I-65 serial killer identified
INDIANAPOLIS - The FBI and Indiana State Police have identified the so-called I-65 Killer as Harry Edward Greenwell decades after three women were raped and killed in motels near the highway in the 1980s.
The victims were all working night shifts as motel clerks when they were killed. The killings started in 1987.
Authoritites say that analysis of crime scene samples positively identified Greenwell, who died in January 2013.
"Greenwell had an extensive criminal history and had been in and out of prison several times, even escaping from jail on two separate occasions," Sgt. Glenn Fifield.
Fifield said evidence linked Greenwell to the Feb. 21, 1987, killing of Vicki Heath, who was working a night shift at the Super Eight Hotel, in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and the March 3, 1989, killings of Mary "Peggy" Gill and Jeanne Gilbert.
Gilbert was slain while working the night shift at a Days Inn in Remington, Indiana, while Gill was killed while working at a Days Inn in Merrillville, Indiana, and the investigation also was known as the "Days Inn Killer" case.
Fifield said Greenwell was also linked by investigators to a Jan. 2, 1990, attack on a woman who was a clerk at a Days Inn in Columbus, Indiana, and who was "attacked in a similar manner as the previous three victims."
"This victim was able to escape her attacker and survive. She was later able to give an excellent physical description of the suspect and details of the crime," he said. "She is the only known victim to have survived the vicious, brutal attacks of this killer."
Fifield said the Indiana State Police crime lab matched ballistic evidence in the Gill and Gilbert slayings, and the crime lab later matched DNA evidence linking the Heath and Gilbert killings to the Columbus, Indiana, case.
Police say they are looking to see if other unsolved rapes and killings from that era are connected to the case.
Greenwell was born in Kentucky and died in Iowa at the age of 68, and his obituary listed cancer as his cause of death. It also said hit had "many friends who loved his straight-up attitude" and did "many good deeds."
Greenwell worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad for 30 years, according to his obituary.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.