A former truck driver was convicted Wednesday of murdering a third woman in Indiana, and he is charged or is a suspect in additional killings in other states, prosecutors said.
Bruce Mendenhall, already serving two life sentences for killing two women in Tennessee, was found guilty of murder by an Indianapolis jury for the slaying of Carma Purpura in 2007, the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office said.
“It is my hope that today’s verdict brings resolution to Carma’s family and others who have waited years for answers and accountability after losing their loved ones,” prosecutor Ryan Mears said in a statement.
Mendenhall was arrested in 2007 in the killing of Sara Nicole Hulbert, found fatally shot at a truck stop in north Nashville, but he made statements implicating himself in other killings in other states, authorities said at the time.
Mendenhall, now 73, has been nicknamed the “Truck Stop Serial Killer,” Mears said.
He was convicted in Tennessee in 2010 of first-degree murder for killing Hulbert, whose body was found on June 26, 2007, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Eight years later, in 2018, Mendenhall was convicted of murder in the killing of Symantha Winters, whose body was found in a trash bin at a Pilot truck stop in Lebanon, Tennessee, on June 6, 2007. He was also sentenced to life in prison in that case.
Mears, the Indiana prosecutor, credited former Nashville police detective Sgt. Pat Postiglione with Mendenhall’s arrest.
Postiglione testified at trial that in 2007 he was investigating Hulbert’s murder and approached Mendenhall’s truck, noticing blood spots on the inside of the driver’s side door, NBC affiliate WTHR of Indianapolis reported. The cab was searched and a bag was found.
“I pulled the bag open, and I looked inside the bag, and I saw, what was obvious to me, blood,” Postiglione testified Tuesday, the station reported.
“There were a lot of blue napkins that were in there that were blood-soaked. There was clothing in there that was blood-soaked. I saw a pair of women’s Crocs shoes and what appeared to me to be women’s clothing, all blood-soaked,” he said, according to the station.
Sentencing in Purpura’s killing is scheduled for Feb. 13, court records show.
In the Tennessee cases, Mendenhall was sentenced to serve the two life terms consecutively, or one after the other.
The Associated Press contributed.
Source link
