Nothing lasts forever. This is an unescapable truth. And no cover-up, no conspiracy, no hidden truth, can stay buried for eternity, least of all if that truth is a living breath group of people with superpowers to change into animals people, rather than a supernatural disease that causes mutations into a half-animal creature with all your intelligence but none of your scruples every thirty days. And the 'good old days' had come and gone. People could no longer simply 'vanish' and never be heard from again, there were missing persons reports, phone cameras, google maps, video drones, and records could be check with a click rather than digging through mountains of dusty papers. And like any old town, Moonlake had laws that were still on the books that no one actually was expected to actually observe. Like the whole 'kill anyone who discovers the truth but won't keep their trap shut', in the 'good old days' this was a lot easier to get away with, as people died all the time and were never heard from again in the days of pandemics, highway robbers, and death of infect from a paper cut. No one in Moonlake took the 'kill someone to keep the secret' seriously anymore, they knew it would only draw MORE attention these days. They weren't stupid... Most weren't. The longer a conspiracy goes on, the more it takes is one person to make one stupid mistake that causes everything to come tumbling down.
These days, people who tried to show the truth were either ignored, or played up as lunatics, or treated as one of the infinite number of fictional 'true stories' that the internet breed like rabbits. The greatest insult to a person is to ignore them. The people of Moonlake knew there was no such thing as bad publicity, and if any effort was put into oppressing a person's view, the more people would be drawn to it, it was human nature.
But all it took one was stickler for the rules, one person naive enough to think the rules were supposed to be followed as written, one person, due to the sheer lack of needing to update the laws in all that time... ignorantly thought they were still supposed to be followed.
The eldest son of a communications company CEO and an infamous skeptic among his peers, wanting to get away from it all, began a web series on comfy old towns, and saw what he wasn't supposed to see. With his phone he was able to upload what he saw in seconds. And a rookie police officer, panicking, drew his weapon and did what he thought he was supposed to do. He didn't realize the upload was a livestream...
Across the country, the killing was seen by millions of interviewers. Police panicked. Contrary cover stories were throw out the front doors, which only drew more attention. Outside police were called in, no matter how much the local police screamed, protested and threatened. There was no stopping this, not anymore. The transformation and the police killing were in the same video, within twenty-four hours they were on the evening news. And the boy's made clear their son was no liar, and he was no feel, he wouldn't upload something to his channel unless it was real.
Moonlake tried to have total lunatics defend the video, to discredit it... but that did nothing to discourage the boy's family, or his friends, who knew he wasn't a prankster, and no one even knew what towns he was going to be visiting. Those denying the livestream were quickly compared to those who rejected the moon landing as real. Investigators and 'other-kin' enthusiasts flooded Moonlake.
There was no going back.