When Yalem had not returned to her dorm by 9:30 that night, her roommates called campus police to report that she had gone running on the Ellicott Creek bicycle path alone and was long overdue. Police and a small group of students organized by Yalem's boyfriend used flashlights to check the bike path for signs of the missing jogger.

A light rain was falling when they called it a night at about 11:30 p.m.

At daybreak, 15 campus police officers and 11 from Amherst's force began searching for Yalem in earnest. Police enlisted bloodhounds and a helicopter.

Even as they searched wooded areas and the banks of Ellicott Creek, some officers wondered if he had struck again.

It had been four months since the last known attack. A 32-year-old woman had been beaten and sexually assaulted along the path. Joggers investigating the sound of someone moaning found the woman, a married advertising executive, in a clearing about 50 feet in the woods near the 2.7-mile marker on the bicycle path. She was barely alive.

The victim was unconscious for more than six hours, and doctors were unsure if she would ever wake up. When she finally came to, she told police that she could not recall anything that happened after some sort of rope or cord was wrapped around her neck by an attacker she did not see.

The garrote, which rendered the woman unconscious by briefly cutting off the supply of blood to her brain, left deep impressions in the victim's neck. Two of them.

Police had seen ligature marks like those before.

In August 1989, a 14-year-old Amherst girl on her way to cheerleading practice at Sweet Home High School was dragged off the bicycle path near the 5.3-mile marker and raped. Three months earlier, a 15-year-old high school student was raped in a similar manner in Buffalo. There was one victim in 1988, another 16-year-old high school student raped in the same area of Buffalo. The first two victims — a 44-year-old jogger in Buffalo and a 17-year-old high school student in Hamburg, respectively — were attacked a month apart in 1986. (MAP)

Because the rapist had never killed, as far as investigators knew, the police officers searching the bicycle path for Linda Yalem on Sept. 30, 1990, were hoping that either he had not struck again or that Yalem was alive but unable to summon help if he had.

Ann Brown, who hopped on a flight to Buffalo with her husband that afternoon, prayed silently as the plane left Long Island that her sister was alive.

Before she was murdered, Linda Yalem told her sister about "Be Safe" signs that had been posted on Amherst's bike path. Two other girls had been attacked in the area.

Brown and her husband John were in Yalem's dormitory suite with several of her roommates at 5:15 p.m. when Amherst Police Officer Mark Cavagnaro discovered the lifeless body of a young woman near the bike path. She lay in woods 125 feet from the path near the 3.5-mile marker.

When evidence technicians carefully removed a white Nike T-shirt bearing the words "Run Like Hell" that was obscuring the partially clad victim's face, investigators knew they had found Linda Yalem. Even with the gray duct tape covering her nose and mouth in a criss-cross pattern, the collar-length brown hair and dark brown eyes matched the image of Yalem on 1,000 fliers university officials had posted earlier in the day.

Forensic evidence collected at four of the six previous crime scenes would later confirm their hunch, but Amherst police detectives spotted something of vital importance to their investigation even before Linda Yalem's body was taken to the Erie County Coroner's office for the autopsy. Double ligature marks on her neck.

It was him. The Bike Path Rapist, as the Buffalo media dubbed him, was now a killer.