America’s MOTEL Killer Who Died a Free Man

Welcome to the "I Can't Sleep Podcast" with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the "I Can't Sleep Podcast". I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention. And then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcast. That's "I Can't Sleep" with Benjamin Boster. Every now and then someone would die. Risk. True stories. No holding back. It comes up behind me. And Whisper's right here. Nobody knows where you are. In no way you can hear your scream. Some of these stories will make you laugh till you're crying. And then I realize I'm unconscious. Some will stick with you for life. They catch my mom poisoning my sister. My brother. We got it, the hands of my mother. People say risk makes them feel less alone and more alive. During my time in prison I discovered a podcast called "Risk" that podcasts saved my life so many times. Live your authentic truth because you never know who may come to your funeral and turn that bitch out. Risk. The show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. Wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. There's a stretch of interstate that runs straight up to Indiana, connecting Chicago at the top and Louisville down at the bottom. It's I-65 and if you've ever driven through the Midwest you've probably been on it and it didn't mean much to you. It's unremarkable really and the flat fields on either side of it. And every 30 miles or so right off an exit there's a little cluster of motels, the day's ends and super eight types. While the killer figured out that late at night those motels got pretty quiet out there. And usually just a lone clerk behind the registration table and they decided they were going to do some unspeakable things there. This killer was never caught, at least not when it mattered and the amount of victims they tallied up is impossible to know for sure, but there's definitely a lot of them. Hey guys it's Andrew and welcome to every town where tonight we're hitting the highway and headed to Indiana together to track down a killer. To grab your snacks and buckle up this is the disturbing case of the days in killer. It was just past 11 o'clock at night on March 2nd, 1989. On 24 year old Peggy Gill clocks in for the overnight shift of the days in off I-65 in Merylville. Earlier that evening before work she'd been over at her dad's and two of them were putting the finishing touches on a birthday cake for him. His 51st was the next day and Peggy was baking from scratch. She wanted it to be perfect for her pops. She hugged him on the way up the door and told him happy early birthday old man. And she had no idea she'd never make it to the actual celebration. About 70 rooms are booked for that night and it's mostly truckers and travelers just passing through. And Peggy takes over the desk, talks a couple minutes with the clerk closing out their shift and then she's alone. Just her, a quiet lobby, and a long night of cross stitching while watching the front door, same as always. But somewhere between half past one and two in the morning, something goes very wrong. We don't know exactly what, because there was nobody there to see it. Nobody except one very unlucky 18 year old college kid who wandered into the lobby around two looking to check in and instead found no one behind the desk at all. He waited a few minutes, shrugged, and then drove up the road and found himself another hotel. And he had no clue just how close he'd become to being part of this story too. And by five in the morning, Peggy was supposed to call her manager and check in. It was a habit they had started after a string of hotel robberies in the area. And five o'clock comes and then goes and there is no call that comes through. Within minutes, the manager is dying the front desk herself and it just rings. She then calls the police and a little after six officers are on the scene. On the surface, the lobby it looks fine. There's no sign that anything bad had happened other than a few guests milling around annoyed that they can't check out, but Peggy's car is still in the lot. Her purse and keys, all of it still stuck behind the front desk, right where she'd have left it on a normal night. And then they see it, the pride open cash drawer, broken open and some cash missing. They start searching from there, looking in all the available rooms until someone remembers the second floor wing, the one that's been closed up for the entire winter. It's entirely filled with empty rooms, so nobody's supposed to be up there at all. And that's where they find her. And Peggy's lying at the far end of that vacant hallway right by a fire exit. As far from the lobby as you can physically get inside that building, as she's naked and her clothes, they're folded in a neat little pile sitting right beside her. As she had been assayed and then shot twice in the back of the head with a 22, the amount of cash taken in the end was $179. So that's the math on this one, $179 for a young woman's life. Now here's the part that should have sent every available officer in the state of Indiana into a full-blown panic. But at six in the morning, with one body just found, nobody had put it together just yet. But on that very same day, about 50 miles south in the tiny town of Remington, another days in night clerk, a woman named Jean Gilbert had just vanished too. Jean was 34 years old, with