Epilogue
The Bike Path Killer was behind bars for the rest of his life, but his long reign of terror had put fear into women, who felt they had as much a right to enjoy the peace and solitude of bike paths as men.
It was true that Altemio Sanchez would never again rape or kill, but he had changed the behavior of women in Western New York, perhaps forever.
A few days after Linda Yalems murder, as the universitytried to reassure worried students and parents, and as Western New York realized there was a serial rapist and murderer on the loose, Lois Baker, a freelance writer who worked in the universitys news bureau, wrote an opinion piece in the Buffalo News on the dilemma facing women.
Last Friday was a thrillingly beautiful fall day, Baker wrote, so instead of doing my daily run around Delaware Park, as is my custom, I decided instead to put in a few miles on the Amherst Bicycle Path. The wild flowers, I knew, would be lovely, and the change of scene would put a little extra spring in my step.
I ran alone, as also is my custom, she wrote. Running is an individual sport. That is one of its special attractions. You dont have to make dates or match schedules.
And the run turned out to be everything she thought it would be.
Mother Nature had arranged stunning bouquets of wild asters in deep purple and light lavender with goldenrod and tiny white daisies along the path. Little grasshoppers popped up from the grasses around me and I sidestepped mahogany-furred caterpillars sunning themselves on the asphalt.
She said she planned to run there again, on Saturday, September 29, 1990, but the weather wasnt quite so nice, so she ran instead in Delaware Park.
Sunday evening, I heard a young woman had been raped and murdered on the bicycle path Saturday during her daily run.
I went to bed that night, stunned, shaken, angry. Linda Yalem died in broad daylight on a public recreational trail, while minding her own business, for only one reason. She was a woman.
Baker might have added, but did not, she could have just as easily been the rapists victim.
Baker, who is married to Michael Beebe, one of this books authors, saw a man during her run who looked out of place. He was not dressed in running clothes, but was jogging slowly on the path anyway. He did not look like a runner.
As Baker approached him, something alerted her, a sense that something about him wasnt quite right. As she passed the man, she turned around and saw that he had turned too, and was staring at her.
Once she had gone as far as she had planned, she turned around on the bike path. And soon enough, here was the same man, short, swarthy-looking, she recalled, with the most prominent heavy, dark eyebrows.
This time, Baker ran a bit off the path to keep her distance. As she ran past him, she once again turned and saw him staring at her again.
She didnt think anything more of the encounter until Monday morning, when a story in the Buffalo News on Yalems murder carried a composite sketch of a man who had earlier raped a fourteen-year-old girl in Willow Ridge, and was suspected of raping a businesswoman earlier that year on the Amherst bike path.
Thats the man I saw on the bike path, Baker told her husband about her Friday run. Thats him. Id recognize those eyebrows anywhere.
She called the Amherst police, and talked to a detective, but decided, when writing her October 4 piece in the News, not to mention it.
Instead, she expressed the frustrations that women everywhere have in deciding where to run.
Instead of protecting women, our governmental leaders tell women to protect themselves. In the process, women are forced to restrict their lives yet one more notch. Be more careful, we are advised. Take more precautions. Always look over your shoulder. And especially, dont go there any more. Its too dangerous.
Women live their days looking over their shoulders. They are hostages in their own society.
So, maybe like Linda Yalem, we peer down a lovely running path and decide we dont want to be scared anymore.As her attacker stalked her from behind, maybe Linda too was telling herself she was tired looking over her shoulder.
During the interview in prison, Sanchez admitted to investigators that he was indeed on the bike path the same day Baker said she saw him.
And six years later, on September 29, 1996, the first time the Linda Yalem Memorial Run was held on the same day that Yalem died, Baker ran in the race.
After Sanchez was arrested, Bakers husband, a former running columnist for the Buffalo News, checked the race results to see if the Bike Path Killer had run the race. Three places behind Baker, the results showed, was Altemio Sanchez.
Joan Diver
Joan Diver could never have guessed that on the morning of September 29, 2006, when she set out for a brisk run on the neighborhood bike path, she would come face-to-face with an unrelenting evil that had plagued Western New York and confounded the local police for almost three decades.
The day, a Friday, had begun unremarkably for the forty-five-year-old mother of four children.
This was a normal day that started routinely, Steven Diver would describe the mornings events in a written statement he was asked to submit later that same day to detectives with the Erie County Sheriffs Office (ECSO).
That fateful morning, Joan, a nurse turned full-time homemaker, and her husband, Steven, a chemistry professorat the University at Buffalo, drank their morning coffee together in their home on Salt Road in Clarence, a well-to-do suburb east of Buffalo. As the house filled with the noisy clatter of their rousing kidsConrad, fourteen, Collin, twelve, Claudie, nine, and Carter, fourJoan and Steven discussed where to go for dinner that night. Steven also brought up the idea of buying electric toothbrushes for the kids.
Just as they always did, the three oldest children hurried off to school. Then Steven Diver said good-bye to his wife before heading to campus at about 7:50 A.M. An hour later, Joan hopped into her blue Ford Explorer, strapped little Carter into his booster seat, and took him to his preschool.
With her husband off at work and all four children at school, Joan Diver had three free hours to herself that Friday morning. And, as she often did with any of her rare, spare time, she prepared to go for a good, hard run.
Joan worked hard to stay fit and healthy. At five-five, she weighed a trim, but certainly not unhealthy, 140 pounds. She was a vegetarian. Her exercise of choice was running, particularly because it was a chance to be outdoors, which she loved. With four children and a household to look after, Joan had few precious moments to herself like this. That made the Clarence bike path a perfect place for Joan.
The path was just a two-minute drive from her house. She had two routes on the path: one that started at Saw Mill Road heading west and the other just down her street on Salt Road, which headed east. There was a small parking lot convenientlylocated next to the path where it intersected with Salt Road. Joan liked to leave her car there while she ran, allowingher to increase her exercise time.
