Police Name New Suspect In Truck Stop Slaying

DANVILLE, Ind. -- Hendricks County officials on Thursday said they've identified a new suspect in the 2004 slaying of a woman whose body was found at an abandoned truck stop.

Detectives from Hendricks County went to Parchman, Miss., this week to interview prison inmate John Robert Williams, checking to see whether he was involved in the slaying of Buffie Rae Brawley, 27.

The interview led the Hendricks County Sheriff's Department to name Williams, 31, a suspect in the death, and information from the interview will be presented to the county prosecutor, sheriff's Capt. Brett Clark said.

Williams, who officials said worked as a truck driver, is serving a life sentence for murder in another case in Mississippi.

Brawley's partially nude body was found in the back of an abandoned truck stop near Interstate 74 in Pittsboro on March 24, 2004. An autopsy determined she died of asphyxiation.

Hendricks County officials' renewed investigation of the Brawley case is the result of a national task force put together to investigate a series of unsolved homicides involving women suspected of being prostitutes at truck stops.

Hendricks County police said they began investigating Williams in mid-July. He has been linked and charged in other cases involving prostitute killings in several states, the county sheriff's department said.

Clark said Brawley had been restrained and badly beaten.

"(She was) ultimately dumped, basically, on the roadside at the back of an abandoned lot and run over partially by (a) semi," Clark said.

Clark said some of the statements that Williams made in his interview with detectives this week led the detectives to suspect Williams in the death. Clark did not elaborate.

Indianapolis police went to Tennessee on Thursday, in part to investigate whether another trucker suspected in serial killings might have been involved in Brawley's death.

Police said Bruce Mendenhall confessed last month to killing six women -- including two in Indiana -- this year.

One of the victims Mendenhall confessed to killing was a friend of Brawley's, police said.