Multiple agencies will provide updates on cold case investigations involving numerous women murdered in Kentucky and Indiana during the 80s and 90s.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – ‘I-65 Killer’ or ‘Days Inn Killer’, as he is known on some occasions, may be responsible for three murders and several other attacks from the 1980s and 1990s.
For more than 30 years, investigators worked to find the man responsible. Now, the Indiana State Police, Elizabethtown Police, and the FBI have announced that they have a major update on the incident.
On February 21, 1987, Vicki Heath was sexually assaulted and shot twice in the head. Police found her body behind trash cans at the Super 8 Motel off I-65, Hardin County.
Elizabethtown Sheriff at the time, Ruben Gardner, was investigating the case as a detective as it happened and said even then he thought the killer was an I-traveller. 65 and this is an opportunistic crime.
Gardner told WHAS11 in 2013. “We did all the usual things you do, compared to every crime we could spot around that had any similarities,” Gardner said. with WHAS11 in 2013. But without any significant lead, the case cooled down until 2008 when Detective Clinton Turner submitted DNA from well-preserved evidence.
“I’d say there’s an 80 percent chance we can find him,” Turner said.
Elizabethtown police have matched the DNA in Heath’s case with at least four other cases in several states. In each case, the women were motel employees, they were all sexually assaulted and robbed, and they all worked under I-65.
Police say the incidents are the trail of a serial killer on the move.
DNA also links the killer to two women who were sexually assaulted and killed in Indiana in 1989.
A year later, 1990, a woman in Columbus, Indiana was sexually assaulted and stabbed but survived. It was the first time police were able to get a description of the killer. She described the attacker as a man with green eyes and a lazy right eye.
In 1991, a Minnesota woman who was also sexually assaulted and stabbed provided police with a similar description of her attacker. The victim described the suspect as a Caucasian male, 6′-6’2”, green eyes, right eye described as lazy eye, and gray-brown hair. He wears a flannel shirt and blue jeans.
“That’s why it’s so difficult because most of our murders are local or have a domestic tie or something. While this is a random murder. nature and there were 16 million people going up and down 65 in the span of a year,” Elizabethtown Police Detective Clinton Turner told WHAS11 in 2013.
Will the detectives have the answer after 35 years? The announcement is scheduled for Tuesday, April 5, at 11:00 a.m. ET in Indianapolis.
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