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.

Content warning: This episode contains a recorded police confession describing a murder in detail as well as discussions of child sexual abuse and a failed execution.

Resources: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 800-656-4673.

Credit: Beth Karas and Sarah Treleaven, and https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unrestorable/id1709321174 . Also WSMV, WKRN, WVLT, WBIR, the Nashville Banner and Roane County News f or the witness accounts, and Metro Nashville ECC for the dispatch audio.

State of Tennessee v. Christa Gail Pike, Tennessee Supreme Court, Oct. 5, 1998 (facts of the crime, the statement to Investigator York, the jacket, the aggravators, Judge Leibowitz)

Christa Pike federal habeas decision, U.S. District Court, E.D. Tenn., No. 1:12-cv-35 — https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-tned-1_12-cv-00035/pdf/USCOURTS-tned-1_12-cv-00035-1.pdf (Talman, Rice, Crabtree, Dr. McCoy, penalty-phase witnesses, Talman's suspension)

UT Volopedia — Job Corps student murdered on agriculture campus (verdict Mar. 22, 1996; sentence Mar. 30, 1996; Dale Avenue center closed 1995)

TDOC — Women on Death Row (arrival Mar. 30, 1996; Patricia Jones attack Aug. 24, 2001; conviction Aug. 12, 2004)

DPIC — clemency petition, abuse history, AG not contesting abuse, the 18-year-old statistic, Coffey letter: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/christa-pike-requests-clemency-ahead-of-september-30-execution-date-experts-amicus-brief-points-to-substantial-risk-of-re-traumatization

DPIC — solitary confinement settlement, Sept. 2024: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/rulings-for-two-death-sentenced-prisoners-recognize-devastating-harm-caused-by-solitary-confinement

WSMV, Oct. 2, 2026 — Shipp and Peterson; pentagram accounts

WVLT, Oct. 2025 — Shipp parole denied; next hearing 2031

KY3/Gray, Oct. 1, 2026 — Seeley, Colleen's niece

Action News Jax, Apr. 2013 — May Martinez on the remains

First Coast News (c. 2015) — remains mailed; the skull on the airplane

Good Morning America/WJXX, Oct. 1, 2026 — May Martinez after the execution

Religion Unplugged, Oct. 9, 2026 — Rev. Mikey Noechel and Metta

ABC News; WSMV (Oct. 13); Fox News — the 911 calls and dispatch audio

DPIC, EJI, WSMV, PBS, ABC — the 2022 Stanton report, Strada, Byron Black, Tony Carruthers, Hines, the same-doctor report, Strada's resignation, Stanton's new review

PBS/AP, TMZ, WLOX/Gray, FOX, ABC, Al Jazeera, Fox17 — October 6–16 developments

WSMV, May 14, 2024 — the child-rape death penalty law

Monday, October 19, 1998. On a farm outside Monterey, on the Cumberland Plateau, State Senator Tommy Burks — a hog and cattle farmer who served 28 years in the Tennessee legislature — is getting ready for a class of nursery-school children coming to pick pumpkins. A dark car passes the farm lane. Then it passes again.

Byron Anthony Looper was born in the same town as Tommy Burks. He went to West Point, switched political parties, sued a law school, sent out roughly 400 press releases as Putnam County Property Assessor, and was indicted on 14 counts while still in office. In 1996 he legally changed his middle name to "(Low Tax)." In 1998 he was the Republican nominee for Tommy Burks's Senate seat. And all that summer, he'd been asking an old friend about guns.

We follow the plan, the used Audi bought for cash, the drive north in the dark, the sixteen hours after the shooting, and the midnight knock on a door in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Then the ballot problem Tennessee law created, the write-in campaign that answered it, a trial with a defense witness who did the prosecution's work for it, and the strange end of the man who called himself Low Tax.

THANKS TO:
The reporters in the Upper Cumberland and in Nashville who covered this case as it happened. Much of what we know about October 1998 we know because they were there.

SOURCES

• State of Tennessee v. Byron Looper, Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals (2003), 118 S.W.3d 386

• Nashville Scene — "The Death of a Senator: Tommy Burks and Byron (Low Tax) Looper," Stephen Elliott (2018)

• NewsChannel 5 Investigates — "Byron Looper Remembered as Political Assassin," Phil Williams

• The Tennessean, October 20, 1998

• NPR, October 23, 1998

• Chattanooga Times Free Press, June 2013

• Tennessee Department of Correction — "Death of Inmate Byron Looper," June 26, 2013

• Crime Library — "Byron Looper"

• Oxygen, "Dying to Belong," Season 1, Episode 4

A NOTE

Some quotations in this episode are read by voice actors from court testimony and published reporting.

