mind, is this even possible? to To do it? Right.
Speaker: No, no, no. And that part is what makes me go, huh? Right. and He's not human, right? Yeah. I mean, because think of the, think of, um which I say no, and then, of course, there's cases where, you know,
Speaker: um that kidnappings and They're not murdered. They're held and they're tortured for years and years happen, right? Yeah. Okay, but this very specific plan, you've got a situation where you would have 11, 12 to 17-year-old girls in coffins in your home and you wouldn't let them out. Well, unfortunately… becomes your full-time job.
Speaker: Well, and it's all you could do. And, you know, they would starve to death. You would end up having um human waste because they're in the boxes all the time.
Speaker: um Like, it's not a ah it's not a feasible plan, right? I don't think so, but I find it disturbing on so many levels.
Speaker: Right. And there was some... indications that heat like the construction had started, right? Yeah. And I wasn't entirely sure. Because i my first reaction is oh well, this guy is clearly not serious, right? That's how that's how I feel. And i that's how I feel the authorities start to approach him.
Speaker: Well, right. And then if he is for real, like I'm really got this plan in my mind that I'm going to do this. It's a lot of work.
Speaker: He should absolutely have gone like a more constructive route to do something else. Right. Cause mean, that's a lot of planning, but then you're all, you've also kind of got to be like, so he's off his rocker. Right.
Speaker: That's what i think. And it's, It just, it gets exponentially weirder once, like, he starts talking. And if he was serious, which i I presume the investigators, when they spoke with him with regard to Becky and and he began, you know, his rambling about everything, you know, I feel like they probably sized up whether he was telling the truth or not. I mean, obviously, he was in custody at that point. So it wasn't like he was ever going to get to do it, right? Right.
Speaker: But it seems like kind of a lot to spill on. It is a lot. So, okay.
Speaker: i We're kind of all over the place, and I apologize for that. But it's not us doing this. It's how this case unfolds. So for the case that I was reading from, that's the abduction of Beckine.
Speaker: So for the abduction of Becky Sabarisi, he's found guilty. He is sentenced to serve a term of between 17 and 20 years imprisonment, and that's going to be served at MCI Walpole.
Speaker: And like this all happens in January of 1995. um I think Walpole is now known as Cedar Junction. um So he's going to spend 20 years there, except for what he did after he got arrested.
Speaker: So he's told this master plan. And shortly after he starts talking about this, investigators in New York began to review what at the time would have been a teletype. Today it would be an email broadcast. But it's a secure message about this guy's potential victim profile.
Speaker: He is starting to be interrogated by the authorities. And starts spilling on a couple of different cases. The first case that he offers up is a young boy named James Bernardo.
Speaker: Had you ever heard of him before we started talking about him? hadn't. So Lewis Lent says he's working in a movie theater and he runs into this kid named James or Jim or Jimmy Bernardo.
Speaker: He offered the boy $5 to help move chairs around in the theater. And the Bernardo kid says, okay.
Speaker: Once he gets him inside the theater, he binds his hands behind his back at knife point. Lewis binds James Bernardo. He drives him to his house.
Speaker: And there he binds him by his wrists and ankles to his bed. The following morning, he drives the blindfolded boy to an area of Woodland in a town called Newfield, New York.
Speaker: He strangles him to death with a rope.
Speaker: And he leaves him there. Now, Jimmy Bernardo's body is going to be found by Hunter several weeks after his abduction. There is duct tape over his mouth and eyes, and it matches...
Speaker: The duct tape that was in Louis Lentz's vehicle at the time of his arrest. I do not know how they match it. I'm assuming it's either similar type. i don't think I don't necessarily think that you're going to have the same exact role of duct tape. Because this is taking place October 22, 1991.
Speaker: And where we catch up with him is 1994. Right. And this is an off-the-cuff confession. Yeah, this is not he's been brought in to talk about the murder of James Bernardo. He's not even in the same jurisdiction as James Bernardo.
Speaker: But this duct tape essentially substantiates this off-the-cuff confession.
Speaker: He's not done there. The next thing he does... is he confesses to the missing girl that we've been talking about, to her murder.
Speaker: So Lewis Lent says that he encountered Sarah walking alongside her bicycle. That's where some of this information about her disappearance comes from.
