Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon

Summary

Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon - Detailed Summary

Episode: Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
Release Date: March 4, 2025
Host: Ann Marie Green
Guest: Josh Yeager, CBS News Producer

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Introduction

In this episode of "Post Mortem," host Ann Marie Green delves deep into the tragic hit-and-run case of Davis McClendon in Greenwood, South Carolina. Accompanied by CBS News producer Josh Yeager, Green unpacks the complexities surrounding the incident, the ensuing trial, and the profound impact on the tight-knit community.

Overview of the Case

The episode begins with a brief recounting of the incident that took place in May 2023. William Bud Ackerman struck and killed Davis McClendon in a hit-and-run collision. The case stirred significant attention due to the intertwined relationships within the small town of Greenwood, where Ackerman was dating Meredith, McClendon's soon-to-be ex-wife.

Key Points:

• Incident Details: Ackerman allegedly hit McClendon with his pickup truck and fled the scene, raising suspicions about the nature of the collision.
• Prosecution's Argument: Suggested the crash was intentional, driven by Ackerman's jealousy over McClendon's relationship with Meredith.
• Defense's Stance: Claimed the collision was accidental, attributing Ackerman's actions to momentary inattention while driving.

Key Evidence and Arguments

Ann Marie Green and Josh Yeager discuss the pivotal evidence presented during the trial, focusing on the digital data retrieved from Ackerman's truck.

Notable Evidence:

• Truck's Data Logs ([05:30]): Detailed information such as speed, acceleration, brake pressure, and tire slippage provided forensic analysts with insights into Ackerman's driving behavior during the incident.
• Handshakes Data: The truck's interaction with public Wi-Fi networks allowed investigators to reconstruct Ackerman's route on the night of the collision, offering crucial geographical context to the case.

Defense's Argument ([03:20] - [04:42]):

• Ackerman was attempting to avoid hitting McClendon, leading to an accidental collision.
• The sudden need to swerve left Ackerman no choice but to crash intentionally to prevent greater harm.

Prosecution's Counterpoints ([02:01] - [03:20]):

• Ackerman's decision to flee the scene and failure to call 911 suggested premeditation rather than an accident.
• Testimonies indicated Ackerman was tracking McClendon and Meredith, highlighting potential motives rooted in jealousy.

Trial Proceedings

The trial, commencing in September 2024, faced multiple delays due to unforeseen circumstances:

• Attorney Health Issues ([13:13]): Ackerman's defense attorney, Jack Swirling, fell ill, necessitating postponements and re-starts of the trial.
• Hurricane Interruption ([13:13]): A significant hurricane disrupted court proceedings, adding to the delays and emotional strain on all parties involved.

Verdict and Sentencing ([15:47] - [16:22]):

• After less than 30 minutes of jury deliberation, Ackerman was found guilty of murder.
• He was sentenced to 45 years in prison without the possibility of parole.
• Ackerman's defense attorney criticized the swift verdict, arguing insufficient time was taken to scrutinize the evidence.

Personal Accounts and Impact

The episode provides intimate insights into the lives affected by the tragedy:

Meredith Ackerman ([07:55] - [09:27]):

• Described as Bud's estranged wife, Meredith's relationship with Bud deteriorated due to his declining mental health and increasing paranoia.
• Bud's transformation from a "sweet and caring" husband to a volatile individual created an untenable living situation for Meredith.

Megan McGovern ([09:51] - [12:21]):

• As a long-time babysitter for the Ackerman family, Megan witnessed firsthand Bud's behavioral changes.
• Her account highlights the pervasive fear and discomfort she felt as Bud's mental state worsened, culminating in the tragic night when she discovered McClendon's body.

Community and Familial Impact ([14:37] - [21:30]):

• Davis McClendon's death left a significant void in Greenwood, a community where everyone is interconnected.
• Both families faced immense grief, with Meredith now single-handedly raising their children amidst the loss.
• The trial and its aftermath exposed fractures within the community, revealing deep-seated emotions and the challenges of maintaining unity in the wake of tragedy.

