The girls couldn’t have been there long. Even on a quiet Sunday in February, there was enough traffic to find them quickly. They were right there, lying side by side beneath the Happy Valley underpass just west of Calgary, not hidden at all.
It was a man driving to Cochrane, Alta., who spotted them along the side of the road at 10:45 that morning. Their clothes were undisturbed and there were no signs of a struggle, no indication of the violence that had been done to them. Just tire tracks recorded in a shallow crust of ice, and two girls lying face down on the cold pavement, as pale and still as dolls.
Their killer had many names. He was Gary, Peter, Ricky, Michael, David, James, William and more. He would one day be unmasked as a serial killer and rapist who’d drifted through Western Canada and the United States, changing cars and jobs and homes like he changed his name, leaving a path of damage that’s only starting to be known. But finding him would take nearly half a century. And for a long time, it wasn’t clear the girls had been murdered at all.
Patsy McQueen and Eva Dvorak, shown in Grade 1 and Grade 3, respectively – were teenagers in 1976, when their deaths horrified Calgarians and mystified police.Supplied
Patsy and Eva
It was hard to know what to make of the deaths of Patsy McQueen and Eva Dvorak. They were 14 years old, both pretty and popular and fun. They’d last been seen late Saturday night, heading toward downtown Calgary. It was Feb. 14, 1976. Valentine’s Day.
The girls’ deaths were a mystery. Though there was semen collected from their bodies, there were no overt signs of violence, and the autopsies were inconclusive. “There is a possibility of murder,” RCMP Corporal Roy Pennoyer told reporters the day after the girls’ bodies were found.
But other possibilities caught the attention of police as well. Police learned the teens had been kicked out of their junior high school on Thursday for drinking and hadn’t gone home, but had been hanging out with friends around the city. One headline proclaimed, “Girls in mystery deaths took LSD, pot, alcohol,” and investigators considered whether it was actually some combination of substances that killed them.
The chief medical examiner found the girls had asphyxiated, which could have been from strangulation or smothering, but he concluded a “drug-related accident” was more likely. While the drugs they’d taken weren’t known to be fatal, police wondered about some new kind of substance that wasn’t being picked up in testing. It was the 1970s, and the drug scene was changing rapidly. What was expected from young women was changing, too.
A coroner’s jury that fall couldn’t decide how Patsy and Eva died, but did make a point of saying the girls had spent the last days of their lives “with little regard for their personal safety.” Judge Kenneth Plomp, presiding over the inquest, opined that it was a “disgusting situation we find ourselves in” where “girls this young can be allowed to run so free.”
While no conclusive finding was made, drugs were seen as the probable cause of the girls’ deaths. The only crime, in that case, was the way someone discarded of their bodies.
But police kept the file and all the evidence locked up securely at the Cochrane RCMP detachment for almost 50 years, the truth held within science that hadn’t been discovered yet.
Melissa and Barbara
With a couple days off from her job at the International Hotel, 20-year-old Melissa Ann Rehorek gathered her toothbrush, wallet and some toiletries in a red plastic shopping bag, and headed toward the mountains.
She’d been staying at the YWCA in Calgary, working as a housekeeper and enjoying her time enough to put off her mother’s attempts to bring her home to Windsor, Ont. She had a line on a job in childcare, and when she wrote to her mom late in the summer of 1976, she signed it, “A happy Melissa.”
People driving on a gravel road west of Calgary on the morning of Sept. 16, 1976, found her body lying in the ditch.
With Melissa, investigators knew right away it was murder. There were signs of a struggle on the road, and a man’s shoeprint in the dirt. The medical examiner concluded she’d been punched in the head and then strangled to death. She’d also been sexually assaulted. Nothing was missing – her wallet was still right there, with $5.50 inside.
In her hand was a clutch of long black hairs.
Police at the time told reporters they were considering the “remote possibility” Melissa’s murder was linked to the deaths of Eva and Patsy, but by then, the girls’ deaths were largely considered to have been drug-related. Instead, since Melissa was known to hitchhike (a popular way to get around at the time), her death seemed more likely connected to the murder of Pauline Brazeau, who had been found stabbed to death outside the city that January.
Barbara Jean Maclean was a 19-year-old Cape Bretoner who, in 1977, was found dead near the airport in Calgary.Supplied
Police attempted to trace the North Star shoeprint and hunted for a truck that had been seen in the area. Then, on Feb. 26, 1977 – five months after Melissa was killed, and just more than a year after Patsy and Eva died – a man walking his dog found the body of 19-year-old Barbara Jean MacLean. She was near the Calgary airport, just metres outside the official city limits. Barbara’s jacket was inside out, and there were bruises on her arm and neck. The fingers on her left hand were bloodied.
Barbara was from Cape Breton and had been living in Calgary working at a bank. She’d been out at the Highlander Hotel tavern with her boyfriend and her brother, Bobby, the previous night, but she argued with her boyfriend and left to go to a party alone.
“There is absolutely no reason for this to happen, she didn’t have any enemies,” Bobby MacLean told a reporter for The Calgary Albertan at the time. “I just can’t seem to put the pieces of the puzzle together.”
