There's still so many things we don't understand about this case
and probably never will.
We just have bits and pieces of some kind of strange puzzle,
and even if we could put them all together,
I don't know if I want to see whatever picture they make.
Yeah.
My name is Joseph Kirby.
I am a former lead detective sergeant in San Bernardino County.
I was supervising the major crimes unit between 2007 and 2015.
San Bernardino County is about 60 miles east of Los Angeles and is a part of
California's Inland Empire region.
We have a population of about 2 million.
We've seen our share of violent crimes, gang related homicides,
relatively large scale drug busts, what have you.
We probably ran upwards of 65 murders a year
in the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau,
which is higher than the national average,
but I had never seen anything
like what happened to the Sheridan family on Alton Avenue.
Nobody had.
911...what is your emergency?
I'm not sure if this is the right person to call,
but I was calling to see if it's possible to get a welfare check for someone.
Can I get your name please?
My name?
My name is Kacie Porter and I was friends with Tiffany Sheridan.
Our kids went to the same elementary school.
When you have kids that age and you meet a lot
parents that you don’t always care for. But Tiff and I, we just hit it off.
We were supposed to meet at this restaurant for lunch,
but she never showed and I figured she had forgotten,
so I let it go,
but then Lauren came home and she said that Sam hadn't been to school in a few
days and I kept calling and I kept texting,
but I never got a reply back.
and I just knew in the back of my head that something is wrong.
I know it's not very long but it's just
not like her to miss a lunch and not call.
We'll send someone over there to check it out.
I'm Will Martinez.
I'm a Deputy Sheriff with the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department.
Me and my partner were the first officers to arrive on scene.
We got a call regarding a welfare check for a residence in the Shandin Hills.
Nice area. It was a gated community as I remember.
Whole thing felt weird.
Something about it was just off.
Police department.
Police department, anybody home?
Let’s go around.
Police department. Anyone home?
My partner called out. We identified ourselves again,
but there was no movement.
Hello?
Anybody home?
Mother of god.
This was a crime scene.
What happened to them...
I think about it every day.
I have nightmares about it.
Why them?
That was a bad day.
When I saw that I was floored.
I looked at my partner and I said, oh my God, he's back.
Hi.
My name's Lexi Taylor.
I'm a senior homicide detective for the San Bernardino PD.
I worked as a patrol officer for about nine years before being offered a job in
the homicide bureau and that's when I started working with my partner, Joe Kirby.
Growing up, my mom worked two jobs to support me and my older brother.
Saw a rotating door of less than great men you would say come and go in her life.
I think that's when I first started thinking that maybe
I would like to try to help people,
Maybe I could help someone like my mom out of a tough situation.
I actually never intended to be a cop.
I had aspirations of being a drummer in a metal band,
but one of my friend's brothers was in the academy and I thought it sounded cool.
I liked how you had to think on your feet,
use your brain as well as your body.
After a couple of days in training,
I was hooked, man.
That is how I have always approached my career in law enforcement.
Try to be there for people when things are at their worst.
Fuck. It was never worse than on this case.
Between 1993 and 1995,
there were three murders in Riverside and San Bernardino County that we
eventually realized were serial murders and which had some
ritualistic aspects.
I think this is it. Yeah.
Okay, she was covered with a blue tarp. You could see it easily from the road.
This is a service road. Not a lot of people come down it.
It was just horrible.
I mean, you never expect to see something like that.
On August 8th, 1993,
the torso of 24-year-old Shifra Gutierrez is discovered in
San Bernardino National Forest.
She had been dismembered.
The genitals mutilated... the uterus removed
The coroner gave a best guess estimate she'd been there two weeks,
but it's difficult to tell.
Shifra was my best friend in high school.
She was a dope bitch.
She just had this joy for living and this lust for life,
and she was funny as fuck.
She wasn't a bad person, you know. She just, I don't know.
She just got into some bad shit like a lot of people out here do.
I was always telling her, I was like, this is dangerous, Shifra,
you got to stop doing this.
Oh shit. I said I wasn’t going to do this.
There's an area off the 91 in the Casa Blanca neighborhood and
that's where Shifra was last seen,
but we do know she went up to a room at a motel called Dean's Corner that was
frequented by sex workers and there was a man with her,
but the clerk couldn't remember what he looked like.
He could have killed her there.
Could have been strangulation, for example. We'll probably never know.
What we do know for sure is that she was somehow moved from that room without
anybody noticing or somebody noticed and just didn't care.
But we got our first lead.
A name.
All guests had to fill out a ledger and the suspect had written down the name
“Albert Shiny”
And the case went cold.
I don't need to tell you that especially at that time,
sex workers and marginalized people tended to get the short end of the stick in
the criminal justice system. I'm not saying it was right,
I'm just saying it was and is the reality.
So it was written off as an isolated incident,
but we were wrong.
A grizzly crime scene has police on high alert in Arlanza tonight,
not far from the Riverside Municipal Airport where the body of 82-year-old
Ambrose Griffith was discovered murdered in his apartment earlier today.
Mr. Griffith was disabled and apparently suffered from MDS, a blood condition that
required daily assistance from a caretaker.
Nine months after Shifra Gutierrez is killed,
Ambrose Griffith is found murdered in his assisted living facility.
On the night of June 3rd, 1994,
someone scaled the backside of his building and entered his unit through a
sliding glass door that was apparently left unlocked.
He was bludgeoned with an oxygen tank that was in his room and then stabbed more
than 30 times with a box cutter.
Yeah, it was brutal and you got to understand this guy was bed bound.
I mean, he could not walk or could barely walk on his own,
so he was totally defenseless to the attack, which was obviously unprovoked.
No one else in the building heard so much as a peep from his room,
so it must have happened fast,
which is some comfort, I guess.
One of his eyes was also removed.
It was a sloppy scene. Murder committed by someone in a frenzy who was not
thinking it through at all.
It's probably why we were able to get our first real clue.
The print was run through the system, but nothing came back.
The lab guys stayed on it for weeks, but it was only a partial.
No motive.
82-year-old victim with no family and few friends except a few people that lived
in his building who were just as sick as he was.
The police didn't make any connection to the Gutierrez murder.
Not yet.
It's okay. It's okay.
We want to thank everyone from the Riverside Police Department with their
continued support.
Someone out there knows what happened to our little boy and
we are begging for you to help us return him home
safely and unharmed.
Noah LaFone was abducted while walking home from school on October 7th, 1995.
He was 12 years old.
There were no witnesses and pretty much no information to go on.
There was a pretty extensive search and media effort this time to try to find him.
We were doing door to doors.
