Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  “You go to the truck stop and you stand there and 100 percent of the girls who come around there have a pimp within twenty feet,” Postiglione told me. “The girl’s so strung out you can spot it a hundred yards away. And she’s ready to get into the truck with Ted Bundy, Bruce Mendenhall.”

  It clearly bothers Postiglione that young women become so vulnerable. It bothers him that he arrested Bruce Mendenhall on July twelfth. Had he arrested the trucker one day sooner, another young woman might still be alive.

  “What made this case unique,” he said, “is we were chasing him as he was killing. Because he killed a girl June twenty-fifth and a girl July first . . . so it wasn’t like he’d killed and he stopped. When he came back to the truck stop that night he’d killed a girl the night before. We were kind of chasing a phantom.”

  • • • • •

  Clark Fine has chased the same phantom. Fine is a classic cop’s cop, a detective in the sheriff’s office in Hendricks County, just west of Indianapolis. Even over the phone, you can hear the ghosts of thousands of cigarettes in his raspy, unfiltered voice. “What can I do for you, darlin’?” he drawled when I reached him at his desk.

  In 2004, Fine had a cold case involving a murdered prostitute named Buffie Brawley. Brawley was found dumped in an abandoned truck stop on Indianapolis’s south side. She had been beaten up, strangled, and run over with a truck. Fine attended Terri Turner’s Oklahoma City confab on the I-40 killings. Indianapolis is on I-70, but truckers frequently travel up from the Southwest to the Midwest via I-44 out of Okalahoma City, intersecting with I-70 at St. Louis. Anything going on in Oklahoma City could easily find its way to Indy. At Turner’s meeting, Clark Fine became friends with a police sergeant from Grapevine, Texas. Like Fine, the Grapevine sergeant had a case similar to Terri Turner’s—a truck stop prostitute who had been killed and thrown from an overpass.

  “It’s kind of mind-boggling how many girls get killed every year doing that,” Fine told me. Eventually, John Robert Williams—the suspect in Terri Turner’s series—confessed to the Grapevine crime from prison in Mississippi. The sergeant called Clark Fine and told him he ought to talk to the guy too.

  “Myself and a partner drove down to Mississippi and we had specific things about our case—she had certain tattoos on her—to see if this might be the guy,” Fine recalled. At the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, John Williams told the detectives he remembered their Buffie Brawley, though he hadn’t known her name. Fine asked a few questions about the crime scene, and Williams got some right and some wrong. Fine asked him if he remembered a tattoo on the woman’s buttock.

  “You have to remember, I don’t have sex with them, I just kill them,” Williams said. Fine was losing interest in Williams fast. He figured he had a serial confessor on his hands, someone like Henry Lee Lucas, who got a thrill bragging to cops about all the murders he’d supposedly gotten away with. But then Williams volunteered that he did remember a tattoo on Brawley’s leg. It said Ebony, he recalled. He told the detectives he thought that was funny, since Brawley was white and “Ebony is usually a black girl’s name.”

  “But the thing is,” Fine told me, “that girl had a daughter named Ebony, and so she had that tattoo. And then I knew this asshole was the guy that did it.”

  For Fine, it closed what had been a long, sad case. At the start of it, he had gone down to the local truck stop to talk to other prostitutes who might know something. One woman he spoke to was Carma Purpura, a young blonde with a broad, infectious smile. “I interviewed her down at the truck stop and I said, ‘This is a dangerous life.’ And she said, ‘I know, but I gotta make a living.’ ”

  On July 11, 2007, Carma Purpura got into Bruce Mendenhall’s truck at a Flying J in Indianapolis. Her cell phone and clothing were in the bag of bloodied items discovered by Pat Postiglione the very next day. Some of the blood in the truck matched DNA provided by her parents. Her body has yet to be found.

  “People think all cops are jaded and go home and get drunk every night, but we do care,” Fine said. “We do care about these people and we want them to have someone working on their behalf. Because they’re throwaway people. Sometimes the only people that give a shit are the cops. Even the family sometimes gives up on them.”

