Major Breakthrough in Search for Bike Path Rapist
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WIVB-TV (Buffalo), Dec. 2
There has been a major breakthrough in the search for the bike path rapist. As you saw first and exclusively right here on News 4, police have uncovered new details in the case that’s gone unsolved for years. News 4’s George Richert begins our team coverage.
It’s been a cold case for years, but now police have released a new composite sketch of the bike path rapist, and announced that he has been linked by dna to a ninth attack, the 1992 murder of Mayjane Mazur, a prostitute who was raped and strangled and left along the railroad tracks on Exchange Street.
Buffalo Police Department Lt. David Mann said, “There’s no question that it’s the same man. It’s to a mathematical certainty.”
Also through a breakthrough in DNA, scientists have determined that the bike path rapist is 51 % European or Caucasian, 30 percent Native American, 13 percent Sub Saharan African, and 6 percent East Asian.
Lt. Mann said, “This information is going to be most important to someone who might already have a suspicion about an individual, who fits this.”
Detectives believe the bike path rapist struck for the first time in june of 1986, near the footbridge in Delaware Park.
A month later, he attacked a woman in the Town of Hamburg, then two years went by before his next attacks, along the railroad tracks off Hertel Avenue in Riverside in 1988 and 1989.
Then in 1990, three attacks along the Amherst bike path, one of them killing U.B. student Linda Yalem.
We now know his next known attack, number 8, was the murder of Mayjane Mazur, found along Exchange Street near downtown in the fall of ‘92, and his last known attack was back along the railroad tracks in Riverside in the fall of ‘94.
George Richert: So where do you think he’s been for the last 10 years?”
Lt. Mann: “That is the subject of endless specualtion and investigation, I mean that’s the mystery part of this, we don’t know.”
Buffalo Police Det. Sal Valvo said, “The theories are he’s in jail, he could be dead.”
But for detectives like Sal Valvo, who stands in a room full of files and charts devoted to this case, he’s hoping to put a name to this face.
Det. Valvo said, “Oh absolutely, not only do we wanna know, there’s a lotta victims and families that wanna know.”
If you have any information at all about this case, you’re asked to call the Buffalo Sex Offense Squad at 851-4495.
(Posted on December 2, 2004)