In the cold, early morning hours of March 3, 1989, 34-year-old Jeanne Marie Gilbert, a Caucasian mother of two, was working the night shift at the Days Inn in Remington, Indiana. She had switched shifts with a coworker to attend her daughter's sectional cheerleading game earlier that evening. A recently divorced woman striving to build a better life for her children, she was also studying business at a local college.
Sometime during her shift, the motel was robbed, and Gilbert vanished.
Her nude body was later discovered in a frozen ditch along a rural road in White County, about 19 miles southeast of her workplace. An autopsy revealed she had been sexually assaulted and shot three times with a. 22 caliber firearm. The fatal shot pierced her lung and aorta, causing her to die from internal blood loss. Her uniform was never found.
The investigation into her murder would stretch on for decades. On the very same day Gilbert was killed, another Days Inn clerk, Peggy Gill, was murdered in Merrillville, Indiana, about 52 miles to the north. Ballistic evidence eventually linked the two murders, and DNA evidence later connected Gilbert's case to the 1987 murder of Vicki Heath, a motel clerk in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and the 1990 sexual assault of another Days Inn clerk in Columbus, Indiana, who managed to survive. These crimes became known as the 'I-65' or 'Days Inn Murders.'
For years, the identity of the killer remained a mystery, leaving the families of his victims without answers. Investigators looked into numerous persons of interest, but the cases went cold. A major breakthrough finally came in 2022 when investigators, using investigative genealogy, were able to identify the man responsible.
The killer was identified as Harry Edward Greenwell, a man with an extensive criminal history dating from 1963 to 1998. DNA analysis confirmed with a probability of more than 99 percent that he was the person responsible for the series of attacks. Greenwell, however, would never face justice for his crimes; he died of natural causes in 2013 at the age of 68.