  • • • • •

  Sara Hulbert’s family did not give up on her. Throughout Mendenhall’s trial, they sat behind the prosecution’s table, looking alternately angry, bored, and stricken. Their Sara had gone down the wrong road, and now the elaborate machinery of the state had clanked into gear to bring her justice. If an effort anywhere near this size had been mounted to help her kick drugs, she would probably be alive today, raising her kids, shopping with her sister, dating men her grandmother didn’t like. But she had fallen in with the wrong sort, gotten addicted to drugs, sold her body at truck stops, and fallen through society’s cracks. After her various run-ins with the law—two charges of criminal trespassing, one of driving with a revoked license—she had now returned to its bosom. Hulbert’s relatives jumped to their feet like boot camp recruits every time the jurors entered or left the room. Those twelve citizens held justice for Sara in their hands. As for the defendant, Hulbert’s family avoided looking at him.

  Mendenhall didn’t look at them either. For most of the trial he sat impassively and watched. His lawyers sometimes spoke to him and he would murmur back. But he showed no emotion as forensics experts recounted Hulbert’s injuries, as investigators held up the weapons found in his truck, as his former boss told the jury how he had teased Mendenhall about fending off lot lizards and how Mendenhall had replied, “I just shoot them.” The exception was when the prosecution played the video in which Mendenhall told Pat Postiglione the story about the “real” killers. As Postiglione, on-screen, deftly maneuvered him into waiving his right to have an attorney present, Mendenhall shook his head slightly, then hunched down in his seat, one hand pressed to his sagging cheek. It was the only show of emotion from a man who otherwise sat very still and stared straight ahead, concentrating on where this very large machine was taking him. It seemed appropriate that his prison nickname was “Truck.”

  The tape had an electrifying effect on the jury: it’s rare that juries get to hear defendants’ stories from their own mouths, and Mendenhall’s was a strange combination of evasive and guileless. On the tape, Postiglione moves very quickly to the events on the night of Hulbert’s death. Mendenhall declares that he had been driving all night, coming down from Indy. He stopped to fill up and get a sandwich at another truck stop, the Nashville Pilot. But as he was in the fuel lane, two men he knew walked up.

  “Where you going now?” they asked.

  “None of your business,” Mendenhall told them.

  “Well, we’ll make it our business,” they said. One of them got in his truck, determined to ride with him. Mendenhall relates all of this to the detectives with the kind of overemphasis four-year-olds use when they’re making up a story. It would be disarming if the man weren’t talking about a murder.

  Mendenhall says he was so upset by seeing the two men, he forgot to get his sandwich at the Pilot. So he stopped at the T.A. and, hoping they would leave, went inside for some food. But when he came back out, the men were in his truck with a dead girl. She was sprawled out in his bed, naked, with a bloody plastic bag over her head.

  “I said, ‘You guys, what the hell . . . ?’ ” he continues. “And they go, ‘It’s your problem, not ours.’ And they got out and left.” He figured they had killed her with his gun, he says, because “they’ve did it before.” Mendenhall says he cleaned up the mess in his truck and put the body on the grass for the T.A. grounds crew to find. As Postiglione is pressing him for further details about the killing, Mendenhall interrupts him.

  “They do it all the time,” he declares. “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Okay,” Postiglione says. He was born in Queens and raised on Long Island, but he has picked up the Southerner’s way of saying “okay,” g
ently, the last syllable rhyming with lie. “You don’t know these guys.”

  “Yes,” Mendenhall says, “I know one.”

  “How did they know you were at the Truck Stops in Nashville?” Postiglione asks, and Mendenhall says, “That’s what I don’t know. They . . . they meet me everywhere.”

  Postiglione is a deft interviewer. It’s clear throughout the tape that he’s nudging Mendenhall to give up details about the murder without ever confronting him directly. The more Mendenhall knows, the worse it will be for him. So the detective plays along with Mendenhall’s story like a parent indulging a child’s imaginary friend. When Mendenhall tells him that the other two men had sex with Hulbert, Postiglione carefully puts the next question in the third person: “Did Bruce have sex with her?” Bruce insists that Bruce did not. Finally Postiglione asks Mendenhall for the men’s names. Mendenhall then makes his big mistake: he names two men he really knows, men with alibis two states away, men against whom he holds grudges. In the part of the videotape that the jury was not allowed to see, Mendenhall goes on to describe a number of other incidents involving these fantasy killers. They caught up with him at a Flying J on I-465 in Indianapolis the night before, he says, and just as in Nashville, they killed a girl in his truck. He ran into them in Birmingham, Alabama, and he suspects they killed someone there because his gun was gone for a while, and “wherever them two are, them, they’re like killin’.” And, when Postiglione prods him to think about whether he’s ever been on I-40 east of Nashville, he recalls running into the killers again at the Pilot in Lebanon, Tennessee—where the girl in the garbage can was found. He went into the arcade to play video games and returned to find his cab full of blood.

