Achi news desk-
Last week Alberta RCMP announced a massive cold case break, saying Gary Allen Srery viciously attacked and killed four young women in Calgary.
The cases went back almost 50 years.
Now investigators say they have received seven tips, some of them connected to BC, where the serial killer lived for about 20 years.
“Some of those tips are related to files that have happened in British Columbia, although specifically more towards the West Coast,” Staff Sergeant Travis McKenzie, with the RCMP Historic Homicide Unit in Alberta, told Global News.
“And we are already in communication with the departments that are investigating those files.”
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Srery had an extensive criminal record in the United States involving sex crimes against young women.
Around 1974 he fled the United States after posting bail for a rape charge and then went to Canada illegally.
He is known to have been in the Calgary area between 1975 and 1979 before spending more than two decades in BC on the Sunshine Coast and in the Fraser Valley.
In 1998, he was arrested for a violent attack in New Westminster and deported back to the United States in 2003 after serving a five-year sentence.
“It makes him a very viable suspect, for any … sexual homicide of a similar victim either in Alberta or a neighboring province or anywhere in Canada that he was known to travel,” said retired criminal profiler Jim Van Allen.
DNA was used to solve the four murder cases in Calgary after evidence found about the victims was matched to Srery, who died in a US prison in 2011.
New developments in DNA science will be central to the possibility of solving more crimes.
“Technology has changed,” McKenzie said.
“The amount of DNA sample we needed, in the 90s or 2000s, we need a much lower sample size now.”
RCMP historic homicide investigators say they welcome any new information from the public.
& copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
