Cops: US Fugitive Killed 4 Women in Canada in the '70s

Canadian police announced Friday they have linked the deaths of four young women nearly 50 years ago to a now-deceased US fugitive who hid in Canada from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, the AP reports. Alberta Royal Canadian Mounted Police Supt. Dave Hall said Friday that Gary Allen Srery might also be linked to unsolved murders and sexual assaults in Western Canada, and authorities are asking the public for more information that may link him to other unsolved cases. "We are now announcing that we have linked four previously unsolved homicides from the 1970s to a now deceased serial sexual offender," Hall said at a news conference in Edmonton, Alberta.

Srery died in 2011 in Idaho state prison of natural causes while serving a life sentence for sexual assault. A break in the homicides in Canada came when authorities began comparing DNA of the killer with profiles on ancestry websites, which eventually led them to a match with Srery, Hall said. Hall provided details of the four Canadian cases linked to Srery.

• He said that in 1976 Eva Dvorak and Patricia McQueen were both 14-year-olds last seen walking in downtown Calgary, Alberta. The following day their bodies were found under a highway underpass west of the city.
• In the spring of 1976, 20-year-old Melissa Rehorek moved to Calgary from Ontario for new opportunities. Hall said she was a housekeeper living at the YMCA in downtown Calgary and was last seen by a roommate before she went hitchhiking. Hall said the following day her body was located in a ditch west of Calgary.
• In 1977, Barbara MacLean was a 19-year-old Calgary resident from Nova Scotia who moved west only six months earlier. Hall said MacLean was working at a local bank and was last seen leaving a hotel bar. He said her body was found six hours later just outside Calgary.

Alberta RCMP Insp. Breanne Brown said Srery had an extensive criminal record including forcible rape, kidnapping, and burglary when he fled to Canada from California in 1974. He lived in Canada illegally until his arrest for sexual assault in New Westminster, British Columbia, in 1998, she said. He was deported in 2003 to the US, where he was convicted in Idaho for sexually motivated crimes and sentenced to life in prison; he ultimately died there.

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