Calgary serial killer flew under the radar in Western Canada for two decades. How did he go undetected?

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Now-dead serial-killer Gary Srery came to Canada in 1974, fleeing northward after posting bail on rape charges in California.

In 1999, he was charged with a sex crime in New Westminster, B.C., and sent back to the U.S. after serving a five-year sentence.

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Now, after using new genetic evidence to connect the American to four five-decade-old cold case murders in Calgary, police are attempting to put together the pieces of what Srery did during the rest of his 25 years in Canada.

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Srery, who died in an Idaho prison in 2011 while serving a life sentence for rape, has been named the killer in the 1976 and 1977 slayings of Eva Dvorak, 14, Patricia McQueen, 14, Melissa Ann Rehorek, 20, and Barbara MacLean, 19, in Calgary.

Alberta RCMP and Calgary police officers who worked on the file believe his crimes were sexually motivated and say it’s likely there are more as of yet unknown victims from the time he spent in Canada entirely off the radar of law enforcement. 

“He has a consistent pattern of regularly committing sexual-based offences (in the U.S.), getting charged, getting convicted,” Staff Sgt. Travis McKenzie, head of the Alberta RCMP’s historical homicide team, said at a Friday news conference in Edmonton. “And then when he comes to Canada, it’s almost like he disappears. So our biggest concern is there are other victims out there we don’t know about.”

Srery illegally crossed the border into Canada in 1974, according to police. Without any official record of his entry to the country and with Srery living a transient lifestyle supported largely by odd jobs, he would’ve been nearly impossible to pick out among a crowd for police or civilians, says a Calgary criminologist.

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“The very fact that he was in the country was unknown to people,” said Mount Royal University justice professor Doug King. “People wouldn’t know who he was.”

With DNA technology being non-existent at the time of the killings, police had to rely on evidence like blood typing and fingerprinting as their top-tier biological evidence. Even as the technology began to emerge in the late ’90s and early 2000s, it was “rudimentary” compared to today’s databases, King said; police were only able to connect that Rehorek and MacLean were even killed by the same person as recently as 2003, but Srery’s name still never arose as a suspect in the investigation. 

Only recently has investigative tech advanced to the point that police were able to pinpoint Srery as the killer of all four girls thanks to investigative genetic genealogy — a technology that relies on DNA profiling and comprehensive databases like those used in family-tracking genealogy tests.

“As technology is developed, it makes police work more precise,” said King. “This situation was really tragedy built on tragedy; the reason they were able to zero in on this guy in particular is that he was a sex offender in the United States and he had a DNA sample drawn from him in Idaho.”

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Police say Srery was in Calgary between 1975 and 1979, and while Calgary police don’t currently believe he’s tied to any other cold case murders here, King says chances are violence followed as the man moved around Western Canada over the coming decades.

“He killed four people in Calgary, and then he left Calgary,” said King. “It would be highly unlikely that he stopped his violent crime spree when he left Calgary. I suspect there are going to be more cases solved … Now we know the name, so now we can start kind of solving some cases that have been on the books for 40, 50 years.”

Each of the four Calgary victims was said by police to have been hitchhiking prior to their deaths — which, at the time, was a widely accepted and even government-endorsed way for young folks to get around. King said he was a teenager in the early ’70s and would often hitchhike “without any worry, without any concern, without any warning.”

“A different time and a different place. But it certainly was easier to victimize people for all sorts of crimes because of the time and the place,” said King. “It’s not that (Srery’s victims) were reckless. It was just part of living in their time.”

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In the early 1970s, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government encouraged young people to traverse the country, opening a network of free hostels countrywide; the prime minister once advised young Canadians: “Hit the road. Drive or hitchhike and see what Canada’s all about.”

The feds had billed hitchhiking as a cheap means by which to conduct a journey across Canada, even releasing a handbook entitled On The Road that provided tips for young folks on a cross-country trek.

“There was a lot of student unemployment at the time and a lot of student unrest. Rather than finding jobs for kids, (Trudeau) thought we’d create this ‘Find Canada,’ ‘Trudeaumania’ sort of response,” said Linda Mahood, a University of Guelph history professor who penned a book about Canada’s hitchhiking past. “The Trans-Canada Highway was brand new, and for a while … it became kind of a fad to hitchhike across Canada.”

It wasn’t until later in the ’70s that people became more wary of the potential dangers of hailing a ride with a stranger as more missing persons cases and killings — many being young women — started to hit the newspapers.

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When Mahood was working on her book and put out an appeal for Canadians’ hitchhiking stories, she heard from a friend of Rehorek’s. The friend was waiting for Rehorek back in Ontario after they spent the summer travelling together before Rehorek’s death in September 1976. The two had enrolled at a Toronto college together and had planned to be roommates.

“She never came to the dorm. They found her body a few days later. She was she was just hitchhiking around Calgary, getting ready to go back to school,” said Mahood.

Mahood said there are several cases dating back to the hitchhiking days of the ’70s that remain unsolved, and she wouldn’t be surprised if some were tied back to Srery now that police have his name.

“I interviewed women who jumped out of moving cars,” she said, noting almost everyone she spoke with had a story about a “Mr. Wandering Hands.”

“There are cases I mention in my book where they’ve never found the person that did it … A lot of bodies were never found.”

mrodriguez@postmedia.com

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