Looking into the eyes of the Bike Path Killer

[samanthajane13]

Editor’s note: This is the first of three excerpts from the new book “The Bike Path Killer,” written by News Staff Reporters Maki Becker and Michael Beebe

Suzi Coggins had awakened late on the morning of July 14, 1986. It was a Monday, and she had summer school that day.

She had flunked math the previous semester at Frontier Central High School in Hamburg, a town just south of Buffalo. It wasn’t that she wasn’t smart. She was, in fact, and she often did get good grades. But she always had a hard time with math, especially when the answers weren’t multiple choice. Years later she’d learn that she was dyslexic.

But in 1986, in the summer between her junior and senior year, she was still undiagnosed. So, instead of spending a lazy summer sleeping in and hanging out with her boyfriend and her buddies, Suzi, then 17, had to get up every weekday morning to go to math class at summer school.

“Mom, can I get a ride?” she begged her mother.

It was a 20-minute walk to school from Suzi’s house—a good mile, mile and a half. Suzi had lost her sneakers over the weekend, and all she had to wear were some uncomfortable, worn out clogs.

“No,” her mother told her. OK. Fine. Suzi remembered thinking to herself. Screw it.

She put on her clogs, grabbed her cigarettes and headed out the door.

On the street, she ran into a couple of girls from school. Real goody-goody types. The kind of girls that Suzi just couldn’t relate to.

Suzi was a bitter and angry girl back then, the inevitable result of growing up too fast. Her parents ran a biker bar and they liked to party with their customers. Suzi and her brother were often left home alone to fend for themselves. And as Suzi became an adolescent, she began to rebel.

Her rebellion had landed her in the hospital the past two Mondays. On June 30, she was riding on a dirt bike with her boyfriend, against the wishes of her mother, when she cut her leg on a sharp piece of metal that had been sticking out of the back of the bike. She needed 17 stitches. Her mother was furious and told her she was absolutely forbidden from getting on a dirt bike again.

The following Monday, she disobeyed her mother again. She got onto a dirt bike with two friends. They were going so fast at one point that Suzi just couldn’t hang on. She fell off and sprained her ankle badly. Again, she was in the emergency room.

On the morning of Monday, July 14, as Suzi ran into those girls she couldn’t stand, she decided to take a different route to school. Normally, she would have stopped at the corner convenience store to buy a soda or maybe a cup of coffee and have a cigarette or two. But with those girls going in that direction, Suzi headed for the bike path next to her school’s outdoor field.

The path cut through a brushy, wooded area and it was hard to see from the road. As Suzi walked onto the path, she was seized with an ominous sensation.

Someone’s watching me, she thought. She looked all around but didn’t see anyone. A creepy feeling had come over her and she felt like something was telling her to get out of the woods.

But she went against her instincts. As she continued on the path, walking fast and puffing on her cigarette, she had another strange thought. I’m going to be in the hospital today.

That’s weird, she thought and then brushed it off. She had after all spent the past two Mondays in emergency rooms for accidents she didn’t predict.

Then, she had a jarring vision: a body, lying naked in the bushes. It freaked her out. Why are you thinking all of these things? Suzi silently asked herself. She shook it off and kept going.

It was about then that she heard a noise and looked around to see a stocky man, who was about 5 feet 8 inches tall, with a dark complexion and dark combed-back hair. He had a thick, full mustache, and he was carrying what looked like a clothesline in his hand. She figured it was a leash for his dog that he’d let run loose on the path.

Suzi turned back around and stopped walking. As she waited for the man to pass her, she took a few drags of her dwindling cigarette and threw it down into a puddle at the end of a drainpipe.

Suddenly she felt something on her neck.

Then she was up in the air and she couldn’t breathe. She looked down and saw the man’s face. He looked mad. Really mad. His face was hard. Out of the corners of her eyes she saw the rope and his hands holding it so tight. So tight. It hurt.

Oh my god, she thought. He’s going to kill me.

Suzi felt a rush. Her head was spinning. She felt high. I can’t think straight, she thought to herself.

“Lie down,” the man told her.

He then told her to take off her shirt. Suzi unbuttoned her button-down black and white checkered blouse, and took it off. The man grabbed it from her and put it over her head, tying the sleeves into a knot behind her head to form a blindfold.

I’m going to die. I’m going to die. Suzi was terrified. She didn’t know what to do.

The man stopped raping her abruptly. It seemed like he didn’t finish. Suzi later realized the man probably got turned off when she seemed unafraid of him.

“What now?” Suzi asked him.

“Nothing,” he growled. He seemed angry with her. He grabbed her and then with what felt like either the back of his hand or maybe his foot, he pushed her into the mud.

