Meagan Jackson and Christopher Dontell embarked on an affair which ended in murder with a body found by local fisherman – someone had weighed it down with cinder blocks
It was Meagan Jackson’s job to move dead bodies for the coroner’s office. She would pick the deceased up from where they’d died and transport them to a morgue or funeral home.
In late 2019, Jackson, then 35, had four children under the age of 15 with her ex, Gregory Rice, but through her work she had met a married man and they were having an affair. Christopher Dontell, 37, was a deputy coroner who had been put in charge of training Jackson when she first started working for the body transport company as a subcontractor in 2018.
Dontell was married to Erica Dontell and they had one child and another baby on the way. He would later allege that he didn’t want an affair, but that Jackson pursued him by turning up at his favourite restaurants. Eventually they kissed in a car park and their relationship became sexual.
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When Jackson and Gregory split up at the end of 2019, after 16 years together, Jackson moved with her children to a home two streets away from Dontell in Conway, South Carolina. She befriended Erica, who had a new baby in the house by then and chatted to Jackson about her financial problems due to the pandemic. Jackson went out of her way to help, took her children over to play and even paid for groceries.
By August 2020, the affair had been going on for about 10 months and Jackson told Dontell she was pregnant. Weeks later, Erica started to get text messages saying her husband was having an affair – and that Jackson was expecting. Devastated, she confronted them, but they denied everything and said the messages had come from Gregory.
Jackson’s phone records would later show she had sent the messages anonymously from a free messaging site. Was she trying to break Dontell and Erica up? Dontell would later claim he thought Gregory had sent the messages. One said there was a package coming to Erica with printed screenshots that would prove the affair. Dontell intercepted it, believing it had come from Gregory. Evidence would later show it was Jackson who sent it.
A body discovered
Jackson told Dontell and Erica that Gregory was abusive and on drugs – none of this was true. Messages between Gregory and Jackson showed that, while they would argue, all Gregory cared about was his children and he had concerns that she wasn’t looking after them properly when they were in her care. Sadly, he was right. But Gregory wouldn’t live long enough to discover Jackson was neglecting their kids.
On 5 October 2020, Gregory, 46, was reported missing by Jackson. He was last seen on 2 October at his construction job and hadn’t contacted anyone since. An extensive search began.
On 8 November, fishermen reported a body in the Little Pee Dee River. It was Gregory. His remains were wrapped in blankets and silver tarpaulin. It was tied with zip ties and weighed down with cinder blocks. He’d been shot at least five times in the head and chest by a .22-calibre handgun.
There were no signs that Gregory had been attacked in his home. There was no evidence of forced entry or that a gun had been fired. So who had killed him and why? Investigators started to follow the evidence and it led to Jackson and Dontell.
Jackson’s phone records linked her to Dontell and put them near Gregory’s home on the night he vanished. Investigators found footage of Dontell shopping in a home improvement store the next day. He bought cinder blocks, silver tarpaulin and zip ties – exactly what was found with Gregory’s body. An empty box for a .22-calibre gun was found with Jackson’s belongings – the weapon would never be found.
Dontell and Jackson were arrested for murder. Jackson was also charged with four counts of unlawful child neglect. The arrest warrant revealed that Jackson had padlocked her children in a room and forced them to use containers for a toilet. Jackson was no longer pregnant. She alleged she had a miscarriage the day after Gregory disappeared.
At first, the pair were released on bail, but they continued to have contact with each other, which confirmed to authorities they were in a relationship and they were brought back into custody.
In December 2024, Dontell’s trial started, but one day in he made a plea deal. In exchange for testifying against Jackson, he agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and for being an accessory after the fact. The murder charge was dropped.
Jackson’s trial was this year and she continued to plead not guilty. The prosecution said Jackson was the only one who benefited from Gregory being dead. She had “infiltrated” Dontell’s life and wanted her ex gone.
Dontell took the stand and testified. He said that on 2 October, after first stopping at the funeral home where he worked in Myrtle Beach, Jackson had told him she needed to visit Gregory and said he should go with her. They went in her work van.
Jackson said she would meet Gregory outside his apartment complex and when they pulled up, Jackson got out with a gun.
“I pulled up in front of him. It was like one swift move – she opened the door, flipped out and was pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,” Dontell testified. “I asked her what happened. Why did you do that? She didn’t say much. She told me to go to the funeral home and I just remember the complete nonchalance, like this was a minor inconvenience we were going through.”
She ordered him to get the body into her van. Dontell said he kept quiet because he feared for his family’s lives.
“She told me if I told anyone about this, she’d kill me and I believed her,” he testified. “I watched her kill the father of her children and she told me she would do the same thing to me.”
They put Gregory’s body in a cooler at the funeral home with a note that said, “Hold for coroner”, which flagged to staff that it wasn’t to be touched. The next day, Dontell went shopping at the home improvement store. Then he used the tarpaulin, zip ties and cinder blocks he’d bought to wrap the body, before throwing it into the river.
The prosecution said the bullets had hit the left side of Gregory’s body, which showed he’d tried to run when he’d seen Jackson get out of the vehicle with a gun. Jackson was described as a “master manipulator” who was trying to infiltrate Dontell’s marriage and destroy Gregory.
“She infiltrates the Dontells’ marriage and life. She moves to their community. She showers them with gifts,” the court heard. “She began to spin her web of lies because she wanted to destroy the Dontells’ marriage, but she also wanted to get rid of Greg. She started to frame him for revealing information about the affair. The defendant was the only one who benefitted from the victim’s murder.”
Devastated families
The defence said Dontell’s testimony couldn’t be trusted and that there was no physical evidence to prove Jackson had killed Gregory. The jury disagreed and found Jackson guilty.
At the sentencing, Jackson’s daughter Savannah had a statement read for her. She testified against her mum, saying, “This crime has torn apart my family, other families and friends beyond any measure. My siblings and I have all suffered greatly, not only from the loss of my father but the loss of a mother too, the loss of our lives. We’ve been waiting so many years for just a little bit of closure and this is it.”
Jackson was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole. She still faces unlawful child neglect charges. Dontell was sentenced to the maximum of 20 years in prison for pleading guilty to charges connected to Gregory’s murder.