December 10, 2024 • 40 mins
Dead bodies and romance.....in Horry County South Carolina, Meagan Jackson is a contractor for the county delivering dead bodies to the morgue of the funeral home. She and her longtime boyfriend Gregory Rice have broken up and they are negotiating custody and support for their four children. Deputy Coroner Christopher Dontell is married to a school teacher and they have two children. The deputy Coroner and the woman bringing dead bodies to the morgue strike up a romance. When Gregory Rice goes missing and turns up dead, suspicion falls on his ex, Meagan and her new boyfriend, the very married Deputy Coroner, Christopher Dontell. Joseph Scott Morgan will explain what happens in the world of death investigation and how people can grow close to their coworkers under extreme circumstances. Joseph Scott Morgan will also take a close look at Meagan Jackson and Chris Dontell - did she think Dontell, because of his occupation, would know better how to get rid of a dead body? Dave Mack will help untangle the web of lies as Joseph Scott Morgan explains why Dontell has changed his plea and what will happen when he testifies against the woman who was carrying his child when her ex-boyfriend is found dead.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.50 Introduction
03:29.84 South Carolina has rich Coroner history
05:12.67 Elected Coroner in Horry County
10:03.41 Explaining "Livery" service
14:52.41 Deputy Coroner having affair with woman who delivers bodies
20:11.42 An affair the includes death and getting rid of body
24:25.02 Special training, would a deputy coroner have a better idea how to get rid of a body
29:57.62 Questions of a death investigator
35:05.65 Digital evidence puts suspect at the scene of where body is found
41:08.05 Conclusion - Deputy Coroner cuts a deal and will testify for the state
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body does. But Joseph S. Gott More, Hory County, South Carolina.
You know, Hory County, and that area around coastal South
Carolina is arguably one of the oldest settled areas by
colonists in our United States. I can't say it's ancient
(00:26):
by American standards, but it is ancient in a sense
in a way that the laws of England migrated along
with those that would settle all of the colonies to
those colonies, South Carolina obviously being one, And when the
(00:50):
colonists came over, they had offices like the magistrate, the bailiff,
certainly the sheriff, but also one office they had was
the corner. The corner came over because that's really the
only method that was available at that point in time
for taking care of the dead, for trying to understand
(01:12):
what brought about an individual's end, if you will. Today
we're going to explore a case that has yet to
be fully adjudicated, but is just pure down home Southern Gothic.
It involves actually a lady who was still married trying
(01:35):
to work out the details of custody and divorce and
those sorts of things, and a fellow, a fellow who
worked in Horry County, A fellow who worked in Horry
County as a deputy corner. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and
this is Bodybacks Dave Mack, my good friend. I have
(02:03):
so many folks that come up to me and they
want to know, well, what in the world do I
have to do in order to become a corner? Really?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah, many of the time I've wondered what that'd be,
like Yoda, find an old body and.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Sitting around with a hot cup of coffee bottle or
in fire and sitting there, let me look at the dead. Yeah,
put down your copy of Dickens and just say, wow,
it just occurred to me. I want to be a corner. No,
But you know, in my kind of in my universe,
because of what I do and what I teach, I
have people that come to me all the time, and
(02:39):
generally it's students, and they'll say, hey, what do I
have to do in order to be one of those people?
And interestingly enough, for most if you want to be
a corner, and I'm talking about an actual corner, you
have to be elected. And it's that way in South Carolina,
and South Carolina's got a rich history of corners. They
(03:02):
have a pretty good corner system that set up. They've
had training in place that did not exist where other places,
you know, other states might not have training. They've had
training for a while. And interestingly enough, here's a little sidebar.
I actually used to know the corner in Charleston, and
(03:24):
she was this fantastic lady, and you talk about a
ball of energy. And what set her aside from all
other corners that I had encountered up to that point
was that she was a nurse and had maintained her license.
And guess what, dave All of the deputy corners and
investigators that she employed at her office, they were also nurses.
(03:46):
And I was always fascinated by the concept because I've
read reports that came out of that office and you
can see that the people that actually worked there had
medical knowledge that they went into great detail. And of course,
my old adage is that nurses make good investigators because
nurses are naturally nosy people. They ask you questions. You
(04:09):
might have a doctor that'll come into a room with you,
and you know, one of the big signatures of a
bad bedside manner is that they don't talk to you.
