On January 13, 2007, Altemio Sanchez had dinner at Solé, a Latin American restaurant in Amherst, New York. When he left, members of the Bike Path Task Force collected the silverware, the glass and the napkin he had used and took them to the Erie County forensic laboratory. The DNA on them matched the DNA left by the man who had raped and strangled Linda Yalem on a bike path in 1990. Two days later, on January 15, the task force arrested Sanchez and charged him with the murders of Yalem, Majane Mazur and Joan Diver. Police said his DNA matched evidence from eight crime scenes.
Around Buffalo he had been known for years only as the Bike Path Rapist, and later the Bike Path Killer, because so many of the attacks took place near secluded bike paths. The three women he killed were attacked sixteen years apart to the day at either end. Linda Yalem, a University at Buffalo sophomore studying communications who was training for the New York City Marathon, was raped and killed on the Ellicott Creek Bike Path on September 29, 1990. Majane Mazur, thirty-two, who had worked as a prostitute, was murdered in November 1992 near the Amtrak line in downtown Buffalo. Joan Diver, forty-five, a nurse, a mother of four and the wife of a University at Buffalo chemistry professor, was strangled on September 29, 2006; her body was found on a bike path in Newstead on October 1. She was the only one of his known victims who was not raped, and investigators believed she died during the strangling before he could.
He was born on January 19, 1958, in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico (the state's prison records give San Juan). His mother had tried to end the pregnancy with an overdose of pills, and after she discovered his father's affair she moved with Altemio to Florida when he was two. He lived in Miami and later in North Collins, New York. As an adult he was a machinist who worked afternoon and night shifts at the former American Brass plant on Military Road, near Kenmore. He married Kathleen in 1980, and they lived in the Cleveland Hill neighborhood of Cheektowaga with their two sons. He coached his boys' elementary school basketball team and their Little League team, played golf and gardened, and some neighbors called him Uncle Al. He had even registered to run in the Linda Yalem Safety Run, the annual race at the University at Buffalo held in memory of the woman he had killed.
The attacks had followed a pattern for a long time. He strangled women with a rope or cord and later with a ligature, wire or garrote, and beat and raped them. As early as 1992 police had tied the Yalem killer's DNA to attacks on six other women in the area, one of them in Delaware Park, and an FBI profiler suggested the killer was Hispanic and used prostitutes. Sanchez was arrested for soliciting prostitution in 1991 and in 1999, once offering an undercover officer twenty-five dollars, and was fined seventy-five. Denise Foster was seventeen when he raped her near railroad tracks in Buffalo and strangled her with a ligature; she survived with the scars. The case could have been broken in 1981. Two days after a rape that year, the victim saw her attacker driving out of a shopping center parking lot and took down his license plate. The car belonged to Wilfredo Sanchez Caraballo, who had an alibi, and the lead was dropped. Twenty-five years later Caraballo told the task force that he had not been driving the car that day. He had lent it to his nephew, Altemio.
Another man had paid for some of those crimes. In 1985 Anthony Capozzi, a Buffalo man with schizophrenia who resembled Sanchez, was convicted of two of the bike path rapes. He maintained his innocence and was denied parole for more than two decades. After Sanchez's arrest investigators went looking for the evidence in Capozzi's case; a subpoena that asked for Capozzi's DNA instead of the victims' samples came back empty, and only when it was reissued were the samples found. They matched Sanchez. Capozzi was freed in March 2007 after twenty-two years in prison, and in June 2010 New York settled his wrongful-conviction lawsuit for $4.25 million.
On May 17, 2007, Sanchez surprised the court by pleading guilty to all three murders, mumbling his admissions through tears. His lawyer, Andrew C. LoTempio, spoke of a troubled childhood and a traumatic experience at twelve and of a deep resentment toward women, while insisting he was not making excuses. On August 15, 2007, Justice Christopher J. Burns sentenced him to seventy-five years to life. "I know I'm going to be spending life behind bars, never to see the streets again," Sanchez said. "But I committed, I did these crimes. And I should pay for these crimes." Most of the rapes attributed to him, by as many as twenty women, could not be prosecuted because New York's statute of limitations had run; the state later changed the law, but not retroactively. Police also looked at him in the unsolved 1985 murder of Katherine Herold, fifteen, found on CSX tracks in Kenmore near where he worked. The district attorney said there was no evidence with which to charge him.
He served most of his sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility and was later held at Wende in Alden. On September 22, 2023, he was found unresponsive in his cell with a cut to his arm and was taken to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital in Amherst, where he died that day at sixty-five. The New York State Commission of Correction's final report, issued on December 18, 2024, found that he died of hemorrhagic complications from an incised wound and that the manner of death was suicide.