This was the first case I was on involving a child,
so I really threw myself into it.
I’d get off work and I'd go join search and rescue.
People put in hundreds of hours
but days turn into weeks and it gets harder and harder to stay positive.
Three months later in January,
his body is discovered in a shallow creek near Silverwood Lake.
He had been weighed down by concrete bricks and his body was in pretty bad shape.
There were multiple lacerations to his abdomen and his liver had been removed.
12 years old.
Whole life ahead of him.
Poof.
We also found a box cutter - the weapon. As well as Noah's school backpack and
all its contents. This is where we got our second lead.
There was a page that had been written on and then torn out,
but you could still see an imprint.
“Kaliban”
What the heck was Kaliban?
A bird from the Caribbean we found out.
Or a character from Shakespeare.
I mean, was this some kind of a code? Was it another Zodiac killer?
About two weeks after his body was discovered,
the Riverside Police Department received a letter in the mail.
Provided details of the three killings. It was unreleased information
only the police would know,
which basically proves whoever wrote it was the killer or at least someone who
had direct contact with the killer.
And there was a message.
Thanks for not catching me! Learned a lot.
Ten transits remain, isn’t it insane?
I’ll be back.
Was he telling us he was planning on killing ten more?
Was that what he meant?
This was the first time we realized this was an actual serial killer.
It's worth mentioning the jurisdictional problems that can arise when someone
commits a murder across county lines.
It can make connecting them a lot more difficult,
but this guy wanted us to know.
He wanted us to know what he did and he wasn't finished.
And then he signs the letter with that symbol.
Years went by. The cases went cold.
Detectives at that time figured whoever was responsible for the three deaths was
either incarcerated for another crime or had died because
they probably wouldn't have stopped killing on their own.
But as soon as I saw that symbol on the ceiling,
I realized that was the killer from 95. He wasn't bluffing in his letter.
He hadn't stopped. He had just taken a 15 year break.
Why?
We're still trying to figure that one out.
One thing's for sure: If his first murder spree
had felt sloppy and unplanned,
this new one was anything but.
The suspect gained entry through a first floor bathroom window,
cut through a screen on the side of the house,
then attacks Ted and Tiffany sometime after 1:15 AM
after Tiffany sends her last work email.
There was bruising on Ted's face. Struck by a blunt object.
We think the suspect probably roughed him up as a form of intimidation and
convinced him and Tiffany to go downstairs willingly.
This little girl...
Samantha.
Yeah, it looks like she put up more of a fight.
Some of the furniture in her room, her comforter, all disturbed and in disarray.
The suspect zip-ties their hands and feet. Wraps duct tape around their mouths.
You see, this guy had gotten smarter. He had learned from the murders in 95.
Less sloppy, more methodical. I mean, the buckets. What the fuck?
Pardon my French.
He ties the three of them to chairs around the dining room
deliberately facing each other. You understand?
He places their feet in these Five-gallon painters buckets.
He prepared these things ahead of time.
Like, they had their names on them, literally.
Like, “Ted”, “Tiffany”, “Samantha” written out.
He draws three lines on each of them,
like the kind you'd find on a measuring cup.
Except this wasn't for measuring out rice...
It’s for their blood.
By volume.
Going,
Going.
Gone.
The suspect used a box cutter to make a small six centimeter
incision through the skin on each victim
and the result was fatal blood loss.
There's about a gallon and a half of blood in the human body.
It takes maybe 15 minutes for that to drain out,
but you can be dead in as soon as three.
The femoral artery is at your groin, basically
at the top of your thigh. If you're sitting upright,
gravity just kind of does its thing.
The technical term for this is exsanguination.
Part of what really earns that term “ritualistic”, in my opinion,
is anything done post-mortem.
So, “normal homicide” you stab a person, shoot a person,
you get the heck out of there. You don't stick around.
Every second you wait is another second to get caught.
From what we can put together,
our suspect hung around another two hours at least.
He leaves the house,
comes back with a 24-foot extension ladder that he gets from his vehicle,
and then he goes to work painting this thing on the ceiling.
And it’s not a small room and he goes almost wall to wall.
It's almost 20 feet.
And he does a good job. He's careful.
Does a couple of layers, almost no drips on the floor.
And he positions the bodies.
And all this he does without any neighbors hearing a sound
or seeing a thing.
No fingerprints, no DNA left at the scene.
No motive. No relation to the victims.
Three days later, another letter arrives in the mail.
Hope you blue baddies are having fun chasing my tail because the harvest has just begun
and reaping’s so much fun.
A gruesome discovery was made just this morning by a jogger
of a human head here in in Paris Hill Park.
The jogger, Chelsea Lunsford, has been coming here every weekday morning for two years.
She enjoys the serenity of the landscape and was not prepared for what she would find.
My friend was just telling me how I should bring mace or a stun gun or something
with me when I go running and yeah, I guess she was right.
On the night of November 8th, the suspect entered the home of the two victims,
Tamara LaTorre and her boyfriend, Glenn Sandweiss,
through a dog door in the back of the house.
They were watching TV in the living room. Volume was up,
which allowed him to sneak up on them undetected until the last minute.
According to Mr. Sandweiss, he attacks Tamara first.
Uses a stun gun to incapacitate her.
We think the suspect was not expecting Sandweiss to be home.
Sandweiss says that he seems confused.
There's a brief struggle before Sandweiss is overpowered by the suspect and brought to
the floor. That's when the attack with the propane torch begins.
He literally burns this guy's face off.
Is there anything else you can remember that would help us catch who did this?
Like what?
Anything he might have done or said?
I don't know.
Okay.
He was just rambling, he kept saying
he wasn't going to hurt us and not to be afraid.
Something about
“Kaliban”
I have no fucking idea!
Jesus Christ, why the fuck is this happening?
Oh God. What did we do?
What do you want to know?
The fuck you think happened?
You really think I was going to be able to be a teacher looking like this?
Standing up in front of a group of 5th graders.
They’d be terrified.
You could still work in education.
Doing what?
Telling my story?
Try and be inspirational.
I can't work.
Got no friends.
Nerve damage.
It feels like my face is on fire all the time.
I'm already dead, man.
I'm just not in the ground
like Tamara is.
You got what you need. I'm fucking done. Get my money
and get the fuck out of my house.
Tamara's head, the sculpture, the weird trinkets on the ground,
all of it was carefully examined and once again, no fingerprints,
no DNA left behind. We had nothing.
Until we got lucky.
A woman who works at the strip mall down the street from the park said she had
seen a guy with a truck unloading several garbage bags into a dumpster the
morning of the murder. White truck, red lettering, she said.