They simply ask you a few mumbled questions. But the
nurse is the one that's going to come in and
poke and prod and say, well, what did you eat
or what medications are you on? And they're going to
kind of size you up because the doctor's moving between
(04:30):
so they've made They're naturally good investigators. But in this case,
this case out of Hoary, South Carolina.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Which, by the way, Myrtle Beach is where whenever I
think of a county, it doesn't help me.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I have to have a city. And when I.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Looked at I had to look it up, and I
am very familiar with the Carolinas, and I still like
Horry County that I think that's Myrtle Beach.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
I gotta look.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
So if you know anything about the coast, it's Myrtle
Beach and that general area. But tell me about the
corner there.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
I want to pack.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
I got into this, Joe, because you were talking about
corners being elected. I mean, please tell me that in
an elected situation, you would actually have to have some
medical training, right. You can't just be like, no, I
could run for corner.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yeah you could, and that's sad and scary. Well, let
me let me tell you something that happened, and we
may have and I think we did. We we talked
about refreshment memory. We did talk about Michael Jordan's dad, right, yes,
a couple episodes back, and of course that was in
Marlborough County, South Carolina. And listen, this this fellow that
was a corner there is a lovely man. He truly is.
(05:34):
And he worked in construction and he was elected to
the office of corner in Marlborough County. And there's a
great piece on the frontline about him and the case
involving Michael Jordan's father, and the interviewers specifically ask him,
what's your educational background. I'm paraphrasing here. Yeah, I have
(05:56):
a I have a degree, a technical degree from a
community college and I don't knowfts drafting or construction or
something like that. And look, that's all fine. As a
matter of fact, I think that's a worthy, worthy occupation
to go into either one of those. But he it's
not like he had come up through the ranks as
an EMT paramedic, nurse, physician assistant. He was serving his county.
(06:22):
It's what he wanted to do. And there have been
a lot of instances, and they actually mentioned one in
that episode of Frontline or it's called death Investigation in America.
I think Frontline is from twenty eleven. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked.
They asked compointedly, was there actually a blind corner in
(06:46):
South Carolina at one point in time? And he says, yes, sir, Yes, sir,
there was, so someone that was actually legally blind had
been elected to the office of corner. I don't think
it's that way at all. When I was in Georgia
working in Atlanta, I knew that there were It was
at least related to me by those that worked at
(07:07):
the public Safety Training center that they had. I think
it was either two or three functionally illiterate corners in
the state of Georgia. And you know you're talking about
filling out death certificate with I'll just keep it simple,
with something like ATHT score at cardiovascular disease. Well, I
(07:27):
have trouble spelling that. And you know I stumbled through
graduate school. You remember how I was mentioning in Marlborough County,
how they contracted with a forensic pathologist that gives you
an idea as to the type of money or lack
thereof that people might have at a corner's office. Like
I'll give you for instance, what have you ever heard
(07:50):
the term in an old Western series called the livery Stable?
Have you ever heard that? It was like on gun Smoke,
go down to the livery well and it's l I
v e r y well. Livery is actually an old
term for transport. And in both the states that I
(08:11):
worked in, they that's still that term is still used
as the livery, not delivery, but livery service. And so
what she was doing is working as a livery service
for the corner and she would contract and there might
be there might be I'm not saying her, but I'm
saying that there might be people that are equipped with
(08:33):
a van, okay, that has racks in it. Essentially, what
if you show up, you've got a you've got a
van with a rack. You go before the county commission
and you put a bid on the livery service for
that county, and you have to be available. You know,
you use communications. They might give you a radio and
I don't know if they'll supply with the book. They'll
pay your mileage and they'll pay you per body. Okay,
(08:54):
So if she catches a case that the corner calls
her on she has to go out and pick up
the body. Well, she's met there by a representative from
the local corner's office and then the body is placed
into the livery service van and the body is then
transferred back to back to the mord. The problem many
(09:16):
times that you have or that has occurred in the past,
not saying it occurs now, but you would have people
that would have questionable reasons for getting into the livery service.
