HIDDEN DEMONS

On January 7, 1994, the residents of Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts started an ordinary snowy winter day in a region of dense forest and picturesque small towns. That same day, a trial opened against Wayne Lo, a college student who had marked his eighteenth birthday by buying an assault rifle and firing on his campus, killing two people and wounding four others.

Around the same time, two young girls were approached in the changing room of the local pool, and another girl barely escaped being abducted at gunpoint on her way to school. Her quick thinking later had far-reaching consequences for a separate case, that of a young boy who disappeared from a strip mall. At first the incidents seemed unconnected, and police and townspeople struggled to accept that such violence could reach their quiet community. They kept assuring one another that nothing like this happened there.

Margery B. Metzger traces these events and exposes Lewis Lent Jr., a serial killer who operated unseen in the shadows. The book also follows how the courage of a father and daughter, together with the work of local law enforcement officers, helped reverse the balance against him.