So we pulled footage from a credit union's ATM at the strip mall and
it wasn't a great angle, but it did catch something.
The owner of the white truck, Victor Shamaz, was a 45 year old man
living in Riverside who had a small house painting business.
He had a rap sheet... it was relatively clean.
A few minor narcotic citations, a “B&E” from a decade earlier,
but he had a restraining order taken out against him recently for apparently
stalking a woman he met online. That didn't sit well with us.
We called him in for questioning and he agreed.
Mr. Shamaz, thank you for meeting with us today.
Yeah. I just wanna help.
So, in regards to this work truck,
it looks like you called it in stolen yesterday after we got off the phone.
Yeah. Yeah. I actually didn't even know that it was gone until you guys told me.
Even though it had been missing for a week?
I haven't been taking a lot of jobs lately,
so it's just been sitting there parked down the road and stuff.
I didn't even notice.
So just to be clear,
you are stating you have not left your house since November 9th?
Yeah, I think so.
You think so?
Did you go anywhere else?
No. I mean, I didn't drive anywhere.
Shamaz continues to claim he has no knowledge of any crimes.
That he simply didn't notice his work truck was stolen.
We asked him if he'd be willing to take a polygraph test to which he agrees.
Is your name Victor Shamaz?
Yes.
He bombs the polygraph test about as badly as you can,
shows to be evasive or lying about nearly every question asked.
In fact, the only question he actually appears to tell the truth on
are his name and address.
Of course,
polygraph tests aren't always accurate and they're not admissible in court.
It's just a useful tool, but it was pretty obvious Shamaz was lying.
So Shamaz manages to get himself arrested after it’s discovered he's carrying a
fairly large amount of methamphetamine and an unregistered handgun.
Looks like Shamaz was trying to skip town.
I just want to come and clear the air.
I don't know what you think I've done, but I have not killed anybody.
Okay. I had nothing to do with any of these fucking murders.
Then why'd you lie to us, Victor?
I was at this “Quik N Go” and somebody come and pulled me out of my truck
and beat the shit out of me, okay?
Like I thought I was a fucking dead man and then he just takes my truck and that's it.
So I don’t say shit because I’m scared
but I have nothing to do with the fucking killers or the murders or any of that shit.
I swear to God it wasn't me.
Okay, slow down.
It became evident Shamaz wasn't our guy. He was a scumbag,
but he wasn't our scumbag and he didn't really know anything,
although he did give us one new piece of information.
So this guy that beat you up and attacked you,
What did he look like?
No. Yeah. Sorry, I should have mentioned that.
But he was wearing like a mask,
like a freaky ass mask.
He started wearing a mask.
That meant only one thing.
He had seen us on the news and knew we were actively pursuing him.
He wanted to make that loud and clear in his next letter.
So close yet so far! How frustrating that must be.
The Great Shambler arrives at the gates!
We will all perish in a flesh mosoleum,
but be reborn amidst wonder and glory forever.
A few months go by, nothing new happens. And of course a part of me is thinking,
hoping maybe that's it. Maybe it's already over and this guy's finished.
But another part of me, the cynical part, knows that can't be true.
He'll let us know when he is finished.
It's about 6 in the morning and I get a call from Joe.
They found another body.
Earlier this morning, a horrific discovery was
reported to police here at the North Riverside Aquatics Center.
This was a bad one.
A group of skate kids broke into the building
to check the place out and smoke weed.
Just a couple of dumb teenagers.
I doubt they'll be doing that again anytime soon.
When you first saw the body,
it looked like it was covered in mud or slime or something.
It was so shiny.
Coroner's official cause of death...
Fatal loss of blood by leeches.
Victim's name was Dennis Zhao,
43-year-old Chinese immigrant living in Riverside.
He was last seen leaving an apartment he shared with several other people
to catch a bus and was never seen again.
Bodies found four days later and he had only been deceased less than a day.
The suspect had been breeding them, right?
This particular type of leech takes about three weeks for the eggs to form and hatch.
And another two weeks to reach maturity.
So he'd been preparing this thing for over a month, coming here day after day,
checking in on his babies, feeding them, keeping the water clean.
Checking the PH.
He might be a monster,
but he does have some kind of paternal instinct.
Then he abducts Dennis Zhao and he brings him here, strips him naked,
puts him in the water,
creates this barrier around the deep end and all along the edges
so he can't get out no matter how hard he tries.
Then he begins releasing these things in the pool.
The species found in the pool with Mr. Zhao
is called H. Stagnalis. In the case of H. Stagnalis
it has this sucker on the front of its body that it uses to attach to
the host.
They have three small jaws that create a Y-shaped incision.
It's how they get the tasty pay dirt.
Leeches will consume up to ten times their own body weight in blood,
which sounds like a lot, but it's really, it's like two teaspoons.
This bloodletting by leeches process went on for nearly three straight days.
The suspect just methodically keeps fishing out full leches,
adding more empties on and on
as Dennis Zhao becomes more and more incapacitated.
I've always been lousy at math,
but basically it took a shit load of leeches to kill Dennis Zhao.
Eventually up to his neck in this filthy leech filled water,
he finally succumbeded to his injuries.
Oh, and the reason no one ever hears screaming from the building...
Zhaos tongue was cut out.
A leech bite looks a little like the symbol, doesn't it?
See how it's sort of a triangle?
But like most clues, this just led to more questions.
What do these dots mean?
What the hell am I looking at?
We later figured out that the suspect first got in contact with Mr. Zhao because of
a Craigslist ad he posted.
They had exchanged a few messages and then arranged to meet up for sex at a
motel down the street from the pool.
This finally led to the big break in the case.
Our technicians were able to identify the IP address where the Craigslist ad
was originally posted.
The ad and subsequent back and forth messaging had been made from a coffee shop
in Mission Grove on February 11th. This was a huge lead.
We finally were able to trace the suspect's whereabout outside of a crime scene.
I mean, I got to admit, I was really starting to think
we were chasing a ghost or a vampire or something.
We did surveillance on the place for about a week.
The last thing we wanted to do was draw any attention to ourselves if this guy
was a regular, for example, and came in all the time.
I mean, we were always hoping and praying maybe he swings by for a cup
of coffee or place another ad, and just like that we'd have him.
No such luck.
There were three employees working that day.
None of them could remember the suspect. It's a popular place,
so he may have picked it for that reason. No surveillance system,
no cameras anywhere at all. But the area does have a large homeless population.
Excuse me, sir, you mind if I talk to you for a sec?
You're talking about the one near Andulka Park?
Yeah. Yeah, that's it. I'm just sitting there, right?
