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INDIANAPOLIS On Tuesday, 73-year-old serial killer Bruce Mendenhall will go on trial for the 2007 slaying of Carma Purpura, just one of as many as 10 women Mendenhall is suspected of killing.
Purpura disappeared in July 2007 from the Flying J truck stop on the southside of Indianapolis and wasn’t seen again until 2011 when her body was found along an interstate in Kentucky.
Hours after Purpura was killed, a Tennessee police officer pulled over a big rig driven by Mendenhall because of its distinctive yellow color. The officer was in the middle of investigating the murder of another woman whose body was found near a Nashville truck stop two weeks earlier.
“I saw a truck coming towards me that looked like the truck we’d been discussing for the past two days,” Sgt. Pat Postiglione with the Nashville Police Department said at the time.
Mendenhall was stopped and Sgt. Postiglione noticed blood spatter on the inside of the cab.
“The cab of the truck was literally awash with blood,” former Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi said during a news conference in 2008.
Investigators said DNA tests matched some of that blood to Purpura. Her debit card and cell phone were also found in the truck.
Mendenhall was arrested in 2007 and during an interview with police, he implicated himself in at least six homicides. That includes the murder of two women at Tennessee truck stops as well as two murders in Indiana and one each in Alabama and Georgia.
He’s been dubbed the “Truck Stop Serial Killer.”
Investigators said Mendenhall often targeted women who worked as prostitutes.
“No one deserves to be left in the way these women were left,” a Tennessee detective said at the time. “No one deserves to die that way and no one definitely deserves to be left the way they were left.”
Mendenhall has been convicted twice of first-degree murder for his two Tennessee victims and was sentenced to life in prison in both cases.
His trial for Purpura’s murder is only scheduled for one day.
Judge Angela Davis is allowing cameras in the courtroom.
After his trial in Indianapolis, Mendenhall is scheduled to go on trial in Birmingham, Alabama for murdering a woman there and dumping her body in a trash can.