The serial killer made little effort to hide his tracks. Over the course of a year in the 1970s, he dumped the remains of four young women in different spots—along a road, in a gravel ditch, under an underpass—just outside Calgary, in western Canada.
They were fully clothed, they had all been strangled and DNA evidence revealed that they had been sexually assaulted.
However, it took nearly 50 years of filtering through 853 possible suspects for Canadian police on Friday to finally reveal that the women had been victims of a serial killer.
Police identified the killer as Gary Allen Srery, who had fled to Canada while free on bail in 1974 after being accused of rape by the Los Angeles police.
He died at age 68, of natural causes, in an Idaho prison in 2011, where he was serving a sentence life sentence for rape in that state. Authorities believe she may have killed other women in Canada and the United States.
Despite Mr Srery's brazenness, there were few witnesses to the murders, committed in 1976 and 1977.
The investigation dragged on for several decades. In the 1990s, four separate task forces analyzed leads, including about 800 tips and 500 statements from the public, Supt. David Hall of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said during a news conference in Edmonton on Friday.
“No investigation, no matter how successful, could undo the damage caused by crimes of this nature,” Superintendent Hall said. But, he added, the perseverance of the investigators over many years “allows us to give answers to the families of the four young women robbed of their future”.
Three of the four victims were teenagers.
Eva Dvorak and Patricia McQueen, both 14, were visiting friends after school last 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 Melissa Rehorek, 20, a day after she disappeared. Ms. Rehorek, a hotel housekeeper, had told her roommates that she was hitchhiking in the mountains before disappearing.
Five months later police found Barbara MacLean, 19, a bank employee who had gone with friends to a cabaret show at a Calgary bar. Witnesses last saw her as she walked home from the bar in the early hours of Feb. 8, 2019. 26, 1977.
A dog walker stumbled upon his remains, which showed signs of resisting his attacker, police said.
Semen was found on all four victims, but at the time the investigative tools to analyze it were limited. It was only in 2003 that laboratory tests were able to link the same unknown culprit to DNA samples found on two victims, Ms Rehorek and Ms MacLean.
A breakthrough in the case came with the help of genetic genealogy, a forensic technique that uses DNA samples to identify a suspect's relatives and locate them. 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.
By the time he arrived in Canada in the mid-1970s, Mr. Srery had already been convicted of rape in the United States.
Detectives are now piecing together a detailed chronology of Mr Srery's life, tracing his movements between 1979 and 1998. His transient lifestyle, the nine aliases he used and his violent history suggest to police that he may have committed other murders.
“We truly believe that the suspect is not only involved in four homicides, but there is a distinct possibility that he is responsible for many more, both in Alberta, British Columbia, and the western United States,” said Sgt. Travis McKenzie, a commander of the Mounties' historic homicide unit, told reporters.
Mr. Srery was never questioned in connection with the Calgary murder investigation. 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.
Since Mr Srery has died, police have given the victims' relatives a detailed presentation of their findings and what led them to focus on Mr Srery, Sergeant McKenzie said in an interview.
“I know they are appreciative and grateful,” he said, “but I also know for a fact that their resentment has never stopped either.”
Mr. Srery was born in Oak Park, an affluent Chicago suburb, and 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 agencies to try to solve cases that have long gone cold. But its use is limited in Canada because the labs needed to do this type 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 are doing this work,” said Nicole Novroski, a forensic geneticist and professor at the University of Toronto. “It really is an incredibly powerful tool.”
