The Killers Were Identified By DNA Found In Her Intimate Organs | True Crime Documentary

At around 2:00 in the morning, 21-year-old Lauren Smith walked out of a bar with three friends. Just a few hours earlier, she had sent her friend a text with one simple request. Come get me. She said she wasn’t feeling well, but no one ever showed up. By morning, two fishermen discovered her body floating in the water near a remote cove.

 Just minutes later, two of the men who had been with Lauren that night arrived by boat. They were already looking for her, even though officially no one knew where she was yet. At first, it looked like a tragic accident. A festival, alcohol, a campsite perched on the edge of a steep cliff.

 But almost immediately, questions started piling up and no one could come up with logical answers. Why had Lauren begged someone to pick her up? Why did she lie to an acquaintance about where she was spending the night? Why were her phone, her bag, and her shoes all left behind at the campsite? And why did the three people who saw her alive for the very last time each tell a different version of what happened that night? This is the story of a college student who studied forensic science and dreamed of working real criminal investigations.

After her death, she left behind evidence that haunted both her mother and investigators for years. But the most important clues didn’t become obvious until forensic experts took a much closer look at her body. Hey guys, let me grab you for just a second. I’m really curious where my audience is watching from.

 So, I’d love for you to drop a comment and tell me what city you’re in and what time it is for you right now. Thanks for taking a moment. Go ahead and share that in the comments. And now, let’s keep going. 21-year-old Lauren Smith was studying forensic science and planned to dedicate her entire career to it.

 She took notes on criminal cases. She spent a lot of time thinking about evidence. At least in theory, she understood better than most people how quickly a situation could spiral out of control, but she never imagined it would happen to her. During the weekend of July 24th, 2015, Lauren headed to Wakefest in Tennessee with her childhood best friend, Hannah Palmer. Hannah was the one driving.

Along the way, they took selfies, blasted music, and laughed the entire trip. They had known each other for so many years that even the quiet moments between songs never felt awkward. That same weekend, Hannah’s boyfriend, Aaron Lily, and his friend Christopher Stout joined them. Lauren had never met Christopher before.

 This would be their first time meeting, and she wasn’t worried about it at all. The four of them planned to spend the weekend camping together, and Lauren was genuinely looking forward to the trip. Lauren’s mother, Sher Smith, had her concerns. Wakefest was a lake festival filled with fast boats, alcohol, and open water.

 Sher knew exactly how dangerous that combination could be. But Lauren was an adult, and besides, she wasn’t planning to stay very long. She intended to head home the following evening so she could attend a party with her boyfriend, Chase. Just one day, maybe a day and a half, and then she’d be back home. That was the plan.

 Lauren never made it to that party. Take a second and remember that detail. She never intended to stay there for long. She had a reason to leave early. Someone was waiting for her somewhere else, but she never made it there. After arriving at the lake, the group set up camp. They didn’t choose a spot near the cliff.

They camped right on top of it. On one side was a 30foot drop. on the other a 90 ft drop. The only way to reach the campsite was by boat or canoe. There was no road and no trail leading to it. Lauren recorded a short video of the campsite to show her friends back home. And in the background, you can hear Hannah’s voice saying, “It’s literally a death trap.” She laughed.

 At least that’s how it sounded to everyone at the time. The sleeping arrangements were simple. Hannah and Aaron would stay in the tent. Lauren and Christopher, who had known each other for less than a day, were supposed to sleep in hammocks set up along the edge of the cliff. Lauren had a boyfriend. Christopher was a complete stranger to her.

 Whether that decision was simply practical or meant something more, no one questioned it at the time. The four of them settled into camp. The following night on July 25th, sometime between 10 and 11:00, Lauren sent a text to her friend Jade. She told her she wasn’t comfortable with what was happening and asked her to come pick her up.

 That message deserves your attention. Lauren wasn’t injured. As far as anyone knew, she wasn’t in immediate danger. She simply felt miserable and wanted to leave. Instead of asking someone from her own group for help, she reached out to someone who wasn’t even at Wakefest and asked her to come get her. Jade never came. While Lauren waited for a reply, she stayed at the bar with Hannah, Aaron, and Christopher.

At some point that night, she ran into an acquaintance named Evan. They talked for a little while, and Lauren told him she was spending the night in a nearby cabin. But that wasn’t true. In reality, she was sleeping in a hammock on the edge of a cliff that could only be reached by water.

 No one knows exactly why she lied about the cabin. Maybe she felt uncomfortable. Maybe it was just easier to explain, but when she ran into someone she knew, she described her situation as being far more comfortable than it actually was. At around 2:00 in the morning, Lauren was seen leaving the bar.

 The person who saw her was Officer Yaruk, a police officer who was working security at Wakefest on his day off. He was inside the bar as it was closing when he watched Lauren walk out with Hannah, Aaron, and Christopher. Now, here’s what Officer Yaruk didn’t know. Just two or 3 hours earlier, Lauren had sent a message asking someone to come get her.

 She had reached out for help to someone outside their group, and now she was heading back to camp with the very same people she had apparently wanted to get away from. Had she changed her mind? Had they worked something out? Or did she simply have no other choice because Jade never answered? The officer watching her leave the bar couldn’t have known any of that.

 From the outside, everything looked completely normal. She was with her friends. She was simply heading back to camp. That was the last time anyone outside that campsite ever saw Lawrence Smith alive. And this is where the timeline takes a critical turn. The bar closes. All four of them leave together.

 They travel back across the water to the campsite on the cliff and sometime over the next few hours, something happened that none of them would ever describe the same way. What investigators would eventually uncover didn’t begin with a witness. It didn’t begin with a confession. It began with two fishermen. Early that morning, before most of the people at Wakefest had even woken up, the fishermen found something in a secluded cove not far from the campsite. They found a body.

Ryan Melonsson, a police officer who was off duty that day, was one of the first to arrive at the scene alongside Officer Yaruk. They followed the fisherman by boat into the cove. And just minutes after Lauren’s body was discovered in that remote part of the lake, Aaron and Christopher showed up. They were paddling straight toward the scene.

 They were shouting that their friend was missing. They were asking if the woman in the water was her. Think about that for a second. The cove was isolated. The body had only just been discovered. The fisherman had reached the officers only minutes earlier. And yet, the same two men who had been with Lauren at the bar, who had left with her at 2:00 that morning, and who had spent the night with her at the campsite, were already out on the water.

 They were already heading to that exact location. And they were already asking if the body was their friend. How did they know where to look? To this day, there is no clear answer to that question. But it’s the question that starts pulling the entire story apart because the answer depends entirely on what happened between 2:00 that morning and the moment the fisherman found Lauren.