ABOUT THE SHOW

Nashvillains is a true crime podcast about the cases that happened here — in Music City and the counties around it. Written and hosted by Jerry Broadway. A production of Hey Dad Productions.

New episodes weekly. If this one was worth your time, the best thing you can do for us is leave a review and tell somebody about it.

December 25, 2020. At 1:22 in the morning, a white RV parks in front of 166 Second Avenue North — the AT&T building on Nashville’s oldest street. Just after 5:30 a.m., a recorded voice begins warning anyone who can hear it to evacuate. At 6:14 it starts counting down from fifteen minutes. At 6:29 it detonates.

No one is killed but the man who built it. Sixty-five buildings are damaged. Phone, internet and 911 service fail across Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia. Roughly 100 emergency call centers in 46 Tennessee counties are affected. Hospitals lose access to records. Flights are grounded.

We walk the morning on the clock, with Officers Tyler Luellen, Brenna Hosey, Michael Sipos, Amanda Topping and James Wells telling it in their own voices from the December 27, 2020 press conference. Three of the six officers on that street had been police officers for less than two years.

Then the part of the story that happened sixteen months earlier — an August 2019 call to Metro dispatch, an attorney who said he believed the bomb claim more than the crisis claim, two officers who knocked on a door on Bakertown Road, and a question this case never answers: what do you do about a man who has broken no law?

And finally, the why. The FBI closed the case in March 2021 calling it an intentional act to end his own life, driven by paranoia and conspiracy beliefs. But the fuller answer did not become public until December 2025, when the agent who led the investigation spoke on the record for the first time.

WITH THANKS

The Metro Nashville Police Department, and the department’s Office of Public Affairs, for the body camera footage and the audio of the December 27, 2020 press conference. The officers’ own account of that morning is the spine of this episode and it exists because MNPD released it.

Jeremy Finley and WSMV4 News in Nashville. Mr. Finley’s December 2025 investigation — published on the fifth anniversary of the bombing — is the source for the FBI’s findings about what Anthony Warner believed, for the lead agent’s first public interview, and for the account given by the woman who warned police in 2019. Several things in the back half of this episode have never appeared anywhere else. They are his reporting, not ours.

Metro Nashville’s Department of Emergency Communications, for the public release of the August 21, 2019 call.

SOURCES

• Metro Nashville Police Department — body camera footage released December 28, 2020; press conference, December 27, 2020

• Federal Bureau of Investigation, Memphis Field Office — investigation findings released March 15, 2021

• WSMV4 News, Nashville — reporting by Jeremy Finley, December 22, 2025

• Metro Nashville Department of Emergency Communications — recorded call, August 21, 2019

• Metro Nashville Police Department After Action Review Board report

• Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency — damage assessment

• Contemporaneous reporting from the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Tennessean and NewsChannel 5

A NOTE

This episode discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day — call or text 988.

ABOUT THE SHOW

Nashvillains is a true crime podcast about the cases that happened here — in Music City and the counties around it. Written and hosted by Jerry Broadway. A production of Hey Dad Productions.

SHOW NOTES

Five days after Tammy Wynette was pulled out of her own car and beaten, every camera in America was pointed at the Grand Ole Opry House. Johnny Cash hosted. Dolly Parton won Entertainer of the Year. Country music was having the biggest year it had ever had. Tammy Wynette's name wasn't on the ballot in a single category.

This episode is about what happened four miles away, five days earlier — and about the three years leading up to it that most retellings skip.

Between her 1975 divorce from George Jones and that October evening, somebody waged a sustained campaign against her. Intruders got into her house fifteen times in one nine-month stretch. The family came home from bowling one night to find every faucet in the house running and slurs written across every mirror and television screen. The house caught fire with her youngest daughter asleep in the back bedroom. Her phones were wiretapped. Her tour bus burned. A week before the abduction, a stranger walked into her eight-year-old's school and tried to leave with her.

Then came the parking lot. A man she said she never saw. A ligature. A broken cheekbone. Eighty miles of back roads and a second car waiting at the drop. He didn't rob her — she still had forty dollars and thirty credit cards. He didn't assault her. He hurt her, and then he was gone.

