Mysterious Case Files.
Lauren Agee: What Happened at Wakefest?
JULY 2015
This case concerns the fate of Lauren Agee, a twenty-one-year-old woman with a bright
future ahead of her, who died under mysterious circumstances.
She disappeared in the middle of the night at a lakeside festival, only to be discovered
the next afternoon, face-down and lifeless in the water.
Almost immediately, an investigation by the local DeKalb County Sheriff’s office concluded
that Lauren's death was accidental, probably due to a fall off a cliff into the lake while
intoxicated.
Foul play is ruled out.
But few people besides the county police believe that Lauren’s death was accidental drowning
caused by a fall into the lake.
There are certainly many suspicious aspects to the case.
The mystery of the case hasn’t let up in over four years.
What actually happened to Lauren Agee that fateful day?
Was it indeed a tragic accident on a lake or was it more than that?
Was there foul play involved?
This video will offer some insight into the mysterious death of this young woman.
Who was Lauren Agee?
Lauren was born in Mississippi and lived in Hendersonville, Tennessee, with her mother,
step-father and three siblings.
She was a bright young woman, popular, close to her family, with an exciting future ahead
of her.
Lauren had won a dancing scholarship to college, then changed her mind and transferred to Vol
State to study criminal justice.
Rather ironically, given how her case became quite sensational, Lauren had plans to go
into the CSI field or law enforcement.
Her mother, Sherry Smith, would say of Lauren, quote: “'She had a knack for science and
solving mysteries.
She was very intuitive”
A Camping Weekend
In mid-July, 2015, Lauren told her mother, Sherry, that she wanted to go to Wakefest, a three-day
wakeboarding tournament near Nashville, Tennessee, which was basically a wild party on Center
Hill Lake.
Her mother wasn’t keen on the festival or Lauren’s choice of companion, Hannah Palmer,
who Sherry felt was a fair-weather friend.
She couldn’t tell her adult daughter what to do but would later recount: "As a mom,
I just really had this really bad feeling."
Sherry explains how they exchanged big hugs not once but twice before Lauren drove away.
It would be the last time she saw her daughter alive.
Hannah and Lauren traveled to Wakefest in high spirits, documenting their trip on social
media.
Once at the festival, the girls met up with Hannah's new boyfriend, Aaron Lilly and his
friend, Christopher Stout.
The two young men were thrill-seekers and spent the day wakeboarding on the lake.
This was Lauren and Christopher’s first meeting.
Kassi Franks, Lauren’s High School friend and Aaron’s ex-girlfriend who was also at
Wakefest recalled Christopher being very flirtatious with Lauren, but she was not reciprocating.
This was Lauren’s first day at Wakefest, July 25th.
Lauren's First Night at Wakefest
Lauren was under the impression that she and Hannah would be staying in a cabin on the
lake, however, she soon discovered that the group of four would all be sleeping outdoors, at
a campsite precariously located on a cliff.
The cliff near Pates Ford Marina is a vertigo-inducing 90 feet, or 27 meters, above the lake on one
side, with a 45 foot drop, or 13.5 meters, down the other.
To reach their campsite, the four had to canoe across the lake then use a rope to pull themselves
up the steep cliff.
There was a tent for Aaron and Hannah and a large hammock for Lauren and Christopher
to share.
Photos of the hammock show it strung up between two trees and literally hanging off the cliff.
This photo of Lauren and Christopher in the hammock is believed to be one of the last
ever taken of Lauren.
The four set up camp and headed back to the marina for the evening.
There were two ways to get back, retracing their steps or jumping from lower down the
cliff into the water.
There were jagged rocks half-submerged in the lake, however, cliff-jumping was a regular
occurrence at Wakefest so, despite the dangers, the four young people decided to do it.
They jumped and Lauren allegedly hit her head on a rock when she landed in the water, causing
her to briefly blackout; a sign of a possible concussion.
Nevertheless, with a twenty-one-year old’s resilience, Lauren carried on partying.
Lauren's Last Night
After an evening of drinking, between midnight and 2 am, the friends made the perilous journey
back to the outcrop where they were staying.
Lauren didn’t want to go.
She asked Kassi if she could stay with Kassie’s group instead, but there was no room in that cabin.
Lauren’s friend Jade was at home when Lauren texted her, asking her to come and get her
because she wasn’t having a good time.
Jade tried to call her back repeatedly but Wakefest had poor cell phone reception and
her calls never reached Lauren.
The Morning of July 26th
Hannah, Aaron, and Christopher would tell police that they awoke to no sign of Lauren,
even though her shoes, cellphone, and other personal belongings were still under the hammock.
