Trucker growing as national suspect

Meanwhile, the Metro Nashville police are fielding dozens of inquiries from law enforcement agencies and families across the country hoping Bruce Mendenhall will be able to provide clues to unsolved murders that go back as far as 20 years.

Mendenhall, 56, of Albion, Ill., was charged with criminal homicide earlier this month after being questioned by police at the same north Nashville truck stop where Sara Nicole Hulbert, 25, was found dead with gunshot wounds in June. Police say he implicated himself in at least five other similar slayings in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Indiana when they first interviewed him. He has refused to speak to police since then.

Nashville Detective Sgt. Pat Postiglione said Thursday the circumstances of the various slayings under investigation are “not exactly the same, but all similar.” Hulbert was a prostitute working at a truck stop as were several of the other victims whose murders police are investigating.

However the FBI also is trying to determine whether Mendenhall could have been involved in the death of an Iowa college student nearly 15 years ago, a spokesman for that agency said. Grinnell College student Tammy Zywicki was abducted after her vehicle broke down on an interstate in Illinois.

The FBI has been creating a timeline of Mendenhall’s travels during his 20 years as a trucker, Postiglione said, and that will help determine whether he should be considered a suspect in a number of unsolved cases.