his divorce and raising two teens, working two jobs and taking night classes on top of it all, just to try to give her kids a shot at something better. At that week, she'd swap shifts with a coworker so she could be off the next day and watch her daughter cheer at a competition. She clocked in at 11, so same as Peggy, 50 miles further down the same dark highway. At 4.30 in the morning, Jean made a routine wake-up call to a guest, but an hour and a half later, guests are standing in the lobby waiting to check out and there's nobody at the desk. One of them eventually tried the door to the registration office, but it's locked and nobody can get in. And right around that same moment, but a whole county away, a passing motorist out on a rural route catches sight of something lying in the ditch along a back road. He slows down and pulls over, it's Jean, and she's nude and not moving. By the time police forced their way into that locked office, let's the same story as Merrillville, cash drawer pride open, and this time $247 gone. The overnight clerk is of course nowhere in sight, and her purse, her keys, her schoolbooks, all of those left behind. And Jean had appeared, had been walked outside a gunpoint, sometime around 5 a.m., she was driven about 20 miles down the interstate to an empty rural exit, essayed and then shot three times with a 22. A one shot tore through her shoulder and one went into her chest and threw her lung. She bled out in that ditch in the cold and in the dark. So two women, two days in, the same gun, all of it folded into one single night. So now that we have a clear picture, let's back it up a bit. And set the scene here, because this whole thing takes place along a stretch of road that, if you've ever driven through the Midwest, you've almost definitely been on without everything twice about it. Now interstate 65 runs straight down through Indiana, connecting Chicago up north and Louisville down south. And the whole way along it, you've got exactly the kind of cheap, reliable chain mode tells you'd picture. and super eight. I'll be back. holiday ends. They're built for truckers and traveling salesmen who just need somewhere to crash for a few hours before they're back out on the road. And running those places overnight, well it's almost always one person. Usually a woman alone behind a desk, a cash drawer in front of her and a parking lot full of strangers cars sitting right outside the window. And so somebody out there had figured out exactly how to use this common scene to commit heinous crimes. They probably been to these exact motels or one similar and saw the pattern and saw it just how simple it would be to do whatever they wanted in the early morning hours when people were asleep and no one else was around. After Peggy and Jean in the end of state police put together a full task for us because this needed a little more attention than one small town department was built to handle. They brought in a couple of psychological profilers but they couldn't even agree with each other on the basics. Then the FBI got involved and it didn't exactly paint a clear picture either and here's why. Well none of them could agree on the real motivation. I mean was it the money and then just having a gun and being alone in the wee hours of the morning and not wanting a witness so they just kept going or was the assault the motive or was the murder the actual prize. And who was this person was it a drifter a trucker a salesman or someone else and was this his first time just went on a rampage on a evening killing Peggy and Jean out of nowhere or was this a seasoned vet in the true crime game and lastly why days in well maybe a disgruntled employee or maybe it's just a coincidence you can see that based on what happened here they needed more a bigger sample size and so they went back and looked at any cases that could fit the mold cases once thought to be isolated one off to see if they could make any connections and this is what they got two years before that night in Merrillville and Remington back in February of 1987 a 41 year old woman named Vicki Heath was working the overnight desk at a super eight motel down in Elizabethtown Kentucky Vicki had just moved to the area to start a new life with her fiance and she'd taken the night job mostly so she could get paid to sit and read romance novels through the quiet hours which honestly doesn't sound like a bad gig at all if that's your thing but life is rarely that simple I guess show it up the next morning to a lobby that looked like a brawl had torn through it furniture was all knocked over and the pay phone had been ripped clean off the wall and they found Vicki outside behind the dumpster and the half melted snow and she'd been essayed and shot twice in the head this time with a 38 they never got any solid leads or suspects for this one but looking at the case again in 89 that had a lot of similarities to Peggy and Jean different gun in the place was messed up but that could just mean the killer got another gun and Vicki fought back but money was stolen and she was assaulted and then shot after working alone at a motel in the middle of the night so the seam is definitely familiar but the first real piece of evidence that started to open this case up came ten months after the days in murders on the night of January 1st and into the second of 1990 a 21-year-old was working the front desk alone at