Speaker: He's driving along Hackadam Road. He claims that he dragged her into his van at knife point. He bound her hands. And he drove her up to the Adirondack Mountains where he sexually assaulted her before bludgeoning her with a tree branch nearby.
Speaker: And then he buried her body in a shallow grave within a clearing near Rickette Lake at a location either in or near the town of Inlet.
Speaker: And he never checked to see if she was dead. um He said she might have even just been unconscious when he buried her. Now he has agreed during this confession to draw a map of the location of her burial to assist investigators in the recovery of her body.
Speaker: So you pick him up for an attempted abduction. He has what the state police later would describe as basically a, I call it a kill kit. They're calling it ah a kidnapping kit or abduction kit or a snatch kit.
Speaker: What do we think about this? um i think that I think that he probably may have felt a little bit of relief.
Speaker: this is you think this is his unburdening? I mean, it's interesting, right? Because been convicted for he's going to do time and then possibly eventually get out, right? Right. he He's only got 15 or 20 years on the Cervasi program.
Speaker: attempted abduction. Right. And then, so he, you know, he confesses to the little boy at the movie theater and then now he's moved on and he is confessing to ah Sarah Wood. Now, my understanding is that the investigators on Sarah Wood's case, Becky's incident happened approximately five months after Sarah Wood went missing.
Speaker: right And they got the teletype on the wire or whatever. And based on the circumstances, ah the investigators on Sarah's missing person case, they actually found it to be relevant, right? Yeah.
Speaker: And so they went and they they went to talk to him and they had her missing person flyer. And when they spoke with him, um He had a few details that he wouldn't have had if he wasn't the one. Yeah. ah Where Becky was abducted was approximately 100 miles away, something like that. I mean, I'm sorry, the where the attempted abduction was. Right. Was a approximately 100 miles away from where Sarah had been abducted.
Speaker: And he was able to, he told investigators that her bike was too big for her, which was true. And even the investigators didn't really know that. But when it was relayed, they were like, yeah, her bike was too big for her.
Speaker: ah The chain was broken, which it was. And he was able to, like, give the details of ah the clothing she had on, which I guess hadn't been released at the time. Right.
Speaker: I don't know. But it was enough, right? Not to mention, she looked ah if you can look at Sarah and put some prescription glasses on her, she looks a whole lot like Becky did.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. Okay, so it's really strange, right? um it I can see where they made that gigantic leap, and I think he absolutely is responsible for it.
Speaker: Yeah, i I would agree with you. That's what I think. I mean, you know, i and then because I knew, um you know, I sort of I knew the narrative going into this.
Speaker: He doesn't confess to sexually assaulting the little boy. noticed that, yeah. Okay. And so we know he did, right? Yeah. We know that it's probably some sort of shame that he's operating off of. um is There's something. There's something going on there because he's like freely giving out these confessions.
Speaker: yeah And ah withholding things, right? Now, um the little boy had been found independent of his confession. So he, you know, they found him and then it was a whodunit, right? Yeah.
Speaker: Because there was no correlation between them. He was literally just standing in front of the theater waiting to meet some of his friends when was. you know He was like, I'll pay you money. And it all happened, right? I'll pay you money to move the chairs. and And so there was no... It was a random stranger abduction.
Speaker: and But his body was found. but Becky's still alive. ye Then we've got Sarah, who... She went missing. The way they found Sarah's bike in the the woods was indicative of...
Speaker: You know, somebody tossing it there after they took her, right? Yeah. and it... ah so So he's confessed to it, and there's quite a bit of a game played for a little bit, and then ultimately he he does plead guilty to it, right?
Speaker: Yeah. Where we pick up is he said that he's going to give this map to the location of Sarah's body. There's an extensive search of this area around Rickett Lake.
Speaker: Everyone is out looking for this little girl. They have over two weeks into the search. They have hundreds of state troopers, ah Department of Environmental Conservation Police, numerous civilians are in on this mix.
Speaker: They have 50 personnel who have come from nearby Griffiths Air Force Base. um They have search and rescue dogs. They're using heavy equipment. They're basically doing anything they can to find this little girl.
Speaker: They've got civilians up there preparing meals, which local businesses are getting involved. um The community is assisting the search in every way that they can. ah they got The public is being ah drafted into assisting.
