In September 2006, after a 12-year hiatus, the so-called Bike Path Killer resurfaced in Buffalo, N.Y. and brutally strangled a 45-year-old mother of four. The re-emergence set off a public outcry and triggered the formation of a joint police task force to find the killer.
As part of that group, New York State Police Intelligence Analyst Betsy (Duchscherer) Schneider ‘93, then just two years removed from a drastic career shift from marketing research to criminal investigations, poured over police investigation files dating back more than two decades. That’s where she and others found Altemio C. Sanchez, a seemingly ordinary family man who had been mistakenly dropped as a suspect in the early 1990s. The Bike Path Killer, also called the Bike Path Rapist, had committed at least 15 rapes and two murders between 1981 and 1994 on wooded paths near Buffalo.
“There was a lot of information in the old files about where [Sanchez] worked, the hours he worked and physical descriptions and places that he had been seen that brought up some more questions,” Schneider said. “He was somebody that I had identified in looking through these files and I brought it to the attention of the lead investigator.”
Schneider earned an MBA from St. Bonaventure University shortly after graduating from Union and worked for nearly a decade as a marketing research analyst. In 2004, as a recently divorced mother of two young boys, Schneider spotted a job posting for a state police analyst and, after five months of training in Albany, was assigned to the FBI-Buffalo Field Intelligence Group.
“I just always loved police work, television mystery shows and crime books,” she said.
The story of the Bike Path Killer investigation, the Jan. 15, 2007 capture of Sanchez and the eventual exoneration of Anthony Capozzi, who was in 1987 wrongly convicted of raping two women, could be the plot of a crime novel. The investigation was covered by America’s Most Wanted, Dateline NBC and followed closely by Buffalo News reporter Michael Beebe.
After the Sept. 29, 2006 murder of Joan Diver, a drop of the killer’s sweat was found in Diver’s car. That sweat yielded a DNA profile similar to a man of Hispanic descent and was also matched to the Bike Path Killer’s genetic profile.
As the task force focused on Sanchez, Schneider and others saw more connections with similar rapes, attributed to Capozzi, in Buffalo’s Delaware Park in the 1980s. At that time, a rape victim identified another man as her attacker after seeing the man at a local mall. The woman recorded the man’s license plate number, which was traced back to Wilfredo Caraballo, who lied to police at the time, saying his car had been at home.
Schneider’s new research identified Caraballo as Sanchez’s uncle and led to a second round of police questioning. The uncle admitted Sanchez had been driving the car at the mall in 1981.
Days later, police found rape investigation kits connected with the Delaware Park attacks and isolated a DNA sample. So, by early January 2007, the only missing piece was a fresh DNA sample from Sanchez, which police obtained by collecting dinnerware Sanchez used at a local restaurant.
“It was a Sunday morning when I got the phone call that the DNA was a match. I just sat there and shook my head. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe we found the Bike Path Rapist,” Schneider said.
Today, Schneider lives with her sons, Gage, 9, and Brock, 7, near Buffalo. She and other task force members have since been honored by the state police, the Buffalo News and the New York State Bar Association for their work in capturing Sanchez and exonerating Capozzi. Sanchez is serving a life sentence at Clinton County Correctional Facility and Capozzi was released in April 2007 after 20 years in prison.
In looking back on the task force work, Schneider cites writing, research and presentation skills learned in graduate school and from Professor Byron Nichols in “Moral Dilemmas of Governing” seminar course.
“I had to present the connection and why he was a suspect of interest. You definitely have to be able to articulate that to a group of investigators. You don’t want to be blabbering on and on. You want to do it concisely and convincingly,” Schneider said.
Schneider is also part of a family with deep Union roots. Her father David Duchscherer ’67 owns an engineering and architecture firm in Amherst, N.Y. and her brother, Eric Duchscherer ’90, is the director of Residence Life at SUNY Potsdam. Schneider’s grandfather Philip Duchscherer ’39, great uncle Henry Duchscherer ’36 and great grandfather Charlie Duchscherer, Class of 1911, were Union men.
“Other law enforcement people have come up to us and said Betsy was pushing them with the evidence they already had,” David Duchscherer said. “Without that, they may have gone in a different direction. She played a key role in capturing this guy.”