He had blood on his thumb and said he’d cut his leg. There was no cut.

In the summer of 2007, women were turning up dead at truck stops across Middle Tennessee. Symantha Winters was found in a trash can behind a truck stop in Lebanon. Three weeks later, 25-year-old Sara Hulbert was found at the edge of the TA lot off I-24 in Nashville. Then Metro detective Pat Postiglione went back to that lot, spotted a yellow semi that matched the surveillance video, and knocked on the door.

The man inside was Bruce Mendenhall, a 56-year-old long-haul trucker from Albion, Illinois, with no criminal record. Behind his seat was a bag of bloody women’s clothing. Next to it was the ID of Carma Purpura, a 31-year-old mother of two who had climbed into a truck at an Indianapolis Flying J the night before.

In this episode:

• Two women, two truck stops, three weeks apart
• The man from Albion who once ran for mayor against a preacher
• Carma Purpura’s last evening, minute by minute
• The knock, the blood on his thumb, and the bag behind the seat
• What he did to these women, and how long he kept them
• A murder-for-hire plot hatched from a Nashville jail cell
• Three murder trials in two states, and an appeal that didn’t end until 2026
• The women he was never convicted of killing, including Latisha Milliken, who is still missing
• The FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative

Can you help? Latisha Milliken, 27, was last seen in Nashville on March 14, 2007. Investigators later identified her blood in Bruce Mendenhall’s truck, and she has never been found. If you know anything, call Metro Nashville’s Cold Case Unit at (615) 742-7463.

Content note: this episode includes descriptions of murder, gun violence and the handling of human remains.

Sources referenced: Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals (2013, 2017, 2020); Indiana Court of Appeals (2026); FBI, Highway Serial Killings Initiative (2009); Metro Nashville Cold Case Unit; Investigation Discovery’s Deadly Recall; WISH-TV, Fox59, CBS News, WRTV, NewsChannel 5, WKRN and the Associated Press.

Nashvillains is a Hey Dad Productions podcast, hosted by Jerry Broadway.

On the afternoon of November 7, 2023, 18-year-old Jillian Ludwig was walking the track at Edgehill Community Memorial Gardens Park in Nashville. She was a Belmont University music business major from Wall Township, New Jersey: a bass player, a singer, and a music teacher who at 17 started "Playing it Forward," a project that played shows to raise money for other musicians.

At 2:24 p.m., a man standing across DeFord Bailey Avenue opened fire on a passing car. One bullet struck Jillian in the head. She lay there for about an hour before a passerby found her. She died the next day.

The man police arrested that night, Shaquille Taylor, had been released from custody six months earlier. Three doctors had found him incompetent to stand trial in a 2021 shooting. He also didn't meet Tennessee's standard for involuntary commitment, and a judge wrote that the court had "reached the limit of its authority."

In this episode:

- Who Jillian was, in her own town and in ours

- Edgehill, Music Row, and the street named for the Grand Ole Opry's first Black star

- How competency to stand trial really works, and why intellectual disability breaks the system

- The warning from Nashville's DA, twelve days before the shooting

- The House floor fight over Jillian's Law, and the six beds statewide

On a Tuesday night in March 1897, a neighbor on Paradise Ridge, in what's now Joelton, saw flames over the hill at the Ade farm. Inside the burning house were Jacob and Pauline Ade, their daughter Lizzie, their thirteen-year-old son Henry, and a ten-year-old neighbor girl who'd only come to spend the night. The sheriff believed they'd been killed with an ax and the house set on fire to cover it. There was money left in the ashes. There was a reward, a grand jury, and men indicted and tried. The only witness was an old dog that could barely see or hear. A hundred and twenty-nine years later, nobody has ever been convicted. A Halloween-week episode of Nashvillains.

Content note: violent deaths, stated plainly.