Exclusive: Woman claims her dad is one of US’ most prolific serial killers, ‘Killed with same frequency as Ted Bundy’

“My name is Galina and I’m the daughter of a serial killer.”

For months, Galina Trefil’s Facebook posts began with this one sentence – a part of a social media campaign where she has been trying to bring her dad, John Trefil, to justice. Galina alleges that her father is “one of America’s most prolific serial killers” who has hundreds of victims across the United States and beyond.

Galina claims that her father has confessed to murdering multiple people, and even revealed a shocking connection he has to India. However, John remains free. Born on December 16, 1939, John is old and ailing at present, but Galina’s quest for justice for his alleged victims continues.

“John said that he was killing since the 1950s (he won’t give an exact year that he started) but after my mother broke up with him in 1965, he murdered an average of about one time per month until he stopped in the late 1990s – either 1998 or 1999,” Galina told HindustanTimes.com in an interview. “He has admitted to killing in the US, Canada, along the Mexican Border (he wasn’t sure if it was Mexico or the US, technically) France, and Holland.”

“He’s said that he killed people in Illinois, CaliforniaVirginia, IdahoOregon, and New England,” she added.

“Growing up, my father was my whole world. I loved him very much but also feared him. I didn’t think that he was psychologically well. Once, when I was about four years old, he went into a rage. I didn’t know why. He was normal one moment and the next he almost threw me off a cliff. His eyes had gone black. His face had turned red. It was like he had just completely snapped and suddenly wasn’t in his right mind. Moments like that, where he was probably psychotic, were terrifying, but I forgave him. Always. I didn’t realize until I was 11 how abnormal things at home were,” said Galina.

“For a while, I fought back. In response, he kept me in a room with no human contact for three months to get me back in line. I thought I was going to die in that room,” she added.

Galina shared with HindustanTimes.com photographs of what she claimed were John’s diary entries. Among them was a quote she found in a page in 2014, which read, “Galina would I rape and murder you? I don’t know.”

“By then, I wasn’t even surprised that he wanted to do this to me – just heartbroken,” Galina said.

Galina said her father was a psychiatrist and surgeon, describing him as “brilliant” and “extremely studious.” However, he was living a “double life,” she alleged.

“My father read books two or three hours every day. He was mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and quite shy. And then, often without any warning, he would just become enraged. Professionally, he worked with many rape victims, helping them through their trauma, and supported the local battered women’s shelter. He also worked with law enforcement and gave them lectures on how to catch predators. He repeatedly testified as an expert witness for the local district attorney’s office,” said Galina.

“But the entire time that he seemed so respectable in public, he was dodging sex abuse investigations behind the scenes – and killing,” she added. “It was a complete double life. In the mid-1990s, one of his patients accused him of rape, and he lost his license to practice medicine. He later admitted that he killed her.”

“My father owned land in the middle of the woods. It was very remote. He built an underground dungeon on that property, which still exists. He told me that there are sixteen girls and two men that he kept inside of that dungeon. One girl was kept there for three weeks. There’s a diary entry of him talking about wanting to torture his own family to death, which is similar to what he said that he later did to these poor girls,” she said.

Galina claimed that John’s victims were not local, and that he would travel to find them. She alleged that her father once attacked a woman who was asleep in her own bed.

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“My father would sometimes incapacitate people with syringes full of liquid Valium. He kept these all throughout our house when I was kid, hidden in the bookshelves. There would be no way to fight back,” claimed Galina.

Galina said that she has personally interacted with some of her father’s alleged victims, including a woman she referred to as Phoenix Doe. Phoenix has alleged that John tried to abduct her two blocks away from his office when she was 17, according to Galina.

“John saw her walking down a street alone at night and stalked her. She thought that she was going to die. She was able to hide from him in a phone booth and call for help,” Galina said of Phoenix.

