Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of one of upstate New York's most riveting unsolved missing persons cases.
Sara Anne Wood was last seen around 2:30 in the afternoon of August 18, 1993. She was 12 years old , riding her pink and white 10-speed mountain bike on her way home after stopping by Norwich Corners Church in the Herkimer County town of Litchfield, where her father was the pastor. Not long after her disappearance authorities found her bicycle, coloring book and crayons hidden in an area of brush not far from her home.
Mary Lyall helps families cope when loved ones go missing. Her daughter Suzanne has been missing since getting off a bus at UAlbany in 1998. "The way things are, you can take, you can go in a car and be in Montreal in five hours. You could go all over the place. I mean, it doesn't take long to take somebody out of the area."
Authorities have long suspected Lewis Lentmay be responsible for unsolved disappearances of youths across the Northeast. The former janitor from North Adams, Massachusetts was arrested in Pittsfield in 1993 after a 12-year-old girl he abducted managed to get free. Lent, currently serving a life sentence at Old Colony Correctional Facility in Bridgewater, Massachusetts for the 1990 killing 12-year-old Jimmy Bernardo of Pittsfield, also confessed to the kidnapping and murder of Sara Anne Wood. He once drew authorities a map to where he claimed to have put Wood's body, but her remains have never been found.
Some have held out hope that Wood may still be alive. After all, there is the case of 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard, the California girl kidnapped outside her school in 1991 who was found almost 20 years later. And the recent case involving three women kidnapped between 2002 and 2004 and held captive in a house in Cleveland, Ohio, where they were held until a neighbor heard their cries and helped them escape in May 2013.
The Wood family founded The Sara Anne Wood Rescue Center, later renamed The Mohawk Valley Branch Of The National Center For Missing and Exploited Children, where Wendy Fical (fye-kuhl) is Program Director.
"As of December 2017, the Mohawk Valley Office itself has sent out 10,580,000 posters of 11,000 missing children. And out of that 11,000 we've helped to recover 7,524 of those children. So the legacy has absolutely brought the recoveries of many children, and that was the hope and the request of the family."
Fical says people still call and ask about the Wood case: "We direct them to the police. So they'll never stop looking. Last year we educated just under 31,000 children and parents and law enforcement in regards to abduction prevention and the exploitation of our children. So that in itself is just a remarkable number that that one tragedy has brought so much awareness."
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