Webb: The I-65 Killer: An Indiana / Kentucky serial killer still runs loose

$426.

That’s how much turned up missing from two Days Inn motels in Northern Indiana on March 3, 1989. It’s a paltry sum, considering what the thief did to obtain it.

Exactly $179 vanished from the first crime scene: the Merrillville Days Inn just off Interstate 65. The night auditor was gone, too.

Police found her behind the motel. Her name was Mary “Peggy” Gill, and she was 24. According to police, she had been sexually assaulted and shot twice in the head. The perpetrator had dumped her body in a secluded spot near the parking lot.

Indiana State Police believe she was killed sometime between 12:30 and 2:30 a.m. – not long before another Days Inn clerk met her end 52 miles down the road.

Police found Jeanne Gilbert lying alongside a country road just as the sun came up. She wasn’t far from the Days Inn in Remington, where she worked. Like Gill, she had been assaulted, shot and abandoned. $247 was missing from the motel cash register.

In 1989, Gill’s family told the Indianapolis Star that Peggy worked hard at the motel, earning a promotion from maid to auditor. She loved to paint and was a talented cross-stitcher, once recreating “The Last Supper” with a needle and thread.

Gilbert was an attentive mother of two. Her daughter Kimberly Gilbert Wright, now an attorney in Lafayette, told WLFI last year that her mom wasn’t even supposed to be working that night. She had traded shifts to watch her daughter’s last game as a cheerleader.

Ballistic and DNA tests later proved the slayings were committed by the same person. And almost 30 years later, the perpetrator still hasn’t been caught.

He’s one of several serial killers across the U.S. who, despite DNA evidence and fiery media scrutiny, commit atrocious acts and somehow fold back into society. They live as secret monsters next door. Most of them die without ever being caught, leaving their victims’ families to spend their lives ravaged with worry and haunted by injustice, robbed of even the sliver of payback earned when the beast who stole their loved one gets dragged off to jail.

Last month, however, brought an exception.

Authorities finally nabbed the man accused of being The Golden State Killer. Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, was arrested on April 25 in Sacramento County, California. FBI and local police are trying to tie him to at least 12 slayings, about 50 rapes and more than 100 burglaries committed between 1976 and 1986.

A book by the late writer Michelle McNamara, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” reignited interest in the case. DeAngelo was caught after authorities matched him through a DNA profile they created on a genealogy website.

Law enforcement officials chasing other uncaught serial killers may ape the approach. The Sacramento Bee reports that the Vallejo Police Department will try the same strategy to catch the Zodiac Killer.

Turbo advances in technology could unwind several mysteries as the years plod on. Maybe the identity of the man who came to be known as the I-65 Killer will be one of them.

It wouldn’t just solve Gill and Gilbert’s deaths. Because they are far from alone.

Vicki

It’s logged as Case Number 87-151.

Elizabethtown (Kentucky) Police were called to the Super 8 Motel along I-65 on Feb. 21, 1987. The night clerk had been reported missing.

It didn’t take long for police to locate Vicki Heath. Her body was tucked behind a trash bin. She had been sexually assaulted and shot twice in the head, killed in a manner that would become horrifically familiar two years later.

Vicki’s sister told the News Enterprise after the killing that Heath had just gotten engaged. She had two kids and loved reading romance novels. And judging from the crime scene, she was tough as hell.

Police could tell Heath battled the perpetrator hard, clawing for her life. The lobby was ripped apart and a telephone had been uprooted from the wall.

“I'm sure she put up a good fight,” Heath’s sister, Kathy Johnson, told WDRB in 2011.

Despite DNA collected at the scene, leads fizzled. The search for whoever killed Heath went frigid.

The same for Gill and Gilbert – until Jan. 2, 1990.

The sketch

The Days Inn in Columbus, Indiana, stands only a few feet from I-65. A clerk there was working the night shift when a man attacked her.

Like Heath, Gill and Gilbert, she was sexually assaulted. But unlike the others, she was stabbed instead of shot.

Her case differed in another, more important way as well: she got away.  

She described her attacker as about 6-feet tall. His greasy hair and beard were spotted with flurries of gray. He wore a sock hat, flannel shirt and jeans. His most striking feature, though, were his lime-green eyes.

In a composite drawing later created from her description – and that has since accompanied every article written about the attacker – his lazy right iris drifts toward the corner of his forehead.

The man is certainly memorable. You’d know him if you saw him. But apparently, all these years later, no one has. Or at least no one has made the connection.

Connections

DNA proved the same man who terrorized the Columbus clerk killed Gill and Gilbert. And just a few years ago, the Kentucky State Police crime lab conclusively linked Heath’s death to the man as well.

It may not end there. On their website, Elizabethtown police say the man could be tied to a “broadening array of serial murders.”

There was a woman attacked and stabbed in Minnesota in 1991 whose description of her attacker fit the I-65 Killer almost exactly.

In 1988, hotel clerks were slayed in Florence, Kentucky, and Rockford, Illinois. Neither location sat along I-65, but both squatted right off interstate highways.

“Detectives are exploring the possibility that they are looking for a truck driver or traveling salesman who would have been traveling the I-65 corridor in the late 1980s or early 1990s,” Elizabethtown police say. “He would now be somewhere between the age of 55 and 65.”

If you have information on any of the cases listed above, you can call ISP at 1-800-552-8917 or Elizabethtown police at 1-800-597-8123.

Elizabethtown police’s description fits a lot of killers over the years. There’s Truck Stop Killer Robert Ben Rhoades, a long-hauler who committed sadistic, unspeakable acts.  

Then there’s Bruce Mendenhall, another truck driver who has been convicted for one murder but is suspected in several others, including the deaths of women from Indiana and Illinois. In October 2016, he was accused of slaying Carmen Purpura, a 31-year-old Indianapolis woman who was found dead alongside the Louie B. Nunn Parkway in Barren, Kentucky, nine years after she was reported missing.

The I-65 Killer isn’t even the only uncaught serial murderer named after a roadway.

Several beasts still run loose. Some of them are probably dead or already in jail for different crimes.

But if the case of the Golden State Killer is any indication, not all of them will escape forever. Somewhere, at some point, a vicious murderer will be yanked from obscurity and dragged into the light.

Maybe the I-65 Killer will be one of them.

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Contact columnist Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com.