Notable Quotes:

• Megan McGovern ([09:51] - [10:25]):
  "The old Bud was sweet and caring... But towards the end... he turned into a completely different person that I didn't even recognize."
• Davis's Son ([14:37] - [14:45]):
  "It was clear that Ackerman was guilty. And that's why we believe the jury came back as soon as they did."
• Meredith Ackerman ([19:40] - [20:35]):
  "I have an uphill battle, but I am lucky in that I have a large and very close family... We'll be okay."

Conclusion

The "Post Mortem" episode offers a comprehensive examination of the Davis McClendon case, highlighting the intricate web of relationships, the weight of digital evidence in modern investigations, and the enduring pain inflicted on the individuals and community involved. Through detailed discussions and personal testimonies, Ann Marie Green and Josh Yeager provide listeners with a nuanced understanding of a tragedy that reverberates far beyond the courtroom.

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For those interested in exploring the case further, tuning into the original "48 Hours" episode is recommended. Subscribe to 48 Hours+ on Apple Podcasts for ad-free access and additional content.

Transcript

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[Ann Marie Green]

Welcome back to another episode of Postmortem. I am your host, Ann Marie Green, and we are discussing a case that I actually reported on this week with 48 Hours producer Josh Yeager. It's about the hit and run death of of Davis McClendon in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina, where everybody knows everybody. And it really isn't just a cliche. People are so interconnected in this town. In May of 2023, William Bud Ackerman fatally struck Davis, who was dating Bud's soon to be ex wife, Meredith. The defense claimed that this was an accidental collision, but the prosecution argued that the crash was in fact an intentional collision killing. So joining me now is Josh. We work together on the case, so it's good to have you here on Postmortem as well, Josh.

[David]

Thanks for having me.

[Ann Marie Green]

Now, first off, if you haven't listened to this episode yet, you can find it in your podcast feed just below this one. Go listen to the episode and then come back here to listen to Postmortem. So I gotta tell you, when I first sort of read about the details of this case, I thought, this really seems pretty cut and dry. There's no question that the reason Davis McLendon is dead is because he was hit. He was in a collision. At the trial, the prosecution made a really strong case that Bud was jealous his estranged wife Meredith had started dating. Bud was tracking them that night, the night they were out on a date, making all these phone calls, looking for them both. And then shortly after 1:00, he meets up with Davis. The prosecution argued that the Crash site showed that Bud deliberately hit Davis, who we learned was standing outside of his BMW at the time. But then he flees the scene on top of that. Right. So if it was an accident, you know, why do you flee the scene? And then he never calls 911. But then I heard the defense's argument, and I thought about the times that maybe I have driven in the dark and maybe didn't see a pedestrian who was about to cross the street to the last minute. And I saw maybe a window of opportunity. I was a little torn.

[David]

It's one of those cases, I think, which is really interesting because you can put yourself mentally in the space of the people on both sides. According to the defense, you have Bud Ackerman, whose intention really is to come and just meet with Davis McClendon and talk to him. He's driving his pickup truck down the road over a rise in the road. It's very dark. He's going faster than he realizes, at least that's what the defense said. And he comes over the rise of this hill, and he is coming straight into the headlights, which are on of the parked BMW. Now, where is Davis McClendon? According to the defense, he is standing outside his car, but he's further away from his car than the prosecution contends. He's actually out towards the center of the road. And when Bud Ackerman approaches him, the defense case is that he has a lot of trouble seeing him. And what does he do? In a split second, he has a decision to make. He has to swerve to avoid hitting Davis McClendon. And what he decides to do is swerve to the left, and he actually crashes his truck into the car on purpose to stop its forward momentum and to sort of avoid Davis McClendon and steer around him to the left. That's the defense's case.