“Lie down and stay here for 20 minutes or I will kill you,” he said.

And boom, he was gone. He took off running.


http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/687885.html?imw=Y

[samanthajane13]

After 16 years, a chilling realization: ‘He’s back’

Editor’s note: This is the second of three excerpts from the new book “The Bike Path Killer,” written by News Staff Reporters Maki Becker and Michael Beebe.

Ray Klimczak, a retired Amherst police detective, was driving back to his new home in Clarence on the evening of Sept. 29, 2006, when he heard on the radio that a woman had gone missing from a bike path in his neighborhood.

It felt like a stab to his heart.

He couldn’t help but think about Linda Yalem. Sixteen years later, he could still see her body lying out in the brush off the Ellicott Creek bike path. Her lifeless eyes, the way they were wide-open and staring up into the sky, flashed before him.

Then he realized what day it was. It was the anniversary of Yalem’s murder. There’s no way this is a coincidence, he thought.

Klimczak called Amherst Police Chief John Moslow.

“John, he’s back,” Klimczak told him. “And there’s no doubt in my mind we’re looking for the same guy.”

His next call was to Detective Lieutenant Joseph LaCorte. The two had worked on the bike path case for over a decade before Klimczak retired in 2002.

“Nobody was shocked,” LaCorte would say later. “The one thing we knew,” he said about the killer, “was that he would never stop unless he was dead or in jail.”

Klimczak knew it was just a matter of time before Joan Diver’s body would be found.

But when the news came two days later—that she was indeed dead and that there was a double ligature mark on her neck—it still left Klimczak an emotional wreck.

Klimczak had spent 12 years trying to find the bike path rapist-turned- killer. He was darn near obsessed with the case.

For Klimczak, it began in 1990 with the second bike path rape in Amherst.

At 7:30 a.m. on May 31, a 32-year-old secretary had been out for her daily walk on the Ellicott Creek bike path. She walked every morning before going to work at a local office. She did it to help her keep in shape for her other favorite pastime, ice skating.

She was headed down an incline and had just passed a rest shelter when she was attacked from behind.

She never saw her assailant. She felt someone put a rope around her neck and pull her from behind. Then she blacked out.

A couple of hours later, joggers heard strange noises coming from the brush. They found the woman semiconscious, moaning incoherently.

Klimczak was assigned to interview the woman. She had been taken to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Amherst, where she remained unconscious for about 10 hours.

Klimczak waited outside her hospital room for much of that time. He remembered walking into the room to talk to her when she started waking up.

“Her eyes were completely reddened and swollen and black-and-blue,” he said. “I thought she had been beaten.”

She said she didn’t see the attacker and had no idea what he did to her, but a medical ex-am had proved she had been raped and choked.

This second rape sent the Amherst police into high gear. There was no way the department was going to let this rapist get away with it again. The officers were determined to get him.

The Amherst police were used to catching their suspects, Klimczak said. “We always solved our crimes.” But here they had a repeat offender: someone who had struck innocent victims twice in their town and gotten away.

Every patrol officer was ordered to take down plate numbers of any out-of-place cars on side streets anywhere near the bike path. Among those officers was a young Joseph LaCorte, who was not yet a detective. A tip line was also set up for anyone with information about the cases.

Klimczak volunteered for a special detail. Knowing that the rapist liked to strike in the early morning, Klimczak began spending just about every morning, starting at 5:30 a. m., hiding in the brush in a spot off the bike path, right in between where the two rapes had taken place. He would dress in full camouflage and endured many an insect bite as he would wait and watch for any suspicious characters walking or jogging by. When he’d see someone like that, he’d get on his walkie-talkie and tell a patrol officer to stop him and get his information.

He kept up the detail until Sept. 29, 1990.

Klimczak wasn’t working that day, so he hadn’t been out on his undercover morning detail. That night, he got a call from another detective letting him know that a UB student had gone missing on the Ellicott Creek bike path.

“My heart sank,” Klimczak said. “Because I knew: we have another victim.”

Linda Yalem was a 22-year-old Southern California girl who had just transferred to UB from a college in Long Island. She was a communication major and she was also training for the New York City Marathon.

Every day, she went for a long run along the Ellicott Creek bike path, which ran along the side of UB’s North Campus. At about 11 a.m. that day, she popped a “Tears for Fears” cassette into her portable tape player and began running.

At 9:30 p.m., her roommates reported her missing. She was supposed to meet them to catch a movie, but hadn’t shown up or called.

