Sara Anne Wood missing from NY 8.1993/1994 Lewis Lent arrested & chged w/ kidnap & assault of 12 yr old Rebecca Savarese, confesses to killing 12 yr old James Bernardo & 12 yr old Sara Anne Wood/Lent doing life/7.2013 Lent confesses to more killing

GREENFIELD — .State police say fragments of a human skull found in woods in northern Saratoga County appear to be from a child 10 to 12 years old.

State Police Maj. William Sprague declined to say who found the bones on Tuesday. He said technicians will try to get DNA from the bones as part of attempts to identify the person, but that could take four to six weeks.

State Supreme Court Justice Michael Daley said he is hopeful that the remains could help put closure to the case of local missing girl Sara Anne Wood.

He was the district attorney in Herkimer County in 1993 when Sara was abducted near her Frankfort home while walking her bicycle on Hacadam Road in the tow admittedn of Litchfield.

Lewis Lent later admitted to killing her in 1996, and was sentenced in 1997. He told authorities that he buried her near Raquette Lake. Several excavations were done, but none were successful.

Greenfield, where the bones were found Tuesday, is about 100 miles from Raquette Lake.

“I think it's really premature to speculate to any significance it may have on our case,” Daley said Wednesday. “I would think that not only we would be hopeful, but I know there are other kids out there that are missing, but no one wants to get their hopes up.”

One of those children is Jaliek Rainwalker of Washington County, who disappeared two years ago Nov. 1. He was 12.

Troop D public information officer Jim Simpson said no local investigators will be headed to the scene.

“We know they're looking into that, but it's going to be awhile before we know anything,” Simpson said. “It's six weeks away if anything. I'm sure (Loudonville state police will) bring us up to speed, but as of yet we're waiting to get that information.”

Contributing: The Associated Press
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wouldn't that be incredible if she was finally brought home to her family!!!!!!

This was such a tragic case in my community, I remember it vividly, although I was young. Sara Annes' family were, and still are prominent members of the community, her father Rev. Bob Wood is a strong victims rights advocate. Her family derserves closure & to have Sara returned to them to rest in peace. Heartbreaking.

SARATOGA COUNTY, N.Y. (WKTV) - New York State Police are investigating the discovery of a child's skull in rural Saratoga County.

Multimedia Watch The Video Related Content•12th Annual Ride for Missing Children is Underway
According to our affiliate, WNYT in Albany, DNA testing will be used to help police match the skull, which was found over the weekend, to missing person cases.

Twelve-year-old Sara Anne Wood went missing from Herkimer County in August of 1993. Lewis Lent is in prison for her murder after pleading guilty. Wood's body was never recovered. Lent had told authorities he'd taken her to Raquette Lake. An exhaustive search there turned up nothing. Another theory investigators looked into was that Lent might have taken Wood to his home in Massachusetts.

Herkimer County District Attorney Michael Daley, now a Supreme Court Judge, prosecuted Lent. He is aware of the discovery of the skull, but says it's too premature to speculate whether it could belong to Sara Anne Wood.

"It's too premature to speculate; I'm sure NYS Police will conduct an exhaustive investigation and when the individual is identified, I hope it will bring closure to the family of a missing child somewhere in this region of the country," said Daley.

Another child, 12-year-old Jaliek Rainwater went missing from north of Albany in November of 2007.

The skull found in rural Saratoga County will be examined by world-renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden and forensic dentist Dr. Lowell Levine at the State Police Forensic Lab in Albany. They will have to extract DNA from the roots of the teeth, and compare it with DNA from missing children. That process could take up to six weeks.

Saratoga County District Attorney James Murphy says the weather forced police to call off the search for evidence at the scene, and that, as of now, no other evidence has been recovered. Murphy says the site is so remote, it's not feasible to bring in heavy lighting in order to search at night.
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SARA ANNE WOOD


Missing Since: August 18, 1993 from Litchfield, New York
Classification: Non-Family Abduction
Date Of Birth: March 4, 1981
Age: 12 years old
Height and Weight: 5'0, 96 pounds
Distinguishing Characteristics: Caucasian female. Brown hair, blue eyes. Wood has scars on both of her legs. One toe on each of her feet is disabled. Both of Wood's cheeks are dimpled. She has facial freckles. Wood wears prescription eyeglasses with tortoise shell frames. Her hair was shoulder-length at the time of her disappearance. Some agencies spell her middle name "Ann."
Clothing/Jewelry Description: A pink t-shirt with the phrase "Guess Who" embroidered on the front, turquoise shorts, a headband and brown sandals.

