On the Trail of the Bike Path Rapist

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Speaker 1 Not far from the tourist shops that ring the thundering falls is a long, quiet path that snakes through the city of good neighbors. Bucolic, green, sweet, and sometimes deadly.

Speaker 2 And I just remember there being a sense of fear.

Speaker 1 Once there was a young family in Buffalo, New York, a transplanted chemistry professor named Stephen Diver, his four children, and their mother, his wife, Joan Diver.

Speaker 3 She'd been a runner for a long time and she was just trying to stay in shape.

Speaker 4 Well, and she said it's a great stress reliever, something something you do for yourself, something you do to give you a better perspective on things.

Speaker 1 Her older sisters remembered growing up with her, the baby of the family, back in Salt Lake City.

Speaker 4 She had a very strong personality. She knew what she wanted and she went after it.

Speaker 1 And what Joan Diver wanted on a fine September morning in the year 2006 was to see the children off to school, drop the youngest one at daycare, and drive down to her favorite run, the long path that winds to Clarence, one of the safest towns in America.

Speaker 1 The bike path, they call it.

Speaker 4 I had asked her, is it a safe place? And she says, oh, it's really safe. People go there all the time.
She says, there's a wooded area. I don't go up to the wooded area.

Speaker 4 I always turn around and come back. We talked about it.
Someone tried to grab us, what would happen? And she says, oh, I'd give him a fight.

Speaker 5 And I says, oh, I would too.

Speaker 4 And I looked at her, I says, but what about your little kids? And she just said, well, Steve would have to take care of them. And we laughed it off.

Speaker 1 that was the last time i'd spoke to her in person september 29th the day joan diver disappeared it was later in the day when stephen diver learned joan had not picked up their son from daycare he called 911 hi i'm calling because um my wife didn't show up to pick up my child at preschool and i'm concerned that she might be at home and she might be incapacitated somehow your name sir my name is stephen diver i'm her husband and then he called again when he realized where his wife had gone.

Speaker 6 Buffalo Police, 911. I called before about my wife being in the bike path, and she is somehow out there.
Oh, she hasn't returned? She hasn't returned.

Speaker 6 Okay, but she's probably injured. And I saw her vehicle at the bike path.
And we're going to drive out on the bike path and find her because she's out there.

Speaker 1 Stephen Diver told the deputies that he'd searched all up and down the bike path, went far longer than the usual two and a half miles his wife usually ran. In fact, he said he saw her SUV,

Speaker 1 a full bottle of water on the console at the entrance to the bike path.

Speaker 1 Which was strange because when they went back to look for the car, it wasn't there. They found it three miles away.
Yet Joan's husband claimed up and down that he didn't move it.

Speaker 7 Dozens of law enforcement officers are combing the Clarence bike path tonight looking for a missing mother.

Speaker 5 It's been nearly 30 hours since the husband.

Speaker 7 Professor,

Speaker 1 especially while they're talking about the money. The news of the mysterious disappearance of a middle-class professor's wife, a mother of four, was no small thing in Buffalo.

Speaker 10 A very big deal, and as the search commenced.

Speaker 1 Sheriff's deputies beat the bushes up and down the eight-mile stretch of the bike path. They scoured the area with ATVs and search dogs, but they could not find a trace of Joan Diver.

Speaker 10 And we really didn't know.

Speaker 1 Whether she was alive or dead.

Speaker 10 We had no idea.

Speaker 1 And so the search was called off. She wasn't to be found.
But of course, she was.

Speaker 5 Two days after she went missing, a mother of four from Clarence has been found dead.

Speaker 1 A volunteer had joined a search party organized by Joan's husband. The volunteer called out the alert.
He'd found the body.

Speaker 1 Alan Rosensky, then a detective with the Erie County Sheriff's Office, arrived soon after.

Speaker 10 She was about 70 or 80 feet from the bike path and another 20 feet into the brush.

Speaker 1 Had she been strangled? Is that what it happened? That's correct.

Speaker 10 Yes, she was.

Speaker 1 But there was something significant, a potential clue, in what was not done by the murderer.

Speaker 10 The manner in which she was clothed,

Speaker 10 she had not been raped.

Speaker 1 In fact, there was no trace of DNA evidence found on her body.

Speaker 1 Nothing to indicate her attacker. The next step seemed obvious.
Since it wasn't a sex-related killing, investigators started looking at the people closest to Joan Diver.