  It’s the lamest story imaginable, and Postiglione plays along gently, nonthreateningly, without ever really suggesting he does or doesn’t believe it. He uses the same neutral tone when he finally tries to get Mendenhall to back off from the lie.

  “We’re not going to treat you any different now,” he says, “if you tell us you were the one who actually did it. And these guys, even though they were mean and nasty to your family, they really had nothing to do with the homicides. If you’re the guy that did these killings. . . .”

  He leaves it hanging, and in the pause, Mendenhall seems to realize the jig is up.

  “Get me a lawyer,” he says.

  After his arrest, Mendenhall attempted to have Pat Postiglione killed. The person he hired for the hit, a fellow prisoner about to be paroled, turned state’s witness. Wearing a wire, the informant had several conversations with Mendenhall in which they plotted the hit, and how Mendenhall would pay for it by driving a truck for the other man after his acquittal. Mendenhall refers to Postiglione throughout the recordings as “the wop” and “the queer.” When I talked to him, Postiglione mentioned the fact often enough to suggest it bugged him.

  • • • • •

  Bruce Mendenhall is not clever. He is not charming. He does not fit popular culture’s preferred image of a serial killer, an evil genius who makes fools of the cops until a brilliant detective brings him down. It’s not clear if he even fits the profile the FBI has built over the last three decades using case studies and interviews with convicted killers. That profile depicts serial murderers as predominantly psychopaths, with deep pathologies that can often be detected in childhood. For instance, criminologists frequently refer to the “MacDonald Triad,” a trio of behaviors that are highly correlated with later homicidal behavior. The three symptoms—fire-starting, bedwetting past the normal age, and cruelty to small animals—don’t obviously predict a life of crime, but the combination has been noted in a large number of criminals. Criminologists agree that if your nine-year-old displays all three, it’s a good idea to seek counseling.

  The trucker killers, however, may have a different pathology, one that isn’t necessarily there from an early age. Eric Hickey, dean of the California School of Forensic Studies at Alliant International University and a frequent law enforcement consultant, thinks the truckers may be a different type of serial murderer than we’ve come to expect. He’s planning on adding a section on truckers who kill to the new edition of his classic book, Serial Killers and Their Victims.

  “If we developed a profile of truck driver serial killers, we’ll find some things that are different from other serial killers,” he told me. “But overall they’re predators, and they like to control people, and they probably have some very bizarre paraphiliac sexual interests.” Predation, the urge to control, paraphilia, aka perversion—those things are in keeping with other serial killers. But Hickey thinks there’s one possible distinction: he believes the truckers are more likely to be sociopaths than psychopaths. “It’s such an opportunistic murder,” he said.

  Sociopaths tend to have below average intelligence. They are capable of feeling emotion, but bad at controlling it. They tend to commit crimes of opportunity. Charles Starkweather was probably a sociopath. Psychopaths, on the other hand, tend to be smart—average or above average intelligence—but they lack normal emotional responses such as remorse, empathy, and sorrow. They are capable of deliberation and self-control, and thus more likely to plan a crime carefully. The planning—the “hunt”—is part of the appeal. Ed Kemper, Ted Bundy, and Roger Reece Kibbe seem more like psychopaths. Hickey doesn’t think the truckers fit that profile.

  “Part of it is the type of work it is,” he told me. “It doesn’t appeal to a lot of psychopaths in general. And you’re limited in your victims. Most people who are truckers are going to be killing prostitutes and hitchhikers. What about those people like Ted Bundy who would never want to kill a prostitute?”

