Strange Harvest

Detectives Joe Kirby and Lexi Taylor recount their time working the case of “Mr. Shiny,” an elusive serial killer who committed a string of murders over three decades in California’s Inland Empire. The first victim, a young woman, is found dismembered in the San Bernardino National Forest in 1993. Shortly after, a bedridden elderly man is bludgeoned and stabbed to death in his retirement facility. A third victim, a young boy named Noah Lafone, is abducted and found murdered in a bog with his liver removed. At the time, the three crimes are not assumed to be connected.

In 2013, the Sheridan family are murdered in their home, bound at the dining room table and exsanguinated via cuts to their femoral arteries. The victims’ blood is used to paint a strange symbol on the vaulted ceiling of the house. The killer subsequently murders a young woman in her home before burning her boyfriend Glen’s face with a blowtorch, severely disfiguring him. Another male victim is found in an abandoned swimming pool which has been half-filled with water and leeches, which slowly exsanguinated him over several days; barbed wire surrounding the pool edges prevented the man from escaping. Tracing the victim’s computer history, Kirby and Taylor deduce that the killer contacted the victim on the internet using public Wi-Fi at a coffee shop. At the coffee shop, they meet a homeless man who had a close encounter with the killer, who was driving a stolen van. The owner of the van, Victor Shamaz, is considered a suspect initially, but claims the vehicle was stolen by a man wearing a strange mask who assaulted him.

Kirby and Taylor eventually trace the killer, whose real name is Leslie Sykes, to a house he has rented for a year, but find it mostly empty. The same symbol painted in blood at the Sheridan crime scene is found etched above the home’s front door. Meanwhile, Sykes taunts police with recurring letters that make oblique references to “Kaliban” and other occult phenomenon. Kirby and Taylor learn that, during his twenty-year absence from California, Sykes had moved to Jerusalem before traveling through several Middle Eastern and European countries, studying ancient sites and occult practices.

A short time later, teenager Victoria Macenroe is shot by Sykes in her home, and her blood is used to draw the same symbol on her bedroom wall. She survives the shooting, which was caught live on webcam, and is hospitalized. Kirby and Taylor, along with other protective officers, stake out the hospital, but Sykes manages to infiltrate it posing as a nurse, and kills Victoria by adding drain cleaner to her blood transfusion bag. Next, Sykes murders an employee at a doughnut shop, removing his heart. Saroj Mallick, a security guard, encounters Sykes but fails to capture him. Mallick is later found dead, strung up in a local playground, executed via the “blood eagle,” an ancient form of ritual murder. In a storage unit rented by Sykes, various organs from victims are found, as well as occult-like books and a statue of a leech-like creature.

After questioning a rare acquaintance of Sykes, Kirby and Taylor learn that Sykes claimed to have had a spiritual experience in the early 1990s after entering a strange cave in the desert. It is surmised that Sykes’s killing spree has been orchestrated to culminate during a looming rare planetary occurrence that happens every 800 years. Sykes subsequently kills a young couple in their home before kidnapping their infant son. Kirby and Taylor trace Sykes to the San Bernardino National Forest, where they eventually find him attempting to burn the child to death in a ritualistic pyre at the time of the planetary alignment, but they stop him short of carrying it out, fatally shooting him. The police and campers in the forest witness a strange light beaming in the sky that night, which they cannot explain.

Kirby and Taylor reflect on Sykes’ murders, but are wary of attributing any supernatural or cosmic elements to it. A letter mailed to Kirby and Taylor two days before Sykes’s death indicates he will return again in 800 years to carry out his mission. In a post-credits scene, Kirby is seen via footage recorded on his cell phone, searching for the cave where Sykes claimed to have had his supernatural experience.

Last Updated: August 20, 2025 at 13:10