 And the only two people who were with her during all of that time were the same two men who somehow ended up in that cove before the investigation had truly even begun. Lauren’s body was found in the water. The campsite itself sat on top of a cliff with a 30ft drop on one side and a 90 ft drop on the other. The hammocks had been strung up right along the edge.

And Lauren, who had texted her friend the night before asking to be picked up, who had lied to Evan about where she was staying, who had every reason to leave early because her boyfriend was waiting for her at home, was now lying in that secluded cove. The first question investigators needed to answer was whether this had been an accident.

 A young woman, a lake festival, alcohol, a campsite perched above open water. At first glance, it could have looked like a tragic accident. People fall, people end up in the water at night. It happens. But there were details at the scene that didn’t fit that explanation. And the investigators who arrived at the cove that morning, following the fisherman and then watching Aaron and Christopher paddle toward them across the water, noticed those details before they had even finished processing the scene. Those details, along with the

medical examiner’s findings about how Lauren ended up in the water, marked the moment this stopped looking like a tragic accident and became something entirely different. By now, you already know that Lauren sent a message asking for help the night before. The people she had been trying to get away from were the last ones to see her alive.

 And they were also the first people to appear where her body was found. That’s not the kind of coincidence that’s easy to explain. That’s where the question began. The same question investigators, Lauren’s mother, Sher Smith, and eventually a jury would spend years trying to answer. Not just what happened on that cliff that night, but who knew what was about to happen, when they knew it, and whether the text Lauren sent to Jade sometime around 10 or 11 that evening was the last time she honestly told anyone how she really felt. Lauren

studied forensic science. She dreamed of working in that field. She understood, at least in theory, how evidence works, how investigators rebuild timelines, and how they uncover contradictions between people’s stories and the physical evidence. In the end, she left behind a trail of evidence herself, the text message, the video of the cliff, the lie about the cabin, and two men in a canoe who somehow arrived at her body before anyone had even called them there.

 Those were the clues she left behind. and they became the responsibility of the same investigators who watched Aaron and Christopher cross that cove, shouting Lauren’s name and asking whether the woman in the water was their friend. I’ve covered a lot of criminal cases, but this one has stayed with me. Because the biggest question isn’t whether Lauren was harmed.

 The physical evidence eventually answered that. The real question is something else. How long had she known something was wrong before everything came to an end? That message to Jade, that lie she told Evan, those weren’t random details, they were the actions of someone trying to tell an outsider that something wasn’t right.

But no one came. The medical examiner’s findings, the autopsy results, and everything they revealed about how Lauren ended up in the water, and the condition she was in when the fisherman found her ultimately destroyed the accident theory. But we’ll get to that in a moment. Right now, something else matters more.

 On the morning of July 26th, 2015, the investigators standing in that cove were already looking at Aaron Lily and Christopher Stout and asking themselves the very same question that’s probably on your mind right now. Why were they already out on the water? At that point, only one thing had been confirmed. Lauren had been found in the water near the shoreline, but no one yet knew what had happened in those crucial minutes after the two officers arrived and saw the two young men already standing at the exact spot where her body had just

been pulled from the lake. And they showed up at precisely the same moment the officers arrived. Take a second to think about that. Not earlier, not later. At that exact moment, Officer Melonsson noticed it immediately. He and his partner watched Aaron and Chris as they approached. And what they saw wasn’t grief.

 It wasn’t the stunned, devastated look you’d expect from someone who had just learned that the friend they’d spent the weekend with was dead. According to Melinsson, what they saw was nervousness. A very controlled, restrained kind of nervousness. the kind that looked less like shock and more like someone desperately calculating their next move.

 Then Aaron did something Melonsson never forgot. The officers took him up to the top of the cliff so he could look over the scene. Aaron agreed. He looked and when they came back down, the expression on his face had changed. Melonsson described it very specifically. He said that on the way back down, Aaron looked like a man who had convinced himself he wasn’t going to get caught.

 That’s not a retelling. Those were the officer’s own words. Now, there were two men at the scene. Neither of them appeared heartbroken. And according to an experienced police officer, one of them wore the expression of someone who felt relieved because he believed he was going to escape responsibility. And all of that happened before investigators had even started asking questions.

 Both men were brought onto a pontoon boat. The interviews began. Officer Melonsson started with Chris. He took a calm, friendly approach. They talked about work, everyday life, and ordinary things. During that conversation, Chris volunteered an unusual detail. He said his job involved handling amputated human body parts. By itself, that’s a completely legitimate profession.

 There’s nothing illegal about it. But the context matters. A young woman’s body had just been recovered from the water. Chris was sitting on a boat being questioned about his deceased friend. And right in the middle of that conversation, without being asked, he casually mentioned that he worked with amputated body parts, just as if it were a random fact about himself. Think about that.

 Then Chris volunteered something else to Melson. Again, no one asked him. The officer wasn’t questioning him about that subject. They were simply talking about his life, his past, and the weekend. Chris inserted the information on his own. There’s one very obvious reason why someone would willingly tell an investigator something like that during a death investigation.

 They do it before investigators discover it themselves. They want an explanation already on the record before forensic testing reveals their DNA on the victim’s body. They’re trying to stay one step ahead. It’s hard to come up with another logical explanation. And Chris handed investigators that information within the very first minutes of the interview.

The entire time, Aaron watched closely. Every time Chris started giving Melsonon more detailed answers, Aaron looked at him, nudged him, and told him to stop talking. Imagine watching that through Melson’s eyes. One man is voluntarily offering information that could explain future forensic findings.

 The other is physically trying to stop him from saying too much. That’s not how people act when they have nothing to hide. That’s how people act when they’ve already agreed on a version of events and don’t want anyone straying from it. Then Chris looked at the officer’s gun. Melonsson noticed. He asked him directly what he was staring at.

 Chris answered honestly. He said he was thinking about taking the officer’s gun out of its holster and jumping off the boat. Melonsson told him that wasn’t going to happen. About 10 minutes later, Chris said the same thing again. He didn’t whisper it. He didn’t mumble it to himself twice. About 10 minutes apart, he looked the officer in the eye and said it twice.

 He told a police officer he was thinking about disarming him and escaping. You could try to find an innocent explanation for that. Maybe he was panicking. Maybe fear made him say something reckless, but afraid of what exactly? If you haven’t done anything wrong, why are you so desperate to get off that boat? What exactly are you trying to run from? The interviews continued.