Speaker 1 How cooperative was the husband?

Speaker 10 Well, it was not extremely cooperative at all.

Speaker 1 But, you know, when people don't cooperate, quite often that raises suspicion.

Speaker 10 That's correct. And ultimately,

Speaker 10 his response to this whole thing was a little different than I'm accustomed to.

Speaker 1 Why had Joan's SUV been moved? Apparently, after her death. What did her husband, Stephen, know? And why wasn't he cooperating?

Speaker 1 The investigator's suspicions soon leaked into the press. Headlines questioned Stephen's culpability.

Speaker 1 92% of cases where a woman is killed, it turns out that it's a male that she knew.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 3 And a lot of families don't know, you know, what's going on within marriages and things, and you find out later that that could be the case.

Speaker 3 We certainly didn't think so, and we love Steve and the family.

Speaker 1 So when this notion that hit the public that maybe you should look at Steve, it just seemed to you, what, ludicrous?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we didn't think that was right.

Speaker 1 But then the investigation seemed to stall. And far away in Salt Lake City, Joan's family waited for news and waited.

Speaker 3 What was rather hopeless at first, too, is they just had no clues on what had happened. She was just there and they didn't know.
Nobody had seen anything.

Speaker 3 They didn't have anything to go on, you know, and it was just a terrible feeling.

Speaker 1 Then it was October and an early storm blanketed Buffalo under two feet of snow. The hope of finding Joan Diver's killer seemed to be buried too.

Speaker 1 There was just one thing that all along had bothered Detective Ruzansky. Something about the way Joan was killed.

Speaker 10 Double ligature marks around her neck.

Speaker 1 It got a feeling going in his gut. Reminded him, eerily, of an old case that had haunted Buffalo for more than 20 years.
The bike path rapist. A man tied to nine rapes, including two murders.

Speaker 14 22-year-old Linda Yellum, a UB student, was sexually attacked and strangled.

Speaker 1 But it couldn't be. After all, Joan Diver had not been raped.
And besides, the last they'd heard of him was way back in 1994. The case had never been solved.

Speaker 1 The man was probably dead by now or in jail.

Speaker 10 There were similarities to the bike path rapist, but we were not absolutely sure at the time whether it was a copycat or was it just another homicide?

Speaker 1 It was November, six weeks after Jones' murder, when a strange DNA result came in.

Speaker 1 It came from a spot, a speck, a whiff of something human swabbed from the steering wheel of Jones' SUV, three miles away from where her body was found.

Speaker 1 Someone had been in there, and that someone was not Stephen Diver.

Speaker 15 Somewhat shocking information is that this case is tied to other known cases.

Speaker 8 The Joan Diver murder tied by DNA evidence to the bike path rapist.

Speaker 1 The new evidence cleared Stephen Diver, of course, but more astonishing was where that microscopic piece of DNA would lead.

Speaker 1 Its powers of revelation even then stirring unseen fates in a prison cell far away. But not yet.
Fates have a way of brewing for a a while.

Speaker 1 For the moment, what jumped out hard and clear was something truly morbid. Joan Diver had been killed on someone's anniversary.

Speaker 10 It was the date of the Linda Yellen death, which was in Amherst back in the 90s.

Speaker 1 After 12 years of hibernation, was Buffalo's bike pass rapist announcing his return?

Speaker 1 Buffalo was a giant once whose rail system, the second biggest in the world, hauled steel one way, finished goods back again.

Speaker 1 But times change, promise fades. Buffalo's railways languished and became, in modest resurrection, bike paths.

Speaker 1 Miles and miles of them, winding from the city through places like Delaware Park and Clarence and safe, secure Amherst. Something's happened on this bike path.

Speaker 1 Now haunted by a man they called the bike path rapist.

Speaker 1 And now like some almost forgotten ghost after a 12-year absence, he was back.

Speaker 5 Authorities call the similarities haunting.

Speaker 1 Dr. Charles Ewing is a forensic psychologist at the University of Buffalo.
He consulted campus police in 1990. when the bike path rapist killed for the first time.

Speaker 1 And now, said Ewing.

Speaker 17 I believe it was a way of saying to the police, it's me, I'm back, you still haven't caught me.

Speaker 1 So now the old failed investigation coughed back to life, and the cops reopened the frustrating old file that puzzled them for more than 20 years.

