...Investigators then believed there were common factors in four cases, including the unsolved Alberta murder of Melissa Ann Rehorek and the B.C. case of Oanh Ngoc Ha.
Ha — a 19-year-old Vietnamese refugee — was found on Feb. 28, 1981, near Golden. She had been raped, strangled and her body mutilated after death.
The shy teen had come to Canada seven months earlier and landed a job as a chambermaid at a Banff hotel. Her body was found face down in the snow, a few metres from the Trans-Canada Highway, about 80 kilometres west of Golden, on the road to Kamloops, and 200 kilometres from Banff.
The fully-clothed body of Melissa Ann Rehorek, 20, was found Sept. 16, 1976, in a ditch along a gravel road about 20 kilometres west of Calgary near the Trans-Canada Highway. She had been strangled.
She was last seen leaving the Calgary YWCA, where she lived. She was planning on hitchhiking out of town for her two days off work from her job as a chambermaid at a local hotel.
...RCMP investigators also suspected her killer might be the same man who strangled Barbara Jean MacLean five months later.
The night of Feb. 26, 1977, 19-year-old MacLean had argued with her boyfriend and decided to hitchhike home.
The following morning, a man walking his dog discovered Barbara’s fully-clothed, strangled body beside a gravel road near 80th Avenue and 6th Street N.E. in Calgary.
Police traced her movements the night before to the Highlander Hotel tavern, where she and her boyfriend had argued after closing time.
...A person of interest in MacLean’s murder was sex offender Gary McAstocker, 34. McAstocker hanged himself in 1994 in his Edmonton home hours before he was to be questioned by police in the suspected murder of a 14-year-old Edmonton girl, Tina McPhee, who disappeared a month earlier while walking to school.