 Both Chris and Aaron gave formal written statements. And this is where their story begins to fall apart in a way that can’t be explained by grief, confusion, or exhaustion after a long weekend. In his written statement, Chris wrote, “In my opinion, the girl came back to our campsite for a little while last night and told us she was going back to her ex-boyfriend.

 She stayed only briefly. Then I fell asleep, and when I woke up, she was gone.” Chris had spent the entire weekend with Lauren. They slept in neighboring hammocks. He knew her name. He used it in conversation, but in his official statement about her death, he  didn’t call her Lauren. He referred to her simply as the girl.

 And he did it more than once. There’s actually a term for that kind of shift in language. When someone stops referring to a person by name, stops speaking about them as an individual, and instead describes them in abstract terms, it’s often called dissociative language. It’s something that’s frequently seen when people try to create psychological distance from a traumatic event. That’s not a diagnosis.

It’s simply an observation about what appears in his statement and what doesn’t. His statement was also remarkably vague in a way that’s difficult to explain by stress alone. There’s almost no clear timeline, almost no meaningful description of what actually happened at the campsite. He claimed that Lauren briefly returned  and said she was going back to her ex-boyfriend.

Then later in the statement, he suddenly wrote that she came back the following morning and appeared to be hiding something from him in front of his new girlfriend. After that, he simply added that he left. The sentences are disorganized. The sequence of events is confusing. For someone who said he was awake for at least part of that night and was present at the scene, his statement contains surprisingly little information that investigators could actually use.

 Then Aaron gave his statement. His version was much more specific. He said the last time he saw Lauren was when all four of them were walking back from the bar. According to Aaron, Lauren was crying over her ex-boyfriend who was there with another woman. He claimed Lauren tried to reconnect with her ex, but he rejected her.

 After that, Aaron said she walked off toward a houseboat on her own. He also stated that the last time he saw her was around midnight, after which he and Hannah went to sleep in their tent. So, according to Aaron, Lauren left the group headed toward the housebo, and that was the last time anyone saw her. According to Chris, Lauren was lying beside him in the hammock when he fell asleep.

 She mentioned wanting to go see her ex-boyfriend. He said he never felt her leave. He woke up and she was simply gone. Those two versions cannot both be true. Either Lauren left the group and walked toward the housebo before Chris fell asleep, as Aaron claimed, or she was still lying beside Chris in the hammock when he fell asleep, as Chris himself insisted.

 One of them is describing a night that simply didn’t happen the way he says it did. And here’s the detail that makes Chris’s version especially difficult to believe. The hammock they were sleeping in was an ENO hammock. If you’ve ever used one, you already know exactly what that means. An eno hammock is lightweight and reacts to even the slightest shift in weight.

 When one person moves, the other feels it. When someone climbs in or gets out, the entire hammock moves. Physically, it’s almost impossible for one person to get out of that kind of hammock without the other noticing, unless they’re in an exceptionally deep, almost unconscious sleep. Chris claimed he never felt Lauren leave. He said he never felt the hammock sway, never noticed the change in weight, never realized she had climbed out.

 He simply fell asleep, and when he woke up, she was gone. Those are the words of someone who either slept through something that’s extraordinarily difficult to sleep through, or someone who already knew Lauren wouldn’t be in that hammock when he woke up because he already knew what had happened to her before he ever closed his eyes.

 Now, investigators are left with two mutually exclusive statements. A physical detail that contradicts at least one of them. One man who started explaining the presence of his DNA before anyone even asked about it. another man who physically tried to stop him from talking and Aaron’s facial expression which an experienced police officer described as the look of someone who believed he wasn’t going to get caught.

 The investigators sat there analyzing all of it. They had the statements. They had their own observations from the boat, but they still didn’t know the cause of Lauren’s death. They still didn’t know what had happened to her in the water or what had happened before she ever ended up there.

 the answer would come, but not right away. And when it finally did, it still wouldn’t answer the question that’s probably already on your mind. Because the real question isn’t just what happened to Lauren. It’s which of those two men knew the truth from the very beginning. And the answer to that question is hidden in a timeline that’s about to become even more complicated.

Because there’s one more person whose version of that night hasn’t been examined yet. Hannah was there. Hannah was Aaron’s girlfriend. She had been Lauren’s best friend since childhood. She was the one who brought Lauren to Wakefest. She was the one taking selfies with her on the drive there. She was the one who was supposed to be looking out for her that weekend.

 And Hannah’s account of that night doesn’t match Aaron’s either. The statement Hannah gave to Officer Yaruk was brief. She said they came back from the marina on paddle boards, climbed back up to the campsite, and went to sleep.  She texted me um and she really she it was really brief. Um but she just asked if I could come get her.

 She said she wasn’t having a good time. I was like, “Is there any way that’s possible for you to come get me?” Um and it was probably 10, maybe almost 11:00 when she texted me that. I tried to call her multiple times. Um and she didn’t have good service out there. So, I couldn’t get the call to go through.

 So, I told her I would have to let her know if I could come get her or not with it being so late and we not left.  Aaron and Hannah slept in the tent. Lauren and Chris slept in the hammocks. That last detail deserves a closer look. Here’s what you need to understand about those kinds of hammocks. They’re not flat surfaces.

 They’re woven fabric that wraps completely around your body. They’re also incredibly sensitive. The moment someone shifts their weight, you feel it. If the person next to you rolls over, you’ll notice even a change in the way they’re breathing can sometimes be felt. And if someone climbs out of the hammock, they have to physically pull the sides apart to make enough room to get out. There’s no quiet way to do it.

There’s no slipping out without the hammock moving. Chris told investigators he never felt Lauren get out. Think about that. He was lying right there beside her in a hammock designed to react to even the slightest change in weight. And yet he claimed he felt nothing. No movement, no rustling, not a single moment when the balance of the hammock changed.

 According to Chris, when he woke up, Lauren was simply gone. Hannah woke up and immediately asked Chris where Lauren was. Those were the very first words out of her mouth. Not good morning, not where is everyone. She asked one question. Where’s Lauren? That suggests Hannah sensed something was wrong before she had any real reason to believe it.

 Chris told her Lauren had probably been up for a while. He repeated that he never felt her get out of the hammock. Then Hannah noticed Lauren’s flipflops, her purse, and her cell phone. Everything was still sitting at the campsite exactly where Lauren had left it the night before. Nothing had been taken. Nothing had been moved. The only thing missing was Lauren.

Everything she would have needed if she had chosen to leave was still lying on the ground. Stop for a moment and think about what those details mean together. A 21-year-old woman doesn’t voluntarily leave a campsite without her phone. She doesn’t wander barefoot through the dark.