Campus cops and Amherst police began a search that went through the night. It continued into the next day. Klimczak was among those out looking for Yalem when, at about 5:15 p. m., a couple of officers found her body.

She lay in a dark clearing surrounded by brush, several yards off the bike path. A footbridge that went over Ellicott Creek was nearby. There was a clear view of the path from Interstate 990.

One leg of Yalem’s running tights and her underwear had been pulled off. Her bra was pulled down. Her shirt was pulled over her head. Two pieces of duct tape covered her nose and her mouth. Her eyes were wide-open.

Those eyes would continue to haunt Klimczak.


http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/688827.html?imw=Y

[samanthajane13]

Bike Path Killer, behind bars, bares his soul

Editor’s note: This is the last of three excerpts from the new book “The Bike Path Killer” by News Staff Reporters Maki Becker and Michael Beebe.

Altemio Sanchez got a call before breakfast on Nov. 8, 2007, at the Clinton Correctional Facility, a state prison so far north in New York that it’s closer to Montreal than Albany, the state capital. The prison guards said they were taking him to the hospital for tests.

Instead, they drove him to the state police barracks in Plattsburgh. Waiting for him were investigators from the Bike Path Task Force, who locked him up, and two profilers from the FBI’s behavioral analysis section in Quantico, Va.

Sanchez had already admitted his crimes, pleading guilty to the murders of Linda Yalem, Majane Mazur and Joan Diver. He also admitted committing between 10 and 14 rapes over a 30-year span.

He not only raped women, he tortured them with his rope garrotes, leaving several women unconscious, not knowing whether he killed them or not. He made even those he didn’t attack look over their shoulders for years as they went for a walk or a run on the bike paths that ring the Buffalo area.

Sanchez looked surprised as he sat at a plain wooden table, handcuffed to a chain around his waist, as Josh Keats, the state police homicide investigator, came in the room and sat across from him.

Keats explained that he had some questions for him, things that would help him as an investigator. Sanchez told him to ask him anything he wanted. The interview was filmed.

Keats began asking about his background, and Sanchez described how his family had left his native Puerto Rico when he was 2, his mother packing up four kids under the age of 5 and moving to Miami after catching his father in bed with a prostitute.

Sanchez began weeping as he talked about his mother’s boyfriend.

“He used her as a punching bag,” he said. “Why she ever loved the guy, I’ll never know why.”

The boyfriend, Sanchez said, also sexually abused him.

Sanchez, his mother, two sisters and a brother lived with this man, he said, in a van in New York City.

He said the boyfriend’s sexual abuse of him and physical abuse of his mother continued until they moved to North Collins, south of Buffalo, where they picked strawberries and other produce with migrant workers.

One day, he said, his mother packed the family’s bags, moved to Buffalo, and the boyfriend was never seen again.

Sanchez spoke without emotion. As he did in the interview when he was arrested, he went for more than eight hours without a bathroom break. Halfway through, the questioning stopped while they had lunch. Sanchez had pizza, chicken wings and a diet Pepsi, a break from prison food.

“I wrote a letter to my wife, explaining what happened to me as a child,” Sanchez said. “She told me, why didn’t I tell her? I tried to tell her so she could explain it to the kids. I didn’t get into any of the details of the rapes. It was more about my childhood, what happened to me and my mother. My wife couldn’t believe it was really me who did this. She filed for divorce. She never knew anything about it. It was more like a dark secret.”

When FBI agent Robert Morton entered the room, the questions became more specific.

Sanchez, what triggers the attacks? Morton asked.

“I don’t know what makes me become one person and another, what makes me commit these crimes,” Sanchez said. “Being raped by mom’s boyfriend, watching the abuse he gave my mom.”

The agent asked him if there was anger.

“The anger is going out and doing harm to someone,” Sanchez said. “Fantasy and anger. I think my fantasy has to do with what my stepfather did to me. My anger had to do with my mom not knowing.”

Why did he kill Linda Yalem, the first murder?

“I never wanted to kill Linda at all,” Sanchez said. “She put up a fight. I lost control. She never gave me control. I took it. I put a rope around her neck and I killed her.”

Why kill Majane Mazur, the prostitute he picked up in downtown Buffalo and strangled on Exchange Street?

“She didn’t know I had the rope in my pocket. I took the rope out of my pocket and strangled her. What made me take the rope out and kill her, I don’t know.”

Morton told him he was a complex person. He was able to compartmentalize. He was the good husband, the good father, the good provider. Then he had another side. How was he able to do this?

“I don’t know,” Sanchez said. “It’s hard for me, even myself to know I have these separate lives. I’m good to my wife, and my neighbors, and then I have to have sex with somebody. I’ve got to play rough with her . . .”