yet another days in and this one down in Columbus Indiana about 140 miles south of where Jean died around five in the morning a man walks into the lobby he looks like a trucker has a scruffy beard and a plaid shirt on he's actually pretty friendly asking for some change for the cigarette machine then he asks if they're somewhere nearby he can grab a bite well she points in toward a couple of spots he thanks her and then leaves 15 minutes later though he's back with a foam cup in his hand she figures its coffee and it is except he throws it straight in her face scalding hot and he's over that front desk before she's even registered what's happening from there he empties the cash drawer goes to her purse pulls the rings right off of her fingers and when she doesn't move fast enough he pulls a knife from there he marches her toward a side door and tells her to go outside and keep walking and don't turn around she does exactly what he says the whole time dead certain she's about to be shot in the back as she wades through a half frozen creek and climbs a hill in the pitch dark and somehow makes it to a trailer home where a stranger lets her inside and then calls the police so she lived and she handed police one detail that would end up mattering more than almost anything else in this entire case the man who attacked her he had a lazy eye his right eye just didn't track wouldn't settle where the rest of his face was pointed about a year later in 1991 a woman was attacked almost the same exact way nearly 400 miles north up in Rochester Minnesota stabbed mass aid she survived to though and when she sat down to describe her attacker she gave them the beard the plaid shirt the build and the same lazy eye here's where it gets a little tangled timeline wise so stick with me for a second a Columbus attack actually got tied to the days in murders pretty fast at least by the standards of the time the M.O. was just too similar but Vicki Heath's murder well at the time that one sat by itself it was a different state different gun it took a while to definitively confirm it was a part of this whole thing and then Rochester Minnesota did the same once that attack happened in 91 it sat as its own little one-off case nearly 400 miles outside the pattern anybody in Indiana was even looking at and this is where the DNA earns its place in the story and that's kind of devastating because it shows you exactly how long this guy got to just live a normal life and nowadays we don't see this because the science is too fast but back then people got to get away with a lot and for decades out of time so in 2008 Colt case investigators pulled the old Vicki Heath evidence and resubmitted it from modern DNA testing in two years later in 2010 it came back a hit in Codus the national criminal DNA database tying her 1987 murder directly to the days in killings of Peggy Gill and Gene Gilbert and that match will it change the entire shape of this thing because now we're not talking about a guy who snapped one bad night in 1989 and then vanished we're talking about somebody who had already killed two years earlier gotten away clean and then came back and did it again twice in a single night and that's before anyone even folded Columbus or Rochester into the count then in 2013 a second Codus match landed and this one pulled in that 1991 assault of a Rochester just like that the map of this guy's crime stretched from Kentucky up through Indiana all the way to Minnesota but they still didn't have a name now that only means this guy wasn't in the criminal database but maybe he was in a public one or at the very least someone related to him was so in 2019 they took this guy's DNA and uploaded it to consumer genealogy databases the same ones people used to build out their family trees and they look for any sort of match they built a family tree and then boom at the end of one of those branches they found a man his name was Harry Edward Greenwell local state and federal investigators work together to breathe new life into the cold case using investigative genealogy to identify Greenwell as the serial killer a 99.99 percent match so they started looking in to who this guy actually was now I know what you'd normally expect from a case like this is some big obvious reason why Harry turned out this way, something in his childhood you can follow from point A to point B that explains how he turned out like this. But the reality is that it's messier and more ordinary than that, which when you really think about it might be even worse in some ways. A Harry Greenwell was born in Louisville, Kentucky in December of 1944 and was one of more than half a dozen kids. His first real brush with the law came at 18, an armed robbery charge that got him a couple of years in a reformatory plus probation. A two years after that, he had a sawdemy charge. He served time in the Kentucky State Penitentiary and he was paroled in '69. In 1978 his first wife died in a house fire up in Wisconsin, and at some point after that he married again to a woman who'd come out of an abusive relationship of her own. He adopted her daughter and the two of them had a son together. By every account you can find he looked like a guy turning his life around. In '82 though, he was arrested again, and this time for burglary in Iowa, he actually escaped custody twice during that process before finally being recaptured and serving his time at a