You might have people that, uh, well, first off, you
can have people that work for a funeral home and
they want to have DIBs on a body. And for
(09:36):
anybody that's out there that's ever had to go through
the heartache of a death and paying for those expenses,
as you know, you know, if you if you're small
funeral home and you score three four funerals per month,
you're you know, you're walking in tall cotton, as they
say down here in the South, because that you know,
(09:57):
that amount of money can get you through months and
month and it's very mercenary when you think about it.
And then there you've got those other individuals that just
want to be associated with the death investigation. They want
to be associated with the police, and they might want
to be associated with forensics. Then you've got another stripe
of people that are out there that are just playing
weird because I've had I remember in New Orleans alone,
(10:22):
we contracted out to one livery service. We'd used a
same funeral home for years and years, and somebody underbid them,
an oh boy, what a clown show. They would show
up and there would be like three or four people
riding in the front of the van, one person seated
on the floor, and they were itching to get into
every scene, itching to get in there, to be around
(10:43):
us as we were working, and those sorts of things,
and the list runs a gamut. But just think about
how ghoulish this type of thing is, Dave.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
That's what kind of caught my attention, Joe, Oh, okay,
go ahead, no, because I'm well, because.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
I think we might be simpatico on Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I was like, Okay, he's a deputy corner and she's
picking up the dead. Okay, I get it, that's how
they met at work. Okay that I'm just thinking about
what kind of people are, you know, doing these things,
because obviously we're talking about body bags, so you know,
it ends really bad for somebody in here, and I'm
going to give it to you really straight. The person
it ends really bad for is not Christopher Dontell's wife.
(11:30):
It's Meghan Jackson's ex boyfriend. They're not even current male.
But they're not even a current couple, Joe.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
They were working through those details of custody issues, and
which is messy in and of itself, particularly if we're
in a you know, we've we've really the idea of
a you know, I was talking about British common law
a little while ago, the idea of a common law marriage,
those things in certain states, those have gone the way
of the Dodo bird. Now, you know, the actual concept
(12:02):
of a common law common law arrangement have kind of disappeared,
and so these things can end quite messily. And in
this case, in particular, it ended quite messily, all right.
It ended with a fellow wrapped in plastic and weighed
it down with two cinderblocks, you know, Dave. When I
(12:36):
met my wife, Kimmy, I viewed myself as a real romantic.
I still try to be, you know. I buy flowers.
I don't cook as much as I used to, but
I'll just say, Mama, throw something on decent. We're going out,
going out honky talking tonight, you know, whatever the case
might be, and we'll go kick our heels up as
(12:57):
best we can nowadays. But you know, romance comes in
all manner of sorts. I've never felt romantic as blue
lights are flashing in the background. I've never felt romantic
as the aromatic odor of house fire, which you know,
(13:20):
kind of through the air and you inhale it. I've
certainly never waxed poetic at the sight of a decomposing body.
But apparently in these circumstances, you know, in the face
of all this love or lust blossomed. And that's one
(13:40):
of the reasons, you know, I kind of wanted to
talk about this case because what the prosecutors are saying
is that that's how these two came together, was going
out on scenes together. Dave.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
It's boggling my mind, Joe, on some of our episodes
when we look at what people think is the good
thing to do. Okay, you've got all these decisions you
can make in life with what you're going to do,
and this was the best plan you could come up with.
I mean, you've got look, I tell people, do not
get married to get divorced. It's an ugly situation. If
(14:14):
you're not ready to get married, don't get married. Don't
do it just because you think it's the thing to do.
The part that gets me about this one is that
whether you agree or disagree with the lifestyle choice. Megan
Jackson was thirty nine years old with four children and
never married to the father of those children, Gregory Rice.
(14:36):
Now I am not judging either one of them on
that and just pointing it out that they were together
long enough to have four children to have a serious relationship,
but apparently there was something missing there that they didn't
want to get married, and they never were. When she
gets involved with Christopher d'ntel, he's married and has two children.
(14:57):
He's currently married, has two children. She is actually now
we don't know how long the relationship was going on.
We don't know. We just know, as you mentioned, Joe,
that you've never felt like you never felt romantic around
the dead bodies, and that's what these people actually were.
