RCMP probe B.C. tips after DNA links U.S serial killer to 4 Calgary cold cases

Last week Alberta RCMP announced a huge break in cold cases, saying Gary Allen Srery had savagely assaulted and killed four young women in Calgary.

The cases went back nearly 50 years.

Now investigators say they’ve received seven tips, some of them linked to B.C., where the serial killer lived for approximately 20 years.

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“Some of those tips are regarding files that have happened in British Columbia, though specifically more towards the West Coast,” Staff Sergeant Travis McKenzie, with the RCMP Historical Homicide Unit in Alberta, told Global News.

“And we’re already in communication with the detachments who are investigating those files.”

Srery had an extensive criminal record in the U.S. involving sex crimes against young women.

Around 1974 he fled the U.S. after posting bail for a rape charge and then entered Canada illegally.

He’s known to have been in the Calgary area from 1975 to 1979 before spending more than two decades in B.C. on the Sunshine Coast and in the Fraser Valley.

In 1998, he was arrested for a violent assault in New Westminster and deported back to the U.S. in 2003 after serving a five-year sentence.

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“He makes a very viable suspect, for any … sexual homicide of a similar victim in either Alberta or a neighbouring province or anywhere in Canada he was known to travel,” retired criminal profiler Jim Van Allen said.

DNA was used to solve the four murder cases in Calgary after evidence found on the victims was matched to Srery, who died in a U.S. prison in 2011.

New advances in DNA science will be pivotal in potentially solving more crimes.

“Technology has changed,” McKenzie said.

“The amount of a DNA sample that we needed, in the ’90s or 2000s, we now need a much lower, sample size.”

The RCMP’s historical homicide investigators say they welcome any new information from the public.