 She doesn’t go to meet someone, head back to a bar, or walk over to see her ex-boyfriend without taking her purse. Those three items aren’t just things she forgot. Together, they send a message. Hannah understood that immediately. She said she became worried the instant she saw them.  Can you share um what Lauren’s condition was leaving the bar that Saturday night?  Uh she had had a few beers, but she was, in my opinion, not drunk.

 Okay. She, you know, of course had had a few, but she was definitely not publicly intoxicated,  not impaired.  Yes.  What happened next raises an entirely different set of questions. The group never asked anyone for help. They didn’t look for a park ranger. They didn’t stop a single passing boat.

 They didn’t go to the first authority they could find and report that their friend was missing. Instead, they went to Wakefest. They looked around. They didn’t see Lauren and then they simply kept going. In her written statement to police, Hannah described it as if it were a perfectly logical series of events. They checked the campsite. They checked the marina.

They thought Lauren might have gone to the bar, but they never actually went inside the bar to see if she was there. Then they noticed police heading toward the campsite. So, they turned around and went back. That’s the version of events Hannah put on paper. If you read it by itself, it almost sounds like the story of a group of young people who were confused and didn’t immediately realize something was seriously wrong. Almost.

But Officer Yaruk, who spoke with Hannah shortly after Lauren’s body was found, described her as being extremely confused. Not devastated, confused. And those aren’t the same thing. Devastation is what you expect to see in someone who has just learned that their lifelong friend is dead.

 Confusion is what you see in someone who’s trying to make sense of a situation they’re caught in. That distinction became part of the case record. Chris, for his part, showed his own version of that kind of behavior. He started volunteering details before anyone asked him about them. He wanted off that boat as quickly as possible.

And then while speaking with investigators, he said something that almost certainly didn’t come across the way he intended. It feels like I’m the suspect here. I get it though. You’re just doing your job. But no one had called Chris a suspect. No one had even used that word. The officers were simply asking questions.

 The same routine questions investigators ask whenever someone goes missing. Yet Chris was the one who introduced the word suspect into the conversation without any prompting. No one had labeled him that. Whatever was weighing on him was obvious enough that it didn’t require anyone to interpret it. His behavior spoke for itself.

 But Lauren’s friends weren’t the only people connected to her at Wakefest that weekend. Her ex-boyfriend was there, too, along with his new girlfriend. And at some point, the group seemed determined to make sure that detail came up in every conversation with police. They kept bringing him up again and again. They pointed investigators back to the fact that Lauren’s ex had been at the festival, to the tension between the two of them, and to the possibility that he somehow had something to do with why she left on her own or what happened to her afterward.

It was true that Lauren’s ex had a new girlfriend, and according to multiple accounts, the two of them had several uncomfortable interactions over the course of the weekend. But investigators looked into him. They found nothing suggesting he had harmed Lauren. There was no evidence connecting him to her disappearance.

 Nothing about his behavior raised suspicion. Those tense conversations remained exactly what they appeared to be uncomfortable moments, nothing more. And that raises an important question. If Lauren’s friends genuinely believed her ex-boyfriend was responsible, why did they go looking around Wakefest instead of trying to find him? Why didn’t they go straight to the police and give them his name? Why did the ex-boyfriend only become part of the conversation after investigators had already started asking questions? The case file doesn’t provide an answer to

that, but it does reveal something else. There was a clear pattern in who kept bringing up his name when they chose to do it and the context in which they did. Lauren’s mother, Sher Smith, and her stepfather were at home when a police officer knocked on their door. He told them there had been a tragedy.

 They immediately drove to the hospital where officers informed them that Lauren had not survived. They also shared the initial theory of what had happened. At that point, it appeared to be a tragic accident involving a fall from the cliff. According to the preliminary account, Lauren had either slipped or jumped, struck her head on the way down, and fallen into the water.

 The initial autopsy findings generally supported that theory. They stated that Lauren had suffered blunt force trauma to the head, consistent with a fall, and had likely drowned. The wording, however, was notably cautious. Consistent with a possible. The report never said Lauren jumped. It simply stated that her injuries were consistent with a  fall from that height.

 Sher Smith didn’t accept that conclusion. Not because she was denying her daughter’s death, and not because her grief kept her from thinking clearly. She simply knew her daughter too well. Sher said Lauren would never have gotten so drunk that she accidentally walked off a cliff. She also said Lauren would never have decided to jump from a cliff in the middle of the night barefoot without telling anyone where she was going.

According to Sher, that just wasn’t who Lauren was. And there was something Sher knew that the initial medical examiner’s report didn’t take into account. Lauren was studying forensic science. She wasn’t reckless. She wasn’t the kind of person who would wander into the darkness toward the edge of a cliff on impulse. She was careful.

 Yes, she was outgoing, fun, and friendly, but she also thought through the consequences of her actions. She was drawn to the field of criminal justice because she understood that the world can be dangerous and that people have to make smart decisions. Investigators had a report that said her injuries were consistent with a fall.

 Sher had spent 21 years watching her daughter grow up, and those two things pointed in completely different directions. At first, the case was closed as an accident. Lauren’s death was officially ruled accidental. Her family was told there was nothing left to investigate. Sher was expected to grieve, accept the loss, and move on. But she couldn’t.

Instead, she started asking questions. She began speaking with people who had been at Wakefest that weekend.  I happened to be out of town at the time. I was also working on another case at the time and I said I would look at it and let her know. And then I spoke to Sherry, told her to send all the documents.

 After that, I told Sher she’s got a good case. She probably would do well with an investigator. My response regarding all cases is you don’t know what you don’t know unless you get into them. You don’t know if the family is  looking at things differently and the police did their job. Um you have to actually go through and  do your own investigation.

 So at the beginning it appeared that there were problems in the investigation. Once I dove into it clearly the police did not do their job. So that’s how I always do it  and I never um disregard what a family says but I never take it as gospel.  Sher began reconstructing the events of that night on her own.

 She wanted to understand Lauren’s condition, what the people around her had been doing and saying, where everyone had been, and how the night had actually unfolded. The more she uncovered, the less the accidental fall theory held up. Too many pieces simply didn’t fit. The hammock, the flipflops, the phone. Chris’s claim that he never felt Lauren leave.

 The fact that the group went to Wakefest before they ever looked for help. And the fact that the officer who spoke with Hannah immediately after Lauren’s death became known described her not as devastated, but as confused. On their own, none of those details proves anything. Each one could have an innocent explanation.

But they don’t exist in isolation. Together, they form a pattern. And that pattern doesn’t look like an accident. Sher never stopped fighting. She contacted investigators. The district attorney’s office, anyone willing to listen, and even those who weren’t. She wasn’t driven by emotion or outrage.

