On the cold morning of March 3, 1989, a shocking discovery was made at the Days Inn in Merrillville, Indiana. Margaret 'Peggy' Gill, a 24-year-old Caucasian female, was found brutally murdered. She had been working the quiet overnight shift as a hotel auditor, a job she took to help pay for her business college tuition. Her body was located in a vacant hallway of the motel. An investigation revealed that she had been sexually assaulted and had died from gunshot wounds to the head.
The cash drawer at the front desk had been forced open and robbed, adding another layer to the heinous crime that shook the local community.
For years, Peggy Gill's murder remained a painful cold case, a mystery that investigators diligently worked to solve. The initial investigation noted the chilling similarities to another crime that occurred on the very same day. Just hours after Peggy's death, another hotel clerk, Jeanne Gilbert, was abducted from a Days Inn in Remington, Indiana, and was also shot and killed. Ballistics testing later confirmed that the same. 22 caliber firearm was used in both murders, linking them to a single, unknown assailant. This connection created the profile of a potential serial killer preying on women working at motels along the Interstate 65 corridor. The attacker would come to be known as the 'I-65 Killer' or the 'Days Inn Killer.'
Decades passed without a suspect, but advances in forensic science would eventually break the case wide open. DNA evidence collected from the crime scenes, including the Gill and Gilbert murders and the sexual assault of a fourth woman in 1990 who managed to survive, was preserved. In 2019, investigators turned to investigative genealogy, a modern technique that uses DNA analysis to find relatives of a potential suspect through genealogical databases. This process generated a crucial lead, pointing detectives toward a man with an extensive and violent criminal history.
In April 2022, more than three decades after the string of brutal attacks, authorities publicly identified the 'I-65 Killer.' His name was Harry Edward Greenwell. A DNA sample from a close relative of Greenwell was compared to the evidence from the crime scenes, and the results showed a greater than 99 percent probability that he was the man responsible for the murders of Peggy Gill, Jeanne Gilbert, and Vicki Heath in Kentucky in 1987, as well as the assault on the survivor. While the identification brought a name to the faceless killer and a measure of closure to the victims' families, there would be no trial or conviction. Harry Edward Greenwell had died of cancer in 2013, taking the full story of his violent crimes to his grave.