  Given that the murders are opportunistic, Hickey says, a big part of the problem could be the truck stops themselves. “I was just looking at one truck stop in Alabama, and they had over five hundred people who were given citations in one year,” he told me. “Men having sex with men, prostitution, thieves, people buying and selling drugs. Often it’s quite common to see deaths occur at truck stops. Truck stops are absolutely fascinating places for criminal activity. If you’ve ever been to a truck stop late at night you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you walk out among the trucks you’ll see a lot of things going on that you don’t want to see.”

  • • • • •

  Truck stops followed in the footsteps of interstate construction. The highway system put more trucks on the road and made it possible for them to cover enormous distances. Naturally, the system required places to refuel both machine and driver. There are roughly ten thousand truck stops in the nation today, ranging from seedy dives like Nashville’s T.A. to places like the Iowa 80: a huge, well-kept T.A. complex containing restaurants, stores, theater, showers, laundry, even a barber and a dentist. Typically, truck stops service four wheelers as well, which is why in the late nineties T.A. changed its name from Truck Stops of America to Travel Centers of America. Even so, like all truck stops, T.A. facilities keep four wheelers and truckers separate. Motorists and truck drivers enter at separate entrances, gas up at separate pumps, park in separate lots, and often pay at separate counters. Special lounges and shower facilities are designated for truckers exclusively. Frequently the restaurants will be set up to quietly divide the populations by offering counter seating for individual diners and a separate room of booths for groups.

  Truck stops emerged to meet truckers’ bodily needs, but they do a bad job. Truckers need to eat: truck stops offer an array of salty snacks, giant bags of candy, factory-made sandwiches and hot dogs. Often there’s a whole aisle dedicated to meat snacks—beef jerky in various forms. In-house restaurants are either greasy spoon diners or fast-food franchises like McDonald’s and Taco Bell. Truckers need to stay awake: truck stops sell extra-caffeinated coffee, cans of Red Bull bigger than any you’ve ever seen, energy drinks with names like Amp and Monster. Given sustenance like that, it’s not surprising that truck stops usually feature another whole row of extra-strength headache powders and antacids.
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  Driving, particularly driving an eighteen wheeler on the freeway, is not kind to the human body. It’s not hard to imagine how truck stops might counter the rigors of driving: they might have salad bars and dog runs and fitness centers. Instead they offer arcades and dingy drivers’ lounges—a row of easy chairs all facing a giant TV, as if what a driver should do when he stops driving is go and sit some more. Truck stops ought to offer a place to unwind and get a good night’s rest; instead they offer CDs and DVDs and a parking lot full of idling or exiting trucks. They ought to offer human interaction, friendly chat at the very least, but instead they provide, unofficially, lot lizards who knock on the door of each cab and offer—for about thirty bucks—fifteen minutes of relief from the lonely life of the road. Truckers sometimes pay them just to talk.

  Add to this the fact that many of the nation’s truck stops have become magnets for all kinds of crime: robbery, drug deals, assaults. Truckers have to deal with the constant threat of becoming crime victims themselves, from an all-out hijacking of their freight to pilferage of their spare tires while they sleep. To criminals, a truck is a rolling opportunity. Even a fifty-three-foot truckload of toilet paper, boosted and sold on the street for a dollar a pack, is a relative gold mine.

  “We are targets for crime because criminals see us as money,” Desiree Wood, a trucker who blogs as “Trucker Desiree,” told me. She doesn’t carry a gun; many trucking companies ban them in their trucks, though some truckers carry them anyway. Other truckers simply avoid truck stops, preferring to sleep at rest areas or in Walmart parking lots.

  In fact, individual truck stops can become so notorious for criminal activity that larger trucking companies declare them off-limits to their drivers. Interstate Distributors keeps a list of banned truck stops. Desiree Wood drives for Covenant, and when the GPS on her truck shows that she has entered an area near one of Covenant’s off-limits truck stops, her communications device gives her a message warning her to stay away. Truck stops in West Memphis, Arkansas, for instance, are no-go, and Covenant drivers are not allowed within twenty-five miles of Atlanta’s outer loop, I-285. The warnings, Wood noted wryly, always refer to the problem truck stops as “high pilferage” areas, rather than mentioning any danger to the truckers.