56-year-old Bruce Mendenhall once ran for mayor of Albion, Illinois.
He didn’t win.
Was it because the people of that town thought he was “loud, hot-tempered and a little peculiar?”
Was it because he looked like this?
With his failed political aspirations, there was only one place Bruce Mendenhall could turn: the road.
Bruce Mendenhall, drivin’ the big rigs but not keepin’ them clean.
Police looked into Mendenhall’s mustard-yellow truck in Nashville, Tennessee, at a truck stop that happened to be where 25-year-old Sara Hulbert was found after being fatally shot two weeks before, on June 26th.
Surveillance cameras had caught his distinctive yellow truck that night, and police were on the lookout for it.
When the inside of your truck is splattered with blood, you’re going to tip off the cops. You learn this in Serial Killer 101. Bruce Mendenhall obviously didn’t do his homework.
Immediately arrested by police detective Pat Postiglione, Bruce Mendenhall admitted his involvement in other murders - another Tennessee woman, a woman in Alabama, Georgia, and two in Indiana.
There are probably more. Remember, Bruce Mendenhall is 56. Serial killers usually start sometime in their mid-20’s.
Mendenhall’s signature killing style has been connected to several other unsolved murders in Indiana and other states, where the victim was shot and then positioned after the killing on their back with legs straight out.
Police are investigating the possibility that Bruce Mendenhall is responsible for other murders in the region including:
- Deborah Ann Glover, an Atlanta prostitute whose body was found near a Motel 6 in Suwanee, Georgia on the 29th of January, 2007. Police are certain that Mendenhall was in Georgia on the day Glover was shot.
- Sherry Drinkard, a prostitute from Gary, Indiana whose body was found naked in the snow.
- Tammy Zywicki, a student who was found stabbed to death on the 2nd of September, 1992. She vanished from Interstate 80 near LaSalle, Illinois nine days after dropping off her brother at Northwestern University.
- Jennifer Smith, a prostitute found nude at a truck stop in Bucksnort, Tennessee in April of 2005.
- Robin Bishop, a prostitute who was run over at a truck stop on Interstate 40 in Fairview, Tennessee on the 1st of July, 2007.
- Belinda Cartwright, a hitchhiker who was run over at a truck stop in Georgia in 2001. A composite police sketch made of the suspect based on information from witnesses bears a striking resemblance to Mendenhall.
- Carma Purpura, a 31-year old mother of two, who was last seen July 11, 2007 at a Far-Southside Indianapolis truck stop. Purpura’s identification was found in Mendenhall’s truck upon his arrest and police are awaiting a blood match on clothing also found in his truck.
On the 10th of April, 2008, Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi says he has charged 56-year-old Bruce Mendenhall with murder in the July 2007 slaying of 31-year-old Carma Purpora of Indianapolis. Carma Purpora’s body has never been recovered, but Brizzi says DNA tests link some of the blood from Mendenhall’s truck cab to the woman’s parents. Investigators also found her cell phone, ATM card and clothing she wore on the day she disappeared.
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