Crime & Justice

US serial killer identified after 3-decade suspense

Washington DC, Apr 5 (EFE).- The authorities in Indiana state in the United States announced Tuesday that they have identified the perpetrator of the murders of three women and the sexual assault of a survivor, cases that remained unsolved for three decades.

Thanks to advances in scientific techniques, the state police identified Harry Edward Greenwell, a man with a long criminal record and who died in 2013, as the perpetrator of the so-called I-65 or Days Inns murders.

Between 1987 and 1990, Greenwell attacked four young women at different motels near the Interstate 65 highway connecting Kentucky and Indiana.

Three of them were murdered while the fourth woman was sexually assaulted and left for dead.

Shortly thereafter, the police linked the four crimes through ballistic tests and DNA analysis, but there was no progress in the investigation until 2019, when a special FBI team intervened with a novel method of investigative genealogy.

This method combines the use of DNA analysis with traditional genealogy research and historical records to generate investigative leads for unsolved violent crimes, according to the police statement.

The authorities entered the DNA profile from the crime scene into genetic databases to locate his family tree and a match was made to Greenwell with a close family member.

“Through this match it was determined that the probability of Greenwell being the person responsible for the attacks was more than 99 percent,” affirmed the statement.

The FBI special agent in charge of the case, Herbert Stapleton, underlined the advance of technology and inter-agency collaboration that enabled the murderer to be identified and “hopefully, start to bring closure and healing” to the families of the victims. EFE

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