The Calgary serial killer flew under the radar in Western Canada for two decades. How did it go unnoticed?

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The now-deceased serial killer Gary Sreary came to Canada in 1974 and fled north after posting bail on rape charges in California.

In 1999, he was He was returned to the United States after serving a five-year sentence for sex crimes in New Westminster.

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Now after using the new one genetic With evidence linking the American to four or five decades of cold cases in Calgary, police are trying to piece together what Sreri did during his remaining 25 years in Canada.

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Sreri, who died in an Idaho prison in 2011 while serving a life sentence for rape, was convicted of murders in 1976 and 1977. Eva Dvorak, 14, Patricia McQueen, 14, Melissa Ann Rehorek, 20, and Barbara McLean, 19, of Calgary.

Alberta RCMP and Calgary police officers who worked on the file believe his crimes were sexual in nature. and says there may be as yet unaccounted for victims since he was off the radar of law enforcement in Canada.

“He (in the US) has a consistent pattern of committing, being charged and convicted of sex crimes,” Staff Sgt. Travis McKenzie, head of the Alberta RCMP Historic Homicide Squad, at a press conference Friday in Edmonton. “And then when it comes to Canada, it's like it's gone. So our concern is that there are other victims that we don't know about.”

According to the police, Sreri crossed the Canadian border illegally in 1974. With no official record of his arrival in the country and Sreeri living a transient lifestyle supported mostly by odd jobs, it would have been impossible for police or civilians to pick him out of the crowd, a Calgary criminologist said.

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“People didn't know he was in the country,” said Doug King, a professor of justice at Mount Royal University. “People don't know who he is.”

In the absence of DNA technology in homicides, police had to rely on evidence such as blood typing and fingerprints as high-level biological evidence. Even when the technology first appeared in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was “simple” compared to today's databases, King said; The police could only relate it Rehorek and McLean were even killed by the same man in 2003, but Sreri has not yet been named as a suspect in the investigation.

It was only recently that investigative genetic genealogy, based on DNA profiling and comprehensive databases such as those used in family genealogy tests, advanced to the point where police were able to identify Sreeri as the killer of all four girls.

“As technology advances, it makes police work more precise,” King said. “This situation was truly a tragedy built upon a tragedy; the reason they were able to zero in on this guy in particular is because he's a sex offender in the united states and a DNA sample was taken from him in idaho.

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Police say Sreri was in Calgary between 1975 and 1979, and while Calgary police don't currently believe he's connected to any other murders there, King said the man could be more violent as he travels across Western Canada in the coming decades.

“He killed four people in Calgary and then he left Calgary,” King said. “When he left Calgary, it was unlikely that he would stop his violent crime spree. I think there are still a lot of cases to be solved … Now we know the name, so now we can start to solve some cases that have been on the books for 40, 50 years.”

Police said each of the four victims in Calgary had hitchhiked before their deaths — a widely accepted and even government-approved method for youths to get around at the time. King said he was a teenager in the early 70s and often hitchhiked with “no worries, no worries, no warnings.”

“Another time and another place. But depending on the time and place, it became easier to victimize people for various crimes,” King said. “It (Sreri's victims) is not accidental. It was just part of life in their time.”

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

The feds have touted hitchhiking as a cheap means of getting around Canada, and even published a handbook. On the way It gave young people tips on how to get cross country.

“At that time, there was a lot of student unemployment and student unrest. “Instead of finding jobs for kids, (Trudeau) thought we were going to do this 'Find Canada,' kind of Trudomania,” said University of Guelph history professor Linda Mahood, who has written a book about Canada's hitchhiking past. “The Trans-Canada Highway was brand new and for a while hitchhiking across Canada became fashionable.”

It wasn't until the 70s that people became wary of the potential dangers of traveling with a stranger, as more and more cases of disappearances and murders, many of them young women, were reported in newspapers.

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When Mahoud was working on his book, publishing the Canadian hitchhiking stories, he heard from a friend of Rehorek's. Before Rehorek's death in September 1976, after they spent the summer traveling together, a friend was waiting for Rehorek back in Ontario. The two had planned to attend Toronto College together and live together.

“He never came to the hostel. They found her body a few days later. He was just hitchhiking in Calgary getting ready to go back to school,” Mahood said.

Mahod said there are several unsolved cases of hitchhiking in the 70s and he would not be surprised if some were linked to Sreeri when his name was with the police.

“I interviewed women who jumped out of moving cars,” he said, adding that almost everyone he spoke to said “Mr. Wandering hands.”

“As I point out in my book, they never found the person who did it … Many of the bodies were never found.”

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