The I-65 Killer

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.