“Another woman that reached out said she was in grammar school when he targeted her, her little sister, and another friend. They were just little girls getting off of a school bus and he tried to trick them into his truck. Thankfully, they just ran,” she added.

Galina also said that her father described a lot of methods he used to target and kill his victims.

“He would target drunk men outside of bars, people camping in the woods, couples, women working in medical fields, hitchhikers, incapacitated patients in hospital beds, tourists standing beside cliffs, women he would find by placing want-ads in newspapers, and sex workers. He would target a specific group for years, and then get bored and switch up his method to something else. From 1965 onward, his claim was that he killed an average of one person per month until he finally stopped,” she claimed.

Galina even said that she believes John tried to kill his own mother.

“My grandmother, Sylvia, loved her son very much, but she was deeply ashamed of his alcoholism, so she disinherited him. My grandmother was very old, very fragile and frail. She “fell” when she was in a room with John. Her injuries absolutely did not match that “fall.” He must have assaulted her, breaking her bones. She had to be hospitalized for a week. She had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember what had happened. She survived,” claimed Galina.

According to Galina, John claims that his last victim died in 1998 or 1999.

“I remembered a great deal of violence from my childhood, but up until 2012, I had told myself that it wasn’t real. I later understood otherwise. This was devastating and extremely isolating. I knew that if I let it go, he would never be caught. It was on my shoulders to amend this terrible wrong,” she said.

“In 2012, it was only the one murder that he admitted to – that of a patient in a Chicago hospital bed in the late 1960s. He told me that he injected the man’s IV with an overdose of dilantin, then went to the hospital cafeteria and ate his lunch, knowing that the patient would be dead by the time lunch was over. He was so smug about this story that I knew this could not be a one-time thing. By 2015, he was freely discussing killing many victims,” added Galina.

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Galina said that her late fiancé, Joshua Lee McCollister, played a huge role in making John open up. She said that Joshua was murdered, without going into the exact circumstances surrounding his death.

According to a July 2025 KRCR article, Joshua was killed in an apparent shooting inside his home off Glendale Drive. Two suspects were arrested in connection to the case – Danielle Roberta Durand and Deunn Antoine Willis – and they were both eventually transported to the Humboldt County Correctional Facility and booked on charges of conspiracy, robbery and murder, per the outlet.

“Joshua risked his life for my father’s case,” said Galina. “He preserved evidence so that it couldn’t be destroyed once the story went public.”

“Joshua was trying to keep my father alive so that John could say where the bodies were buried. He would cook John’s food several times a week. It was very stressful. John would be abusive sometimes, but Joshua just took it, smiled, and kept him eating all the things that John couldn’t resist,” she added.

Galina frequently writes about Joshua on Facebook to keep his story alive. Here’s a look at one of her recent posts:

Galina compared John to notorious serial killer Ted Bundywho kidnapped, raped, and murdered dozens of young women and girls during the 1970s.

“John killed with the same frequency as Ted Bundy. The difference between them is that Bundy got caught, and John didn’t,” said Galina.

One of the slayings John confessed to was that of an unsolved murder in Mendocino County in the 1970s, the Sheriff’s Office said, per the outlet. Detectives found that John’s confession aligned with consistencies found in the case and requested that his DNA be collected to compare with DNA from an unknown male found at the scene.

A warrant was issued in May 2023, and John’s DNA was collected and submitted to the California Department of Justice Bureau of Forensic Services. After being processed, his DNA was uploaded to the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a national DNA database that allows state and local crime labs to store and compare DNA samples from crime scene evidence.

The department told the Sheriff’s Office that the DNA did not match the profile from the unsolved murder. The DNA remains in CODIS and no unsolved murders have come up a match.

The Sheriff’s Office even searched a property and cabin in Comptche where Galina claimed John killed and buried people. Investigators also reviewed John’s diaries and journals, but reportedly found no evidence to substantiate the allegations made by Galina. The investigation remains active, the Sheriff’s Office said in 2025.