Speaker 1 They had the assailant's DNA, yes, but he was still out there, lurking in the paths.

Speaker 15 No one's going to use the bike paths for a long time.

Speaker 1 In Buffalo, there is a statue of David. And if this story is true, it was cast as a direct copy of the original by Michelangelo.
The bike path runs right past it.

Speaker 1 The highway just beyond that is a very public place.

Speaker 1 And yet that is where, more than 20 years before he killed Joan Diver, police believed the bike path rapist struck for the first time.

Speaker 2 The 44-year-old woman who was jogging, raped, and strangled, and strangled in such a way that almost every blood vessel in her eyes was burst, horrifically strangled, and left on the path.

Speaker 1 Remarkably, that first rape victim in 1986 survived, as they all did at first. All of the women attacked in the morning in broad daylight.

Speaker 2 Victim number two was a 17-year-old girl. She was raped and strangled as well with the double ligature.

Speaker 1 Lisa Redmond, then a detective, was all too familiar with the bike path rapist resume from her work at the Buffalo Police Sex Offense Unit.

Speaker 2 The next victim was a young girl on the railroad tracks in Buffalo, raped and strangled. The next victim was also in Buffalo.
It was another young girl on the same railroad tracks.

Speaker 1 And there were more survivors to find.

Speaker 18 He told me to get down on the passenger side of the floor.

Speaker 1 Denise Foster still carried ligature scars on her neck when we spoke with her almost 20 years later.

Speaker 18 Put the rope around my neck and just held it

Speaker 18 and he told me if I moved or if I screamed he would pull it tighter.

Speaker 1 The rapist took her down to a wooded creekside, forced her down on a rock, stripped off her clothes.

Speaker 18 And that's when he raped me and

Speaker 19 he strangled me and just left me there.

Speaker 1 Remember it getting tighter.

Speaker 20 I blacked out and I was unconscious.

Speaker 1 When she regained consciousness, she says she stumbled naked into the road where a neighbor saw her and called police.

Speaker 20 He left me for dead because he didn't want me to identify him.

Speaker 1 Six rape victims survived. And then on September 29th, 1990, the violence escalated.
The bike path rapist became a killer.

Speaker 16 Linda Yalam's body was found yesterday along the Ellicood Creek bike path in Amherst. The 22-year-old UB sophomore had been training for a marathon.

Speaker 1 The bike path rapist killed killed again in 1992, 29-year-old Mae Jane Mazer, a prostitute, her body discarded beside the railroad track.

Speaker 1 In 1994, he struck again, raping a 14-year-old on her way to school, raising the bike path rapist toll then to nine rapes, including two murders. And then, he simply stopped.

Speaker 1 disappeared until 2006 when he killed Joan Diver on the anniversary of his first murder.

Speaker 8 Ironically, her disappearance and death came 16 years to the day Linda Yalem was killed on the Amherst bike path.

Speaker 1 Now there was a new urgency to solve the 20-year-old case.

Speaker 8 Police say they will dedicate a team to hunting down the rapist and killer.

Speaker 1 So for the first time ever, four police departments, the Buffalo Police, the Amherst Police, the State Police, and the County Sheriff, joined in a special task force to find the man now tied to 10 attacks, including three murders that spanned more than two decades.

Speaker 1 The public demanded it. And who knew if the killer would strike again?

Speaker 12 We started going backwards and looking at cases that happened prior to the diver homicide.

Speaker 1 Dennis Delano was a cold case specialist with the Buffalo Police Department at the time. The detective had a bit of an attitude.

Speaker 12 If I have to turn over every rock we can,

Speaker 12 we're going to exhaust all possibilities to get at the

Speaker 1 But every task force member knew this.

Speaker 12 That the diaper homicide was linked to the other crimes. If we solve that crime, you have to solve the rest.

Speaker 1 For years, law enforcement had known that DNA evidence from seven rapes and now three murders was left by one man. But who?

Speaker 1 FBI profilers said the bike path rapist most likely worked at night. And what investigators now knew from modern DNA analysis was that the killer was of Hispanic origin.

Speaker 1 But what struck Delano was his M.O.,

Speaker 1 the distinctive signature he left.

Speaker 12 All of them had double ligature marks on their neck. A lot of them were told to put an item of clothing over their face and eyes.