And he comes up to me and
I didn’t know what he wanted... “I want to hire you as day labor.”
Did he say what kind of labor?
Landscaping, working on a house or something.
And you get in his car?
Yep.
What kind of car?
Like a...
...sedan or something, like a blue Camry.
When I started talking to this guy, my jaw was on the floor, man.
But if he was telling the truth, this was huge.
We even had a vehicle description, but it gets even better.
Mr. Johnson tells us he knows where the suspect's house is.
Apparently the suspect had driven him to it.
Okay, see that arrow?
It wants you to go left, but you're going to go straight.
He didn't know the street address,
but he says he thinks he can remember how to get there by memory.
Apparently he had been driven to a residence in High Grove where the suspect
says he needs to grab some tools before they went to the so-called “job site”.
And that's what brought us to 144 Artesian Avenue.
After picking up a duffel bag, they get on the 215 headed north.
Mr. Johnson said the guy seems normal, friendly. I mean, even conversational.
And that brings us to the bracelet.
Johnson says he found this bracelet in a trash container a few years ago,
says he just likes to wear it, thinks it's cool.
Apparently the suspect asks him about it, starts grilling him.
“How long have you been a diabetic? Do you take insulin?” Etc
and Johnson tells him, bracelet's not his.
And then the suspect gets very visibly angry, pulls off the highway,
tells him to get out, drives off, and that's that.
Johnson never sees him again.
He's incredibly lucky.
I believe if that bracelet had been real,
if Johnson had fit whatever criteria our suspect was looking for,
he would most definitely be dead right now.
After learning all this, we go to the house. Just a normal house.
We knock... nobody's home.
But we can't just kick the door in without probable cause. I mean,
all we've got is the word of an unemployed drifter with a minor criminal record
who we also paid for the information he gave us.
That's not going to get us a warrant.
And that's when I see it above the door - staring us in the face.
We kept most of the evidence we had,
which wasn't much, pretty close to the chest as far as the media was concerned.
That symbol... the image was never released to the public
so nobody could know about it unless they were involved in one of the crimes.
That was enough.
We called in the cavalry.
I don't know what I was expecting to find in there.
Torture dungeon... haunted house...
something from a horror movie.
But it wasn't like that at all.
It was banal, mundane.
That doesn't mean it wasn't a little weird.
But weird doesn't necessarily make you guilty.
There was no evidence the person that lived there was involved in anything other
than the symbol over the doorway, and that was purely circumstantial.
Look at this. That's just lovely, isn't it?
The property owner was an older woman who lived in San Diego who said she had
been renting the house to, you guessed it,
someone who called themselves Albert Shiny.
Apparently Mr. Shiny was willing to pay for a year up front in cash,
so she didn't ask too many questions and had only met him twice.
So we start dusting for fingerprints and we can't find any - literally.
Not one print, which makes no sense for the inside of someone's house.
There should be thousands of them.
I mean, was this guy wearing gloves every second of every day?
Finally, we found some fingerprints on a telescope that was outside on the deck.
Immediately got them out to the lab and run through the computer
And boom, we got a hit.
The print matched to the partial that was found in 95 from the Noah LaFone murder.
I couldn't believe it. We might have our guy.
The fingerprints belonged to a Leslie Sykes.
Born December 20th, 1962 in Branson, Missouri.
Homer Johnson, the homeless gentleman,
swore Sykes was the person who had given him a ride.
The woman who rented the house also ID’ d him off his photo.
Sykes had no criminal record, no employment history, no current address,
no phone number or bank account, and big surprise,
the guy hadn't paid taxes in more than two decades. Yeah, he really was a ghost,
but he was our ghost and we had to find him before he killed again.
Riverside Police are asking for the public's help in locating this man.
50-year-old Leslie Sykes is a person of interest in what has been dubbed as
the “Mr. Shiny murders”.
The killer in that case has now taken the lives of eight people in both
San Bernardino and Riverside counties and is still at large.
We tried to do a total media blitz,
get this guy's picture in front of as many people as possible.
The story got carried all over California,
even in a few of the surrounding states, but no one was really paying attention.
But one person that did see the coverage was Leslie Sykes.
Leslie Sykes has been transfigured. You can't stop him or what he has become.
Hail Azragor. Hail Drag Aul.
You have no idea what I’m saying. Five to go, and then you'll know.
Five to go and then we'll know what?
It was a sick game to him, but it was also absolutely serious.
Would he really stop at five? The next murder happened less than a month later.
March 19th.
The victim was a 16-year-old high school student named Victoria Macenroe.
16...
She was alone at her parents' home in Highland.
They had gone out to visit friends in Rancho Cucamonga.
Sykes jumped the gate and entered through a first floor window at or around 9:21.
And we know this because it was caught on camera.
Okay, so this is the “Color Dreams” palette by Adorable Damage.
I am just obsessed with this brand lately.
I actually reviewed their “Shimmer Shadow” palette in my top ten video and
they are just killing it. Okay?
What I'm going to do is I'm going to go in for kind of a smoky look
with this one right here,
and then you can just go in a circular motion.
You don't have to do a bunch of back and forth windshield wiper crap.
So we'll start...
“Windshield wiper” - that sounds stupid.
Hey, I thought you were going to text me on the way home. I'm starving.
Mom?
Dad?
No please. Please I’ll do anything.
Please, my parents can pay you anything, just please don’t hurt me.
Please!
The video glitches pretty bad there and it's hard to tell what's going on.
We've combed over it frame-by-frame,
but it's just too messed up to see anything clearly.
But obviously Sykes was performing some kind of ritual.
Ritual murder, strictly speaking, is a relatively obscure phenomena,
not just in the United States, but worldwide.
It just doesn't happen that often in its purest form.
To this day, people still believe that the Manson family was a Satanic cult.
It's not true.
Of course, that's not to say that ritual murder never happens.
There were the murder suicides in the Solar Temple cult,
the Falls Rivers Cult, Order of the Black Sun.
The Mr. Shiny murders definitely seem ritualistic,
but I didn't recognize any of the iconography.
This wasn't some goetic rite pulled from a grimoire.
There was nothing Abrahamic.
As I told the police at that time,
whatever it was,
this guy was a true believer,
and very, very dangerous.
Now, this is all crazy in its own right,
but what's truly unexpected is what happens next.
Somehow, Victoria survives being shot not only in the head but in the back twice
and the shoulder. This is probably because a 22-caliber weapon was used.
And just incredible luck.
Victoria?
Emergency workers arrive in about 15 minutes and they're able to stabilize
Victoria on her way to St. Bernadine Medical Center.
I wish I could tell you the story ended there.