[Ann Marie Green]

Yeah, that's absolutely it in a nutshell. And so what the prosecution needs to do is try to find as much information as possible to determine what could be in Bud Ackerman's mind at this moment. Was he really trying to stop his forward momentum or not? Because we really don't know exactly where Davis was necessarily in the road. And so the prosecution gathers a lot of digital evidence, but one of the key pieces of evidence was the data that they recovered from Bud's truck. We all know that we're being tracked all the time, but I don't know about you. I was even a little surprised by the millisecond. By millisecond detail that this truck was Capturing and keeping.

[David]

Incredible. It's actually my favorite thing about this story. As we all know by now, devices that we use in our everyday lives capture data. When I say that, you probably think of things like phones, tablets, laptops, and so forth. Well, it turns out that the touch screen on the dashboard of your car is another one of these devices. In this case, the truck captured and stored a tremendous amount of data. It measured things like speed, acceleration, brake pressure, the slippage of the tires as they spun on the concrete. And one other thing which just blew my mind. They talked about this thing that the car does called handshakes. When the truck encounters a public WI fi network, that network actually communicates with your car, and it sends out a ping that essentially says, here I am. I'm a public WI FI network. And your car answers that ping and says, here I am. I'm a car that's passing your network. Well, it turns out that the car, in this case, as many others, stores a record of those communications. Why is that important? You can essentially use that information to plot the route that the car drove on. And that's what investigators were able to do in this case. They were able to learn a lot about where Bud Ackerman had driven on this particular night.

[Ann Marie Green]

I didn't know about that either. And I was also really surprised that that's the sort of data that is stored. The other thing that I thought was really interesting was this bit about the cell phones. Meredith handed over her phone so investigators could see the text conversations that had been happening and how many phone calls were being made between Bud Ackerman and herself when it comes to Bud's phone. Well, one of the things we learned is that once police have a warrant for your phone and your phone is in their custody, they may not be able to initially get past the security measures if you don't give them your passcode. But once there's a software update, that's when they have an opportunity to get into a phone. And so they will just hang onto the phone until the next software update. So prior to that, they really can't sort of break into your phone, but after that, possibly.

[David]

Right.

[Ann Marie Green]

All right, so let's talk about Meredith and Bud's relationship. Meredith said that by the end of their marriage, she really felt that Bud was struggling with his mental health, that he was becoming paranoid, jealous. And she says that she found hidden surveillance cameras in her home, and that was pretty much the breaking point. But from everything we heard from her, this was initially a happy marriage.

[David]

It was. And she talked about it actually in terms of being a sort of a white picket fence life that she thought she was gonna get. I mean, here again is a small town and a woman who meets the son of a well known family in town. His family works in dentistry, and he became a businessman at one point himself. And within a few years of getting married, they had three children. So they were really sort of living the dream. And according to Meredith, what really changed things was that Bud started experiencing difficulty at work. He had been working in an auto body shop, but then became the owner of that shop. And as the owner, just found himself subjected to the stresses of running his own business. And according to Meredith, he started sort of bringing that stress home with him. At the end of the day, she talks about him always having enjoyed a drink, but that as this stress at work took hold of him, his drinking became more frequent and there was more of it. And the more he drank, the more sort of unpredictable and volatile he became.

[Ann Marie Green]

And there was someone else who really saw buzz deterioration up close. It was Megan McGovern. She was the babysitter. She started babysitting when she was a kid herself. She was only around 12 years old. And so as she grows from a tween to a teen to sort of a young adult, she has an up close look at this relationship. And I want to play part of the interview that we did with Megan for you.

[Megan]

The old Bud was sweet and caring. I remember, like, when my grandfather passed away, I went over there that day and he just held me, told me he loved me. I would go to babysit and he would take my car and fill it up with gas for me before I'd come back. He always told me I was like his fourth child. And then towards the end, though, I mean, he turned into a completely different person that I didn't even recognized. And I was honestly kind of scared to be around. It wasn't like necessarily I thought he would hurt me. I just got a really bad feeling whenever it was just us.

[Ann Marie Green]

So there you have sort of a little taste of it. And we asked her, you know, was he ever violent or inappropriate? Josh? And she said, no, absolutely not. But she could just see things getting darker and darker and darker with him.