Why had he stopped his attacks from 1994 until 2006 when he killed Joan Diver?

“After I did the two murders, I was getting scared,” Sanchez said. “I had a talk with myself. ‘You’ve got to stop.’ I stopped for 12 years.”

“I was still seeing prostitutes. When I was seeing prostitutes, my sexual drive was getting worse and worse. My philosophy was, I have got to rape somebody and take control. I didn’t have that kind of control with the prostitutes.”

Morton asked, why did he start again?

“I wanted to control somebody,” Sanchez said. “I don’t think I had any intention of hurting Diver. She put up a fight. She was taking my control away. I just wanted her to stop what she was doing, don’t fight. Just let me do what I’m doing and I’ll go home.”

THE BIKE PATH KILLER by Maki Becker and Michael Beebe. Copyright 2009 Maki Becker and Michael Beebe. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Kensington Publishing Corp., www.kensingtonbooks.com .


http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/689836.html?imw=Y

[samanthajane13]

Bike Path Killer back in the spotlight
By Phil Fairbanks
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: October 24, 2009, 1:08 PM

Altemio Sanchez preyed on women for nearly three decades, killing three and raping many more in a reign of terror that finally ended with his arrest and confession.

Now, two years later, the Bike Path Killer is back in our lives, this time as fodder for the question: What did Sheriff Timothy B. Howard do right and wrong in his quest to crack one of the biggest unsolved crimes in memory?

Howard raised the question when he aired a re-election ad touting his leadership in forming the Bike Path Killer task force, a coalition of police departments credited with tracking down and arresting Sanchez.

"I called for its formation, and I set the ground rules," Howard said during a recent interview. "I wanted to throw every possible resource at finding Sanchez."

His Democratic opponent, John Glascott, a Cheektowaga Police captain, has responded by pointing to Howard's role in the 2006 search for Joan Diver, one of Sanchez's three murder victims.

The sheriff's department came under fire when a volunteer search party discovered the body of the Clarence mother of four the day after the department scaled back its own round-the-clock search.

"He could have called in other law enforcement agencies," Glascott said of Howard. "You never should stop a search and let friends and family find the body."

At the time, Howard's right-hand man took responsibility for scaling back the search and acknowledged the bike path area where Diver was found had been searched at least twice.

"We may have missed it," Undersheriff Richard T. Donovan told a packed news conference three years ago.

Howard, who often points to Sanchez's arrest as one of his proudest achievements, took issue with Glascott's criticism of his department's handling of the search.

"The investigation never ceased," Howard said. "It was never stopped."

The sheriff's role in the Bike Path case has emerged as a campaign issue in part because of radio and Internet political ads praising and criticizing him.

A new Internet video by Marc J. Odien, founder and editor of WNYMedia.net, an online source for local news and information, lambastes Howard for his handling of the Diver search.

The ad, now widely available on YouTube and other online services, claims Howard called off the search, "less than 24 hours after Joan Diver went missing."

Odien, who was paid to build Glascott's campaign Web site, said the candidate had no role in the video.

"This is all mine," he said. "I just think the whole Diver thing was mishandled."

A.J. Baynes, Howard's campaign manager, called the ad a "blatant, desperate attempt by a losing campaign to garner votes."

"The basic facts stand that less than two months after the Sheriff took control and organized a county wide task force," Baynes said, "a criminal that terrorized our community for 20 years, who was residing in our opponents' back yard, was brought to justice."

Howard is quick to take credit for getting the inter-agency task force off the ground, but others are just as quick to question his role.

What was Howard's involvement?

A recent book on the Sanchez case — "The Bike Path Killer" by Buffalo News reporters Maki Becker and Michael Beebe — devotes an entire chapter to Howard's role in creating the task force.

"He wanted to form a task force of experienced investigators who would go over each and every rape and murder the Bike Path Rapist had committed," the book states.

The writers describe Howard as a veteran cop, a former state trooper, with an appreciation for collaborative police work and the benefits it often produces.

"This guy had been allowed to go free for too long," the book says of Sanchez, "taunting the police with his ability to strike at will, disappearing for as long as he wanted, and scaring the hell out of any young girl or woman who walked or ran alone. [Howard] wanted to throw everything at him."

The two candidates do agree on one thing: The task force worked.

The group, relying on traces of DNA found in Diver's SUV, concluded the Bike Path Killer, who had been absent for 12 years, was back. The task force also realized he was right in their midst.

Eventually, the trail led to Sanchez and, in January 2007, he was arrested. He confessed a few months later and, in August of that year, was sentenced to life in prison.


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