Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

BUFFALO, N.Y. - 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.

"I just remember there being a sense of fear," says Lissa Redmond.

Once there was a young family here in Buffalo, N.Y.; a transplanted chemistry professor named Steven Diver, his four children, and their mother - his wife - Joan Diver.

Diane Dennis: She'd been a runner for a long time and she was just trying to stay in shape.

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

Linda Tanner: She had a very strong personality. She knew what she wanted and she went after it.

What Joan Diver wanted, on a fine September morning in 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 through one of the safest towns in America. "The bike path," they call it here.

Linda Tanner: I 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." We talked about if someone tried to grab us what would happen. And she says, "Oh, I'd give him a fight." And I said, "Oh, I would too."

September 29. The day Joan Diver disappeared.

It was later in the day when Steven Diver learned Joan had not picked up their son from day care. He called 911.

(911 call)
911 operator: Buffalo police 911.
Steven Diver: I called before about my wife being on the bike path. And she is somehow out there.
911 operator: Oh she hasn't returned?
Steven Diver: She hasn't returned but she's probably injured. And I saw her vehicle at the bike path. We're going to drive out on the bike path and find her because she's out there.

Photo: Steven Diver and family Joan Diver

When sheriff's deputies arrived, Steven Diver told them he'd been searching up and down the bike path for his wife. He went far longer than the usual two and a half miles she usually ran. In fact he told them he'd also seen his wife's SUV with a full bottle of water on the console at the entrance to the bike path.

Which was strange because, when they came here and looked for the car, it wasn't there. They found it three miles away.

The news of the mysterious disappearance of a middle class professor's wife, a mother of four, was no small thing in Buffalo.

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.

Alan Rozansky: We really didn't know--
Keith Morrison: You didn't know whether she was---alive or dead.
Alan Rozansky: We had no idea.

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

A volunteer had joined a search party organized by Joan's husband. The volunteer called out the alert. He'd found a body. Detective Alan Rozansky arrived soon after.

Alan Rozansky: She was about 70 or 80 feet from the bike path and another 20 feet into the brush.
Keith Morrison: And she had been strangled?
Alan Rozansky: That's correct. Yes, she was.

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

Alan Rozansky: The manner in which she was clothed-- she had not been raped.

In fact, there was no trace of DNA evidence found on her body, nothing to indicate her attacker.

But then the investigation seemed to stall. Far away, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Joan's family waited for news. And waited.

Diane Dennis: What was rather hopeless at first too is they just had no clues on what had happened. They didn't have anything to go on, you know. It was just a terrible feeling.

There was just one thing that, all along, had bothered detective Rozansky. Something about the way Joan was killed.

Alan Rozansky: Double ligature marks around her neck.

It got a feeling going in his gut. It 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.

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

Alan Rozansky: There were similarities to the bike path rapist, but we were not absolutely sure at the time whether it was not a copy-cat or just another homicide.

It was November, six weeks after Joan's murder, when a strange DNA result came in.

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

Someone had been in there.

(Sheriff's press conference)
"There's some shocking information that this case is tied to other known cases … the Joan Diver murder tied to the bike path rapist."

It was astonishing where that microscopic piece of DNA would lead, its powers of revelation even then stirring unseen fates in a prison cell far away.

But not yet. Fates, as you'll see, have a way of brewing for a while. For the moment what jumped out hard and clear was something truly morbid: Joan Diver had been killed on someone's anniversary.

Alan Rozansky: It was the date of the Linda Yalem death, which was in Amherst back in the '90s.

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

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