Wood was last seen riding her pink and white ten-speed mountain bicycle to her family's residence on Hacadam Road in Frankfort, New York on August 18, 1993. She was returning from Norwich Corners Church on Roberts Road and Gaffenburg Road in Frankfort, where she attended summer Bible school. The church was less than a mile from her house. Wood picked up some posterboard, a church song book, and some 8-by-10-inch plastic transparencies at the church before heading home. She apparently made it safely down Roberts Road and was last seen pedaling up a steep hill on Hacadam Road, four-tenths of a mile from her residence.
Wood's bicycle and the supplies she'd picked up were discovered in an area of brush several hundred feet off of Hacadam Road later in the evening. The bicycle was leaning against a tree and the supplies were scattered nearby. Wood has never been seen again.

Lewis S. Lent Jr., 45, was charged with Wood's abduction and murder in 1996, three years after she was last seen. A photo of Lent is posted below this case summary. Lent plead guilty to the abduction and murder of another child, twelve-year-old James Bernardo, in Massachusetts in 1990. Lent initially confessed to Wood's abduction and claimed he buried her body in a clearing near Raquette Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. He drew a map of the burial location for authorities. It was supposedly in or near the town of Inlet. Extensive searches there did not produce any evidence as to Wood's whereabouts and Lent admitted that she was not really there. He refused to divulge the whereabouts of her remains, saying he had another body buried nearby and did not want that one to be found.

Lent later recanted his statements, but was convicted of the crime nonetheless. Wood has never been located. Lent is also considered a suspect in the 1992 Massachusetts disappearance of James Lusher Jr.. Lent has never been charged in connection with Lusher's case, but witnesses placed him in the area of Lusher's disappearance. He has also been investigated in the disappearances of Monique Santiago, Kimberly Moreau, and Tammie McCormick.

Wood's family founded The Sara Anne Wood Rescue Center, later renamed The Mohawk Valley Branch Of The National Center For Missing and Exploited Children. Foul play is strongly suspected in her case due to the circumstances involved. Texas authorities are assisting with the investigation into her disappearance.


If you have any information concerning this case, please contact:
New York State Police
315-866-7111
OR
Texas Department Of Public Safety
800-346-3243

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Turning a Spotlight On a Life in Shadow; An Outsider Is Under Suspicion
By KIRK JOHNSON,
Published: Friday, January 14, 1994



For most of his 43 years, Lewis S. Lent Jr. lived on the margins of society, inhabiting a world epitomized by the job he held for the last seven years: cleaning the empty and silent theaters of an 11-screen multiplex in the wee hours of the morning. He came, with his own key, when the ticket-takers and moviegoers were long gone and the laughter and excitement were stilled. In turn, he was usually gone when the first employees came in for the new day.


But Mr. Lent, whose life is now at the center of a sprawling investigation into grisly charges of child abduction and murder, including the slaying of Sara Anne Wood in upstate New York, was not, by most accounts, the sort of morose loner who often turns up on a police blotter.

The picture that emerges in interviews with neighbors, friends, family members and co-workers is that of a man who seems to be both complicated and simple at the same time, upbeat and friendly, but without goals or direction, showing few dark edges to his character, but at the same time capable of making threats.

One acquaintance, for example, recalled Mr. Lent -- known to everyone as Lewie -- being keenly interested in what he called horticulture. At the theater, however, cleaning compounds that should never be mixed were hidden because, the manager said, he did not trust Mr. Lent's ability to follow even simple, often-repeated instructions. He liked to talk about cars and claimed an expertise in repairing them, but the rattle-trap vehicles he owned were usually junk heaps that barely ran and were repaired by friends, an acquaintance said.

A high-school dropout who has drifted from job to job over the years in different parts of the country, Mr. Lent is an ordained minister with the Church of Christ who always volunteered to help his neighbors shovel the snow. But he lost his theater job in November after the manager said Mr. Lent had threatened him and his family, and he once turned up at a neighbor's house with a baseball bat, angry because the neighbor's German shepherd was scaring local children.

"He was different -- he was goofy," said Lisa Rondeau, the case manager at a nonprofit assistance agency in this town, where Mr. Lent lived, and where he came for help last month. Ms. Rondeau said Mr. Lent's thick eyeglasses, his flannel shirts and jeans, and his ebullient good cheer made him something of a comic figure -- odd, but definitely not violent or aggressive. "There was just something about him -- very, very nice -- he just wanted to help everybody," she said.

Mr. Lent was arrested last Friday nearby in Pittsfield and charged with trying to force a 12-year-old girl into his pickup truck at gunpoint. On Monday, after a series of what investigators called "very cooperative" interviews over the weekend, the police charged him with second-degree murder in the death of a 12-year-old Pittsfield boy, James Bernardo, whose body was found in upstate New York in 1990.

