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

Welcome back to another episode of Postmortem. 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 Yeager. 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 Budd Ackerman fatally struck Davis, who was dating Budd'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 accidental. An intentional 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. Thanks for having me. 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 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 was killed was because of the murder. The reason McClendon is dead is because he was hit. He was in a collision. At the trial, the prosecution made a really strong case that Budd was jealous. His estranged wife, Meredith, had started dating. Budd 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 o'clock, he meets up with Davis. The prosecution argued that the crash site showed that Budd 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. It's one of those cases. I think, which is really interesting because you can put yourself mentally in the space of the person of the people on both sides. According to the defense, you have Budd 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 Budd 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 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. 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 Budd 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 Budd'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. I was surprised by the millisecond by millisecond detail that this truck was capturing and keeping. 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 touchscreen. 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 of the tires as they 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. And 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. 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. 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 on to 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. Right. 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. 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 going to 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 difficulties. He had been working at 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. The more sort of unpredictable and volatile he became. And there was someone else who really saw Bud's 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. 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 9-1-1. 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 the kid. 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. 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 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, I can only imagine what that period of time must be like. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 close relationship with X or Y or Z. Totally. I almost felt like in a way, both like sort of swirling the attorney for the defense for Ackerman and the prosecutors, they were almost, I'm not going to say falling over each other to compliment each other, but they were very complimentary towards each other. Of course, John Metters and John Conrad actually happened to be the same team that worked on the Murdoch case, the very high profile South Carolina case. And so, you know, I think that's, I think that's, I think that's, I think that's 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 we covered this story. I mean, they're in court against each other every day. Yeah. Yeah. So true. We did get at least one 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. 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 than 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 streetlight 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, he sort of turned to us and said, you know, I'm really not the right person to interview. I'm 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, and, 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. 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, a serious individual. 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. Yeah, absolutely. It was, it was really good. And, and, and good on you to be nimble enough to be like, all right, we're going to change this plan and grab this guy now. All right. So, so back to the court case. It's, you know, 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, 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? 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. We know working on these, 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? 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 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 that we'll be OK. Yeah. And we should remind people there's Davis's family, too. I mean, he was 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. Indeed. And this is just a particularly poignant example of what's true in so many of the cases we cover and in that there 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. Yeah. And nothing any legal system can do can fill that crater. 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 keep it moving, you 48 Hours producers. But thank you. It was my pleasure. You're a class act and hope to do it again. Well, if you like this series post-mortem, please rate and review 48 Hours on Apple Podcasts and follow 48 Hours wherever you get your podcasts. And you can also listen ad-free with a 48-hours-plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. Thanks again for listening.