Nashville decided it had theories. Publicity. An affair. George Jones, who didn't help himself by hinting he knew who was behind it.

Twenty-two years later, two of Wynette's daughters offered a fifth theory in print — one that pointed inside the house, at a Music Row songwriter she'd married ninety days before. He denied it until he died in 2010, was never charged with anything, and his family is in court over his reputation to this day.

Tammy Wynette never changed her story. Not once, in twenty years.

In this episode:

• The 12th CMA Awards, and the ballot her name wasn't on
• Three years of break-ins, fires and threats before anyone laid a hand on her
• What she said happened in that car, in her own account
• Why detectives called it puzzling — and why the crime doesn't work as a kidnapping or a robbery
• The songwriter she married ninety days earlier, and the hits he'd written for her ex-husband
• 1998, the exhumation he requested himself, and what the autopsy found
• The theory her daughters published, and the timeline problem it answers

FURTHER READING

Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen by Jimmy McDonough (Viking, 2010) — the major biography, built on original interviews.

Stand By Your Man by Tammy Wynette with Joan Dew (1979) — her own account, written the year after.

Tammy Wynette: A Daughter Recalls Her Mother's Tragic Life and Death by Jackie Daly with Tom Carter (2000).

The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George by Georgette Jones (2011).

Contemporary coverage: The Tennessean, October 5, 1978; People; the Washington Post; and Newsweek's "Country Music Mystery," July 18, 1999.

Note: One voice heard in this episode is a dramatized recreation. No recording of the 1978 incident exists.

Marcia Trimble was nine years old, a fourth-grader working on her Girl Scout cookie sales in one of the safest, wealthiest neighborhoods in Nashville. Thirty-three days after she disappeared, on Easter Sunday, her body was found in a neighbor's garage, hidden in a plastic wading pool about 150 yards from her home. She had been strangled.

What followed became Nashville's most notorious unsolved murder. Investigators fixed early on Jeffrey Womack, a 15-year-old neighbor who was among the last people to see Marcia alive. He passed two polygraph tests, including one given by the police department's own examiner, and still couldn't shake the suspicion. In August 1979, officers in SWAT gear arrested him at two in the morning. The case against him was dismissed on August 11, 1980, for lack of evidence, but the cloud followed him for nearly three more decades.

Meanwhile, Jerome Sidney Barrett had been arrested in March 1975 for a separate sexual assault and was still in custody when Marcia's body was found. He was never investigated in her death. According to research for The Suspect, wiretapped calls from a police informant pointing investigators in another direction never made it into the case file.

In 2007, while investigating Barrett in the 1975 murder of Vanderbilt student Sarah Des Prez, Metro's cold case detectives found that his DNA also matched evidence from Marcia's clothing. On July 18, 2009, a Davidson County jury convicted Barrett of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 44 years, on top of the life sentence he was already serving for killing Des Prez. Marcia's mother, Virginia Trimble Ritter, told reporters simply: "After 34 years, it's over."

In this episode:

• The afternoon walk through Green Hills and the last confirmed sightings
• Easter Sunday, 1975, and the wading pool in the garage
• How a 15-year-old boy became the city's forever suspect, and what it cost him
• The informant, the mosque, and the phone calls that never made the file
• The man who was already in police custody the whole time
• A DNA match at six trillion to one

AUDIO CREDIT

Special thanks to Demetria Kalodimos and Genuine Human for sharing research audio from their work on the Marcia Trimble case. Kalodimos spent more than three decades covering this story in Nashville, first as an anchor and investigative reporter at WSMV-Channel 4 and later as a documentary filmmaker. Her Emmy-winning film Indelible: The Case Against Jeffrey Womack examines the thirty-plus years Womack spent as the only suspect Metro Police ever seriously pursued in a murder he did not commit.

Genuine Human: https://genuinehuman.com

FURTHER READING

The Suspect: A Memoir — Surviving Three Decades of Accusation in Nashville's Most Infamous Murder (2012)
By Jeffrey Womack and John Hollins Sr., with an introduction by E. Thomas Wood and a foreword by John Seigenthaler.

Womack's own account of the investigation, told alongside that of Hollins, the attorney who represented him for more than three decades without charging him a fee. Former Nashville District Attorney Torry Johnson called it "a cautionary tale for law enforcement."

Some voices in this podcast were created with Fish Audio AI