Speaker 1 Then, as detectives worked through the yellowed old files, Delano came across something very strange, bizarre.

Speaker 1 A completely different file of rape cases, which occurred in the same place by the Statue of David, a few years before the first known attack by the bike path rapist.

Speaker 12 We wound up making a spreadsheet of all of the crimes. They were all basically identical.

Speaker 12 The only difference that we could find was that a gun was used or a knife in the first set of crimes and a ligature was used from 1986 to 2006.

Speaker 1 But here's what made that case so strange. Somebody else was convicted of the earlier crimes near the Statue of David.

Speaker 1 A young man named Anthony Capozzi. Though he wouldn't be so young anymore, he'd already been in prison for over two decades.

Speaker 1 And yet, when Delano and the others compared the rapists' crimes with those of Capozzi, it made the hair stand up on the back of their necks.

Speaker 12 A lot of the mannerisms that the perpetrator was doing were all identical in all of the crimes.

Speaker 1 What sort of mannerisms?

Speaker 12 When he was leaving, he told them to wait a certain amount of time.

Speaker 12 Give me 20 minutes to get away. Give me 10 minutes to

Speaker 12 leave.

Speaker 1 Give me five minutes. Could there have been two rapists with a virtually identical M.O.
on Buffalo's bike path? Had one taken over in perfect imitation of the psychopathic crimes of the other?

Speaker 12 It was very uncanny the way

Speaker 12 they all just seemed to match.

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Speaker 8 The Joan Diver murder tied by DNA evidence to the bike path rapist.

Speaker 1 The return of a ghost in one of the safest towns in America reignited a cold case that had haunted Erie County for more than two decades.

Speaker 15 And if he's been able to self-control himself for 12 years before the next crime, it's somebody that's very cautious.

Speaker 1 After 12 years of dormancy, the bike path rapist was back.

Speaker 16 We will not stop until we have an arrest in this case.

Speaker 1 But now a task force desperate to find the bike path rapist discovered in some of its musty old case files something very strange. A quite separate case of rape back in the mid-80s.

Speaker 1 In this very same place, a woman jogging past the statue of David.

Speaker 9 When suddenly a man came up behind her, put a gun to her head, dragged her down into the bushes, and raped her.

Speaker 1 Scott Brown was a reporter who covered the story. Three rapes all around the same area.
And the arrest of the apparent rapist, a young man named Anthony Capozzi.

Speaker 1 And I think the community kind of let out a sigh of relief. Capozzi was 29, a schizophrenic who lived at home, one of the five children of Mary and Albert Capozzi, who spoke with us in 2007.

Speaker 1 Anthony was asleep, said Barry, when the police came to get him.

Speaker 2 He said, Ma, don't worry, I'll be back. Because he figured he didn't do anything, you know, that he'll be back.

Speaker 1 Young Capozzi was charged with three counts of rape, brutal attacks with a knife and a gun.

Speaker 1 The prosecutor was able to put together a very solid case with the aid of one of the victims who identified Capozi from a photo lineup.

Speaker 1 Capozi was convicted of two of the rapes, sentenced to 35 years in prison. And the prosecutor personally thanked the eyewitness for her courage in coming forward.

Speaker 19 I think the case shows that if you're the victim of a violent crime, particularly rape, that if you come into court and you testify, that the jurors will do the right thing.

Speaker 1 The victim thought so too.

Speaker 22 If enough women can get up there and say this has happened, then maybe rape and

Speaker 22 sodomy and all these horrible crimes will become a thing of the past.

Speaker 1 And the Capozzi family watched as the authorities took Anthony off to prison. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Every day,

Speaker 1 every night when you go to bed, You don't think of anything else. You think of what's happened to your family.

Speaker 1 every day mary prayed every week albert and mary drove to whatever prison anthony was being kept in for 22 years

Speaker 1 five times he came up for parole five times was denied you know they did offer him a chance to get out

Speaker 1 all he had to do was confess right

Speaker 1 he wouldn't do that younger brother said to him anthony tell them you did it because they'll get you out earlier he said hell,

Speaker 2 why should I tell them when I didn't do it?

Speaker 1 And now, after 22 years, members of a task force looking for the bike path rapist and killer found themselves staring at the Capozzi case with brand new eyes.

Speaker 12 The truth didn't seem to match the circumstances. It just didn't jive.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 Because after Capozi went to prison, the rapes continued. These new ones couldn't have been him, yet they occurred in the same place, same M.O.

