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

[Music] welcome back to another episode of postmortem I am your host anarie green
and we are discussing a case that I actually reported on this week with 48 Hours producer Josh joerger it's about
the hidden run death of Davis McLendon in the small town of Greenwood South Carolina where everybody knows everybody
and it really isn't just a clich people are so interconnected in this town um in
May of 2023 William Bud arrian fatally struck Davis who was dating buds 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 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 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 you know I first sort of read about the details of this case I thought this really seems pretty cut and dry uh
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 uh Bud
was tracking them that night uh the night they were out on a date making all these phone calls looking for them both
um 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 learn 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 91 one 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 till the last minute and I saw maybe a window of opportunity um I was a little torn it's
one of those cases I I think which is uh 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 Bud arrian who's in 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 McLendon 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 acrian
uh approaches him the 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 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 defenses case yeah that 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 arrian's mind at this moment was he really trying
to stop his forward momentum or not um because we really don't know exactly where Davis was necessarily in the road
um 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 incredible it's actually my favorite thing about this story um as we all know by now devices that we use in
our everyday lives capture data when I say that you 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 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 uh 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 roote 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 acrian had driven on this particular night I didn't know about that either and I was also really
surprised that that's a sort of data that is stored the other thing that I thought was really interesting was um
this bit about the cell phones Meredith handed over her phone so investigators could see the the text conversations
that had been happening and how many phone calls were being made between bud akran and herself when it comes to Bud's
phone 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 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 uh Meredith and Bud's relationship Merida said that by the end of their marriage
uh she really felt that bud was struggling uh 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 as a small town and a 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 uh 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 um and volatile he became
and there was someone else who really saw Bud's deterioration um up close it was Megan McGovern she was the
babysitter she started babysitting when she was a kid 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 the old Bud was sweet and caring um
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
like his fourth child and then towards the end though I mean he turned into a completely
different person that I didn't even recognize and I was honestly kind of scared to be around it's not like
necessarily I thought he would hurt me I just got a really bad feeling whenever it was just us so there you have sort of
a little taste of it and 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 dark darker and darker and darker with him yeah this is another
fascinating aspect of the story the sort of proximity of this young woman Megan McGovern to the acrian family and how
young she is as you pointed out an Marie she starts as a 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 and in her own life she becomes the person
Meredith calls that night when she's concerned that Davis McLendon has left this bar and finds out that he's gone to
meet bud arrian and it's actually Megan who gets out of the car and is the first
one as you point out to see Davis McLendon on the side of the road and to call 911 she said she'd never seen a
body a person in in that condition uh as as Davis was on the side of the road she's really right in the thick of
everything and she's just a kid welcome back well just hours after killing Davis McLendon but acrian was
arrested and charged with his murder in September of uh 2024 Bud's case went to trial which faced a couple of challenges
uh from the very very start this trial had trouble getting off the ground uh through no fault of of anyone's
really I mean there there were several things that uh they came to bear one is that bud arrian's attorney Jack swirling
had health problems and actually um became ill in the courtroom twice and had to go to the hospital during the
very very earliest stages of the trial and so um the trial at one point is postponed and has to start all over
again once it starts the gigantic hurricane we all heard about um last fall winter hit right in the middle and so
there was a a pause of several days if not longer these people um 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 yeah totally
um close to the end of the hour you see uh Davis's son speak and he's very very angry not just at bud acrian but at the
arrian family um 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 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 a CH 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 I mean sounds it's 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 yeah 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 I almost felt like in a way both like sort of swirling who the um attorney for the defense for acrian 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 Mets and and uh 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 they almost every answer to every question we asked included a compliment for the lawyer on
the other side and and the same from B Bud akerman'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 opposing as opposing Council 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 yeah yeah so true
um we did get at least one lucky break though when we were out at the scene shooting we had a plan to intervie to
interview um certain individuals in law enforcement and then someone else showed
up this is a complicated um 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 um and sometimes it gets uh further off track
than others we plann this elaborate shoot out at the uh scene of the collision and when you're shooting in a
sort of Quasi remote area late at night um 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 EX exactly what it is you want to feature um 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 um 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 be asking about
this s 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
in what it means you could just you got the sense that he was a very a serious individual I mean he's not he he doesn't
do what he does for the publicity or for the cameras he's a lowprofile 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 uh we're going to change this plan and and grab this guy now um all right so so back to the cour
court case uh it's you know less than 30 minutes of deliberations for the jury they find B arriman guilty of
murder um he is later sentenced to 45 years in prison without a possibility of parole as we said in the hour uh 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 uh
Davis's friends said that it was clear that acrian 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 uh bud arrian is appealing his conviction uh we don't have an answer about the outcome of that
yet you know we know working on these on these stories uh 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 uh 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 she's got a an uphill battle but she is lucky in that she has
a large and very close family yeah um and we asked her how she's doing and and what she thought of in terms of her kids
Futures and she she sounded determined to spare them as much as possible from the impact of 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 yeah um and we should remind people um there's Davis's family too I mean he would he wasn't for for
very very long um he also had children um and you know now Davis's ex-wife is left being a single parent as well um
they were not interested in talking to 48 hours but um you know the loss of Davis has left a huge huge hole um in uh
these families in this community indeed and this is just a particularly poignant
example of 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 fill that greater y
absolutely um well Josh it was great working with you on this um 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 it was my pleasure your class act and hope to do it again well if you like this series
postmortem please rate and review 48 Hours on Apple podcast and follow 48 Hours wherever you get your podcast and
you can also listen ad free with a 48 Hours Plus subscription on Apple podcast thanks again for listening

"48 Hours" correspondent Anne-Marie Green and producer Josh Yager discuss Davis McClendon's death. McClendon was fatally struck by a truck that belonged to Bud Ackerman, the estranged husband of McClendon's love interest. Watch the "Post Mortem" podcast for more on the defense's argument that the collision was an accident, and discover the digital evidence from Ackerman's truck. Also, find out why the Ackermans' babysitter was the first one on the scene to call 911.

Crime. Social justice. Impact. "48 Hours" investigates the most intriguing crime and justice cases that touch on all areas of the human experience including greed and passion. "48 Hours," which premiered in 1988, has developed a rich history of original reporting and impact journalism that has helped exonerate wrongly convicted people, caused cold cases to be reopened and solved, and along the way changed lives.

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Brief Summary

The episode covers the hit-and-run case of Davis McLendon, focusing on the trial of Bud Arrian and its community impact.

Key points

The Hidden Run Case. A tragic collision leads to a murder trial in a small town.
Megan's Perspective. Megan McGovern shares her experience with Bud's transformation.
Trial Verdict. Bud Arrian is found guilty of murder after a brief deliberation.
Meredith's Struggles. Meredith navigates life as a single mother after the tragedy.
The Impact of Loss. Davis's death leaves a significant void in the community.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I was honestly kind of scared to be around him.

Megan's feelings about Bud's change in behavior.

0:54WatchMar 6, 2025

Tension

65/ 100Some tension

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