Galina told HindustanTimes.com that before John built the dungeon, he would rent other remote properties in the woods with cabins in them.

“I returned to one of them in 2023, and chains were still on the bed where his victims were tortured. It’s one of the many things that law enforcement has claimed is not evidence of any crimes. And that’s one of the reasons that many local people have grown increasingly angry with law enforcement over this case. A bed with chains, surrounded by gun shells, women’s torn clothing, and writing on the wall talking about killing people. How much more does law enforcement need?” she questioned.

The Mendocino Sheriff did not return HindustanTimes.com’s request for a comment.

In photos of diary entries Galina claimed were written by John, which HindustanTimes.com reviewed, he was clear about his impulses and spoke about his urges to rape and murder. In one of his alleged diary entries, John wrote that that one particular person, “Midgett,” is dead because of him, Galina said, claiming that the person her father was referring to was William Flint Midgett of Virginia.

“John Trefil should have been arrested decades ago. Law enforcement had everything they needed to get the investigation into murders happening then. Me coming forward now has only highlighted their failure,” Galina said.

“My father repeatedly asked to be taken back to the places where he buried multiple victims, in what he calls “his cemeteries.” He has promised to point to where the bodies are buried. Law enforcement has not been willing to take him. They say what he says is incomprehensible, but I recorded footage of him having conversations perfectly well and uploaded them on social media,” she added.

“It was a dream of John’s for many years to travel to India, with the specific intent of sexually assaulting Indian children,” she alleged. “He wrote about this candidly in his diaries. His fixation on assaulting Indian girls makes it hard for me to believe that he never followed through on it. John also tried for years to lure Asian women from multiple countries to come to the United States to marry him. He’d meet them through matchmaker agencies, write to them about how he was a successful doctor seeking a wife, and profess his love. I don’t know if he ever actually convinced any young woman to come overseas.”

Galina added that her father had “tremendous respect” for Indian culture and that she saw him read a “few hundred books written by Indian authors.”

“He studied Ayurvedic medicine. He went through periods of vague devotion to Hinduism. On the flip side of all that respect though, there’s this undercurrent of predation,” said Galina.

“The claim is that he has Parkinson’s, but I spoke to multiple doctors and nurses in 2017 who informed me that this wasn’t true,” she said.

“I know that a lot of people focus on his age and health, but I don’t. I focus on the grief-stricken parents of his victims. I want those parents to be able to stand in court and give impact statements, as happened in the case of the Green River Killer. I want all of these people to have their chance to look John Trefil in the eye and say what the theft of their daughters and sons did to them. My expectation is that, so long as he receives proper care, John will live to see that day come,” she added.

“In the last few years, because of what my father is, and because of my posts and videos, I’ve undergone an assault that sent me to the hospital, received multiple death threats, been stalked long-term, and the love of my life was murdered,” she said. “The stalking that Joshua and I were undergoing was intimately entwined with this case, because there are people that want to take this sensational story and profit off it. I wouldn’t cooperate with them. Now Joshua is dead and I’ve gone into hiding just to stay alive.”

Galina claimed that she and Joshua repeatedly reached out to authorities with allegations of stalking, but did not receive the help they needed. She alleged that some people who were stalking them stole some of her father’s diaries “with hopes of selling them as some kind of sick murder memorabilia.”

“After Joshua was killed, I immediately made sure that all of my father’s evidence was taken far away so the people stalking us couldn’t get their hands on it,” she added.

Galina said that over the years, she has built a posse which currently has about 40 members from various states and countries. She described the individuals involved as “good people trying to bring a man that killed young girls to justice.”

“Fighting this war on behalf of the murdered has become my life’s work. I know that I may not survive. But I saved the evidence. The posse will continue the work if I am gone,” said Galina.

“All that I ever wanted was to be a wife and a mother. If I do survive, what I will be known as is the daughter of a serial killer, who hunts serial killers,” she concluded.