Every Town - America’s MOTEL Killer Who Died a Free Man

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Tonight we’re hitting the highway and headed to Indiana together to track down a killer. So grab your snacks and buckle up, this is the disturbing case of THE DAYS INN KILLER. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/gahqP2zCJ3Y 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Every town has a dark side. There's a stretch of interstate that runs straight up through 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, mainly 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 days-ins and Super 8 types. Well, the killer figured out that late at night, those motels, they 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. Welcome to every town where tonight we're hitting the highway and headed to Indiana together to track down a killer. So grab your snacks and buckle up.

This is the disturbing case of the Dazing Killer. It was just past 11 o'clock at night on March 2nd, 1989, when 24-year-old Peggy Gill clocks in for the overnight shift of the Days Inn off I-65 in Merrillville. 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. She had no idea she'd never make it to the actual celebration. About 70 rooms are booked for that night. 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. It's 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, well, 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. 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's 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 essayed 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 6 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.

A jean was 34 years old, which was divorced 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. That week, she'd swapped shifts with a co-worker 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 for her. 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

Catch his 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, well, it's the same story as Merrillville. Cash drawer pried open, and this time $247 gone. The overnight clerk is, of course, nowhere in sight, and her purse, her keys, or schoolbooks, all of those left behind.

A gene had appeared had been walked outside a gunpoint sometime around 5 a.m., and 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 through her lung. She bled out in that ditch in the cold and in the dark. So two women, two days inns, 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 ever thinking twice about it. 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. days-ins, super rates, holiday ins. 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 in 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'd probably been to these exact motels or one similar and saw the pattern and saw 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 Gene, Indiana State Police put together a full task force because this needed a little more attention than one small town department was built to handle. They brought in a couple of psychological profiles. 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 purpose? 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 one evening, killing Peggy and Gene 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-offs 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 8 motel down in Elizabeth Town, Kentucky. Vicky had just moved to the area to start a new life with her fiancé, 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. And guests showed up the next

morning to a lobby that looked like a brawl had torn through it. Furniture was all knocked over, and the payphone had been ripped clean off the wall. And they found Vicky 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, it had a lot of similarities to Peggy and Gene. A different gun in the place was messed up, but that could just mean the killer got another gun and that Vicky 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, this scene was definitely familiar.

But the first real piece of evidence that started to open this case up came 10 months after the Days in murders, on the night of January 1st and into the 2nd 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 Gene died. Around 5 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 there's somewhere nearby he can grab a bite.

Well, she points him toward a couple of spots, he thanks her and then leaves. Fifteen minutes later, though, he's back with a foam cup and his hand. She figures it's 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 and goes through her purse and 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, assayed.

She survived two, 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. And 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 Viggy 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, cold case investigators pulled the old Vicki Heath evidence and resubmitted it from modern DNA testing. and two years later in 2010, it came back a hit in Kodas, 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 for 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. That's before anyone even

folded Columbus or Rochester into the count. Then, in 2013, a second CODIS match landed, and this one pulled in that 1991 assault up in Rochester. And 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 wasn't 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 use 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 worked together to breathe new life into the cold case, using investigative genealogy to identify Greenwell as the serial killer, a 99.99% 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. Harry Greenwell was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in December of 1944, and was one or more than half a dozen kids. This first real brush with the law came at 18, an armed robbery charge that got him a couple of years in a reform.

formatory plus probation. Two years after that, he had a sodomy charge. He served time in the Kentucky State Penitentiary, and he was paroled in 69. In 1978, his first wife died in a housefire up in Wisconsin. 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. 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 in 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 years later, he met another woman named Julia 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'd describe pretty much anybody's grandfather. Kind, caring. Had 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. Spend hours out there growing tomatoes, onions, carrots, beets, squash. He hauled it all up to the local farmer's market in a tiny Iowa town and sold it to his neighbors. 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. We'll never know, and 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 whys 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, alone 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 him. That's why he left a few survivors behind. Now the killings, they were just clean up, a 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 birthday, 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. And 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 Inn back in 1991. 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, fitting 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 and into the light.

So in the end, this one's not really a story about catching a monster. More a story about a monster who got to grow old, retire, garden, remarry and die peacefully surrounded by people who loved him. And rest assured, he's not the first. He 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 Everytown. 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 slash scary mysteries. 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 Everytown filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.