[David]

Yeah. This is another fascinating aspect of the story. The sort of proximity of this young woman, Megan McGovern, to the Ackerman family and how young she is. As you pointed out, Anne Marie, she starts as a young teenager who becomes a babysitter for the family, and her relationship to them really changes. She talks about almost starting to leave behind the role of just a babysitter and to become more and more of a confidant of Meredith, almost a younger sister type person who Meredith talks to about problems both with the kids and in her own life. She becomes the person Meredith calls that night when she's concerned that Davis McClendon has left this bar and finds out that he's gone to meet Bud Ackerman. And it's actually Megan who gets out of the car and is the first one, as you point out, to see Davis McClendon on the side of the road and to call 911. She said she'd never seen a body, a person in that condition as Davis was on the side of the road. She's really right in the thick of everything and she's just a kid.

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[Megan]

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[Ann Marie Green]

Welcome back. Well, just hours after killing Davis McClendon, Bud Ackerman was arrested and charged with his murder In September of 2024, Bud's case went to trial, which faced a couple of challenges from the very, very start.

[David]

This trial had trouble getting off the ground through no fault of anyone's really. I mean, there were several things that came to bear. One is that Bud Ackerman's attorney, Jack Swirling, had health problems and actually became ill in the courtroom twice and had to go to the hospital during the very, very earliest stages of the trial. And so the trial at one point is postponed and has to start all over again once it starts. The gigantic hurricane we all heard about last fall, winter hit right in the middle. And so there was a, a pause of several days, if not longer. These people, it's their lives that are hanging in the balance and so when something like a hurricane takes place, can only imagine what that period of time must be like.

[Ann Marie Green]

Yeah, totally. Close to the end of the hour, you see Davis's son speak and he's very, very angry, not just at Bud Ackerman, but at the Ackerman family. For this town, this is a wealthy family, well known, but also Davis, he's pretty well known in the town himself. So the memorial for Davis was massive. It was so large that they had to hold it outside. That's according to Davis's friends. So it sort of tells you about the impact of the loss, but also how everyone felt the loss.

[David]

I mean, he was beloved in the community. We talked to his friends who say he was just. He didn't have an enemy in the world. He was just loved. Loved everyone and was loved by everyone.

[Ann Marie Green]

Everyone knowing everyone, and everyone being sort of interconnected in some way, shape or form is challenging for us, too. I felt like everyone was very conscious that whatever they said was, you know, going to. Obviously going to get back to people who they may see in church or on the street or at the Walmart, and they were kind of conscious of that.

[David]

It felt to me like anyone who said anything to us wasn't just saying it to us. Literally felt like they were saying it to everyone in town. There were people who said to us, I just can't see my way to talking about this. I have strong opinions about what happened, but I can't share them because I have a close relationship with X or Y or Z.

[Ann Marie Green]

Totally. I almost felt like, in a way, both, like, sort of swirling. Who's the attorney for the defense for Ackerman and the prosecutors? They were almost, I'm not gonna say falling over each other to compliment each other, but they were very complimentary towards each other.

[David]

Of course, John Meadows and John Conrad and actually happened to be the same team that worked on the Murdoch case, the very high profile South Carolina case. And what you say is right. They. Almost every answer to every question we asked included a compliment for the lawyer on the other side and the same from Bud Ackerman's lawyer traveling in the opposite direction. I think all you have to do to understand that is to realize that they've probably worked as opposing counsel in cases two or three times since. Since we covered this story. I mean, they're. They're in court against each other every day.

[Ann Marie Green]

Yeah, yeah, so true. We did get at least one lucky break, though. When we were out at the scene shooting. We had a plan to interview certain individuals in law Enforcement. And then someone else showed up.

