WARNING: This article contains disturbing content.
A serial killer from the United States is believed to be the person responsible for the decades-old deaths of four Calgary females and the RCMP believes investigators may link more deaths to the now-deceased man.
At a news conference in Edmonton on Friday, police said Eva Dvorak, 14, Patricia McQueen, 14, Melissa Rehorek, 20, and Barbara MacLean, 19, were all killed in the 1970s by Gary Allen Srery.
Police said ahead of each of the four victims’ deaths, they had been walking in the evening. All four died of asphyxiation and their bodies were left outside of Calgary’s city limits. In each case, seminal fluid was found on the victims but police noted that at the time of their deaths, there was no way to test for a DNA profile of a suspect.
That changed in the 2000s because of technological advancements made in policing. Since then, the RCMP began to narrow down a list of suspects that originally began with 853 people.
Once Srery was identified as detectives’ prime suspect, a cross-border investigation began. The RCMP said Srery was a known serial sex offender who had victimized women in the U.S. prior to arriving in Calgary in the 1970s.
Srery died in an Idaho prison in 2011 where he was serving a life sentence for a sexual assault. The RCMP said Friday they believe he may be responsible for additional homicides and sexual assaults in Alberta, British Columbia and the U.S.
The RCMP said the Calgary Police Service had over 70 of its members work on the cases.
The CPS says Insp. Kevin Forsen of the major crimes section will be speaking at a separate news conference about the same case at 1 p.m. local time in Calgary.
More to come
–with files from Morgan Black, Global News
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