 She was methodical, focused. She brought facts and she asked the questions the original investigation never did. Little by little, the case began moving again. When investigators took another look at the evidence, they didn’t uncover one dramatic breakthrough. Instead, they found a series of small details that had been documented from the very beginning and then quietly overlooked.

 Witness statements that didn’t quite match. A timeline filled with gaps. behavioral observations officers had recorded at the scene but never followed up on. Take the hammock for example. That detail had been in the case file from day one. One of the officers had specifically noted how sensitive the hammock was, how physically difficult it would have been for someone to climb out without the other person noticing.

 And the fact that Chris insisted he hadn’t felt anything at all. Every bit of that information had been sitting in the file since the very morning Lauren’s body was discovered. But no one pulled on that thread. Sure did. And once you start pulling on a single thread in a case like this, the entire fabric begins to unravel.

 Now investigators were asking a different question. Not whether Lauren fell, but whether she was alone when she went over the edge of that cliff. Was the blunt force injury to her head really consistent with a fall? Or did it look more like an injury she suffered before the fall? And had the water hidden, what actually happened on the edge of that cliff that night? The autopsy report stated,  I think a medical examiner’s job is to be um separate from the police.

Unfortunately, I think they’re so biased and then they are part of the problem and working with the police. Whatever the police tell them is what they write down. That is the system throughout the country. So, as in this case, I believe the medical examiner was told one thing, wrote it down.

 It’s very clear and on the record that that happens all the time. And that was the end of the case. There are problems in Lauren’s case. For instance,  the fact that in the state of Tennessee, we don’t automatically do kits on unattended females, which is unacceptable and should be a crime that that’s not done.

 The medical examiner should have done a deeper dive and let Lauren’s body tell the evidence. For instance,  the the features on her body are not consistent with the fall. It’s very clear. You don’t have to be a police  officer to look at that. You don’t have to be a medical examiner. A average person can look at it and go, “She didn’t fall off that cliff.

” It is obscene that people are trying to promote that. Um,  yes, there is evidence that are contradicting what has been put on the record. That single phrase ended up carrying far too much weight in the official version of events,  and no one ever stopped to ask what it might actually be hiding. There was another detail that Sher learned almost by accident from someone who had been at the campsite that night.

It was so specific and so completely out of place, if this had truly been an accidental fall, that it simply didn’t fit the story at all. It never made it into the original police report. No one ever followed up on it. It was just a detail someone mentioned once and then it was forgotten. And that detail pointed to one specific person.

 It wasn’t Lauren’s ex-boyfriend. The cliff jumping theory wasn’t supported by a single photograph. During the week after WakeFest, Sher reached out to anyone she could find. She spoke with friends, people who had attended the festival, and anyone who might have taken pictures or videos near that cliff.

 She was looking for just one photo, one video, any evidence that people were actually jumping from that cliff. She found nothing. And it wasn’t because no one was recording. Quite the opposite. People were constantly taking pictures and filming videos. There were selfies from the drive to the festival, photos from the campsite, and social media posts shared throughout the  weekend in real time.

 But there wasn’t a single photo or video showing anyone jumping from that particular cliff. Because as far as anyone could tell, no one was jumping from it at all. Think about what that means. The explanation that eventually made its way into the medical examiner’s report and shaped investigators original understanding of Lauren’s death doesn’t appear to have been based on evidence.

 The written police reports contain no mention of people jumping from the cliff. Not one. So where did that detail come from? and who introduced it into the official case file. That question has never been fully answered. Only one thing is known. Someone at the hospital or someone involved in the autopsy process received the cliff jumping theory and passed it along as part of the initial narrative.

Whether that information came from one of the three friends who had been with Lauren or whether someone simply assumed it based on the scene itself has never been determined. Chris Yarchuk is one of the heroes in this case. That is the police officer you want showing up at a crime scene.

  Chris knew what he was looking for. He knew what the evidence stated and he was very accurate. He stands exactly where he stood uh 10 years ago.  Sher searched for even a single piece of evidence that people had been jumping from that cliff and she found nothing. The police reports never mentioned cliff jumping, not once.

 And yet, the medical examiner ultimately ruled Lauren’s death an accident, concluding that she had fallen from the cliff. But in the first few days after Lauren’s body was discovered, something else happened that Sher could never come to terms with. That very night, after Lauren was found in the water, Christopher Stout made a post on Instagram.

 He shared a photo of himself with Hannah  and Aaron. just the three of them. Lauren was gone. The caption read, “The best weekend of my life.” Until it wasn’t. Wakefest 2015 was an amazing time this year. I met some incredible new friends who made it a weekend I’ll never forget. By his own account, Chris had spent the night beside Lauren in neighboring hammocks.

According to multiple witnesses, the two had been physically intimate at some point during that weekend. He had known Lauren for less than 48 hours before her body was found in the water below the cliff. And on the very day her body was discovered, he publicly posted a photo of the three people who had survived and called that weekend the best of his life.

 There’s no need to speculate about his state of mind. There’s no need to guess what he was thinking. The post exists. The caption exists. The time it was published is documented. All that remains is a simple question about behavior. If someone you had just spent an entire weekend with died, what would you post? Most people wouldn’t post anything at all.

 Someone in shock might write something emotional or disorganized, but very few people would post a photo of the survivors and describe that weekend as the best one of their life. That was the behavior and that’s what’s documented in the record. Later, all three of them, Christopher, Hannah, and Aaron, chose not to attend Lauren’s funeral.

   He told an offduty police officer that he had had sex with Lauren after the offduty police officer said, “We will do a kit.” Which is logical and  normal, you would think, except for in the state of Tennessee and Texas and a few other places. So, it’s consistent across the country.

 But what it tells me, I have a very strong opinion about no kits and them not being processed. We see over and over cases are resolved once you do kits and other cases are tied to it. If they had done that, that would have told whether or not Chris was telling the truth and had sex with her or if someone else had sex with her, if  she had been sexually assaulted.

And the fact that a police  officer who was the detective, Jeremy Taylor, on the record said she had her period and that’s why they didn’t do a red kit. makes you wonder the quality and mental state of the men involved  in the judicial system and the the uh criminal justice.  None of the three of them came to Lauren’s funeral.

 Hannah had been Lauren’s friends since childhood. They grew up together. Hannah was the one driving Lauren’s car on the way to Wakefest. They spent the entire weekend together at the same campsite. And yet she never came to say goodbye to the friend she had known for most of her life. Sher noticed. Of course she did. She was standing at her daughter’s funeral, and she could see that not a single person who had spent Lauren’s final weekend with her was there.

