Smithville woman says detectives coerced false murder confession. Now she’s suing
A Smithville woman who says a pair of detectives in Clay County coerced her into falsely confessing she murdered her fiancé in 2020 has filed a lawsuit over their investigation, which led to a lengthy criminal prosecution.
Clay County prosecutors used the confession to charge Lori Ackerman with second-degree murder in the death of Shannon Tate in December 2020. She spent more than a year in jail before she was released on bond, the lawsuit said.
At her trial in April 2024, Ackerman’s defense centered on evidence about false confessions. A jury acquitted her after deliberating for less than two hours.
Attorneys for Ackerman said that her confession came at the prodding of the detectives who interrogated her at length as she was in the middle of a mental health crisis set off by Tate’s death. They asserted that Tate killed himself after he became overwhelmed by personal and professional problems, according to the lawsuit.
Ackerman’s attorneys also alleged in the lawsuit that a Clay County-contracted pathologist who conducted an autopsy on Tate falsified his death investigation findings as part of a conspiracy with law enforcement to support their theory that Tate was murdered.
The lawsuit, which accuses a group of defendants of violating Ackerman’s Constitutional rights and seeks damages over the matter, was filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City Dec. 5.
In a statement provided to The Star by one of her attorneys, Lori Ackerman said she was still trying to process the events of the last few years and heal from it all.
“Of course, I am grateful that the jury got it right, but I never should have been in that courtroom,” she said. “I wouldn’t wish my experience on anyone.”
“One day I was living my life, the next I was experiencing it fall apart,” she said. “Not only did I lose my job, my healthcare and many relationships, but I was no longer seen as a human being. I was a headline. I was an object of anger and mistrust. It was as though my own voice disappeared and my life was no longer my own.”
The case centers on actions by detectives Elizabeth Neland, with the Smithville Police Department, and Amber Bedow, with the Clay County Sheriff’s Office. Both are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Also named as defendants are Clay County; Trenton Woolery, a Smithville police officer who was involved in the investigation into Tate’s death; Forensic Medical of Kansas, a group contracted by Clay County to conduct death investigations; and the estate of John Ralston, the investigator who conducted the Tate autopsy (Ralston died in 2022 of lung failure before Ackerman’s trial, according to the lawsuit and an obituary.).
Court records do not yet list attorneys for the defendants. Representatives for Forensic Medical and the Smithville Police Department did not respond to requests for comment for this story, and Woolery declined to comment. Neland, Bedow and a representative for Ralston’s estate could not be reached for comment.
In a statement, Clay County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Sarah Boyd said the Smithville Police Department was the lead agency on the case, and the sheriff’s office provided a detective (Bedow) and technical support.
“As with all criminal investigations, those involved worked to the best of their ability to determine the facts of the case,” she said. “Those facts were then turned over to the Prosecutor’s Office for determination of charges.”
The shooting investigation
In the weeks before Tate’s death, the lawsuit said, the man suffered significant personal and professional setbacks that overwhelmed him. His work duties were scaled back, a family relationship deteriorated and on Dec. 10, 2020, the day of the shooting, he received word that his pay was being cut dramatically.
Ackerman and Tate spent time together at a bar and eventually returned home, where the situation spiraled, the lawsuit said. Exhausted by it all, Ackerman went to a bedroom, pulled Tate’s handgun from under a bed and placed it under her chin, her attorneys wrote.
According to the lawsuit, Tate took the gun from her, and Ackerman left the room and then heard a gunshot.
As law enforcement investigated the shooting, Ackerman repeatedly relayed to Woolery, Neland and Bedow her account that Tate had taken the gun from her, she left the room and then heard the gun go off, her attorneys said.
Tate’s hands were swabbed to test for gunshot residue, but those swabs were never tested, the lawsuit said. Testing of the gun later showed only Tate’s DNA on the trigger, attorneys wrote.
Ackerman spoke with Ackerman and told other officers at the scene that her behavior was suspicious, apparently because she “would become more emotional when (he) asked what happened,” the lawsuit said.
Woolery responded to a hospital, where a CT scan showed that Tate, who was right-handed, was shot in the right temple, the lawsuit said. A radiologist’s report said Tate suffered a “self inflicted gun shot to right side of head.”
Despite the report, Woolery falsely advised the police station that the bullet entered the left side of Tate’s skull, Ackerman’s attorneys said, noting that false information was then used against Ackerman throughout her long interrogation.
During their interrogation, the two detectives promised Ackerman that they would take her to the hospital to see Tate as soon as they got the information they needed, the lawsuit said. As they questioned Ackerman, the detectives eventually began to convince her that she was lying about not seeing Tate shoot himself and attacked her memory of the entire night, the lawsuit said.
“Exhausted, confused, sleep-deprived, and traumatized by her fiancé’s suicide, Ackerman was primed for the final step in the detective’s plan: manipulating Ackerman into admitting that Tate had not killed himself but that she had killed Tate,” her attorneys wrote.
She began to repeat a theory, reportedly from Neland, that Tate had been shot accidentally as he took the gun from her. She was placed on a 24-hour investigative hold and put on suicide watch at the Clay County Jail.
The detectives resumed their interrogation of Ackerman the following day at the jail, where they insisted that Ackerman had intentionally shot Tate in the head, the lawsuit said. She returned to her initial account that Tate had shot himself, then to her false confession that he had been shot accidentally, her attorneys wrote.
The detectives continued to push, and “after more than 14 hours of the detectives’ coercion and 16 hours of custody, Ackerman gave up. The detectives successfully manipulated Ackerman into falsely confessing to a murder that did not occur,” the lawsuit said.
She adopted a narrative from detectives and told them she shot him from several feet away, the attorneys wrote.
A ‘demonstrably false’ autopsy, and a life dismantled
Two days after Tate’s death, Neland and Bedow attended the autopsy, which was conducted by Ralston, with Forensic Medical of Kansas City.
During the autopsy, Ralston determined that Tate was shot at close range, up to 36 inches from his head, when he should have known that the gunshot wound was a “contact” wound caused by the gun’s placement firmly against Tate’s head when it went off, the lawsuit said.
The wound was consistent with a suicide, but Ralston did not list that in his report, where he ruled the death was by homicide, the lawsuit said.
The attorneys alleged in the lawsuit that Ralston’s conclusions were “demonstrably false” and were falsified at the request of Neland and Bedow to bolster Ackerman’s false confession.
Since Ralston died before Ackerman’s trial, a different medical examiner was appointed to review the autopsy. That official concluded the gunshot wound was a “contact” wound because both a muzzle imprint and soot were visible on the right side of Tate’s head and determined the findings were consistent with suicide or homicide, the lawsuit said.
Before her trial, Ackerman was eventually released on bond a year and two months after Tate’s death. Attorneys wrote that her time behind bars was traumatic and that it caused her to miss crucial life events, including Tate’s funeral, and caring for her ailing father, who had cancer. He died shortly after she was released.
In a statement provided to The Star, Sonya Pfeiffer, one of Ackerman’s attorneys, wrote that by time her client heard the words “not guilty” in a courtroom, her life had been dismantled.
“Society treats wrongful convictions as the ultimate failure of our criminal legal system, but we cannot ignore the wreckage caused by a wrongful prosecution as we have described in the allegations in the complaint,” she said.
“We rightly recognize the devastation of wrongful convictions, but we rarely discuss the reality that wrongful prosecutions can be just as traumatic. Even when the jury gets the final outcome right, the process itself leaves permanent damage.”