After going through surgery, she was put in the recovery ward
and I had multiple officers assigned to guard her room
just in case, and the hospital security was put on alert.
It should have been enough.
Sykes attacks and subdues a nurse just getting off his shift in the hospital
parking lot. Takes his uniform and entry badge.
He walks straight through the front doors,
right past security and goes to Macenroe’s floor.
I mean, he seems to know exactly where to go.
He goes to the nurses station, introduces himself to the other staff,
says he was transferred from pediatrics.
They believe him, says he knows all the vernacular and hospital procedure.
Sykes quite literally cares for three different patients over a four-hour period.
He walks by police and security several times and is never noticed.
Yeah, including by Joe or me.
He was right there. We practically touched each other.
If I had just been paying attention. If I had just looked into his eyes.
I’ll never forgive myself for not realizing just how bold he might really be.
He waits until there's a shift change
enters the room for stored pharmaceuticals and proceeds to poison an an AB-negative
blood transfusion bag with an industrial cleaner he finds in a custodial closet.
He knows that Macenroe is the only one with AB-negative in the wing and is the
only one who will receive that bag.
Then he leaves.
Later that night, a nurse comes in to rotate out Macenroe’s backup bag
and unknowingly replaces it with the poisoned one.
Victoria was dead within minutes,
but Sykes was long gone by then.
This was a huge blow to everyone involved in the case.
The one victim that survived, we couldn't protect her.
I mean, we were right there. We could have had him.
Yeah, that was one of the roughest nights in my entire life.
Could we take a break?
It was a rollercoaster.
Realizing that she might be hurt,
then thinking that
she might be okay,
thinking that she was okay...
Some days I feel like she's still here.
You’ve kept her room like this?
Yeah, we couldn't touch it.
I think about that saying a lot.
“You really die the last time someone says your name”
and I guess we kept all her stuff because
we didn't want her to die,
even though I know she's dead.
Victoria Macenroe is serial killer, Leslie Sykes’,
ninth and most recent victim in the Mr. Shiny murders,
a killing spree that spans three counties and over 18 years.
Authorities continue to urge the public to keep a watchful lookout for Sykes
who remains at large and is considered armed and extremely dangerous.
Residents of the Highland neighborhood where Macenroe was murdered
have expressed their frustration at police for their inability to capture
or even come close to capturing the elusive killer.
It's unacceptable. It's insane.
Somebody in the San Bernardino Police Department
should be held accountable for letting it get out of hand like this.
It’s messed up how they haven't caught the guy yet.
This used to be a pretty great place to live, but honestly,
I'm really scared and that girl, she just lives like a couple blocks from here,
so I mean who's next, right?
We were really feeling the pressure by this point.
Macenroe’s murder seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back in terms
of public outrage, but I felt for all of them,
every single victim deserved justice and for everything we'd done up until this point
until you catch your guy, you haven't done shit.
We'd already been offering a cash reward for any lead that led to the arrest of
Leslie Sykes, but I convinced the DA's office to substantially up it.
It ended up being one of the highest in San Bernardino's history.
$80,000 for just one person.
At the same time, we were digging into Sykes past,
trying to figure out everything we could, which wasn’t easy.
All his known relatives were dead.
He had been briefly married in 88 to a woman named Suzanne Hemler,
but that was over by 91. Tried to contact her, but she committed suicide in 2008.
We started reaching out to people Sykes went to high school with,
but nobody seems to remember him.
Finally, we find someone who will talk to us.
A guy named Jared Kelly.
He was what? Shy, quiet? He was just off socially. We'd go to bars, hang out,
pick up chicks, and he would just strike out.
Leslie's only real hobby, if you could call it that,
was hiking. Some rock climbing.
He'd go out to Joshua Tree sometimes on the weekends by himself,
do his thing, and then one time he came back.
We were doing gate installation,
and he's like fucking all
wound up acting weird as shit.
How so?
Just like... agitated, distracted.
Later on he told me he'd had some sort of “religious experience”
in a cave that he found out there...
A cave?
He saw these red lights coming from inside of a cave and he
heard the sound of rushing water, “but not”,
and that he smelled food cooking like barbecue
And that he went inside and something appeared to him.
Like what?
I don’t fucking know. Like a vision.
The last time I saw him, he was living out of his car
and he said that he had burnt all of his possessions.
The shit that he was saying. It was so out there that it fucking stuck with me.
It's like ingrained.
“Shambler from the Stars”
and “The Thorn of Time”,
which is metal as fuck.
What do you think that means?
911 -
Hi, I need help at (redacted), San Miguel Parkway, Rancho West.
Do you need an ambulance or police?
Police.
Somebody killed my dog.
Somebody killed your dog? Sykes attempts to break into the residence of Miles and Kelly Harris,
an older couple living in Rancho West. He scales the fence into their backyard,
but is almost immediately attacked by the Harris's 48 pound pit bull, Cesar.
Mr. Harris overhears the commotion,
looks into his backyard and sees the struggle happening. I mean,
this was a big animal and it's able to physically knock Sykes off his feet.
We know he was hurt pretty bad because we find blood on the ground in multiple places.
Sadly, the dog's only able to keep this up for so long before
Sykes uses a bladed weapon and stabs it repeatedly.
Then he jumps the fence again.
This time I was not going to let the same thing happen to the Harris’ that
happened to Victoria Macenroe.
They were immediately put into protective custody.
Not that it mattered because Sykes must have had a backup plan for that night.
31-year-old Leo Deetz was working a night shift
at a 24-hour donut shop in La Sierra when he was attacked
Yeah, I don't like fantasy shit either, but this was actually pretty dope.
It was like violence and sex and stuff. I dunno.
It's based on books, so it seems pretty legit.
Yeah, you too, man. Yeah. Peace.
Leo Deetz is found the next morning with his heart removed from his body.
A security guard sees Sykes exit the back of the shop and tries to confront him,
but Sykes flees.
Honestly, I was just doing my job.
I was wrapping up my rounds for the evening here in this complex.
I was going to take some donuts home to me and the girlfriend.
I saw a man leaving the shop in a very, very weird mask.
The guard still manages to grab his license plate number and report it to the police.
I'm just bummed I didn't get the reward money.
In the surveillance video from the donut shop
you could tell Sykes was in pain from the dog bite.
He's unfocused and unprepared.
Then he's forced to ditch his car after it's reported by the guard,
which we find abandoned near the 91 and 215 interchange.
The more desperate Sykes became, the more likely he was to make a mistake.
That was the hope.
We kind of hit a brick wall digging into Sykes past.
He just vanished into thin air after 91.
That's when we realized it's because he wasn't in the country.