 And that’s when the questions became impossible to ignore. Why wasn’t Hannah there? What was keeping the three of them away? What were they afraid of? After the funeral, Officer Melonsson called Sher. He told her directly that he did not believe Lauren’s death had been an accident. He didn’t hint at it. He said it plainly, but he also admitted he didn’t have enough evidence to prove it.

 For a police officer, that’s a significant statement. I don’t believe this was an accident. I just can’t prove it. A few months later, the Dalb County Sheriff’s Office officially closed the case. The medical examiner’s ruling stood. Accidental death. Lauren had fallen from the cliff, struck the rocks, and ended up in the lake. Lauren’s personal belongings were eventually returned to share.

 She went through everything carefully and noticed that two things were missing. Lauren’s sleeping bag was gone, and some of her clothing was missing as well. Not everything, just certain items. They were simply gone. No one ever explained what had happened to them. The case was closed. Lauren’s death was officially ruled an accident.

 Sher got her daughter’s belongings back without the sleeping bag, without part of her clothing, and without a single explanation, but she refused to stop. Sher turned to forensic death investigator Sheila Weissaki. What Sheila saw in the photographs of Lauren’s body did not match the theory of an accidental fall. She started with Lauren’s neck.

 There were hemorrhages around it. Injuries like that are not what you expect from striking  rocks or hitting the water. They are commonly associated with significant pressure being applied to the neck. That’s not speculation. It’s what that type of hemorrhaging is generally understood to indicate. And it’s not the kind of injury typically caused by falling off a cliff.

 There also appeared to be what could have been a bite mark on Lauren’s chest. But there was something else that raised even more serious questions about the accidental drowning theory. There was no water in Lauren’s lungs. If Lauren had fallen from the cliff, struck the rocks, entered the water alive, and then  drowned, you would generally expect water to be present in her lungs.

That’s the normal mechanism of drowning. A person inhales water, the lungs fill with it, and those findings are usually visible during an autopsy. But there was no water in Laurens’s lungs. Yes, so-called dry drowning is a real phenomenon, but it occurs only under very specific circumstances, and those circumstances are generally considered highly unlikely in a scenario where someone falls from a height, survives long enough to enter the water, and then drowns.

 That’s the sequence of events required by the official conclusion. Yet, the physical findings involving Lauren’s lungs pointed in a very different direction. Still, the most significant detail Sheila and Officer Yaruk noticed in the photographs was something else entirely. There was a distinct mark on the front of Lauren’s body, a triangular impression.

 Next to it was another mark that resembled the outline of a handle. Officer Yaruk described it this way. Anyone who’s ever sat in a canoe would recognize that shape immediately. It matches the bow or stern of a canoe. If that interpretation is correct, the mark represents post-mortem levidity. After death, blood stops circulating.

 Gravity causes it to settle in the lowest parts of the body. That process leaves permanent patterns showing the position the body remained in during the first hours after death. Once those patterns are established, they do not change.  Do I believe she was moved to her location? Yes. Do I believe that the currents took her? No.

 Did they check the canoe or investigate  anything? Anything. They did not investigate anything. So, no. No. And they don’t want to. First of all, as an investigator, I’m not there to get you. I’m not there to create or um make up anything. I just want the truth. That’s all I was there for. When Aaron showed up, I was with another investigator and she and I both agreed it was time to get out of there. He walked in hot.

 And again, I’m not there to get you. I’m there to get the truth. Talk to me. Just tell me what happened. I go and talk to so many people that tell  me their side of the story. Just tell me your side of the story. And if you want me to leave, I’ll leave. I’m not there to cause a problem.

 I’m there to find out what happened. And I believe Sher Smith deserves the right to know what happened to her daughter when she passed away, whatever it looks like.  Once post-mortem levidity becomes fixed, it doesn’t change. And the mark on Lauren’s body, a triangular impression with what appeared to be the outline of a handle, was consistent with her body resting against the bow or stern of a canoe after death.

 Think about what that means. If Lauren died at the campsite or somewhere nearby and her body was later placed in a canoe and transported across the water, postmortem leidity would preserve the exact position her body remained in during that transport. The shape of the canoe could leave an impression on her body. Blood would settle around the points of contact and when investigators later photographed her body, that pattern would still be visible and unchanged.

 According to those observations, that’s exactly what the photographs appeared to show. If that’s true, then the shoreline, the cliff, the rocks, and the position in which Lauren’s body was found may not have been the place where she died at all. They may have been the place where her body was taken after her death. The theory that she fell from the cliff, rolled into the lake, and accidentally drowned could have been nothing more than a staged scene designed to create that impression rather than reflect what actually happened. And there’s another

detail that makes the possible canoe mark even more significant. If Lauren’s body was transported by canoe and left in the water, then someone had to paddle that canoe back afterward. Someone had to return to shore after leaving her body behind. Someone had to go back to the campsite and continue the weekend.

The same campsite where Christopher, Hannah, and Aaron were staying. Now, let’s look at Lauren’s body itself at what the photographs show and what they don’t. Lauren was found fully clothed. She was wearing bright pink shorts and a black top. If she had fallen from that cliff, whether it was about 30 feet or nearly 90 feet, depending on which version you believe, and landed on the rocks below, her clothing should have reflected that.

 A fall from that height onto rocks  tears fabric apart. Clothing rips. It catches on sharp edges, jagged surfaces, and impact points. The body underneath typically suffers deep cuts, abrasions, and severe blunt force injuries. Falling 30 ft onto rocks is not a minor impact. Falling nearly 90 ft leaves very little chance of escaping catastrophic external injuries.

 But Lauren’s clothing wasn’t torn. Her body showed very few external injuries, and the injuries that were present did not match what you would expect from a fall of that magnitude onto rocks. There were no large lacerations typical of that kind of impact. There was no blunt force head injury consistent with a fall from approximately 30 or 90 ft.

 Her clothing remained intact. Those injuries were not consistent with  a fall. That’s not speculation. That’s based on the physical evidence, the condition of Lauren’s body, and just as importantly, the injuries that were absent when compared with what would normally be expected after a fall from that height onto rocks.

 The case was closed. The official ruling was accidental death. Meanwhile, the photographs of Lauren’s body showing the hemorrhaging around her neck, the absence of water in her lungs, the mark believed to be consistent with a canoe impression created by post-mortem levidity, her undamaged clothing, and the lack of injuries normally associated with a fall remained in a case file that no one revisited.

 Sher had those photographs. Sheila examined them and officer Melson had already told Sher that he did not believe Lauren’s death was an accident. The three people who spent that entire weekend with Lauren never came to her funeral. They never contacted her family. And one of them even posted on Instagram that it had been the best weekend of his life.