He has also become, through his own admissions, the prime suspect in the disappearance of Sara Anne Wood, a 12-year-old girl who was last seen alive in August near her home in Frankfort, N.Y. The New York state police have been searching for her body in a remote area of the Adirondacks near Raquette Lake since Monday, based on Mr. Lent's statements and descriptions. Today the F.B.I. brought in special infrared equipment that would help show where the ground had been disturbed, but the search was suspended about 6 P.M.

And the web of implications appears to be broadening. In Bennington, Vt., an 11-year-old girl and her father today picked out Mr. Lent's picture in a police photo lineup as the unshaven man with thick glasses who tried to grab her at a Kmart on Dec. 30.

In the dense tangle of rumor and guesswork that has swirled around the case, some investigators have speculated about multiple personalities or some other disorder that would make such behavior understandable, and some people who know Mr. Lent say they hope the medical guesses are true.

"Maybe he's got an aneurysm or something pressing against his brain -- I hope for his sake that's what it is, because this doesn't sound like him at all," said Mr. Lent's former boss, Richard R. Baumann, the manager of the Cinema Center Theater. Reviewing Recollections

Mr. Lent has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and is being held without bail in Massachusetts. His court-appointed lawyer, Richard D. LeBlanc, has declined to comment on the case and did not return telephone calls today.

But here in North Adams, a struggling old factory town in the Berkshires, where the snow is deep and the smoke from wood-burning stoves seems to hang over everything, behavior has already changed. Just down the block from the street where Mr. Lent lived for the last 18 months, Reno Maselli stood waiting for his grandchildren's school bus so he could escort them home.

"My son, he called up and said, 'Why don't you take a walk over there and see that they get off the bus all right,' " Mr. Maselli said, stomping his feet and eyeing the street. "Everybody's scared. It's something that's so close."

Other people, who have mostly positive recollections of Mr. Lent, are rethinking what they saw and what it meant. Tim Lescarbeau, who lived across the street from Mr. Lent on Hudson Street, remembers that Mr. Lent was always there with his shovel after a big snow, ready to help, and how he bounded over to introduce himself and shake hands the day he moved in, and how he would talk about his love of walking and hiking and nature, and how friendly he was with the neighborhood children.

Mr. Baumann is reconsidering what he took to be warm-heartedness when Mr. Lent would take a young child to the movies.

"It's hard to believe you could live next door to somebody like that," Mr. Lescarbeau said. "Everyone thinks it could never happen in their town." Moving Around

Mr. Lent, who was born and raised in upstate New York in the hamlet of Reynoldsville, in Schuyler County, dropped out of Watkins Glen High School in 1967, when he was in the 10th grade, according to a spokesman for the school. Soon after, he moved to Florida, where he lived -- perhaps off and on -- until 1983 in the town of De Land, northeast of Orlando, according to the Volusia County Sheriff's Department, which is investigating Mr. Lent's activities there.

During that time, however, he did not stay put. In June 1976, for example, he was arrested in the tiny town of Truth or Consequences, N.M., 116 miles from the Mexican border.

Detective David R. Bryant of the Truth or Consequences police said Mr. Lent was apparently employed there and had picked up some tires from an auto supply store for delivery, but the tires never arrived. Embezzlement charges were dropped, Detective Bryant said, when Mr. Lent paid for the delivery himself. He said the department was still investigating why Mr. Lent was in New Mexico, and how long he stayed. Investigators in the multi-agency task force here are also looking into reports that he was, at varying times, in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Sometime in the 1980's, Mr. Lent returned to the Northeast to live, and settled in Pittsfield, and then later North Adams in Berkshire County, where he has no criminal record. But even here, his movements may be hard to track.

Working a job where no one ever saw him, Mr. Lent was free to come and go when he chose, as long as the theaters were cleaned, and he was known to have imposed on friends to fill in on occasion, Mr. Baumann said. That means he could have easily have been gone for a days at a time without notice.

Steven Nichols, another neighbor here in North Adams, said he grew to recognize the sound of Mr. Lent's truck starting up in the middle of the night and eventually thought nothing of it.

What did jar him was the day last February when Mr. Lent showed up at the door, armed with a baseball bat.

"He said, 'Please restrain your dog -- I do have a gun and if I have to use it I will,' " Mr. Nichols said. "I got rid of the dog a week later."

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SARATOGA COUNTY, N.Y. (WKTV) - Officials with the Saratoga County District Attorney's Office now say that human remains that a hunter discovered in a remote wooded area in rural Saratoga County over the weekend are not those of Sara Anne Wood, who went missing from Herkimer County in August of 1993.

Multimedia Watch The Video Related Content•Tests to determine if found skull is that of Sara Anne Wood
On Wednesday, officials in Saratoga County said it'd take weeks to extract DNA from the roots of the teeth from a partial skull that was found because the teeth themselves were too degraded for comparison to dental records.

