Sep. 23--A train crew first saw the body, lying across the CSX tracks just inside the Kenmore border with Buffalo, a half-mile from what was then called the American Brass plant on Military Road.
She appeared almost doll-like, a young teenage girl dressed in a T-shirt, blue jeans and cowboy boots.
There was a deep gash over one eye, an angry red line circled her neck. A similar mark was gouged into the back of her hand, as if she had got it inside the garrote her killer used to strangle her.
Her name was Katherine Herold, 15, a freshman at Kenmore West High School. She was the daughter of Donald G. Herold, the Buffalo Museum of Science director who had died the year before on an excursion in Mexico, and his wife, Elaine, an archaeologist and professor at Buffalo State College.
Town of Tonawanda detectives spent months investigating the July 1, 1985, murder but never solved it. Her family felt police had written off her killing, one cop telling them she was a rebellious kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And that's where it stood for two decades. Until Joan Diver was killed last Sept. 29 on the bike path near her home in Clarence.
Detectives from four agencies tied the Diver murder through DNA evidence to the Bike Path Killer, and then found him to be Altemio C. Sanchez, the Cheektowaga man who led a double life for three decades.
Suddenly, the Kathy Herold murder investigation, reopened by a Town of Tonawanda cold-case detective, Brian Moline, had the most promising leads in decades.
Could Sanchez be responsible for a fourth murder? "The way I see it, looking at the other crimes he committed," Moline said, "there are similarities that cannot be ignored and have to be investigated," such as:
--Sanchez's murder victims -- Diver, Linda Yalem and Majane Mazur, and some of those he raped -- also had been subdued using a garotte.
https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-168994966.html