Josh Yager
Appearances
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
Right. So 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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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 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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
And she was pretty optimistic about it. She said, we'll be okay.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
uh just a particularly poignant example of what's true in so many of the cases we cover and and 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 it's just left a crater in these people's lives um and nothing any legal system can do can feel that greater
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
It was my pleasure. You're a class act and hope to do it again.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
It's one of those cases, I think, which is really interesting because you can put yourself there. mentally in the space of the person 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
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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 McLendon. And what he decides to do is swerve to the left.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
And he actually crashes his truck into the car on purpose to stop its forward momentum and to sort of avoid Davis McLendon and steer around him to the left. That's the defense's case.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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... 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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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,
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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, you can only imagine what that period of time must be like.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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. Totally.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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 what you say is right. 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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
I think all you have to do to understand that is, 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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
this is a complicated issue for a producer. As a producer, you know, you worry 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 plan 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.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Hit-and-Run Homicide of Davis McClendon
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.