Speaker: Sarah's father ultimately is bringing sandwiches and beverages, and he brings excavation equipment out. These people,
Speaker: Efforts to find Sarah's body are extensive. And ultimately, they don't find her. Louis Lent is tried separately for Jimmy and for Sarah.
Speaker: In June of 1996, he ends up pleading guilty to Jimmy Bernardo's abduction and murder. On October 16th of 1996, he gets a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Speaker: And at the formal sentencing for the murder, he tells his attorney he wants to plead out to Sarah's murder, but he sees Sarah's parents in the courtroom and he refuses to to provide any further details pertaining to where she might actually be.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: somewhere in the mix of all this he claims that she wasn't actually buried near rickett lake and he's not going to tell anyone where she's buried because he says there's another victim's body close to hers and he does not want that body to be found okay that's crazy right
Speaker: It's so crazy. a boy it's ah It's a boy. It's someone close to him. Like, we've got these rules that Bundy used to throw out there. too young, too close to home, too embarrassing.
Speaker: ah Right, exactly. and this is ah This is infuriating to me. It's infuriating to me. And I was trying to figure out, of course, I get you know really fixated on it. And I was trying to figure out
Speaker: ah what the motivation is for this. ah Not for the murders themselves. Not for the abductions themselves. Not for the assaults. Just for the game playing after the fact. Well, specifically confessing, pleading guilty, doing your time, but refusing to give up her body. And it's my opinion.
Speaker: and and these are, this is like a touchy thing to try and figure out, but there's something he doesn't want them to know. And I don't think it has anything else to do with another victim.
Speaker: And he didn't just, like, he, these people went on wild goose chases at his behest. I saw where, when he initially told them, when he initially drew a map and and told them where her body was, there were men ah just,
Speaker: buckets full of men, um volunteers who were in like knee deep and waist deep snow. it was negative 30 degrees outside. nop And they were that intent on provided on finding her based on the provided map, right? Because he he took and drew out a map and said, okay, this is where I left her.
Speaker: And ah they searched and searched and searched to no avail. And then ah for 50 days, they were out there trying to find her. Yeah. ah it And from my understanding is, I don't know how long that went on, but eventually they took him out there with them.
Speaker: yeah Yeah. It's difficult to see, like like, from what they've released, it's difficult to see the timeline on all of this, but i follow what you're saying. Okay. And so by the time, you know, they didn't find, there was a, just a, this was a, like a huge deal. This little girl had been taken. Then like this random guy confesses to it.
Speaker: And then he's given the body location. And so there were a lot of ah man, there was a lot of manpower put into finding her, um that was volunteer right so it was this huge effort that was undertaken and at the end of it he is this like smug jerk and he sits and he said like it there's a little snippet of the audio and he says
Speaker: um he says, the the investigator's talking, he says, and so we brought you out today and like we held up our end of the bargain, right? We've treated you really well. And and he's like, yes.
Speaker: And he's like, so are you going to, you know, are you not going to be able to hold up your end of the bargain? and he's like, well, I thought I'd be able to remember, but clearly i didn't remember. This is is where I thought it was, right?
Speaker: And it's so surreal, that moment, right? Because the investigators are almost too nice to this guy. agree.
Speaker: And i was trying to figure out what could you say to turn the tide on this guy, right? Everybody tries. Yeah. Okay, and so think that they should tell him that they have ah evidence that someone else has confessed to it. That's a good idea.
Speaker: And that the only way ah to remedy that is
Speaker: Is for him to produce the body. Because now they've gotten so they've got somebody else who has given the information. And now they're not so sure he committed the murder anymore. Take the credit away from him?
Speaker: Yeah, take the credit away. and And say, whichever one of you guys is able to tell us where the body is, ah that's who we're going to hold accountable for it.
Speaker: I hate to be the one to do this to people, but like we're not going to be able to wrap all of this up in one episode. like There's so much more to this case. So where we're leaving office, he's just confessed to Jimmy Bernardo's murder in June. He's been sentenced.
Speaker: And we're going to pick up what happens afterwards. in the next episode.
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Speaker: don't want to go, but it's cause I'll disappoint ya. It's all I've ever dreamed of, something I cannot let go of.
Speaker: I hate the competition. This culture's like a Jimin. I lost the motivation to get fit in your expectations.
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Speaker: Thank you for joining us.
