Oil Trail, Truck Data Lead to Murder Conviction in South Carolina Hit-and-Run

On a dark road in Greenwood, South Carolina, just after one in the morning on May 7, 2023, Davis McClendon stood outside his BMW sedan and never came home. Investigators found his body fifty feet from the car, a shirt and shoe scattered on the pavement, the vehicle's fender torn back like a tuna can. What they didn't find at first was the other vehicle—the one that had hit him. But there was something else: a slick of oil on the road, tire marks, and a trail of evidence that would lead them straight to a man consumed by jealousy.

McClendon, forty-six, was everyone's best friend. His coworkers at a retirement home knew him as the most empathetic person they'd ever met. His friends described him as someone who loved big, who had time for everyone, who seemed incapable of making an enemy. He had recently divorced, but that hadn't dimmed his devotion to his children or his friends. Then, on Christmas Eve 2022, he met Meredith Haynie at a bar. She was celebrating her thirty-ninth birthday in a ugly Christmas sweater. He sat down and started talking to her. They kept talking. Within months, they were planning a future together—rocking chairs on a porch at eighty, she would later say. They had less than six months.

Haynie had left her husband of ten years, Bud Ackerman, an auto body shop owner from a prominent local family, about six months before meeting McClendon. She described a marriage that had deteriorated into something frightening: Ackerman's drinking and unpredictability, his screaming and degradation, his paranoia. She found hidden cameras—one cut into a pillow in their closet, another in their dresser facing the bed, others in the children's rooms and buried in the front yard. When she separated from him in spring 2022, she felt like she could breathe again. But when Ackerman discovered she was dating McClendon in early May 2023, something shifted. He texted her: "How could you." He called McClendon and asked him to back off until the divorce was final. McClendon and Haynie talked about it and decided that was just another way Ackerman was trying to control her.

On the night McClendon died, Ackerman spent hours hunting for them. Phone records and security video told the story: at 8:54 p.m., he texted Haynie asking why she hated him. She was at dinner with McClendon at Break on the Lake. Ackerman called her on FaceTime—"Where are you? Who are you with? Why are you doing this to me?"—and eventually she told him or he figured it out from what he could see around her. By 10:40 p.m., security cameras caught him at a club called Key West, drinking, talking to people, his agitation visible. He called Haynie again. She said he sounded intoxicated and vulgar. After midnight, his truck circled the parking lot at Break on the Lake, searching. But McClendon and Haynie had moved back to Key West. At 12:51 a.m., McClendon stepped outside to call Ackerman. "He wanted to talk to him," Haynie said later. "He thought he could bring the temperature down." McClendon told Haynie he was going to meet Ackerman. She went to check on him and he was gone.

The oil trail led investigators from the crash site directly to Ackerman's parents' house, where he'd been living since the separation. When deputies arrived, they found his white Ford F-250 pickup leaking from the undercarriage, a crack in the grille, damage consistent with hitting a person. Ackerman was arrested at 6:30 a.m. But the real evidence came from the truck itself. Modern pickup trucks store thousands of data points—speed, acceleration, brake pressure, even which Wi-Fi networks they pass. Investigators extracted over three thousand events from a single twenty-four-hour period. The data showed Ackerman had driven past Haynie's house that night, onto McClendon's street, circling, searching. At 1:11 a.m. and thirty-one seconds on May 7th, the truck's computer recorded a hard brake. Seconds later, the door opened before the truck shifted to park. Ackerman got out, then got back in, shifted to drive, and turned around near a streetlight—the same streetlight where oil spatters were found a foot up the post. Then he drove home, leaving an oil trail all the way to his parents' driveway, where his phone disconnected from the infotainment system. He was home.

Ackerman's attorney argued it was an accident. He said his client had no intention of hurting McClendon, that he simply wanted to talk to him, that McClendon was standing in the middle of a dark road and Ackerman didn't see him until it was too late. He said Ackerman swerved left to avoid him, not to hit him. He called an expert who testified that in the dark, on a slope, with the BMW's headlights in his eyes, Ackerman would have had at most two and a half seconds to react—not enough time. But prosecutors painted a different picture. They showed doorbell camera video from neighbors capturing the moment of impact, the truck passing through the frame, then a sound like a crash, then muffled sounds that prosecutors said was Ackerman yelling at McClendon. They presented Meredith Haynie, who testified about the obsessive calls, the tracking, her fear. They presented the digital evidence: the truck's brain, as one prosecutor called it, showing Ackerman was going twenty-five miles per hour, that he was on the wrong side of the road when he hit the BMW, that he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. The jury deliberated for less than thirty minutes. They found Ackerman guilty of murder. The judge sentenced him to forty-five years with no possibility of parole.

Haynie believes McClendon saved her life that night—that Ackerman had meant to target her, and that she's only alive because he found Davis first. She's rebuilding with her three children, determined to give them a life beyond that dark intersection. McClendon's friends still struggle with the fact that no one in the Ackerman family called 911. Ackerman is appealing his conviction. He will not be eligible for release until 2068.