After 16 years, a chilling realization: ‘He’s back’
Published: June 01, 2009, 12:30 am
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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.
Tuesday: Altemio Sanchez tells detectives why he raped and killed.
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