He said she was a “trusting girl – perhaps too trusting.”
Police immediately connected the murders of Melissa and Barbara. Both were young, attractive women who’d been walking alone at night and were sexually assaulted, strangled to death, and left fully clothed west of the city, in places where they would be quickly discovered. There was black hair found at both scenes.
Most killers are known to their victims, and police interviewed people Barbara had been with that night, investigated sex offenders in the area, and then questioned hundreds of taxi drivers with the idea she may have gotten into a cab. More than 600 black-haired men gave hair samples, which investigators hoped could be matched to the killer. But no suspect was identified.
The investigation posed many challenges. While the similarity between the murders hinted at a serial killer, putting cases together wasn’t quite so simple. Officers seeking to link cases between jurisdictions and police agencies in those days had to search manually through boxes of documents and index cards, sometimes reading whole files looking for connections between cases.
And there were a lot of cases.
A special RCMP squad had been formed in 1976 to look for similarities in a number of homicides of young women in Western Canada, sometimes called the “Yellowhead murders.” Sections of the Yellowhead Highway – which runs from B.C. to Manitoba – would be linked to so many disappearances and deaths that it later become known as the Highway of Tears.
Between the cases of Patsy, Eva, Melissa and Barbara, dozens of officers chased down more than 800 tips, took 500 statements and investigated 853 suspects or persons of interest well into the 1980s. But none of them were the killer.
“They were all in that one period of time, and then it stopped,” Sergeant Ray Forsythe, one of the officers working on the cluster of cases around Calgary, told reporters in 1981. “It’s possible that if there is one culprit he’s now in jail and we won’t find him.”
Gary Allen Srery lived an elusive life, changing his appearance, name and address many times over the years as he faced charges for an array of sexual crimes.Supplied by RCMP, Jason Franson/The Canadian Press
The mousetrap
Three decades later, and 700 kilometres away, Gary Allen Srery stood in a courtroom, his eyes turned away from the woman speaking to him.
They’d met at the Mousetrap Bar in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, just more than a year earlier, in the summer of 2008. At 67, he was still a big and powerful man, six feet tall and 225 pounds, hair dyed an unnaturally dense black over a salt-and-pepper moustache. The 45-year-old woman had been on crutches, and he offered to drive her home. There, he assaulted her sexually and physically for hours.
Now, they met again in the courtroom. The woman repeated his name over and over until he looked at her.
“Mr. Srery, you’ve damaged my life,” she said, according to coverage in The Spokesman-Review. The paper said she walked with a cane, and spoke with difficulty, struggling to get the words out.
“You have made me have a stroke because of the stress and the damage that you did to me …,” she said. “I have a family that loves me very much that has had to watch me go through living hell. You damaged me and I can’t be repaired.”
She said she thanked God it happened to her, and not to someone younger. Not a teenager.
It wasn’t Mr. Srery’s first time in court. His first sexual-assault charges – which included rape by force, oral copulation, sodomy, kidnapping and assault to commit rape – dated back to 1965 in California, when he was in his early 20s.
Mr. Srery would be in and out of prison in the U.S. for sexual assault for almost a decade after that, formally classified as a “mentally disordered sex offender” and facing regular charges until he vanished in 1974, while out on bail on a new allegation of rape.
This time, both his victim and the prosecutor asked that he be given a life sentence.
“As long as the defendant is in society, he is a risk to women,” prosecutor Terri Laird told the judge in 2009, according to a story in the Coeur d’Alene Press. “I’m begging the court not to take a chance on another human being.”
Mr. Srery didn’t speak. The judge sentenced him to life, and he was taken away to an Idaho state prison.
“I felt like I’d done my job,” the woman who survived his attack told a reporter, after he was sentenced. “And that was just protecting all the other women.”
In 2009, an Idaho judge sentenced Mr. Srery to life in prison.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
The tip
The tip came into the RCMP in 2023. It was about an old case, two girls found dead beneath the Happy Valley overpass in 1976.
The tip itself wasn’t significant, but it was reason enough for investigators on the RCMP’s Historical Homicide Unit to open the box and take a fresh look at the cases of Patsy McQueen and Eva Dvorak.
The murders of Melissa Rehorek and Barbara MacLean had been revisited a number of times through the years, the investigation continuing to evolve as science advanced. In 2003, new DNA testing had been able to conclusively say the same man sexually assaulted and killed Melissa and Barbara. But while DNA matched the victims with each other, there was nothing in the country’s national DNA databank matching the sample to an offender. For 20 years, Melissa and Barbara’s killer remained simply “Profile A.”
But after the tip in 2023, things changed again.
Investigators submitted DNA evidence from the semen swabs taken from Patsy and Eva’s bodies, and came back with a match to Melissa and Barbara’s killer. That confirmed all four victims been assaulted by the same man – and that Patsy and Eva’s deaths had surely been homicides.
There had also been significant advancements in investigative genetic genealogy, where police use genetic information voluntarily uploaded to commercial ancestry sites to identify suspects through the DNA profiles of their relatives. This meant there was a new way for DNA evidence to lead police to a killer.