Speaker 2 horrifically strangled and left on the path.

Speaker 1 The detective was convinced it had to come back to that little area right around the statue of David. In fact, to that bit of brush right on the side of the bike path.

Speaker 1 Supposedly, they were two separate cases, but why hadn't anybody noticed that the location of the crime was exactly the same, that the method used was virtually identical?

Speaker 1 These crimes had to be the work of one man.

Speaker 12 As investigators, you look for

Speaker 12 the truth, not necessarily the perpetrator. You're looking for exactly what happened.
What is the truth of that situation, that crime?

Speaker 12 And that leads you to the perpetrator. Now, once you know the truth, you can pretty much figure out who did what, when.

Speaker 12 In this case, nothing seemed to add up.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 we kept going over and over it again, and it just kept coming up the same way. There's something wrong here.
And

Speaker 12 again, as an investigator, if the pieces don't fit, you just keep investigating. And that's what you do until they do fit.

Speaker 1 Maybe the trial transcript would offer some solid evidence that those rapes attributed to Capozi were somehow different than the others. But...

Speaker 12 There was no other evidence linking him to those crimes other than eyewitness identification.

Speaker 1 Was it possible Capozi was misidentified by a rape victim that he was sent to prison for crimes committed by somebody else?

Speaker 10 That's when we took a ride out the Attica Correctional Facility to interview him. It didn't take long to talk to him, to know he wasn't the type of person that could do heinous crimes.

Speaker 1 Their job was to catch a rapist and killer, Joan Diver's killer, not to fret about an old, resolved case. Still, they put together what they learned about Capozi.
and took it to the district attorney.

Speaker 1 In my experience, if you go to a prosecutor and say, I think you got an innocent man in jail, they're not likely to react very positively to that. They didn't in this case either.

Speaker 1 Frank Clark was the district attorney then.

Speaker 1 He told the detectives there wasn't much his office could do.

Speaker 24 The law requires hard evidence. The statute is very, very clear as to what's required in order to overturn a jury verdict.

Speaker 1 So detectives followed their instincts.

Speaker 1 Perhaps rape kits, slides of evidence from the Capozzi case stored in the vaults of the medical center, would have traces of DNA, and that might exonerate Capozzi.

Speaker 2 And we had hoped the Ari County's Medical Center had some slides, and we're told there was no such thing.

Speaker 1 No DNA, no proof of anything. And Anthony Capozzi stayed in prison.

Speaker 12 It wasn't a good feeling.

Speaker 1 It's sickening. Meanwhile, in the search for the bike path rapist, detectives seemed to be stymied.

Speaker 2 Now we have

Speaker 2 a serial killer rapist out there and an innocent man in jail. So all of of a sudden we found ourselves in the middle of two investigations.

Speaker 1 And that's about the time they discovered in the old Capozi file a clue.

Speaker 10 And I said, this is our guy.

Speaker 1 In the months after Joan Diver was murdered by Buffalo's bike path rapist, the task force Manhunt produced two bizarre discoveries in a case file that had been gathering dust for more than 20 years.

Speaker 1 One, the possibility that Anthony Capozzi, a convicted rapist, was an innocent man. And two, a clue buried in the old Capozzi file that had never quite been tracked down.

Speaker 10 It was involving a rape many years ago and a rape victim and possibly

Speaker 10 it was in this Anthony Capozzi file because possibly they suspected Anthony Capozzi of that rape.

Speaker 1 When did that rape occur?

Speaker 10 1981.

Speaker 1 And what was the the clue tucked away in the file? A license number from the back of a car given to police by a woman who reported she'd been raped by the car's driver.

Speaker 12 We came across the fact that the victim had spotted her attacker two or three days after the attack. She was pretty sure at the time it was her attacker.

Speaker 1 She took down the license number. At the time, way back in 1981, the owner of the car had an alibi.

Speaker 1 But now, when detectives checked again, it turned out the owner had been hiding a guilty secret all those years.

Speaker 1 He wasn't in the car, but someone he knew was.

Speaker 10 And he said, Detective, you're looking for me. I said, yes, I am.
He says, is this about something that happened many years ago? Yes, and I didn't even pry. He supplied.

Speaker 10 He goes, my nephew, Altimio Sanchez, was driving the vehicle.

