‘Girl on the Run’: Hulu Doc Recounts 2008 Hunt for ‘America’s Most Wanted Woman’

Sarah Jo Pender, an Indiana woman convicted of two murders, has spent more than 20 years behind bars — save for the months she spent evading authorities after a prison break. Now Pender’s case and her escape are the subject of a Hulu documentary, Girl on the Run: The Hunt for America’s Most Wanted Woman, debuting on Thursday, February 19.

The doc comes as Pender continues fighting for her freedom — through legal means this time — and after the prosecutor in the case has expressed second thoughts about the conviction. Read on for the backstory — and the latest developments.

Sarah Jo Pender and her onetime boyfriend were convicted of the 2000 murders of their roommates.

In July 2002, Pender was convicted for the October 2000 murders of two people, her then-roommates Andrew Cataldi and Tricia Nordman, and she was sentenced to 110 years in prison.

Richard Hull, Pender’s boyfriend and the fourth roommate at the time of the crime, was convicted in the killings as well and given a 90-year-sentence, per WRTV.

Pender has said that Hull and Cataldi got into an argument the night of the killings — the same night she bought a shotgun from a nearby Walmart — so she left the four roommates’ house in Indianapolis, Indiana. She said that when she returned, Hull had shot Cataldi and Nordman to death and was loading their bodies into a pickup truck, and she accompanied him as he dropped the bodies into a trash bin. She said she thought Hull would kill her if she contacted the police.

There was no direct evidence linking Pender to the murders, but then-Marion County Deputy Prosecutor Larry Sells relied on evidence including a letter Pender allegedly wrote to Hull and the testimony of an inmate named Floyd Pennington, who claimed Pender confessed to coercing Hull into killing their roommates, per WRTV. Sells knew Hull pulled the trigger, but he believed Pender masterminded the murders and exerted influence over Hull. He even called her the “female Charles Manson.”

Pender escaped from prison in 2008 and recaptured months later.

In August 2008, Pender broke out of Indiana’s medium-security Rockville Correctional Facility by hiding in the back of a state prison vehicle driven by a prison guard, according to the Chicago Tribune. She spent nearly five months on the lam, and she ranked as the only woman the U.S. Marshals’ 15 Most Wanted Fugitives list at the time.

In December 2008, nearly five months later and hours after a rerun of the TV program America’s Most Wanted publicized her case, police in Chicago received an anonymous tip about Pender’s whereabouts in the city. Tactical officers found her in an apartment and took her into custody.

The guard who abetted Pender’s escape was later sentenced to eight years in prison, according to the Indianapolis Business Journal. A former inmate was accused of aiding the breakout as well, according to WTHR, and she was sentenced to seven years in prison, court records show.

The prosecutor in the case now thinks Pender’s murder convictions should be “set aside.”

In 2023, a then-retired Sells expressed doubts about Pender’s conviction. “I’ve come to the conclusion that there definitely exists a reasonable doubt as to Sarah’s culpability in the case,” he told WRTV.

In 2003, Hull vowed in an affidavit that he acted alone and had a fellow inmate named Steve Logan forge the letter from Pender. In an affidavit of his own in 2019, Logan admitted to faking the document, saying he was “bullied, manipulated, and coerced” into doing so.

Furthermore, Sells discovered after Pender’s trial that Pennington had written a “snitch list” that indicated he would do anything to get a plea deal, including lying under oath. (Pennington, for his part, has claimed he told the truth about Pender.)

The snitch list and the forged letter are two of the factors that convinced Sells that “important evidence presented at [Pender’s] trial was tainted and that her murder convictions should be set aside,” he told WRTV.

He added, “I never had anything like this happen in any case I ever prosecuted before. It took a long time for me to come to the conclusion I’ve come to now … Justice is long overdue for Sarah Pender. Unfortunately, the legal system has to date failed her, but that grievous error can and should be corrected.”

Last month, a judge denied Pender’s request for a sentence modification.

Pender, now 46, asked a Marion County judge for a sentence modification in December 2025, pleading “for a chance to be free and not die in prison,” WRTV reported separately.

She told the court, “I bought the gun. I didn’t run away and report the crime, and I helped Rick afterwards. I deserved to go to jail. However, shocked and devastated does not come close to how I felt when I was found guilty of Drew and Trish’s murders. … I thought the judge would give me 45 years. 110 years was unfathomable.”

In January, however, the judge denied the petition, according to WRTV.

Now, the three-episode Hulu documentary Girl on the Run — directed by Sebastian Smith and produced by Plum Pictures and ABC News Studios — is revisiting the case, with exclusive interviews with Pender and Hull. The law enforcement officer who led the pursuit after Pender’s breakout is also interviewed as the doc offers “an inside look at the strategy, frustration, and psychological chess match behind the hunt” following “one of the most audacious prison breaks in recent history,” Hulu says.

Girl on the Run: The Hunt for America’s Most Wanted Woman, Thursday, February 19, Hulu