On Thursday, officials in the Saratoga County D.A.'s office say they found additional teeth, which were in better condition, and that they were able to use dental records to exclude Sara Anne Wood as the person whose remains were discovered.

At a press conference in Saratoga County Thursday afternoon, officials said the remains belong to a woman named Jennifer Hammond, 18, of Littleton, Colorado. Hammond went missing from Ballston Spa in 2003
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Remains Of Missing Colo. Teen Found In N.Y.SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY (CBS) ― The human bones found in the town of Greenfield, NY have been identified as those of missing Colorado girl Jennifer Hammond.

Dental records helped investigators match the teeth to Hammond, who was 18 years old when she went missing in August of 2003.

Saratoga County District Attorney James Murphy said Hammond went missing in the Creek and Pines Trailer Park in Ballston Spa, NY, when she failed to appear at the designated pick-up location with her employer, Atlantic Circulation, Inc.

Hammond is originally from Littleton and had made arrangements for a bus ticket from Albany to Colorado. That ticket was never picked up.

Her belongings were left behind in an Albany hotel. She had not made contact with her family since August of 2003.

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Looking at the photo's of the out house.
NOTICE: the barrels to the left of each,
and the gutters and down spouts for collecting rain water.

I actually found this site on accident when I was looking for local news to see if there was something on Sara Wood. I knew Sara when she was little. Her family used to go to our church before he left. I loved seeing her and I would pick her up and hold her,when we would go to a church on Saturday mornings for singing and giving food to the hungry. She was a sweet girl.

Thanks so much for posting this information.

Thanks for sharing your story with us pbullen! I'm so glad you found this site!

I agree pbullen for telling us about Sarah.
Do you know if Sarah's parents are still around?
Do they still attend your church?

for your post pbullen. welcome to VH.

A child serial killer has confessed to murdering a 16-year-old boy 21 years ago and dumping his remains in a 58-foot deep lake.
Lewis S. Lent Jr., who is serving a life sentence for a separate murder conviction, has described step-by-step how he kidnapped Jamie Lusher from a street in Westfield, Massachusetts on November 2, 1992, and cut short his young life before getting rid of the body in Greenwater Pond in nearby Becket.
Police divers from Massachusetts and New York will begin searching for the teen's remains in the 80 acre pond tomorrow, hoping to give his family closure in the cold case.

iller: Lewis Lent, pictured in 1997, has confessed to the slaying of Jamie Lusher, 16, in 1992
'To this day, when I see a kid, a 16-year-old kid on a bike with black hair, I will instinctively look,' the victim's father, James Lusher, told reporters today, according to the Boston Globe. 'My closure is finding my son.'

Hampden District Attorney Mark Mastroianni, Berkshire District Attorney David Capeless, State Police Colonel Timothy Alben and Westfield Police Captain Michael McCabe said in a joint press conference that Lent confessed to the killing in return for not being prosecuted for the crime.
Lent was arrested and charged in January 1994 with kidnapping and assaulting Rebecca Savarese, 12, of Pittsfield. She managed to escaped and alert police. During three days of questioning, Lent confessed to the attempted abduction as well as to two child murders.
He was convicted in the 1990 kidnapping and murder of James Bernardo, 12, of Pittsfield. He dumped the child's body in the woods about 250 miles from the town.

He also pleaded guilty in New York to the kidnapping and murder of Sara Anne Wood, 12, of Frankfort, New York in 1993. But her remains have never been recovered, despite him drawing a crude map for investigators showing where he supposedly dumped the body.
Mastroianni added at the press conference that Lent was also suspected in other unsolved crimes, despite being behind bars since the 1990s.
'Lent is someone who law enforcement here and in other places is very interested in,' he said. 'He is a subject that is on the radar for other cases. This information and the new information gathered from Lewis Lent has reinvigorated investigations.'
Jamie Lusher's father said that while Lent obviously dumped his son's body in the pond to hide the evidence of his crime, his choice of where he laid the 16-year-old to rest offered some peace to the family.

'Unwittingly, Lewis Lent put my son where he loved to be — he loved the mountains,' Lusher said. 'So, if in fact they never find anything, he's where he loved to be.'
He added that closure was finding his son and that he wasn't bothered about Lent being prosecuted in the killing.
'I couldn't care less what happens to Lewis Lent,' he said. 'He can rot in hell, I don't care.'
The boy's sister, Jennifer Nowak, agreed.
'There is no closure unless we have the person,' she said. 'We don't have anything. We've never had anything.'

Victim: The family of Jamie Lusher, pictured, are hoping to find remains of the boy in a pond in Becket, Massachusetts
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Horrible!!