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The I-65 Killer — The I-65 Killer

The I-65 Killer:Harry Edward Greenwell·Vicki Heath·Peggy Gill·Jeanne Gilbert

The case

Vicki Heath was working the night audit at the Super 8 in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, on February 21, 1987, when a man came in off Interstate 65. He raped her and shot her twice in the head, leaving her behind the motel. It looked like a robbery until the same pattern turned up two years later.

In the early hours of March 3, 1989, clerk Peggy Gill was killed at a Days Inn in Merrillville, Indiana. About fifty-two miles south, Jeanne Gilbert was taken from her post at the Remington Days Inn hours later and left in a ditch nineteen miles away. Both women were raped and shot, and both cash drawers had been pried open. On January 2, 1990, a clerk at a Days Inn in Columbus, Indiana survived an attack and gave police a detailed description of the man, down to his lime-green eyes. Investigators had a face and a DNA profile but no name for more than thirty years.

In April 2022, Indiana State Police and the FBI announced that investigative genetic genealogy had matched the crime-scene DNA to Harry Edward Greenwell, a railroad worker with an arrest record going back to 1963. He had never been a suspect. Greenwell died of cancer in Iowa in January 2013, so no one was ever charged with the murders.

Case photographs

Harry Greenwell
Harry Greenwell
Composite Sketch
Composite Sketch
Jeanne Gilbert, Margaret "Peggy" Gill and Vicki Heath
Jeanne Gilbert, Margaret "Peggy" Gill and Vicki Heath

Where it happened

Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where Vicki Heath was killed in 1987

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