The serial killer made no effort to hide his tracks. Over the course of a year in the 1970s, he dumped the remains of four young women in different locations – along a road, in a gravel ditch, under an underpass – just outside Calgary, in western Canada.
They were fully clothed, all had been strangled, and DNA evidence revealed they had been sexually assaulted.
Yet it took nearly 50 years and screening 853 possible suspects for Canadian police on Friday to finally reveal that the women had been victims of a serial killer.
Police identified their killer as Gary Allen Srery, who had fled to Canada while out on bail in 1974 after being accused of rape by Los Angeles police.
He died at age 68, of natural causes, in an Idaho prison in 2011, where he was serving a prison sentence. life sentence for rape in this state. Authorities believe he may have killed other women in Canada and the United States.
Despite Mr. Srery’s audacity, there were few witnesses to the murders committed in 1976 and 1977.
The investigation lasted several decades. In the 1990s, four separate task forces reviewed leads, including about 800 tips and 500 public submissions, the superintendent said. David Hall of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Friday at a news conference in Edmonton.
“No investigation, no matter how successful, could undo the harm caused by crimes of this nature,” Superintendent Hall said. But, he adds, the perseverance of investigators over many years “allows us to provide answers to the families of the four young women deprived of their future”.
Three of the four victims were teenagers.
Eva Dvorak and Patricia McQueen, both 14, were visiting friends after school on February 15, 1976, and were last seen together around midnight. Their bodies were found less than 12 hours later, in an underpass.
Seven months later, in a gravel ditch just west of Calgary, police found the body of 20-year-old Melissa Rehorek, a day after she went missing. Ms. Rehorek, a hotel housekeeper, had told her roommates she was going to hitchhike to the mountains before disappearing.
Five months later, police found Barbara MacLean, 19, a bank employee who had gone out with friends to see a cabaret show at a Calgary bar. Witnesses last saw her returning home from the bar in the early hours of February 26, 1977.
A dog walker came across her remains, which showed signs that she had fought back against her attacker, police said.
Semen was found on all four victims, but at the time, investigative tools to analyze it were limited. It was not until 2003 that laboratory tests linked the same unknown offender to DNA samples found on two victims, Ms. Rehorek and Ms. MacLean.
The case got a breakthrough thanks to genetic genealogy, a forensic technique that uses DNA samples to identify and trace a suspect’s relatives. In 2022, DNA from the murders of Ms. Dvorak and Ms. McQueen was used to link all four murders to the same man, Mr. Srery.
When he arrived in Canada in the mid-1970s, Mr. Srery was already a convicted rapist in the United States.
Detectives are piecing together a detailed timeline of Mr Srery’s life, tracing his movements between 1979 and 1998. His fleeting lifestyle, the nine aliases he used and his violent past suggest to police that he might have committed other murders.
“We sincerely believe that the suspect is not involved in just four homicides, but it is quite possible that he is responsible for many more, whether in Alberta, British Columbia or the western states “United,” said Staff Sgt. Travis McKenzie, commanding officer of the RCMP’s historical homicide unit, told reporters.
Mr. Srery was never interviewed in the investigation into the Calgary murders. However, he was convicted in Canada in another rape case in 1998 – in New Westminster, British Columbia – and then deported to the United States in 2003.
Because Mr. Srery is dead, police provided the victims’ relatives with a detailed presentation of their findings and what led them to focus on Mr. Srery, Staff Sergeant McKenzie said during the a meeting.
“I know they are grateful and grateful,” he said, “but I also know for a fact that their grief has never stopped either.”
Mr. Srery was born in Oak Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, then moved to California with his family and three younger siblings, authorities said. He married in 1960, had several children and divorced in 1969.
Genetic genealogy has become a more common technique among law enforcement to try to solve long-unsolved cases. But its use is limited in Canada because the laboratories needed to do this kind of work are largely located in the United States.
“In light of the growing demand for genetic genealogy testing in Canada, we need to reevaluate where we do this work,” said Nicole Novroski, a forensic geneticist and professor at the University of Toronto. “It really is an incredibly powerful tool.”
