A 74-year-old man known as “The Truck Stop Serial Killer” will not be tried in Alabama for 2007 killing of a woman in Birmingham.

Bruce D. Mendenhall is charged in a string of serial killings of at least a half dozen women in multiple states, including Alabama, Indiana, Tennessee and Georgia.

Mendenhall’s victims – mostly sex workers – were all left nude, their heads covered in plastic bags secured with tape and shot in the back of the head. Their bodies were then dumped.

In Birmingham, Mendenhall was charged in the slaying of Lucille “Greta” Carter, a 44-year-old who was found dead July 1, 2007, on Finley Boulevard.

Investigators said Carter was shot with a .22-caliber weapon and dumped nude next to a trash bin on a service road. She had a plastic bag over her head and duct tape around her neck.

Mendenhall in March was sentenced to 65 years in prison for the killing of Carma Purpara, whose body was found along a Kentucky Highway more than four years after she was last seen at an Indianapolis truck stop.

He is already serving two life sentences for the murders of two women in Tennessee.

Following Mendenhall’s sentencing three months ago, Jefferson County prosecutors began to try to determine their next steps in Carter’s case and issued a public plea for her family members to come forward.

Jefferson County Chief Deputy District Attorney Joe Roberts said prosecutors and Birmingham police met and determined they still had sufficient evidence to move forward with the prosecution if Carter’s family wanted to do so.

“Our office made contact with the family of Lucille Carter and discussed with them what it would take to have Mendenhall brought back to Jefferson County for prosecution and the challenges with prosecuting a case nearly 20 years old,” Roberts said.

The main point of discussion was that Mendenhall has been sentenced to life without parole in Tennessee and will never be released but will die in prison.

“After discussion and consideration,” Roberts said, “the family of Lucille Carter notified our office that they were satisfied that Mendenhall would never be released from prison and did not want him to be extradited back to Jefferson County for trial.”

Roberts said Mendenhall’s murder warrant in Alabama has been recalled and the case is now closed.

Mendenhall was first arrested in Nashville on July 12, 2007.

A detective there spotted a truck at the TA truck stop on Interstate 24 that matched surveillance footage from the night 25-year-old Sara Nicole Hulbert was murdered at the same truck, which happened on June 26, 2007.

A search of his truck, which prosecutors would later describe as a “killing chamber,” turned up bloody clothing, the identification of another victim, and blood splattered around the inside of his truck’s cab.

Police confiscated a rifle, knives, handcuffs, latex gloves, several weapons cartridges, black tape, a nightstick, and sex toys.

He was convicted in 2010 of first-degree murder in Hulbert’s death and sentenced to life.

Mendenhall also received a 30-year prison sentence for soliciting the murder of three witnesses in Hulbert’s case.

Prosecutors say Mendenhall tried, from a jail cell, to hire someone to carry out the killings of two Nashville police detectives and three witnesses.

In 2018, Mendenhall was convicted and sentenced to life in the slaying of 48-year-old Samantha Winters, whose body was found inside a trash can at a truck stop in Lebanon, Tennessee, on June 6, 2007. She had been shot in the head.

Mendenhall was convicted earlier this year in Purpara’s murder. He is also suspected in multiple other similar murders.

He remains behind bars in the Tennessee Department of Corrections.