Lauren Agee

Case background and investigation

Lauren Agee was a 21-year-old woman from Hendersonville, Tennessee, who was studying criminal justice when she died during a summer camping trip in July 2015. Agee had traveled with friends to Center Hill Lake near Smithville, in DeKalb County, for WakeFest, an annual grassroots wakeboarding tournament. On the night of July 25, 2015, she was camping on a cliff overlooking the water near Pates Ford Marina with a group that included Hannah Palmer, Aaron Lilly, Christopher Stout and others. At some point that night Agee disappeared from the campsite. On July 26, 2015, her body was discovered by fishermen in the lake at the base of the cliff.

The DeKalb County Sheriff's Department investigated and concluded that Agee had most likely fallen from the cliff to her death in the dark, ruling the manner accidental. A coroner's report cited blunt-force trauma and possible drowning, and toxicology indicated her blood-alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit for driving. Authorities said there was simply no evidence to support treating the death as a homicide or the product of foul play, and no criminal charges were ever brought against anyone in connection with it. To many in law enforcement, an intoxicated late-night fall from a lakeside cliff was a tragic but straightforward explanation.

Agee's mother, Sherry Smith, rejected the accidental-death conclusion and became convinced her daughter had been killed. She hired private investigator Sheila Wysocki, who commissioned independent reviews of the evidence. Wysocki and the family pointed to findings they said were inconsistent with a simple fall, including reports of multiple areas of blunt-force trauma to the head and neck, an absence of water in the lungs, and other marks on the body, and they argued that more people had been at the campsite than were originally reported to police. In December 2016, Smith filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Palmer, Stout and Lilly. During depositions the three defendants invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Lower courts wrestled with whether the civil case could proceed, and an appeals court ruled the family had the right to pursue the wrongful-death claim.

The manner of Lauren Agee's death has never been officially reclassified as a homicide, and the case remains disputed and effectively unresolved. Law enforcement has maintained that the evidence supports an accidental fall, while Agee's family and their investigator continue to insist she was the victim of a crime that was never properly investigated. The family and Wysocki have publicized the case through media coverage and a true-crime podcast, and have advocated in Washington for stronger homicide-victim rights, citing frustrations such as lengthy delays obtaining federal records. Nearly a decade later, no one has been charged, the competing accounts remain unreconciled, and exactly what happened to Lauren Agee on the cliff above Center Hill Lake is still contested.