A Serial Killer from the U.S. Preyed on Young Women in Canada

The serial killer made little effort to hide his tracks. Over the course of a year in the 1970s, he dumped the remains of four young women in different spots — along a road, in a gravel ditch, beneath an underpass — just outside Calgary, in Western Canada.

They were fully clothed, all had been strangled and DNA evidence revealed that they had been sexually assaulted.

Still, it took nearly 50 years and filtering through 853 possible suspects for Canadian police on Friday to finally reveal that the women had been the victims of a serial killer.

The police identified their killer as Gary Allen Srery, who had fled to Canada while out on bail in 1974 after being charged with rape by the police in Los Angeles.

He died at 68, of natural causes, in an Idaho prison in 2011, where he was serving a life sentence for a rape in that state. The authorities believe he may have killed other women in Canada and the United States.

Despite Mr. Srery’s brazenness, there were few witnesses to the killings, which were committed in 1976 and 1977.