 The case was closed, but the questions it left behind were too serious to ignore. No one could explain what happened to  Lauren’s sleeping bag. No one could explain why some of her clothing was missing. No one could explain where the cliff jumping story came from or who introduced it into the official record.

And no one could explain why the three people who knew Lauren best that weekend, including her childhood friend, never came to say goodbye. There was one more question that had never been properly examined. the timeline of Lauren’s final night, what she was doing in the hours before she was found, who she was with, and what actually happened in the final moments before everything came to an end.

 In July of 2016, Lauren’s mother filed a $10 million civil lawsuit. Not because she wanted the money. She said that herself. She believed the civil case would succeed, where the criminal investigation had failed by forcing those three people to answer questions under oath. All three of them invoked their fifth amendment right against self-inccrimination.

Every single one of them. Think about that. Three people were with a 21-year-old woman on the night she died. All three had already given statements to police. All three had already told investigators what they claimed had happened. But when the civil case gave them the opportunity to testify under oath, every one of them refused to answer.

 People don’t invoke the right against self-inccrimination simply because they have nothing to hide. They invoke it when they believe that anything they say could later be used against them in a criminal case.  I released without warning in order to further the case and that’s exactly what it did. It also shined a light on the system itself.

 So it educated people and also helped move the case forward.  Everything that has happened in that case pretty much is public. We spent those 4 and 1/2 years researching, trying to talk to people, trying to find out what happened to her. We even filed the wrongful death lawsuit to try to get information so we could find out what happened to Lauren.

We are at a point  right now that we have decided that to pursue the lawsuit in Dicab County would be a mute point. We’re not going to get anywhere in that county at all. So, we have decided to drop the lawsuit, but I think our time is better  used helping other families and making sure that this doesn’t happen again.

 So, it’s been a little over 5  years since I’ve been back to this actual marina.  It’s kind of weird just the fact that I had a friend that  passed away here and that whole weekend was just not something I’d ever want to relive. About right here is where we can climb up to the the campsite. The theory that is going right now, she woke up in the middle of the night.

 She fell out of the hammock going to the bathroom and she stumbled into the water. You can’t fall out of this hammock unless the ropes break.  To demonstrate, Cassie brought a hammock similar to the one from that weekend.  And this is your hammock. You just get in and you’re in. Another thing is the marina’s right there.

 You’re telling me that no one was awake or no one heard a scream, a yell, a splash? There’s no way. I mean, look how many house boats are out here right now. Just imagine WakeFest. There’s twice as many boats.   Aaron has been in an accident. When we were going to trial, uh there was a date we all showed up for court and his attorney said that he had been in a motorcycle accident and he was paralyzed.

 At that point, they did not know if he was going to  make it. From what I understand, he is still paralyzed. And um he is married  to Hannah. They have a child and um Chris has had a child. Um so  so here’s where the case stood. A wrongful death lawsuit with no testimony. A police investigation in which the original 911 recording was lost.

 a medical examiner’s conclusions that a private investigator would later challenge point by point and three key witnesses who all refused to speak. Let’s go back to what Sheila Weissaki actually found. Her investigation is, in my view, one of the most important parts of this entire case. Sheila was the private investigator hired by Lauren’s family after the official investigation had essentially stalled.

 She wasn’t an amateur. She traveled to the scene herself. She studied the terrain. She conducted a series of field experiments. And the results were remarkably clear. According to the official version of events, Lauren fell from the cliff overlooking the cove. For months, investigators worked under the assumption that she wandered away from the campsite in the dark, fell over the edge, landed in the water, and that the current eventually carried her body into the cove, where she was later found face down. Sheila decided to test that

theory. She used a crash test mannequin. She recreated every realistic scenario she could. The mannequin was dropped. It was pushed. It was rolled. They simulated forward falls, backward falls, and every reasonable body position they could think of. Not once did the mannequin end up in the water. Not a single time.

 The shape of the cliff and the shoreline made it physically impossible for a body falling from that location to reach the water below. And even if you assume the impossible that Laurens somehow did land in the water directly beneath the cliff, the current created another problem. Sheila’s testing showed that the water at that location flows away from the cove where Lauren was found, not toward it.

 Neither the direction of the current nor the natural drift pattern could carry a body to the place where Lauren was discovered. Now, the question investigators had been asking since the morning her body was found became even more urgent. Lauren could not have entered the water from that cliff. Physics doesn’t support it and she could not have drifted into that cove with the current.

 The water doesn’t flow that way. That leaves one obvious possibility. Someone put her there. Sheila proposed that a canoe may have been used. It wasn’t a sensational theory. It was a practical one. The cove is easily accessible by water. Someone in a canoe could have transported Lauren’s body there, left her face down in the water, and done so without leaving any evidence on the cliff itself.

 No signs of a fall, no conflict with the way the current actually moves. To this day, it’s the only explanation that doesn’t conflict with the physical evidence. And still, no one has ever been charged. Now, let’s go back to the morning Lauren’s body was found. back to Chris, the man who slept beside her in the hammock that night, the man she had met for the very first time that weekend.

 Without being asked, Chris volunteered that he and Lauren had been sexually intimate. He offered that information on his own. And despite that statement, investigators never conducted a forensic examination to determine whether a sexual assault had occurred. Later, Hannah told investigators that Lauren never would have had sex with Chris.

 Lauren had a boyfriend named Chase waiting for her at home. The very next evening, they were supposed to attend a party together. According to Hannah, Lauren simply wouldn’t have done that. So now there were two completely different accounts. Chris said there had been sexual contact. Lauren’s closest friend insisted there could not have been, but no forensic examination was ever performed to determine which version was true.

 The first officers at the scene heard Chris make that statement. Yet the one piece of evidence that could have confirmed or disproved it was never collected. That’s more than simple negligence. Negligence is forgetting to photograph one corner of a crime scene. Failing to perform a necessary forensic examination after a man tells investigators he had sexual contact with a woman who is now dead under unexplained circumstances is a serious departure from basic investigative standards.

 And once that opportunity is lost, it can never be recovered. That opportunity was lost. During the interviews, the three friends were never separated. They were allowed to remain together. They heard each other’s answers. They were able to shape a shared version of events in real time. The very moment investigators should have been looking for inconsistencies between their statements.

 The entire purpose of interviewing witnesses separately is to expose differences in what they remember. If witnesses are allowed to discuss everything before giving their statements, what you get is no longer independent testimony. It’s a rehearsed story. Then there was the missing 911 recording. Stop and think about that.