They actually came together as a couple because she's delivering
(15:18):
dead bodies and he's the deputy corner out there looking
at him. I don't know how much time they had
together over the dead bodies. But I have to assume
they had some and I just don't think that's a
place where love would be born.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
No, they would have, and it would have been very
intense situations you form with people that move bodies. I
formed friendships with a lot of people because we were
in very Listen, you're going to have this kind of
you have to talk to somebody.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Man, You're going to actually have situations that come up
where you really do need to talk to somebody.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
You will, and it's you're the only one. You're the
only one that truly understands what is going on out there,
and you're and I'm not saying this from a romantic perspective.
What I'm saying is these these folks that I've worked with,
males and females, never got involved with anybody I ever
(16:15):
worked with. It just knew that that was foreboden. It's
just not something I didn't want to It never ends, well, no,
it doesn't. Rabbits and pots and things like that. But
you know the.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Idea that I will not be ignored, Dan. But the
idea is that you've got this situation where you're in
very intense circumstances Listen, when you when you haul an
entire family out of the house and I don't know
if they did this as a result of say a
(16:48):
multiple homicide, there's a bond that's formed there that nobody
else can really understand. And you you do it over
and over again, and you I know people that I
have worked with that you warm this kind of unspeakable
language where you know what the other is going to
do because you have to move in concert with one another,
(17:09):
and you have to be careful. Now, if he's a
deputy corner, there are certain considerations he has to take
into account for a relative to security of the body.
And that's everything from making sure that, for instance, in
firearms related to this, that the hands are bagged. I've
had to bag heads before. You have to put them
in clean white sheets. You have to zip up, seal
(17:32):
the bag with a lock, make note of the lock number.
And you're trusting this person that's going to deliver this
body that they're not going to stop from point A
to point B, which is the morgue of the storage facility.
There are cases out there where people that worked as
livery drivers have driven through drive through restaurants through like
(17:56):
Burger joints with bodies in the back of the car
and have no respect whatsoever for the dead or the
continuity of the case. I mean, just think about it.
If you cannot communicate well enough, or if a person
is not on point with what they have to do,
do you realize that if you're seen from the moment
you leave the scene and you're trying to get back
(18:19):
to you know, to the Morgan, you spend through Duncan
to go get as my friend from Boston says, a
donkey says what he calls them a donkey's cup of
coffee on the way back, and you're seeing doing that,
do you realize what the defense can do to you.
They can wreck you on that case because you're you're
not technically breaking the chain, but it's very poor taste.
(18:40):
So it's a very intense relationship. You can see how
things might bubble up over a period of time. And
what's difficult for me to understand is how long this
relationship had been going on and how it intensified to
this point. Was he advertising? Was she advertising? Where they
just looking for something other than the norm which they
(19:03):
had uh at, you know, in their regular domestic situations.
I don't know, David, I actually scratcher.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
I did look it up and spend a little bit
of time on it, and it really was take out
the fact that he's a deputy coroner and that she's
a livery person, you know, take that out of it,
and this is your you work together and uh, you know,
grass is always greener. That's really what it amounts to.
Married guy, two kids, and he sees this girl over
(19:30):
here who's you know, available, and or says she is so.
I again, there's so many strings to pull out here,
but obviously obviously he believed that he couldn't have her
if her ex boyfriend was still in the mix, and
(19:52):
she believed they couldn't be to you know that that's the.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Billy goods that's being sold.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
My ex boyfriend here, the father of my four children,
has to be dead for us to can you on.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
That's what it amounts to. Yeah, and that's I think
that that's what prosecutors are alleging, and what what makes
this case. I think I don't know if I ought
to use the word silatious, but I think I will.
It adds this kind of salacious, uh a bit to
this whole thing because it's first off, you know when
you see people that work in the morgue. First off,
(20:23):
if you know, I've had this experience when you tell
people that you work around the dead. You either people
are either really intrigued or they find it completely repugnant
want nothing else to do with you. But there's a
level of salaciousness to it that. You know, some dime
store novelist that writes trashy romance novels, they might pick
(20:43):
up on a thread and probably have at some point
in time written some kind of you know, narrative that's
that's similar to this, that's got that kind of ghoulish
twist on it. And I think a lot of people
are curious about that sort of thing. Uh. And in
this case, you've got an individual who is wrapped up
(21:05):
in this event that works specifically as a deputy corner.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
What is a different than a corner? When you say corner,
deputy corner, I'm guessing he's second in command.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Well, there could be. You can have multiple deputy corners, Okay,
And this is kind of how it breaks down. And
I'll give you for instance. Let me use Louisiana for
an instance. Because in Louisiana, the corners are physicians. They're
not like, they don't have an associate's degree in woodworking. Okay,
they're physicians. You have to be a physician to run
(21:39):
for the office. And in order to be a deputy
corner in one of the parishes there which they have
multiple deputy corners, those are all also physicians. You can
have forensic pathologists that are appointed as deputy corners. In Louisiana,
for instance, the corner's office does all the psych ater
(22:00):
or commitment, so you have deputy corners that are psychiatrists.