In November, 2023, Calgary police had used investigative genetic genealogy to charge 73-year-old Ronald James Edwards with murder in the death of Pauline Brazeau, one of the other women killed in Calgary in 1976. (That case is slated for trial in 2025.)
Staff Sergeant Travis McKenzie leads the RCMP cold-case unit that looked into Mr. Srery's connection to the Alberta killings in the 1970s.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
Working with a specialized company to build out a family tree, investigators zeroed in on a suspect in the deaths of Patsy, Eva, Melissa and Barbara. It was someone who’d never come up in any of their investigations: an American sex offender named Gary Allen Srery.
“In the investigation world, we have this saying that your suspect’s name is in the file,” said Staff Sergeant Travis McKenzie, who heads the RCMP’s Historical Homicide Unit in Edmonton. “But Srery’s name was never in the file. He was never interviewed. He truly went unnoticed.”
Investigators believe Mr. Srery snuck into Canada illegally sometime between July, 1974, when he breached his bail in California, and February of 1976, when police believe he killed Patsy and Eva.
He remained in the country illegally for 20 years, having no significant interaction with police until he was arrested and imprisoned for sexual assault and unlawful confinement in New Westminster, B.C., in 1996. He was deported to the United States after being released from prison in the summer of 2003.
Mr. Srery died in custody in Idaho in 2011. If he was alive, he’d be 81 years old, and facing four counts of murder.
“It pains us that he’s dead …,” said Staff Sgt. McKenzie, speaking to reporters at a news conference in May. “I’ll be honest, I would have loved nothing more than to be standing before you telling you that we just put handcuffs on this guy, and now he gets to go face Canadian courts. But unfortunately, that’s not the way this one ends.”
Police are retracing Mr. Srery’s movements – the cars he owned, the odd jobs he worked, the places he lived – to see if it sheds light on other unsolved crimes.Supplied by RCMP
The others
Investigators are now retracing Mr. Srery’s path, talking to people who knew him and had relationships with him. They’ve released a timeline of where he lived, and a list of all his known aliases, a level of detail that’s highly unusual for the RCMP to make public.
“We do have an end goal,” Staff Sgt. McKenzie said, in an interview with The Globe and Mail, “which is to see if we can link Gary Srery to any other files.”
RCMP have also shared pictures of the victims, the scenes where their bodies were found, and the killer, hoping people will recognize him.
In one photograph, taken in the years before the Happy Valley murders, Mr. Srery stands alone in a living room, long dark hair parted in the middle with a hippie-style headband. In another, he’s outside wearing a red cap and full beard, holding a puppy. In a later photo, he has short hair and is clean shaven and wears a green vest, posing with the mountains in the distance.
Mr. Srery was married in California in the early 1960s and had one son before divorcing in 1969. In Canada, he worked odd jobs and had a number of relationships, living under names including Willy Blackman, Travis Blackwell and Rex Long. He lived mostly in B.C., including in Halfmoon Bay, Abbotsford and Chilliwack.
“I hate to use the word ‘chameleon,’ but he was. He was a horrific person who callously inflicted so much trauma to so many people ...,” Staff Sgt. McKenzie said. “He was an absolute monster, and yet he was able to maintain relationships without being described as a monster by other people. They would say he was charming and charismatic.”
The RCMP is appealing to the public to share any information about where Mr. Srery went in Canada, where he lived illegally.Supplied by RCMP
Staff Sgt. McKenzie says interviews with people who knew Mr. Srery, surviving victims and psychological reports paint a picture of a coercive, manipulative, extremely violent man who blamed other people for his actions, and effectively “led a double life.”
He said people who knew Mr. Srery were “floored” that he’s been identified as a serial killer.
There are currently 231 unsolved homicides in Alberta, and investigators are continuing to look for deaths that could be linked to Mr. Srery. They’re hoping people who knew Mr. Srery – or were victimized by him – will come forward, and that other police agencies in Canada and the U.S. will take a closer look at cases that may be related.
Given Mr. Srery’s pattern of behaviour, police know it’s unlikely – even impossible – that he stopped hurting women between Barbara’s murder in 1977 and his arrest in B.C. in 1996. What’s more likely, Staff Sgt. McKenzie says, is that Mr. Srery was committing violent offences in that period, “and it’s just not being reported, or it’s not being caught.”
“I have a lot of gratitude that we happened to receive that tip for Eva and Patsy, because it made us open that box,” Staff Sgt. McKenzie said. “What other agencies are out there who have those files as well?”
The victims’ families declined to do interviews with the media, but in statements released through the RCMP, they spoke about the way the victims were in life, all those decades ago. Patsy McQueen, “a typical teenager,” who was always making everyone laugh. Eva Dvorak, who loved to dance and sing, and never sat still. Melissa Rehorek, so honest and trusting, with a love of nature and a desire to see the country. And Barbara MacLean, whose loss has been a constant wound for those who loved her.
“We are four families who share a connection of the worst kind, one of pain, grief and suffering over many years,” Barbara’s family wrote. “It is our hope that we all may find a measure of peace in the days ahead.”
With research by Rick Cash
Crime and punishment: More from The Globe and Mail
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