Updated on: August 23, 2026 / 2:10 AM EDT
/ CBS News
When authorities in Greenwood, South Carolina, arrived at the deserted intersection after 1 a.m. on May 7, 2023, they found a mangled BMW sedan in the road with debris scattered around it. On the shoulder near the woods, lay the car's fatally injured owner, 46-year-old Davis McClendon. But something about the scene seemed strange.
McClendon was about 50 feet away from his car, suggesting he'd been outside standing next to it and been hit. His shirt and shoe were lying on the pavement. There was no other vehicle with relevant damage.
McClendon's girlfriend, Meredith Haynie, was there by the time authorities appeared, but she said she hadn't been there to see the collision. Authorities would use an array of evidence to build a murder case against Haynie's soon-to-be-ex-husband Bud Ackerman, who would claim hitting McClendon with his truck had been an accident. But prosecutors argued the touch screen computer in the dashboard of Ackerman's Ford F-250 pickup truck provided a blueprint of the intent they needed to prove he'd been targeting McClendon that night — and killed him with "malice aforethought."
Haynie tells "48 Hours" correspondent Anne Marie Green she'd been on a date with McClendon that night, before he'd vanished out of a local club at 12:51 a.m. Haynie's only TV interview is featured in "The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon," now streaming on Paramount+.
Haynie told authorities she and McClendon had begun the evening at a restaurant called Break on the Lake. Next, they'd gone to a party and then to a well-known club called Key West. When McClendon suddenly left out the back door, she said she had suspected he was going to meet Ackerman, who had been critical of her and McClendon for seeing each other before Ackerman's and Haynie's divorce was final. She said Ackerman had been compulsively calling her that night. And she allowed investigators access to her phone, which turned out to contain texts supporting her account.
"What did the text messages reveal?" Green asked lead detective Lt. Matthew Womack of the Greenwood County Sheriff's Office.
"It showed the pattern of what she was explaining to the on-scene investigators," Womack replied. "Like him calling multiple times, him texting multiple times, things of that nature."
Within minutes of arriving at the scene of the crash, authorities suspected Ackerman had run McClendon down. There was an oil trail leading from the crash site directly to the house where Ackerman was living. And evidence suggested Ackerman's pickup sideswiped the sedan, hitting McClendon next to the driver's door, carrying him across the road and depositing his body where it was found.
Having heard Haynie's story, investigators hoped they could get more information from Ackerman himself. They soon located him at his parents' home about a half mile from the crash site and they found his pickup truck leaking oil in the driveway. But when they tried to question him, Ackerman referred them to his attorney.
In the coming days, investigators would retrieve time-stamped video showing Ackerman at the locations where Haynie and McClendon had spent their evening out and soon afterward, near the crash site itself. But Ackerman still wasn't talking much to them.
That's when his truck started speaking for him.
Womack says the touch screen computers or "infotainment systems" in many modern cars measure and store incredibly detailed information about how, when and where the vehicle is being operated. And Ackerman's pickup truck was no exception. When authorities extracted data from the onboard computer, they found a motherlode of incriminating measurements.
"… In a 24-hour time period, it's over 3,000 events …" Womack told Green. "And then each one is time-stamped … for each event."
He says Ackerman's "infotainment system" logged a series of communications almost like digital "handshakes," in which the truck automatically pinged public Wi-Fi systems it happened to pass.