You have deputy corners that are sexual assault people that
are physicians like obgyns, and then under them you have investigators.
But you get to a state like South Carolina, we
have an elected corner those deputy corners, and we have
them here in Alabama as well. One of my good
(22:22):
friends that I teach with is a local corner and
he has deputy corners and there's three of them, I
think there's three of them, and he's the only full
time employee for the office because they can't afford any
more people. They don't have investigators, So my friend can't
work all the time day, he can't. He has to
have time off, and so he's not gonna you know,
(22:42):
you're talking about where he works. It's like a county
of I don't know, probably one hundred thousand people. He
can't just go, you know, willy nilly all night long
and work as a corner and then he's a professor
during the day. So he has deputy corners. Well, they
assume his position, but they are not elected. Deputy corner
are appointed by the elected corner and so that's how
(23:03):
you get into that position. And most of the time
you'll find a deputy corners unless it's some kind of
inappropriate relationship where they're just drinking buddies. You'll have people
that will be either current or former police officers, EMTs, paramedics.
You'll even have firefighters or mortuary attendants that will be
deputy corners as well. And that's what happens. And they
(23:26):
have full full authority when they're deputized corners. They carry
a badge. In most states they carry a gun. A
lot of states do and under a corner law. I
know in Georgia, in and out, I think in Alabama
you can carry a firearm probably in South Carolina as
well as a corner. So it's an interesting history, and
it's an interesting way for an office to be run
(23:49):
and to take care of the dead. But here's the thing.
I guess if if you enter into an agreement with
another person that happens to work peripheral to what you do,
and they have asked you, look, I can't, we can't
if you want me, we can't continue on this way.
(24:14):
My boyfriend ex boyfriend who's given me hell, which we
don't know if he did or not. He's making custody
issues troublesome. We have to be shd of him. It
gives I think that it would give any prosecutor and
certainly any home side detective pause to think, well, did
she use this individual because she thought that he might
(24:34):
have special knowledge? Faith then you work in the field
as a corner investigator, deputy corner, medical, legal, death investigator,
(24:58):
emmy investigator. Look, the names are the list is long,
but they all essentially do the same job. We try
to determine what happened to the dead. Okay, when you
do that, you you know, I'm not trying to sound
like Liam Neeson and Taken, but we do have a
(25:19):
particular set of skills, Okay that you know people find
value in a lot of people. Do insurance companies, police departments.
You know, it varies because we are the ones that
are out there moving bodies around, examining bodies, interacting with families,
(25:40):
all these sorts of things, and it takes a certain
level of training, Dave, And this is what makes this
story so very unique, I think, and out of all
of those that we kind of cover, I think in
this particular case, it's quite fascinating.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
You brought up something earlier when we were just talking
and I hadn't thought about it. Okay, when we look
at the situation here, we have thirty nine year old
Meghan Jackson, mother of four, the father of her four children,
Gregory Rice, and Christopher Dantel, forty one year old, married
(26:15):
father of two. Meghan and Christopher are having an affair.
Meghan and Gregory are a former couple with four children,
and they are battling out over custodial issues. It never
occurred to me that Meghan might have chosen to involve
(26:38):
herself in a relationship with somebody she thought might have
a better idea on how to kill and get rid
of somebody. And to be honest with you, now that
You've opened up that door of my brain. That's all
I can think about. Do you know how to kill it?
I mean no, not you, Joe, just in general. I mean,
if you're looking for somebody, I mean, you want to
get rid of them, who are you going to look for? Well,
(26:59):
a deputy corner would be a good place to start,
I would think, but based on what happened here, he
was the wrong one.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah, and listen, I can't tell you how many times
I've been the button of jokes relative to that. It's
it's a door that people like to work through comically
and walk through comically. I think they, you know, it's
always wink wink, nudge, nudge, you know about Well, we've
got the guy here that knows how to get rid
of a body, you know, and that that'll happen, you know,
very you know, with some frequency. I hear. I've heard
(27:27):
that joke for years and years. But let's face it.