The three stated that they were all drunk when they returned to the campsite and that
Lauren had fallen asleep in the hammock shared with Christopher.
They had heard and seen nothing of her after about 3 am.
At about 4:45 that afternoon, a fisherman and his son were fishing on the lake.
In the cove, they spotted a pair of pink shorts and soon discovered Lauren’s lifeless body,
face-down in the water.
They reported it to Chris Yarchuck, an out-of-town police officer working security at the festival,
who immediately headed to the scene.
While Yarchuck and the fishermen were trying to retrieve Lauren’s body, a canoe paddled
past.
It was Christopher and Aaron, who Yarchuck claims called over something to the effect
of - “hey, is that our friend?”
OFF-DUTY COPS
Ryan Melanson was also working security at the festival.
Like Yarchuck, he was an off-duty cop from White County working a side gig.
Despite not being from the local force, they both went into investigative mode when faced
with a dead body.
The policemen had strong doubts about the case and what they themselves had observed
during the day she was found.
Yarchuk would later state how he noticed a lot of trauma and blood on the back of Lauren's
head, on her left side, and her shoulder area.
He even noticed what looked like a bite mark on her chest.
That’s why he suggested the investigating police perform an assault kit on Lauren.
Officer Yarchuck showed his skepticism by saying - quote: "I know she didn't drown.
People that drown sink.
She was floating.”
Melanson and Yarchuck felt that Lauren’s friends didn’t make much effort to find her.
The three said they assumed Lauren had headed back to the Marina even though all her belongings
remained underneath her hammock.
When questioned, Hannah, Aaron, and Christopher gave different accounts of what happened and
their stories kept changing.
Employees at the marina, Deanna and Harry Elder, also interacted with the two young
men and young woman.
They found their conduct strange, even unsettling.
Harry would recall: “Their whole concern was about going home”.
At one point, Hannah claimed that Lauren had gotten into a boat with an unknown man which
Deanna knew sounded completely bogus.
The local DeKalb County investigators then arrived, questioned festival-goers, and examined
Lauren’s injuries.
The Autopsy
The autopsy showed that Lauren's body had blunt force trauma, broken fingers, a broken
nose, bruising and hemorrhaging on her back and thighs, double the legal limit of alcohol
in her bloodstream, but - surprisingly - very little water in her lungs.
However, theoretically certain people can drown without water in the lungs, known as
‘dry drowning,’ although it is quite rare.
Nevertheless, DeKalb County authorities ruled Lauren had died from blunt force trauma and
possible drowning and closed her case after a two-month investigation.
They decided that Lauren had fallen off the cliff, suffered blunt force trauma, and landed
in the water, where she must’ve drowned.
This sounded plausible until you consider that the current in the lake was moving away
from the cove where Lauren’s body was found.
There was also so much vegetation down the side of the cliff that she would’ve invariably
got tangled up and caught before she reached the water.
Strangely, Autopsy photos show an odd downwards-pointing triangle imprint on Lauren’s chest, exactly
the shape of the molded metal tip on the front of Aaron and Christopher’s canoe.
DeKalb County officers said that this injury matched something in the rescue boat which
carried her body to shore, but Yarchuck argued that triangle was at a ninety-degree angle,
not pointing downward.
The imprint on Lauren’s body also displayed a smaller triangle inside the large triangle,
which seemingly did match Aaron and Christopher’s canoe.
Those who don’t buy the official version of how Lauren died believe that she may have
been dumped from a canoe into the water.
If this wasn’t the case, then what could’ve caused the strange imprint?
A Mothers Fight
Sherry received a call from DeKalb County alerting her that Lauren was in the hospital,
and when she arrived, she was informed of her daughter’s death.
She was dismayed to be told that Lauren’s companions had been questioned and let go.
Sherry’s dismay turned to anger when she discovered that no one had reported Lauren
as missing.
In fact, it’s understood, the three had stayed at the lake that Sunday after Lauren’s
body was found and continued to party.
Chris Stout even posted on Instagram later that day after Lauren's death with the bizarre
comment: “Best weekend ever”.
Sherry would claim that Hannah, who had been a long-time friend of Lauren's, as well as
Aaron and Christopher, never appeared to grieve, mourn, or even shed a tear for her daughter.
None of them attended Lauren's funeral and Hannah left town barely a month after Lauren's death.
SHEILA WYSOCKI
Feeling let down by the DeKalb police, Lauren's family hired private investigator Sheila Wysocki
to conduct her own inquiry.
Wysocki found something in her autopsy that was never mentioned in the initial report:
Lauren had hemorrhaging in her throat.
Wysocki said: ”I believe something was happening to Lauren and that she was either trying to
get away or fighting, and that's where her head was hit, blunt-force trauma, and I believe
that's how she actually died.