[David]

This is a complicated issue for a producer. As a producer, you know, you worry about. About logistics and plans. You want to make sure that everything is planned out within reason. And sometimes it gets further off track. Others. We planned this elaborate shoot out at the scene of the collision. And when you're shooting in a sort of quasi remote area late at night, there are lots of considerations. It's completely dark except for a street light and headlights from a car. So you've got to make arrangements to light the whole area and light exactly what it is you want to feature. You've got to position things as accurately as you can. Who are you going to be interviewing and what are they likely to say? And we had a limited amount of time there, and we started interviewing one of the police officers and he sort of turned to us and said, you know, I'm really not the right person to be asking about this. Such and such an individual would be a lot better. Let me just give him a call on my cell phone and we'll see if he wants to come over. So he picks up his phone and calls this individual. And the person agreed. And all of a sudden we had someone brand new to interview. We hadn't planned on, we hadn't made time for. And it turned out to be a very important interview.

[Ann Marie Green]

Yeah, because he was the one who really kind of like processed that accident scene. And people in law enforcement, they. There's sort of a range of personalities, right. And this is the guy who's like focused on detail, very level. This is the one that you want, you know, taking out the measuring tape and seeing this is like a quarter of an inch. And what it means, you could just. You got the sense that he was a very serious individual.

[David]

He doesn't do what he does for the publicity or for the cameras. He's a low profile guy who's extremely detail oriented.

[Ann Marie Green]

Yeah, absolutely. It was really good. And good on you to be nimble enough to be like, all right, we're gonna change this plan and grab this guy now. All right, so back to the court case. It's less than 30 minutes of deliberations for the jury. They find Bud Ackerman guilty of murder. He's later sentenced to 45 years in prison without a possibility of parole. As we said in the hour, defense attorney Jack Swirling believes that the jury did not take enough time to really dig into the evidence to really consider what they had heard. He thinks that the verdict came back too soon. Davis's friends said that it was Clear that Ackerman was guilty. And that's why they believe the jury came back as soon as they did. So what's going on with this case now? Are there any updates?

[David]

Well, according to Jack Swirling, the defense attorney, Bud Ackerman is appealing his conviction. We don't have an answer about the outcome of that yet.

[Ann Marie Green]

You know, we know working on these stories, even after a conviction, there's obviously still a lot of pain. The pain does not go away for these families. Can we talk a little bit about how some of the people are doing? What about Meredith?

[David]

Right, so this is, this is an extraordinary aspect of the story. Meredith is now a single mom. She works as a grammar school teacher, but she told me she's got three kids, she's got three lunches to make. She's got three soccer practices, she's got three school plays. And that's not even taking into account being there for her school kids outside of class. There's a lot that a teacher has to do in that regard also. So she's got an uphill battle, but she is lucky in that she has a large and very close family. And we asked her how she's doing and what she thought of in terms of her kids futures, and she sounded determined to spare them as much as possible from the impact of what's happened and to give them as normal a life as she possibly can. And she was pretty optimistic about it. She said we'll be okay.

[Ann Marie Green]

Yeah. And we should remind people there's Davis family, too. I mean, he wasn't divorced for very, very long. He also had children. And, you know, now Davis's ex wife is left being a single parent as well. They were not interested in talking to 48 hours, but, you know, the loss of Davis has left a huge, huge hole in these families, in this community.

[David]

Indeed. And this is just a particular, really poignant example of what's true in so many of the cases we cover and that there really are no winners. And there's one side that prevails in the trial and another side loses. But the person who's gone can never be brought back. It's just left a crater in these people's lives and nothing any legal system can do can fill that crater.

[Ann Marie Green]

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Josh, it was great working with you on this case, on this hour. I look forward to the next time we work together. I know you're already busy deep in another hour. You guys, you guys keep it moving, you 48 Hours producers. But thank you.

[David]

It was my pleasure. Your class act and hope to do it again.

[Ann Marie Green]

Well, if you like this series postmortem, please rate and review 48 hours on Apple Podcasts and follow 48 hours wherever you get your podcast. And you can also listen ad free with a 48 hours plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. Thanks again for listening.

[Megan]

I cannot believe this is real life.

[Ann Marie Green]

My logical brain just shut down.

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