Turns out Sykes had used his late ex-wife's credit card
to purchase a one-way ticket to - of all places
Jerusalem.
I know. What the F, right?
I mean, we were just baffled and we also realized this was beyond the scope of our
resources, so we reached out to the FBI and asked for their help.
They in turn got in contact with Interpol and a whole side investigation got
underway trying to find out what Sykes was doing over there.
What was found out was... let's just say it didn't clear anything up.
Sykes flies to Jerusalem in 96,
not long after the murder of Noah LaFone, and then evidently passes into Syria.
The information here is sketchy at best,
but apparently Sykes was living in Northern Iraq for two years,
but then flees after Operation Desert Fox in 98.
As far as we know, Sykes didn't speak Arabic, but apparently he learned.
Sykes then crosses the border into Turkey and then into Italy in 2001.
While there,
he attends a museum exhibit on Etruscan pottery in the city of Mantua
and gets into some sort of altercation and is arrested.
I don't know what Sykes is doing looking at Etruscan pottery,
but he doesn't stay in Italy long before moving on to Germany in 2003,
and that's where we learned of someone who claims to have
had direct contact with him there.
I met Mr. Sykes when I was living in Xanten.
He contacted me through the internet about several
books that I was selling.
Specifically, he was looking to buy my copy of a printed
work from the late Middle ages,
a manuscript known as “The Scriptures of Valeel”
It's a very valuable book.
Only half a dozen copies or something still exist.
What is the book about?
It's a book of spells, basically. Witchcraft.
And he bought it off you?
Well, wanted to buy it off me, but I wasn't selling.
I don't know if he was for real or not, but he offered some wild prices.
100...150,000 Euro. The guy kind of creeped me out, to be honest.
So when my shop was vandalized a couple of days later and the book was gone,
I immediately knew who did it.
To know that I came that close in contact with a serial killer.
The thing that gets me more than anything else though is what the hell happened
to that book?
We had hoped maybe that Sykes would be deterred by how bungled the last
few attacks had been. We didn't think he would stop,
but maybe just slow down long enough for us to find him.
If anything, it must have reinvigorated his cause.
Get in the fucking car, Cody. This is not our issue.
We can't just leave him.
Are you fucking kidding me? This is not our problem. I'm leaving.
Emily, wait!
Holy shit.
This is fucking crazy.
The victim was Saroj Mallick,
the security guard that saw Sykes behind the donut shop and reported his plate to police.
After leaving work on April second,
he was supposed to meet his girlfriend at a bar at 8:30, but never shows.
He doesn't show up for work the next day either, and his cell phone is off.
Although his co-workers are a little concerned, nothing's reported to police...
I guess he had a habit of just blowing out to Vegas for the weekend
without telling anybody.
But he didn't go to Vegas.
The following day he's found hung from a public playground swing set.
“Displayed” is the word. It was a form of torture
the ancient Vikings used to use called “Blood Eagle”.
The flesh of the back is cut open,
the ribs are bent back, then both lungs are pulled out.
The mutilation resembles, yeah - you guessed it. Wings.
Blood eagle.
It was clearly done for dramatic effect.
When the fire department is getting his body down, they find the CD.
Oh fuck.
Hello? Hello!
Anybody, help!
Hello!
Let me out of here!
Okay. Whoa, whoa, stop. Please. No. Oh shit. No!
Please stop! Please stop! Please stop!
I have been selected because of my direct actions.
I should not have interfered with the great one's plan and
for my blasphemies, I will be put into transit.
Hello!
Hello.
He wanted us to know he was punishing this guy for trying to stop him.
He was saying stay out of his way or else. He was saying
this is your fault, not mine.
You can't actually feel responsible for any of the deaths.
Oh, but I do.
No, I'll carry his death and all of their deaths on my conscience
until the day I leave this planet.
After the Malik murder, a lot less tips came in. People were afraid.
I guess they had every right to be.
We picked apart Sykes’ house with a fine tooth comb
and found almost nothing useful at all.
We excavated parts of the backyard. There was nothing but dirt.
We knew Sykes used Presto brand toothpaste.
The one DVD he owned was season two of “Meet the Fur Balls” and his favorite drink
was two percent milk. Yikes. He ate there, he slept there,
but it didn't seem like he lived there. It was like a front,
it was like a show being put on to pretend
the person that lived there was vaguely normal.
After a long day of chasing some leads that went nowhere.
I went to the backyard of Sykes’ house to get some fresh air.
I think I was hoping I'd have some transcendent moment
a lot of profilers talk about when you enter the headspace of the killer and you
start to think like them.
That never happened.
None of it made any sense to me.
So it's like two in the morning and I'm just zoning out,
looking up at the stars
and then I remember that telescope that we pulled Sykes’ prints from.
What stars was Leslie Sykes’ looking at?
The area in the sky that Leslie Sykes had his telescope pointed at was
interesting for two reasons.
First, he was looking at Ophiuchus. Now, most people haven't even heard of Ophiuchus.
It's one of the 13 major constellations along the ecliptic smack in between
Scorpius and Sagittarius. It's also called the so-called “13th zodiac sign”,
although that's getting into astrology and not hard science.
My wife would kill me for explaining it that way.
The ancient Greeks were the ones that named all the constellations as we know
them today. Pisces is a fish, Taurus is a bull, et cetera.
Ophiuchus is the serpent bearer,
a man battling a giant snake.
Reason I mention Ophiuchus is because a rare celestial event was taking place in
its constellation borders that exact month.
A planetary alignment where Mercury,
Jupiter and Saturn come in earshot of each other in a way that happens once
every 800 years or so. This is a real thing. You can look it up.
May 13th, 2011 - you could view it with the naked eye,
but only for a few hours, which is why it's so special.
The symbol.
A leech bite.
Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn.
A rare planetary alignment that was only a few weeks away.
So is this all one big coincidence?
One thing that they really drill into your brain at the academy is that the human
mind is very adept at finding patterns in things, even if they aren't there.
They tell you to watch out for it - to not get carried away.
To remember Occam's razor.
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one,
but sometimes it's actually the strangest.
We had brought in these big halogen lights to Sykes’ house because the place was
so dark at night, but as soon as we turned it on, it blew a fuse.
So one of the deputies is trying to reset the breaker and realizes the sub-panel
in the closet wasn't working. As he's messing with it,
the whole thing just comes out of the wall. Like everything in that house
it was a fake. Behind it, there was a space with a lockbox.
Of course, we cleared the house and called the bomb squad just in case.
They used one of those little robots and everything.
No bomb. That didn't seem like his style, anyway.