Speaker 1 Sanchez. Remember, DNA had revealed the bike path rapist was most likely of Hispanic heritage.
So, could this Sanchez be the man they were searching for? First, some investigative grunt work.

Speaker 1 The mistake now would be disastrous.

Speaker 12 We took Hispanic names that were previously investigated, narrowed those down through state police resources, which ones were arrested prior for prostitution, because FBI did a profile years ago and said that most likely the suspect frequents prostitutes.

Speaker 1 There were 84 names on the list. And one of them was Eltimio Sanchez.

Speaker 10 And I said, this is our guy.

Speaker 1 Was he? This El Timio Sanchez had been arrested twice in Buffalo for soliciting prostitutes, but that was years and years ago.

Speaker 1 Now, detectives decided not to interview Sanchez unless they could find hard evidence to connect him to the rapes in the bike path.

Speaker 10 Well, we decided we were going to surveil El Timio Sanchez and get a DNA sample from him because we decided we'd powwowed amongst all of us and said, you know, if we knock on his door and say, hey, can we have a DNA sample?

Speaker 10 He's going to say, see you later. Goodbye.
And now he's going to be looking over his shoulder.

Speaker 1 It was a Saturday night when they got their chance. Sanchez took his wife out on a date to a restaurant.
That was the moment to find that hard evidence, DNA evidence.

Speaker 1 Investigators asked the waiters at the restaurant not to touch the couple's glasses when they left.

Speaker 10 He left a glass and a napkin.

Speaker 1 But would the glass or napkin yield enough DNA for some kind of identification? Investigators rushed the glass and the napkin to the forensics lab. And then the wait began.

Speaker 2 So now everyone's at the office. All the chiefs are there.
All the entire task force. Everyone from Amherst, the state police, the sheriff's department.
It was like waiting for a baby to be born.

Speaker 2 We were literally hovered around the phone.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it was him.

Speaker 2 And now we all know who this guy is.

Speaker 2 Now we got to figure out what to do.

Speaker 1 The next morning was January 15th, 2007. Altemio Sanchez clocked out after his night shift, got in his car, and drove away.
Squad cars pulled in beside him.

Speaker 1 And Sanchez just stopped by the side of the road. He did not resist.

Speaker 14 It's the break that law enforcement and people living around the Clarence Bike Path have been waiting for.

Speaker 1 The official announcement was, perhaps understandably, colorful.

Speaker 15 The monster that's been known as the bike path rapist has been taken into custody.

Speaker 1 And then gradually out came a horrific surprise. The DNA linked Sanchez to crimes beginning years before anyone had even heard of the bike path rapist.

Speaker 1 Beginning, in fact, years before Anthony Capozzi, still sitting in prison, was convicted of two of those very rapes.

Speaker 1 Sanchez, 49 years old, was charged initially with two counts of murder in the second degree. He pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 1 And in the hours and days after his arrest, all of Buffalo watched, both horrified and astonished, as they learned about Altimio Sanchez. Who really was he?

Speaker 1 Was it actually possible a man of his standing and reputation could have committed such awful crimes?

Speaker 15 A great many people in Western New York can relax. The bike path rapist has been taken into custody.
This predator is off the street.

Speaker 1 In the city of Good Neighbors, it turned out the suspected bike path rapist and killer was just that, a good neighbor, living among them. He is a fantastic guy.

Speaker 2 Gosh, Balcony.

Speaker 25 The most wonderful family.

Speaker 25 We just love them dearly. They have just been the best neighbors anybody could want.

Speaker 25 Beautiful wife, beautiful children, two boys, and Al has always just been so gracious and kind.

Speaker 1 It was simply beyond imagining. Altimio Sanchez, accused of raping and killing women for decades, was a regular guy who lived a quiet, middle-class life in the Buffalo suburb.

Speaker 4 I never would imagine the bike path rapist murderer was a house away.

Speaker 1 49-year-old Eltimio Sanchez had owned his own house for years. He'd held also for many years a steady, respectable job working the night shift at a brass factory.

Speaker 2 Like any family on any suburban street. He was always the first one that signed up for the charity things and volunteered to help out.

Speaker 1 Did you have anybody talked at all?

Speaker 1 Sanchez's family said police. His wife of 25 years had no idea, not a clue, until the headlines and news reports brought their whole world crashing down.
She had no suspicion, nothing?

