‘Truck Stop Serial Killer’ Is Found Guilty of a Third Murder

He’s long been called the “truck stop serial killer.” Even before his murder trial in Indiana this week, Bruce Mendenhall was serving two consecutive life sentences for killing two women last seen at truck stops in Tennessee.

On Wednesday, after a two-day trial, Mr. Mendenhall, 73, was convicted of murdering Carma Purpura, 31, a mother of two whom a witness last saw speaking with Mr. Mendenhall at a Flying J Travel Center on the south side of Indianapolis on July 12, 2007.

Mr. Mendenhall, who’ll be sentenced on Feb. 13, now awaits trial in the killing of another woman, in Alabama, and is a suspect in at least two other killings, according to the authorities.

Investigators described Mr. Mendenhall as a long-haul truck driver who was living in Illinois at the time of a sadistic spree in which he preyed on victims from the cab of his 18-wheeler near highways in several states.

The prosecution in Ms. Purpura’s homicide case credited a now-retired police investigator from Nashville, about 300 miles away, with connecting Mr. Mendenhall to the killing. He had been investigating a similar murder of a 25-year-old woman, Sara Hulbert, whose body had been discovered at a truck stop parking lot in Nashville a few weeks earlier. Mr. Mendenhall was behind the wheel of a yellow 18-wheeler that resembled a truck in a surveillance video taken near where Ms. Hulbert’s body had been dumped.

“This case broke due to a hard-working detective who was dedicated to working across state lines to ensure that justice was achieved for the victims and their families,” Ryan Mears, the Marion County Prosecutor, said in a statement on Wednesday.

When the investigator, Pat Postiglione of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, approached the truck, he noticed what appeared to be drops of blood on the interior of the driver’s side door, according to his testimony. During a search of the truck, to which Mr. Mendenhall consented, Mr. Postiglione said, he discovered a bag with some blood on it behind the driver’s seat. He also found a black knife, a roll of black electrical tape and a .22-caliber rifle beneath a bed frame in the sleeper compartment.

An ATM card and a phone belonging to Ms. Purpura were recovered from the truck Mr. Mendenhall was driving, along with some other personal items, The Indianapolis Star reported. Some of the blood in the truck matched DNA samples taken from the parents of Ms. Purpura. Like Mr. Mendenhall’s other victims, she had been shot in the back of the head. Her body was found on the side of a highway in Kentucky in 2011.

During his initial encounter with law enforcement, Mr. Mendenhall was unusually chatty, investigators said. When Mr. Postiglione asked him if he was the person they had been looking for in connection with Ms. Hulbert’s murder, Mr. Mendenhall answered, “If you say so,” the police investigator previously testified.

The family of Ms. Purpura, who, according to her obituary, was a self-employed artist, did not immediately comment on the verdict.

One of Mr. Mendenhall’s lawyers said on Thursday that he was not authorized to speak about the verdict and referred questions to the lead defense lawyer in the case, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2010, Mr. Mendenhall was found guilty of murdering Ms. Hulbert, a crime that carried an automatic life sentence under Tennessee law, The Courier and Press Newspaper in Evansville, Ind., reported.

“The cab of his truck was a killing chamber,” Tom Thurman, the deputy district attorney in Nashville at the time, said then. “He had a .22-caliber rifle, latex gloves, handcuffs, razor blades, sex toys and electrical tape. He is a truly bizarre individual. Who knows what makes a man in his 50s turn into a serial killer.”

Mr. Mendenhall was also found guilty of trying to hire a hit man to kill three witnesses in Ms. Hulbert’s murder case and was sentenced to an additional 30 years in prison.

In 2018, the former truck driver was convicted in the 2007 murder of Symantha Winters, who was found dead inside a trash can at a Pilot truck stop in Lebanon, Tenn. That brought him another life sentence, consecutive to the first one.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.