Michelle McNamara and her editors agree to push her book deadline after being granted access to the Orange County Sheriff's Department's East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker room. After everybody realized the killer moved south, that story exploded. The hope was that by having greater public attention, the right person gave the right tip.

Rasputin is gone, but Nicholas II continues his catastrophic policies in war and at home. When Nicholas goes back to military headquarters, he is in fact leaving control of government, exactly when Russia needed to be held together by its Czar. The war by this time is deeply unpopular. It's not only unpopular, it's also arguably the engine that's causing enormous economic crisis, that's causing general unrest. Deprivation pushes the population from unrest to revolution.

The last episode explores Mescaline, the psychoactive molecule in San Pedro and peyote cacti, a sacred medicine that Native Americans have had to fight for the right to use. At the Indigenous practices there's always an elder, someone who knows the territory very well, who's presiding. There's usually a group, a community is involved, There's always an intention, a purpose to what you're doing, and you're treating it as sacred, in order to achieve altered states of consciousness, which contribute to worship in various ways, or celebration or healing.
But maybe all this is not so new to Western culture after all. In the old Greek histories of Eleusis, people who were initiated there got the drink, the kykeon, and then they had the illumination. The precise recipe is a mystery, but we know that the kykeon was a psychoactive brew that was used at the Eleusinian mysteries, a sacred annual ritual of enlightenment practiced by some of the world's greatest minds including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. So why did this ritual come to an end more than 1,000 years ago? Was the possibility of illumination or achieving a higher consciousness considered threatening to the powers that be? Have the drug wars been merely an extension of that fear?
Psychedelics has a major part in how we can heal as a community, how we can heal as a city, and how we can heal as a country. The current renaissance of psychedelics could not come at a better time as the world confronts a crisis in mental health. But psychedelics have much to offer. The psychedelic experience changes the mind in ways that will help scientists better understand how it works. All these altered states allow us to probe what is the greatest mystery in all of nature. The emergence from mere matter of something as miraculous as consciousness. But an even bigger question is whether psychedelics might help us address the environmental crisis of how we think about our place in nature. One of the greatest gifts of psychedelics is how they reanimate the natural world, allowing us to perceive the subject, the spirit of all species, not just our own. And to feel a deeper sense of interconnectedness with nature.

In 1979, law enforcement is thrilled when the East Area Rapist attacks abruptly stop in Northern California. But in reality, the East Area Rapist had only moved 400 miles south, to commit a number of gruesome murders in the Santa Barbara area, where he would become known as the Original Night Stalker. Michelle McNamara ultimately came up with the name 'Golden State Killer' cause he terrorized up and down the state.
Michelle starts to write a true crime book that would transcend the genre because the way she humanized all of the victims.

Jean Hargadon Wehner discusses how she came to remember years later the sexual abuse she suffered at Archbishop Keough High School. She also talks about what happened when she reported the abuse to Church officials and how she realized she was connected to the death of Sister Cathy Cesnik.
As the can of worms is opened on the hidden world in the high school and the people begin to talk about what happened behind closed doors. With the Jean’s accusations, Abbie Schaub, Gemma Hoskins, and Tom Nugent learn about a story of a graveyard and a source nicknamed 'Deep Throat' who could hold the key.

Deep Throat comes forward with the orders of anonymity with the horror story of what happened in 1994 with the charges against Maskell. With the location of a secret grave of documents, Deep Throat’s story contradicts the story of the former state’s attorney Sharon A.H. May. The group begins to investigate Dr. Richter who worked with Maskell to groom girls and their families.
As the case prepares for a potential trial, the disappearance of Father Maskell causes problems as the prosecutors find themselves defending the idea of repressed memories. When things fall apart, victims still find themselves seeking justice. Abbie and Gemma seek the links between Jean and the killer... which leads to a man named Brother Bob.