I mean, it's it's not so much the knowing how
to do it as it is the observation of how
people have previously done it and how they screwed up.
And that's the.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Big piece of this, you know, the last several years
of doing Nancy Grace doing crime stories with Nancy Grace
doing it on when she was on hl N, CNN,
and all the other incarnations. You and I have been
on those shows. You've been on every network there is
talking about Usually it's a crime, somebody's dead and you're
having to break down all the things that happened. And
(28:05):
I've been on these shows listening to you over the years,
and you would be amazed at how many times I
sit there and I think, I really wish I had
paid attention in biology class. I had no clue. I
have to look words up most of the time when
you're talking about stuff. Oh lord, it's just it's amazing
to me. But here's the thing I didn't really know
(28:26):
until I was watching the TV show Ozark that if
you even when you puncture the lungs when you try
to think a body and they tend to float up anyway.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, yeah, they do. I got to tell you. It's
there's any number of ways that I have borne witness
to people attempt to get rid of bodies and failed miserably.
And of course, and I saw this played out a
lot in my career in New Orleans, in particular because
(28:56):
you're It always fascinated me, and this comes back to
to this area as well. It always fascinated me that
we have the I guess you could get into an
argument with a wildlife biologists to say what is the
actual apex predator in North America and some would argue, well,
perhaps a brown bear or a grizzly bear. My money
(29:17):
is always on an alligator. And so being in swampy areas,
I was always fascinated by people that would go to
a swamp and wrap bodies in plastic and then walk
away from them and get rid of a body that way,
as opposed to going out and seeking out an area
where you might have the apex predator on the North
(29:38):
American continent that is an eating machine and you you know,
and I would see that many times. So it played
out many times in cases that I'd worked, thinking if
you had just gone, you know, like half a mile away,
we wouldn't be here. A matter of fact, people would
still be saying, well, you know, we're gym at or
you know where Susie at because we haven't seen a
(30:00):
long time. Well there's a reason I ain't seen her. Uh,
there's Sometimes it almost appears as though, that people overthink things,
and Nancy has actually asked me questions, David, I got
to say this kind of a personal confession here. Nancy's
actually asked things of me on on air before, and
(30:20):
I've been hesitant to say them because because I don't
know who's listening and he's watching, and it's and I've
had people ask me that question. They'll say, does it
ever bother you that you're teaching people? You know, these things?
But I guess you could say that. I guess you
could say that if you were an accounting professor at
Jacksonville State University where I teach. You know, well, if
(30:43):
if you're an accounting professor, or do you think that
they're teaching people how to cook the books, how to
under money? Well, well, part of it maybe I don't.
I don't know, But it all comes down to what's
in the heart of the person, right how they're going
to use that information.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Look at the television shows over the last thirty years. Yeah,
and you're talking about crime dramas and dramas about the
health you know, in the hospital from the Yard of
Grey's anatomy to the relationships that go on in those situations.
You had dead people all the time to crime dramas.
I mean, that's what we are fascinated with, those things
that are on the other side, that crime, the other
(31:20):
side of what we see as polite society and right
and wrong. And the next step is, Okay, once you've
killed somebody, if you want to get away with it,
what are you going to do? And what we end
up reporting on most of the time is what somebody
did that led to them getting caught and spending the
rest of their life in prison. And what boggles my
mind is how people decide to kill somebody so flippantly
(31:44):
that they can't even stay out of jail for a month.
You took a permanent solution, and you didn't plan to
get away enough to be gone for a month.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, Yeah, And that's that is the fascinating part. And
I think that that plays in deeply with this case,
in particular with mister Rice's homicide. And I'll go ahead
and plainly say that this is a homicide and it's
a continuing homicide investigation to you that has yet to
be adjudicated, except for one part that I want to
get to here very quickly. That is fascinating. We don't
(32:16):
see this happen very often. But back back to our
primary focus when we think about these circumstances, what we
got involved, well, two major pieces of evidence in this case, Dave. Obviously,
I've kind of buried the lead here because we do
have a body that has been discovered, that has been
(32:37):
wrapped in a tarp and has been weighted down with
center blocks. But also that old bit of evidence that's
kind of new evidence that keeps popping up is digital evidence.
