The “I-65 Killer”, also known as the “Days Inn Killer”, has been identified by police as Harry Edward Greenwell more than 30 years after he allegedly raped and murdered three female motel clerks along Interstate 65 between Indiana and Kentucky in the late 1980s.
The case went unsolved for decades before Indiana State Police, the FBI and officers from the police department in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, announced the suspected serial killer’s identity at a press conference on 5 April.
Authorities said Mr Greenwell - who died in 2013 - was finally identified through “investigative genealogy” which showed his DNA was a more than 99 per cent match to crime scene evidence.
“The animal that did this is no longer on this Earth. I’m not going to say his name. I think we need to focus on the victims today,” Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter said at the multi-agency press conference.
The first woman attacked and killed by the mysterious assailant was Vicki Heath, a 41-year-old mother of two who had recently gotten engaged before she was found dead beside the trash cans behind the Super 8 Motel in Elizabethtown on 21 February 1987.
Investigators said subsequently that the motel’s lobby betrayed signs of a struggle and it emerged that Heath had been assaulted and shot twice in the head with a 38-calibre pistol.
The killer’s second and third victims were both slain on the same day: 3 March 1989.
Mary “Peggy” Gill, 24, a night auditor at a Days Inn motel in Merrillville, Indiana, was found dead in the building’s parking lot by a passing motorist, having met the same fate as Heath.
Her family said she had loved baking, cross-stitching and painting, according to The Indianapolis Star.
The last victim was Jeanne Gilbert, 34, a mother of two who also worked as a part-time auditor at the Remington Days Inn, near Remington in the same state.
Both Gill and Gilbert had been fatally shot with the same .22-calibre and the attacker had robbed both premises, making off with $426 in total.
A fourth woman working the night shift at a Days Inn motel in Columbus, Ohio, was sexually assaulted and stabbed in 1990 but managed to escape the scene and the DNA retrieved from the incident enabled police to conclude that her attacker was the same man responsible for the other slayings.
She described her assailant as six foot tall with greasy hair, a grey beard and green eyes (one of which was lazy), wearing a beanie hat, a flannel shirt and jeans.
A year later, another woman survived a similar attack in Rochester, Minnesota, that may also have been linked.
Police officially considered the matter a cold case until 2008 when fresh analysis of the DNA evidence was commenced.
Two years later, the affair was confirmed as being a serial killer spree.