 An emergency call, a record that is automatically logged, timestamped, and retained by the dispatch system. Gone. That was the very first official record created on the morning Laurens’s body was found. It documented who reported the incident, exactly what was said, and how it was reported, and it no longer exists. Officer Yaruk, who had also been working security at the bar the night before and watched Lauren leave with her friends at around 2:00 that morning, later stated publicly that he did not believe her death was an accident. That’s a law

enforcement officer saying that. someone who saw Lauren alive just hours earlier. Someone who openly stated that the official conclusion did not hold up under scrutiny. The original medical examiner signed off on findings that Sheila’s investigation later argued were physically impossible based on where Lauren’s body was found.

 Why those contradictions were never addressed remains unanswered. This is where Sheila’s investigation became especially important. After Lauren’s death, Hannah and Aaron moved to Florida. Sheila flew there to meet Hannah in person. She wanted to hear Hannah’s account separately, away from everyone else. She wanted to know what Hannah would say without Aaron sitting beside her.

 Hannah told Sheila that after speaking with Chris and Aaron that morning, she assumed Lauren had simply gone somewhere and would come back on her own, so she wasn’t worried. She didn’t even go looking for her. Think about that. Lauren had disappeared from the campsite. The last known place she had been was a hammock next to a man she had known for only a few days.

 Yet Hannah’s explanation was that she didn’t search for her friend because Chris and Aaron told her not to worry. During Sheila’s interview with Hannah, Aaron called. Sheila says she could hear his voice through the phone. According to Sheila, he told Hannah, “Stick to our story.” What story? That’s not a rhetorical question.

 It’s the question at the center of this entire case. Because if there’s a story everyone has to stick to, then there is a version of events that was agreed upon in advance. And that version is not necessarily the same as what actually happened. People don’t tell someone to stick to the story if the story is simply the truth. Aaron came home while Sheila was still there.

He walked silently through the room where the interview was taking place and disappeared into another part of the house without saying a word. A short time later, he came back with a friend. He said he didn’t want to be recorded. Then he started questioning Sheila instead. Why had she come? What exactly was she looking for? What was she trying to accomplish? Sheila told him she wanted only one thing.

 To find the truth for Lauren’s family. Aaron replied that he had spoken with Detective Jeremy Taylor many times and that all three of them had agreed to take polygraph examinations.  How has Lauren’s death affected you and your family?  Lauren’s death has been absolutely  devastating to our family. She died 4 and 1/2 years ago.

 It’s like she died yesterday. We spent those 4 and 1/2 years researching, trying to talk to people, trying to find out what happened to her.  We even filed the wrongful death lawsuit to try to get information so we could find out what happened to Lauren. We are at a point right now that we have decided that to pursue the lawsuit in Dicab County would be a mute point.

we’re not going to get anywhere in that county at all. So, we have decided to drop the lawsuit. We feel that our efforts can be used to fight for Lauren’s law. Well, we got to call it something else. I’m sorry. They Laurens’s law is already taken, but I think our time is better used helping other families and making sure that this doesn’t happen again.

 Aaron also said that detective Jeremy Taylor had assured them there was no need to take a polygraph. Think about that. Three people connected to a suspicious death volunteered to take lie detector tests and the lead detective told them it wasn’t necessary. This happened in the same case where the original 911 recording was lost.

 The same case where a critical forensic examination was never performed. The same case where the witnesses weren’t even separated during questioning. the same case that produced no charges and no clear answers. After saying all of that, Aaron asks Sheila one simple question. Why was she still asking questions after all this time? Hannah said she wanted to be honest.

 She said they all wanted the truth to come out. After that, nothing of real significance was said. But that meeting in Florida became one of the most important moments in the entire case. Not because anyone confessed, no one did. It mattered because of the phone call Sheila overheard. Because of what Aaron said to Hannah while the private investigator was sitting only a few feet away.

 He said it even though he knew Sheila was in the room and he knew the conversation was being documented.  When’s the last time you were here?  So, it’s been a little over 5 years since I’ve been back to this actual marina. It’s kind of weird. Just the fact that I had a friend that passed  away here and that whole weekend was just not something I’d ever want to relive.

About right here is where we can climb up to the the campsite. All right. So, this is the campsite. About right here is where Lauren’s hammock was. The theory that is going right now, she woke up in the middle of the night. She fell out of the hammock going to the bathroom and she stumbled into the water. You can’t fall out of this hammock unless the ropes  break.

 To demonstrate, Cassie brought a hammock similar to the one from that weekend.  And this is your hammock. And you just get in and you’re in. Another thing is the marina’s right there. You’re telling me that no one was awake or no one heard a scream, a yell, a splash. There’s no way.

 I mean, look how many house boats are out here right now? Just imagine Wakefest. There’s twice as many boats here.  The thing about this investigation was there was no investigation. There were so many different  inconsistencies with the story. And just being there with Cassie made it even more apparent that something fishy happened.

 She saw things that were at the campsite from the day they  actually camped there.  See the tepee torches?  Yeah. Yeah,  they’re still here.  You You believe that those are the same ones from 5 years ago?  You can tell  it does look exactly like the one in the photo, too.  This is where the case stands today.

 No one has ever been arrested. No criminal charges have ever been filed against anyone. Lauren’s official cause of death is still listed as accidental drowning. Lauren Smith was 21 years old. She was studying forensic science. She dreamed of building a career in criminal justice. She spent the last weekend of her life at a lake in Tennessee with people she trusted.

 She never made it home. I’ve covered a lot of true crime cases, but this is the one I can’t stop thinking about. Not because the evidence is especially dramatic, but because if there really was a cover up, it was remarkably ordinary. Four friends spend a weekend at the lake. A body is found in a quiet cove.

 An explanation emerges that gives everyone a reason not to ask any more questions. And for years, only one person kept asking them. Lauren’s mother. She did it on her own, paying the cost herself because no one else would. The marks that some experts believe could have been left on Lauren’s body after it was transported in a canoe following her death have never been explained by the official version of events.

 The eyewitness account identifying Aaron on the water that morning has never been publicly disproven. Hannah Palmer invoked her right not to answer 154 questions. Christopher Stout has never publicly commented on the case. Aaron Lily has also never made a public statement about what happened. Lauren’s case remains unresolved. Sheila Weissaki continues working on the investigation.

 Sher Smith is still waiting for answers. In the archives of unresolved deaths, there’s another case that follows almost the exact same pattern. A young woman, a group of friends, a body of water, an official ruling that effectively ended the investigation before the most important questions had ever been answered.

 And a family that spent years trying to convince the system to reopen the case. Most people have never heard of