state penitentiary, and he got out in '83 at the age of '39. And then as far as anyone's been able to piece together, well he got a job working the railroad. The Canadian Pacific specifically, where he'd spend the next several decades eventually retiring in 2010 after roughly 30 years of service and a role connected to safety along the rail line. That's interesting, if you think about it for a moment, a man whose entire working identity revolved around keeping people safe was, for at least four of those years, assaulting and murdering women who worked alone overnight at highway motels. A year later he met another woman named Julie at a bar in Minnesota, and they married and stayed together for almost 20 years, right up until his death in 2013, and she had no idea who he really was. When the FBI tracked her down in 2022 to deliver the news that Harry was officially nailed as the days in killer, well she described him the way you described pretty much anybody's grandfather. Kind, caring, at a temper sometimes, sure, but nothing that ever once made her think she was sleeping next to a man who'd done what he did. Harry loved gardening, spent hours out there growing tomatoes, onions, carrots, beet, squash. He hauled it all up to the local farmers market in a tiny Iowa town and sold it to his neighbors. When it wasn't for the money, it was more as an excuse to get out there and chat with people in the community. Harry liked horse racing, and college sports. He lived in a three bedroom farmhouse looking out over a quiet state highway, in a town of maybe 300 people. And near the end when he was dying of cancer and hospice care, he requested a visit from a priest. And his wife who was in Catholic herself figured it must have been for confession. After the truth came out in 2022, she couldn't help wondering what exactly he might have confessed in that room, and whether any of it touched on what we now know he did. I will never know, that's the honest answer, and he died without ever facing a single charge, a single courtroom, a single moment where anyone got to look him in that lazy eye and ask him why. We'll never know what the killer was thinking, we'll never learn any of the wise of his actions. And that's just where we sit today. As for the actual why, well investigators have a theory, and it's basically the same one they had back in '89, just confirmed and extended over time. They now believe robbery was the spark every single time. This was a man who needed cash, who knew exactly which kind of place to find an easy target, a lone woman, a lone overnight with a cash drawer, and nobody around to help. And once he was standing there, already armed, already passed the point of no return on the robbery, well, something else took over, the assaults, the killings, investigators have come to believe the murders themselves weren't really the point for them. That's why he left a few survivors behind. Now the killings, they were just clean up, the way to make sure nobody who saw his face ever got to describe it to police, except of course that's exactly what happened and yet, in the end it didn't really matter, at least not to Harry. He never had to sit in a courtroom, while Peggy Gill's father, who lost his daughter on his 51st birth, they looked at him. He never had to answer for Jean Gilbert's kids, who grew up without their mom because she wanted to make sure her daughter had money for cheerleading. He never had to explain himself to the two women who survived him and have had to carry this for decades, knowing the man who did this to them just kept selling vegetables and kept living. And really, who knows what else Harry did and all that time he was out in the world, because remember, these people we mentioned are only the ones we know about for sure. There was a hotel clerk shot dead in Rockford, Illinois in December of '88. Another motel clerk shot dead in Kentucky less than two weeks after that. It was the same gun in both cases, and a description matching a bearded man seen in the area at the time came through. Another hotel worker was beaten and stabbed at a holiday in back in 1991, and none of those have ever been officially connected to Greenwell through DNA. All of them happened in the same stretch of years, on the same general stretch of highway, putting the same pattern almost exactly. We're all now able to share in the healing process, knowing the long, known attacker has now been brought out of the dark, into the light. And so in the end, this one's not really a story about catching a monster, or a story about a monster who got to grow old, retire, garden, re-marry, and die peacefully surrounded by people who loved him. Rest assured, he's not the first to get to go out like that and he certainly won't be the last. Because remember, we can only talk about the people we know who have done things, but there's a lot of unsolved cases out there, more than you'd be comfortable knowing about. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town. If this one resonated with you, then show us some love at our Scary Mysteries merch store or go check out our secret collection of videos over on patreon.com/scarymysteries, the links are down in the description. If you don't do that, well, remember to come back here next week for another episode of Every Town, filled with scary, strange and mysterious stories, because you never know, every year town will be next.