The box was just a cheapo,
we just pried it open with a crowbar. And inside just two things:
Leslie Sykes’ passport expired from 2003
and a key with an attached key chain.
We drove over there straight away and went inside the unit.
In retrospect, it was pretty stupid of us.
I mean, the thing could have been booby trapped or he could have been waiting in there for us.
Who knows?
But it felt like we'd run out of time.
We just got lucky.
Everywhere my light goes, you go. Okay?
Jackpot, winning-lotto-ticket, royal flush lucky.
Here's why we never get fingerprints.
The guy wears a full on hazmat suit.
This is the mold we believe for the mask that he's been seen in.
Yeah, this guy's big into space. Over here. Real big.
Carl Sagan, eat your heart out.
Oh, you got to check this out. This is...
early childhood reading for late night.
“Celestial Witchcraft of Early England.”
This right here we think is Dennis Zhao’s tongue, right?
Unless he's cut out other tongues.
This hair is Victoria Macenroe.
We think it is because we watched her hair get cut off
and that is Saroj Mallick.
He's been here recently.
Yeah.
Over here is what we think is Sheridan's blood.
Check this shit up here.
“Hail Azragor”
And then this weird altar.
Is this Azragor?
Have you ever heard of Azragor?
Azragor... no.
How about Kaliban?
Like in Shakespeare?
“The Thorn of Time” sounds familiar. I've heard that. Where have I heard that?
This is a pre-cuneiform, so it's all very cryptic, but here
“Et El Groth Gulka Levesque Kertubu”
“The Temple of the Outer Gate beyond the Thorn of Time”
“Kertubu” I've heard before. That means...
Crowning.
Coronation.
Whereas before we had little to no evidence to go on,
we now had way too much.
Sykes had collected tons of information on each of his victims,
had them all in a filing cabinet. Criminal history, medical records,
information the public does not have access to,
so he must have been paying off cops or private investigators,
and every murder had been meticulously documented. There were photos, drawings,
hundreds of handwritten pages by Sykes with his ramblings,
a pure window into a man's madness.
We were pulling all-nighters in that horrible space.
Even after the bodies were removed, the smell never went away.
We were going crazy.
On May 8th, the manager of the place comes looking for us.
Someone sent mail to the office for us.
It was another letter.
The Great Lord of the Threshold has arrived at the gate.
The Great Recification, The Final Extirpation!
The dawn of Kaliban.
One left for me, then he’s set free.
911 emergency. How can I direct your call?
Hello?
Help me.
Ma’am, do you need police or -
Help.
Ma’am?
Around midnight on May 12th,
Sykes breaks into the home of Glen and Stephanie Courtland via a garage window
and abducts their three month old baby, Sawyer.
He could have killed that child in his crib right then and there,
but he was waiting. I mean, he was deliberately waiting for something,
But what?
We had no idea where Sykes was going or what his plan was,
but it didn't seem like a coincidence that the triangle in the sky
was supposed to appear that morning.
That was a Friday, by the way,
the 13th.
Coincidence, right?
I am just getting to work. It's around 3:00 AM and let's see.
Okay, right here, right here. Not 20 feet from where I found that woman's body.
I see this red SUV parked. The vehicle is empty. I just got a weird vibe,
so I called it in.
I immediately got a reply that the automobile has been stolen and that the
driver is armed and dangerous.
I watch the news closely and I was like, is this Mr. Shiny?
They found Sykes’ SUV,
right in the spot of the very first murder in 93.
He ran out of gas right there of all places. What are the odds?
This three planet alignment was going to be visible between 6 and 6:30 AM.
I mean, that gave us just a matter of hours to find Sykes and baby Sawyer.
One way or another, this thing was gonna end.
...like Osama Bin Laden? That's the first thing... that's a pretty believable
thing that he died. I dunno. I believe those -
Do you want a marshmallow?
Ready...
Yeah I want a marshmellow.
Made the sm’ores.
Extra gooey.
This is disgusting, I'm so sorry.
We all went to UC Riverside together,
but I was moving out of state for my master's degree,
so it was sort of a last hurrah with the girls.
We didn't even know that thing with the planets was even happening.
I think we're just getting old, dude.
Old ass hoes for life.
We had units coming in from Arrowhead, Crestline, even Big Bear,
but they were spread out all over the place. If Sykes was on foot,
he could only get so far, but we still needed a lot of manpower.
Best we could do in that first hour was two cars. Two.
That park is almost a million acres.
When we were on the way out there, you know, I was actually excited.
Why?
Because Sykes was the boogeyman of Berdo. Even the FBI was after him.
If we were the arresting officers, that would be huge.
So fucking stupid.
They started going from campsite to campsite in a grid.
Every tent, RV, porta-potty out there - they were shining a light into it.
Whose in there with you?
It's just my daughter.
Nobody was being cooperative or wanted to talk to us, but who would be?
Anybody else here with you?
No.
Imagine you're asleep in your tent and a cop shines a light in your face.
I'd be pissed too.
You see anything suspicious tonight? You see a man with a baby.
Baby?
It was a clusterfuck.
Heavy brush, too dark. Lots of places to hide.
Even now, GPS maps in that kind of area just aren't that reliable.
Neither are cell phones, but luckily some places still had landlines.
What is your emergency, please?
My name is Silvia Vallejo
Some crazy guy broke into our place where we’re renting.
My husband is still inside with him, please send somebody...
There's a property out there where you can rent these individual cabins for the night.
Sykes forces his way inside one of these cabins where Martin and Silvia Vallejo
are staying. It's about 4 o'clock in the morning at this point.
He's able to subdue Martin,
but Silvia gets away and calls 911 at the cabin next door.
Did you make the call, ma'am?
Yes. He's in there with my husband.
Where's the cabin?
Third cabin on the right. Please help him.
Stay here.
He has a child. There's a baby with him.
Stay here.
The two closest units arrived at the cabin around 4:50 AM. Backup was on the way,
but ended up getting lost and wouldn't get there for over an hour.
These guys had no idea what they might be walking into.
I got the front door.
Clear.
Alright, it's clear.
Standby.
The place was deserted. Extremely bad vibes.
You seeing this?
I think that's when I started to get scared.
Then we found Mr. Vallejo.
Looks like a bedroom.
We got a suspect.
We got a suspect!
Let me see your hands!
Hands! Hands!
Moving up.
It looks like he’s duct taped... with his hands.
What the fuck.
That’s a drill.
I got him, I got him.
Pull off the mask.
Oh my god.
He’s injured.
God, get medical out here!
Sykes essentially lobotomizes the man. Leaves the body to be found like that.
It was just bad, bro.
