Over the course of a year in the late 1970s, Calgarians woke up to horrifying headlines splashed across newspaper front pages.
In just over 12 months, four young women’s lives were extinguished under mysterious circumstances.
Friends Eva Dvorak and Patsy McQueen, both 14, were found dead on the side of the Trans-Canada highway west of Calgary on Feb. 15, 1976. The body of Melissa Rehorek, 20, was found in a ditch on a quiet gravel road 22 km west of the city seven months later.
And in February of 1977, the body of Barbara MacLean, 19, was discovered by a dog walker just outside the city’s northeast quadrant.
For years, despite evidence, interviews and autopsies, the explanations into all four deaths were scant.
The cause of death for McQueen and Dvorak, who had been sent home the day they died after being caught drinking at their junior high school, was listed as undetermined. Autopsies revealed the pair had drugs and alcohol in their systems when they died, but their deaths were never ruled as murder.
Rehorek and MacLean’s deaths showed similarities, leading investigators to believe they might have been victims of a single killer, but a suspect was never identified.
For decades, the families and friend of each young woman waited for more information, for the cold cases to run hot. As the years ticked by, hope diminished.
Almost half a century later, in 2024, the RCMP released a bombshell press release.
“American believed to be serial killer behind deaths of 4 young Calgarians,” read Global News’ headline on May 17, 2024, as police announced a break in not one, but all four cases.
At a news conference in Edmonton, police announced that all four young women were victims of a serial killer by the name of Gary Srery — an American citizen living in Canada illegally at the time of the homicides.
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.
Now, Global’s true crime offering, Crime Beat, is looking back on the case, with exclusive interviews from the detectives who helped link the crimes, never-before-heard details from one of the victim’s sisters and a jaw-dropping interview with the serial killer’s own son, who provides insight into how his father became a serial killer — and the reasons he believes his dad is responsible for the death of another young Alberta woman.
Keep reading to learn more about Srery, how advances in forensic technology helped link the Calgary murders and why investigators think he may be connected to additional murders and sexual assaults.
Who is Gary Srery?
Gary Allen Srery was born in Illinois in 1942, the first of three siblings, and moved with his family to California in the mid-1950s.
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While little is known about his formative years, by the 1960s he began to rack up an extensive rap sheet, particularly for violent and sexual offences, starting with a forcible rape conviction in 1965.
He faced additional charges of kidnapping, sexual perversion and burglary around that time, leading to the State of California to classify him as a “mentally disordered sex offender,” and he was committed to a mental health facility.
In and out of incarceration, the next few years saw Srery rack up additional charges, including rape, drug possession, kidnapping and sodomy.
In 1974, Srery attacked a female hitchhiker in the San Fernando Valley in California, and, attempting to escape the Los Angeles rape charge, he crossed into Canada illegally.
He was a bit of a chameleon, ever-changing his appearance, his vehicles and his aliases. Once in Canada he became an under-the-table drifter, working as a salesman or in kitchens in Southern Alberta and B.C., and staying off the radar of police. He often used the names “Willy Blackman” and “Rex Long.”
Srery’s deception worked. It wasn’t until his 1998 arrest in New Westminster, B.C., for a violent sexual assault, that his crimes north of the border caught up with him. Following a five-year sentence in Canadian prison, he was deported back to the U.S. in 2003.
A trickle of tips and leads
With Srery back in the U.S., investigators continued to pick away at the cold cases.
In 2003, taking advantage of advancements in forensic technology, evidence from Rehorek and MacLean’s crime scenes were sent in for DNA testing and confirmed what police suspected all along — seminal DNA found on their clothing matched a single, unknown offender.
It was almost another 20 years, in the fall of 2022, when Dvorak’s sister, Anita Vukovich-Kohut, learned that the case of the two junior high students had been reopened after she called police to check in on the case.
“I don’t know what the trigger was that got [police] to start looking into it,” she told Crime Beat, “but when I asked about it they had already begun the process.”
RCMP told Crime Beat that two months before receiving Vukovich-Kohut’s call, they had received a tip that spurred further investigation: an inmate had found McQueen’s name in the notes of another inmate.
While the tip turned out to be a dead end, the investigator handling the case realized there were exhibits in the McQueen and Dvorak case that hadn’t been tested using new DNA technology.
While waiting for the results of the testing to come back, and inspired by the capture of the Golden State Killer using investigative genetic genealogy (IGG), police, in partnership with the RCMP, reopened the cases of Rehorek and MacLean.
When they uploaded the DNA samples from the cases into the genetic genealogy databank, it spit back a family tree of more than 6,400 people related to the unknown offender, dating back to the early 1700s.
Within months, they narrowed down their search to a small group of brothers. One of the siblings, Gary Srery, had already made headlines about being a serial rapist, giving investigators their No. 1 suspect.
Meanwhile, police were able to link Srery to the Calgary area during the time of the four murders, and reviewed the cases of eight other women who survived attacks by Srery, painting a picture of how the suspected serial killer moved and operated.
When the DNA results came back, police were finally able to confirm that Srery had violently raped and murdered all four young women.
Are there other Canadian victims?
While the families of each Calgary victim say they were relieved to finally have some closure, Srery was long dead, having died from natural causes in an Idaho prison in 2011 while serving a life sentence for another violent rape.
Investigators say he’s likely responsible for other unsolved murders, but his death means there’s a good chance Srery took secrets of other committed crimes to the grave.
Even his son, Richard, believes there are other crimes at the hands of his dad that are waiting to be uncovered.
“He is one of the most charismatic, convincing, intellectual people I have ever actually ever encountered,” he told Crime Beat in an exclusive interview, explaining he believes his dad used his smarts and social skills to prey on his victims.
“I can’t help thinking, even to this day, how many do we not know about?”
The case of Kelly Cook
One of the unsolved cases he believes is connected to his dad, said Richard, is the mysterious 1981 kidnapping and murder of a 15-year-old girl in rural Alberta.
Revealing a letter written to him by his father from prison, Richard said the note mentioned several aliases Srery had used in the past, including the name “Bill Christensen.”
Bill Christensen was also the name used by a man in Standard, Alta., 70 km north of Calgary, who called up an unsuspecting teenager by the name of Kelly Cook, luring her to her death under the guise of a babysitting job.
Two months later, Cook’s body was found in the Chin Lake Reservoir, east of Lethbridge, tied up with ropes and anchored by concrete blocks.
Years later, anticipating a visit from RCMP to his home in the U.S. to talk about cases linked to his father, Richard said he had stumbled across Cook’s case in another Crime Beat episode: The Case of Kelly Cook: The Backup Babysitter.
“I was convinced from watching it, this is him, this is the (case) they’re going to talk to me about,” he said. “He lived there, the aliases…everything about it just adds up.”
Surprised when Cook’s case didn’t come up in their conversation, Richard said he brought it up with the investigators, who quickly shot him down, saying they didn’t have a connection between the case and his dad.
The RCMP claims there’s no mention of the alias Bill Christensen in Srery’s file, nor evidence that connects him to Cook’s death.
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Crime Beat airs its penultimate episode of the season at 10 p.m. ET on Global, examining a series of serial killings in Calgary in the 1970s and how the man responsible, Gary Srery, might have had more victims. Check your local listings for airtimes. Episodes appear streaming and on the StackTV app the following day.
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