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Nashville Detective Sees Apparent Blood in a Trucker's Cab and Arrests Bruce Mendenhall in a Truck-Stop Killing

Police said the Illinois trucker implicated himself in six deaths of women in four states. He was charged that day with killing Sara Nicole Hulbert.

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Illustration of a police car with flashing lights among parked semi-trucks at a foggy truck stop at night. Not an actual scene from the case.

Women had been found shot at truck stops in Tennessee in June 2007. On July 12, a Nashville detective returning to one of those truck stops arrested a long-haul trucker, Bruce Mendenhall.

Detective Sgt. Pat Postiglione had gone to the truck stop off Interstate 24 in north Nashville for a follow-up interview in the death of Sara Nicole Hulbert, 25, whose body was found there with gunshot wounds on June 26. He saw a truck that matched the description of one spotted the night before her body was found. The driver, Mendenhall, 56, of Albion, Illinois, seemed nervous and let him look inside the cab, and he was taken into custody when the detective saw what appeared to be blood. He was charged that day with criminal homicide in Hulbert's death.

Police said that during questioning Mendenhall implicated himself in Hulbert's death and in the death of Symantha Winters, 48, whose body was found on June 6 at a truck stop in Lebanon, 26 miles east of Nashville. They said he also implicated himself in a death in Alabama, one in Georgia and two in Indiana. His truck was impounded and searched by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

Mendenhall was later convicted of Hulbert's murder and sentenced to life, and in 2018 he received another life sentence for the murder of Winters. In January 2025, an Indianapolis jury convicted him of murdering Carma Purpura, 31, a mother last seen talking to him at an Indianapolis truck stop on the morning of his arrest.

Police said in 2007 that Mendenhall had made statements implicating himself in six deaths, while IndyStar reported in 2025 that he denied direct involvement in the killings he described.

Sources