I believe she went backwards trying to get away, hit her head and fell down the ledge.
She has bruising on her thighs, her nose is broken, so there are a lot of injuries that
absolutely don't add up to a fall off a cliff into the water.
She's got broken fingers, which would be consistent with a fall, but it's also consistent with
somebody fighting.
The significance to me of the bruising on the thighs initially was someone putting their
knees on a person, holding them down.”
With all this evidence of assault, Wysocki was exasperated by the inadequacy of the
DeKalb investigation.
The list of things the police failed to do was astounding – Firstly, no assualt kit
was ever ordered; the investigating detective admitted he didn't listen to any 911 calls;
key texts were erased from Lauren's phone, and recordings were never made of interviews
with witnesses.
And it gets worse: the crime scene wasn’t even cordoned off and the scene was trampled on.
It was also not properly searched, as a potential crime scene should be, nor was any evidence
numbered or bagged, itself a huge breach of police protocol.
Furthermore, not a single DNA test was conducted, including any samples taken from under Lauren's fingernails.
To this day, Sherry doesn’t know what happened to her daughter's backpack, sleeping bag,
or any of the clothes she packed for that weekend.
So, in 2016, Sherry hired former federal prosecutor, Alex Little, to bring a $10 million lawsuit
for wrongful death against Hannah Palmer, Aaron Lilly, and Christopher Stout.
All three had to give depositions but all three chose to plead the fifth.
New Witnesses
In 2017, a witness came forward about the night of Lauren's death.
Chris Brown was with his wife, daughter and daughter's boyfriend at the Marina when they
saw a young man swimming towards the dock at midnight.
People usually traveled by boat in that part of the lake so it was very dangerous to swim,
especially in the dead of night.
The man climbed up on the dock, coughing up water, saying that he had nearly drowned,
searching for his friends.
Chris Brown’s description of the man and his clothing was a match for Aaron Lilly.
This would be damning evidence however eyewitnesses saw Lauren leaving the Marina, alive and well,
at two in the morning.
But it's another detail of an eventful night, and worth further examination.
And yet DeKalb County showed no interest in re-opening the investigation, even after Lauren’s
family and friends presented them with a petition of ten thousand signatures.
Fight For Justice
At this stage, Lauren’s family and friends had several theories about what happened to
Lauren, and they were frustrated that the authorities were pursuing none of them.
DeKalb officers always maintained that Lauren got up in the middle of the night, fell off
the cliff and landed, injured, in the water, where she drowned.
This all sounded possible apart from the fact, the DeKalb officer, Chris Yarchuck and Sheila
Wysocki all performed experiments with a dummy the size and weight of Lauren, which they
threw down the cliff repeatedly.
None of them managing to land the dummy in the water.
Chris Yarchuk even tried the experiment from the middle of the cliff to see if the dummy
would make it to the bottom of the cliff; it did not.
Even if you accept the police claim that Lauren landed in the water and drowned, as previously
mentioned, her body ended up in the cove, despite the current in the lake moving away
from this cove.
Another theory is that Lauren could’ve later died from the head injury she sustained when
cliff-jumping earlier that day.
Did her companions maybe panic and put her in the water to avoid blame, and in doing
so, cause the strange triangular mark on Lauren’s chest?
Or did one of the men assault Lauren and kill her to cover their tracks?
They both had criminal records, and Aaron Lilly’s was for domestic violence.
In March 2017, a judge ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence for Sherry’s suit against
Hannah to proceed but the lawsuits against Aaron and Christopher are still ongoing.
Aaron and Hannah are now married and living in South Florida, while Christopher Stout
is currently in jail for parole violation with two pending DUI charges.
DeKalb County Sheriff Patrick Ray and District Attorney Bryant Dunaway have refused to reopen
the case, but Sheila Wysocki endeavors to keep Lauren's case in the public eye with her podcast
'Without Warning."
Sherry continues to fight for justice for her daughter, as she says "I'm her voice.
As her mother, I have to be her voice, and I have to pursue the truth, because I owe
that to her, right?
I'm all she had and she would expect nothing less from me."
The mysterious case of Lauren Agee
That is the mysterious case of Lauren Agee, the 21-year-old woman who died mysteriously
at Wakefest in 2015 and her companions who continuously refuse to answer questions about
that night.
Are Aaron Lilly, Christopher Stout, and Hannah Palmer responsible for her death, or do they
at least know what happened to her?
What would the DeKalb authorities have discovered if they had investigated her death as meticulously
as they should have?
If you have any information, contact Sheila Wysocki (888-599-0008) or via email at Sheila@sheilawysocki.com