I don't know what else to say.
An empty glass is found on the kitchen counter with remnants of milk from the fridge
and Sawyer's dirty diaper is thrown in the garbage.
Even then, he was still taking care of the baby.
After this pit stop he leaves into the woods.
What’s the ETA on RA unit, over.
What the hell was that?
We should go check it out.
Shouldn’t we wait for backup?
Dude, he's got a baby.
I didn't even want to go, but it was a baby, right? What would you do?
Imagine that's your kid,
But I should have said no. I should have waited at the car.
If that makes me a coward, I don't give a shit.
Shit.
You hear that?
He was doing witchcraft out there, man.
You saw the video.
What else would you call it?
Joe, what fuck is this, man?
Where the fuck’s the shooter!
Just one more.
I didn't understand at the time what exactly that wood thing was, but
I found out they have a name for it.
A pyre.
That's where the crying was coming from.
Sykes.
Fuck.
I don't know what we saw or didn't see.
It was strange.
If you looked at it from one angle,
you could see it. From another, it wasn't as clear.
The videos don't do it justice at all.
I'm still not convinced any of the, what do you call it?
Karmic phenomena.
“Cosmic” phenomena.
Cosmic phenomena.
I mean, sky looked weird that morning, no doubt about that.
But there's plenty of weird stuff that happens in the sky.
Aurora Borealis.
That looks totally different.
Okay, but you can't tell me that's not some weird looking space stuff too, right?
I don't remember much. It gets hazy. So that thing in the sky,
it looked like red eyes.
Jeez, dude.
Holy shit.
What the fuck.
What the fuck is that?
Lizzy?
What’s going on?
Liz?
Kate, wake up. I need you to call 911. Kate, please.
And just like that... it was over.
We got him.
Help's on the way. Just stay there.
How’s the baby?
He’s okay.
That was too god damn close.
He's gone.
What?
We need some help over here.
You got to be fucking kidding me.
Leslie Sykes’ body was found about a hundred yards from the cabin in a creek
covered in leeches. He'd only been in the water for a matter of minutes.
It's like they were drawn to him.
It made any kind of visual identification impossible,
but we still confirmed it with fingerprint and DNA.
It looks like Sykes have been living out there for at least a couple of weeks,
sleeping in a makeshift shelter and stealing food from other people's campsites.
His final time on this earth was spent
hungry, cold and alone.
No phantoms. No ghost.
A flesh and blood human.
A piece of shit human, but human nonetheless.
So I was getting up for work that morning and I was checking my Facebook
and I had all of these messages and I was like what
you know, what's going on here?
And then I realized they got him.
Like they really fucking got him.
The Inland Empire can breathe a sigh of relief with the news just coming in that
the hunt for serial killer, Leslie Sykes,
AKA Mr. Shiny, has finally come to an end.
Police shot and killed Sykes this morning in a standoff in the San Bernardino mountains,
but not before ending the life of one Riverside Police Department Deputy.
Richie... I don't want to talk about it.
It should have been me.
I'm here to formally announce that Leslie Sykes,
otherwise known as Mr. Shiny, died this morning at approximately 6:00 AM
Pacific Standard Time as a result of an extended gun battle with local authorities.
I couldn't believe it.
Like all of this, this like, weight was just lifted from my chest, you know?
Like Shifra could finally rest in peace because that fucking asshole was dead.
I mean, nothing's ever going to bring my girl back, but
at least we can all start to heal now.
I feel no joy in Leslie Sykes’ death. I really don't.
I did in the beginning, but as time has gone on...
I wish I could have interviewed him.
I wish we could have got more information.
In the time span that Sykes was actively killing - that we know about -
there were over 100 unsolved homicides in the two counties.
Could some of these be Sykes? We'll never know.
Is it possible Sykes had an accomplice? Someone that helped him, funded him?
We'll never know.
He got off too easy if you ask me.
Should have drawn and quartered that motherfucker.
Sorry, is that too much?
No, that's actually perfect.
Happy I could set the record straight.
Oh, when we first found out that they killed him,
I guess it was bittersweet.
I was just glad he couldn't hurt anybody else.
We try to keep Victoria's memory alive, but it gets harder as time goes on.
Friends lose interest.
I think about that saying a lot that goes,
“You really die the last time someone says your name.”
Honey, you already said this.
I know, but it is just so true.
Ted Bundy.
Gacy.
These guys will live forever
and now so will Mr. Shiny.
Eight victims were honored today at a memorial held at Pioneer Memorial
Cemetery, including those from the original crimes in 1995.
Almost a thousand people joined the service to pay their respects to those lives
taken two soon by serial killer, Leslie Sykes.
Lizzy.
Lizzy - Kate. Kate, wake up. I need you to call...
So the lights on the sky triggerd a seizure?
Great place to have your first one, right?
Wait, you weren't epileptic before that?
Started for the first time that night,
and I wasn't the only one who had bad luck either.
Gail randomly started having vertigo after that trip.
So you know, you ask me if I believe in ghosts and this
paranormal stuff and I don't. But...
No, I don't believe in that stuff.
But I still wish we never went camping that weekend.
We moved to Portland. I know it sounds superstitious,
but it just seemed like that whole county was cursed.
What do you think Leslie Sykes was up to?
I have no idea.
You must have theories. Come on, people are going to want hear this.
What do you want me to say?
He was part of some apocalypse cult trying to summon a six million year old leech god.
The Thorn of Time. Kaliban...
That's not something you put in the police report, pal.
That's not gonna help the families try and bring closure and heal from this mess.
What I can say for sure is this.
Leslie Sykes was a monster and we caught him and we killed him.
What about his last letter?
As Lexi likes to say, “Same shit, different day.”
Same shit. Different day.
Do you think it means anything?
It’s post-dated two days before he died.
If he sent it, he must have had an inkling things might not go to plan.
What about what he says at the end of the letter?
Well, if it's true, I guess we'll find out in another 800 years.
Rejoice for I can now learn the mysteries of the worm.
The harvest season will return,
the reaping will continue.
I'll be back.
There's still so many things we don't understand about this case
and probably never will.
We just have bits and pieces of some kind of strange puzzle,
and even if we could put them all together,
I don't know if I want to see whatever picture they make.
Yeah, got what you need. I think that's perfect.
Okay. Awesome.
Alright. Thanks guys.
Okay. August 23rd, 2023. Back at Pinto again.
Went a little further south this time, but yeah, it's a bust.
Something about this place just doesn't, doesn't feel right.
Talked to a guy at a gas station.
He told me there's a series of caves down at Cox comb,
so we're going to try that next. It's worth a shot.