Speaker 2 No. She was absolutely dumbfounded.
They were going on vacations. Their sons were both grown up.
They were spending more time together.

Speaker 7 She seemed very

Speaker 1 normal.

Speaker 1 How could it be?

Speaker 1 The man finally arrested after more than 20 years of brutal attacks, rapes, murders, the ugliest of human behaviors, turned out to be a married church-going dad, a little league coach, some of whose players called him with affection Uncle Al.

Speaker 17 The better he acted, the more model a citizen he was, the less likely it was that he would ever get caught.

Speaker 1 Forensic psychologist Charles Ewing was among the few who were not surprised.

Speaker 17 They don't wear signs, I'm a killer. Most of them are fairly ordinary people.

Speaker 1 As investigators searched for information to back up the DNA evidence, they were astonished to discover that in the evening of the very day he allegedly murdered Joan Diber, Sanchez was attending a party with his wife.

Speaker 17 That's the kind of person we're dealing with when we talk about a psychopath, somebody who can commit a crime like this, and hours later

Speaker 17 it's miles and miles away. It's as if it never happened.

Speaker 1 When the investigators interviewed Sanchez, they were confronted, they said, by a wall of self-control and denial.

Speaker 10 He was dancing a lot.

Speaker 10 I think he was probably preparing this for years.

Speaker 1 And he didn't crack.

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 10 He did not crack.

Speaker 1 But with that solid DNA evidence linking Sanchez to those seven rape cases and three murders, there was little chance he was going to walk. Then District Attorney Frank Clark told us in 2007.

Speaker 24 In the public's eye, when you have this DNA, which takes the probabilities to the tens of billions, I mean, the public just assumes DNA, that him guilty, case over.

Speaker 1 And the citizens of Buffalo and the suburbs of western New York let out a collective sigh of relief, or at least almost all of them did. Denise Foster saw it on TV.

Speaker 20 The news showed his face, I just

Speaker 18 like went into stone.

Speaker 18 I knew it was him.

Speaker 1 And the torment flooded right back. How'd you know?

Speaker 18 I remember the face.

Speaker 1 Is that clear?

Speaker 17 Yes.

Speaker 1 Did it bring it all back to you?

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 1 When we spoke to her 22 years later, Denise told us the terror still lingered. The rock, the rape, the strangulation, the blackout, the naked stumbling for help, it hadn't gone away.

Speaker 1 Even the physical scars were still there around her neck.

Speaker 18 I've had nightmares.

Speaker 1 About this place. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What does it seem to you now?

Speaker 18 It's still the same place, but

Speaker 18 there's nothing that can happen to me here no more.

Speaker 1 As the investigation continued, the task force discovered that Denise was just one of many in a growing list of casualties, more victims than anybody had suspected.

Speaker 1 Beginning, investigators now believed in the late 70s.

Speaker 1 But as they put together their case for the trial of El Temio Sanchez, a second obsession gripped members of the task force.

Speaker 1 Their belief that an innocent man, Anthony Caposi, had been wrongly convicted of two of the rapists' crimes.

Speaker 12 I knew he was innocent and he was in jail. And I felt that we had enough circumstantial evidence to create a doubt that he was guilty.

Speaker 1 That belief was not shared, however, by the DA.

Speaker 24 I don't have any quantitative proof like DNA where we can look at it and make a determination.

Speaker 12 We found out that it's a lot more difficult getting somebody out of jail than it is putting them in jail.

Speaker 1 But Delano, as we said, has a bit of an attitude. Since he couldn't get anywhere with the DA.

Speaker 7 Channel 2-does at 6.

Speaker 1 He went public and spoke with reporter Scott Brown.

Speaker 12 In my mind, one person committed all attacks. A lot of the verbiage, which I can't really get into, was similar in most of the cases.

Speaker 1 He's like Andy Sipowitz, and he wouldn't let go of this thing. Caposi's sister Pam Gunther saw Delano's appeal on TV.

Speaker 19 I was shaking.

Speaker 19 I said, I cannot believe this. This is an angel.

Speaker 1 She called her parents Anthony's parents. You didn't know what was happening.
No, didn't know. She said, Mom, what would you like? The best thing you could have.

Speaker 2 We said, Anthony, naturally.

Speaker 1 And sure enough, the DA was still unmoved by Delano's arguments.

