By  Seamus McGraw

November 21, 2006

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CLARENCE, N.Y (Crime Library)  —    A police task force formed in the wake of Joan Diver's brutal slaying earlier this fall, apparently at the hands of the elusive Bike Path Rapist, has been inundated with tips over the past several days. But so far, the identity of the killer, now linked to 11 attacks over more than 20 years, remains a mystery.

Authorities from the Erie County Sheriff's Department, the Amherst police and other agencies have received more than 300 tips since they declared last week that there was "irrefutable" DNA evidence linking Diver's slaying to a string of attacks ­— including two other homicides — dating to the early 1980s.

The killer, dubbed the Bike Path Rapist because he apparently snatches his victims from remote bicycle trails and rail beds in the suburban Buffalo area, has long frustrated authorities. He first surfaced, authorities now believe, in 1983, with an attack on a 13-year-old girl in Angola, and over the next decade, he struck nine more times. In two cases, his victims died. On Sept. 29, 1990, Linda Yalem, a University of Buffalo co-ed, was found slain, and two years later, Majane Mazur, a young woman with a history of drug problems, was killed.

As police probed the slayings and rapes, a pattern emerged. Authorities believe that the rapist and killer's only criteria was that his victims be alone and vulnerable. He would stalk them and attack from behind, throttling them, sometime into submission, other times to death, with a trademark rope or cord ligature.

In most of the cases, he left behind telltale samples of semen from which his DNA was culled. But according to the Buffalo News, at some point late in his career, the attacker stopped leaving semen, prompting some to speculate that he might have lost the capacity to ejaculate. Nonetheless, authorities were able to develop at least a partial profile of the man from the evidence he left behind. From his DNA, authorities were able to determine that he was predominantly Caucasian but also had some Native American ancestry, and authorities believe he was in his early 20s when the attacks began. That information, along with partial descriptions provided by the attacker's surviving victims, has been forwarded to the FBI, where experts are preparing a composite sketch. That sketch could be completed as early as today.

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Contact Seamus McGraw at seamusm@ptd.net

Seamus McGraw

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