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

**Anne-Marie Green** (0:10)
Welcome back to another episode of Post Mortem. I am your host, Anne-Marie Green, and we are discussing a case that I actually reported on this week with 48 Hours producer, Josh Yager. It's about the hit and run death 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 killing. So joining me now is Josh. We worked together on the case, so it's good to have you here on Post Mortem as well, Josh.

**Josh Yager** (1:01)
Thanks for having me.

**Anne-Marie Green** (1:02)
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 Post Mortem. So I got to 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 McClendon 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.
Then shortly after 1 o'clock, 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, 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've 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.

**Josh Yager** (2:20)
That'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.

**Anne-Marie Green** (3:42)
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, so I was even a little surprised by the millisecond by millisecond detail that this truck was capturing and keeping.

**Josh Yager** (4:30)
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. One other thing which just blew my mind, we 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.