Speaker 1 Without some concrete evidence to show his innocence, something like DNA, Anthony Capozzi, already in prison 22 years, would stay right where he was.

Speaker 1 And try as they might, detectives on the task force just couldn't find the hard evidence that could undo what they now firmly believed was a gross miscarriage of justice.

Speaker 1 So, as the trial of El Timio Sanchez approached, they wondered, would two people wind up in prison for the very same crimes I mean it's that's not right though it's always been my understanding that if something's not right you try and correct it not just overlooking it but even Delena was going to be shocked by the impending discovery

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Speaker 1 In the summer of 2007, after more than 20 years, Buffalo celebrated the revival of its bike pass. But Altimio Sanchez had already decided not to wait for his day in court.

Speaker 1 The number of rapes attached to his name had mounted to 15, along with three murders, and investigators had discovered something truly creepy.

Speaker 1 On the roster of the runners, in a race commemorating the victim of the bike path rapist's first murder, was the name Altimio Sanchez, wearing bib number six seven nine.

Speaker 1 It was on that last anniversary of that very same murder that the rapists spent the morning killing Joan Diver and spent the evening at a party.

Speaker 17 This is somebody who has to find ways of reliving the thrill of the kill. And the ultimate way, of course, is do it again and do it again on the same date.

Speaker 1 In May 2007, four months after his arrest, Eltimio Sanchez, without explanation, elected to plead guilty to three counts of second-degree murder.

Speaker 1 The statute of limitations had run out on the rape cases.

Speaker 1 His wife attended his court hearings, visited him in jail, and, according to sources, was unable to get her husband to tell her what he did or why.

Speaker 1 But that isn't the whole story, of course. What about Anthony Caposi in prison 22 years for supposedly committing two rapes?

Speaker 12 The district attorney's office is telling us that we need hard evidence to free Anthony Caposi from prison, even though we knew beyond a shadow of doubt in our hearts that he was innocent.

Speaker 1 Stuck at injustice.

Speaker 1 And then, suddenly, there was news. The Erie County Medical Center, after years of misinformation, officials revealed a remarkable discovery.

Speaker 1 The rape kits, the swabs, the slides of evidence collected in the Capozzi case were there after all.

Speaker 1 There was DNA.

Speaker 1 And the test revealed? The rapist was not Anthony Capozzi. It was Eltimio Sanchez.

Speaker 1 And that's how it came to be that on a fine spring morning, Mary and Albert Caposi, after 22 years, gathered their family around them and phoned their son in prison to tell him.

Speaker 13 You're free, Aunt.

Speaker 8 You're free.

Speaker 22 They realize that you didn't do any of those things, Aunt.

Speaker 2 You're free.

Speaker 21 They made a mistake.

Speaker 22 They made a mistake.

Speaker 1 A miracle. It was really a miracle.

Speaker 1 Anthony was 29 when they took his freedom away.

Speaker 2 He said, Ma, don't worry, I'll be back. Because he figured he didn't do anything, you know, that he'll be back.

Speaker 2 But he came back 22 years later.

Speaker 1 In all those years in prison, he continued to suffer from schizophrenia. So he was released to a psychiatric center to get help to adjust to an independent life.

Speaker 2 The family invited us to the

Speaker 2 psych center where he was released to after jail. And when we saw Anthony Caposi for the first time as a free man,

Speaker 2 there were no words. There were no words.

Speaker 10 When he saw me at the psych center, he goes, this is for you. I remember you.
It's a piece of candy. He goes, this is for you.
So I keep it in my pocket. Let me see.

Speaker 10 I wrapped it up. It fell apart.

Speaker 1 Now, there was one more thing to do. On August 14, 2007, Altimio Sanchez, the bike path rapist, appeared in court for sentencing.

Speaker 23 I just wanted to mention that whatever sentence I get today, I deserve.

Speaker 23 I know I'm going to be spending life behind bars, never to see the streets again.

Speaker 23 But i committed i did these crimes and i should pay for these crimes

Speaker 1 you will the sentence was 75 consecutive years in prison following anthony caposi's release the new york state legislature passed a bill known as anthony's law signed by the governor in 2007 its purpose to expedite compensation claims brought by individuals who have been wrongly incarcerated.

Speaker 1 In 2010, Anthony Caposzi received a settlement of $4.25 million

Speaker 1 in the state of New York.

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