We've got this individual that has assisted, if you'll allow
me to say that, in the taking of the life
of another person, and his digital fingerprints are all over
(33:01):
this thing.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Dave, unbelievable that forensic data recovery is a I know
it's been ongoing pursuit for the last twenty years, but
now we've gotten to this point where in this particular case,
it wasn't just the fact that they had text messages
from Ms Jackson to mister John tell say I'm gonna
cut his brakes, which, by the way, cutting breaks on
(33:23):
a car really, come on.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Do they watch Mannix? I know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, wow, Barnarie, Harry O, Mannix and Rockford were all
out in the garage Barby Jones. Yeah, yeah, Barnardy did.
But the bottom line is, who really know? Really you're
going to cut breaks? Which one? Do you even know
where to begin with that?
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Right?
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Most people don't look maybe in the movies or TV shows,
but it doesn't I mean, if that's your thing, really
go ahead, you know. Do you really think they're not
going to figure that out when they look under there
and say, gee, this break line has been cut.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
You know precisely? And if your deputy corner you should
know better than that, because yeah, the car is not
a dead body. However, you are around enough people in forensics,
trust me, you know them. And there's a thing called
tool marks. And if you were to even attempt to
do that, uh, and not involving in a homeside I
guess I guess you're going to The whole idea is
(34:19):
that in one of the flattest areas of the country, right,
you're going to cut the brake line on somebody so
that their brake sail and they, I don't know, run
down the one hill that might be in Hory County
and slam into a building or tree. It's it's not
going to profit you much at that point time. So
you look at that that train of logic there, and
(34:40):
you see that these are not individuals that are really
for thinking, as you mentioned just a second ago. They're
they're not They're not able to see the long game here,
because the fact is is that, uh, you know, we
we've got we've got this individual whose phone, whose phone
(35:01):
is literally approximating the same location as the deceitent.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
How was the guydad, Joe, I meant to ask you
that a minute ago. How did he actually die? I
know we had him wrapped up and put in the water,
but was he shot stabbed?
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Well, we shot, he's executed. Yeah, he's he's been executed
and shot in the back of the head apparently, And
of course by the time he's recovered, he's he's in
again in a moderate to advanced state of decomposition. At
this point, I've been dead for a month in the swamp, yeah, river.
But but here we go. We're back to my old
(35:34):
term of cocooning. And so you wrap a body up
and they did this with zip tized. By the way,
they zip tied both ends of the bag and secured
it with cinder blocks. Listen, I mean, I guess and principle.
It's a great idea if you're, you know, watching a
movie and you're writing a script, but is it practical.
(35:55):
There is a high probability they're going to find the
decedents remains, and when you do find them.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Day.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
One of the reasons I like to use that term
cocooning is that you are containing that body in total.
Now you might have water that has entered into the back,
but anything that's there, some of that fine particulate matter
that might be there, You're going to prevent perhaps any
kind of aquatic life from attacking areas where you might
(36:27):
have injuries. They won't be as much as degraded as
they would have been otherwise if they left the body
completely exposed. So, you know, for all of your care
and your preparation of ending this man's life, a man
who by the way, was the father of four children,
(36:50):
you know you've failed miserably.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Day, Yeah, Joe, to try to tell this story timeline,
thumbnail sketch, what everyone you know? Very sure?
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Here we go.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Gregory Rice is forty six years old. He has four
children with Megan Jackson, who is thirty nine. Four children.
They never got married during their long relationship, but have
four children. Now that they are broken up, they're negotiating
visitation and support. Christopher Dantell works as a deputy corner.
I meant to mention Megan Jackson has a contract with
(37:22):
the county to pick up dead bodies and take them
to funeral home or to the corner or whoever needs
the body. That's what she picks up and takes. That's
how Meghan Jackson and Christopher Dantell get to know one another. Again.
He's deputy corner, So there you go. Person delivering the
dead bodies would get to know the deputy corner. When
Gregory Rice is reported missing in the midst of this
(37:46):
support and visitation negotiation with Meghan Jackson, the suspicious eyes
of the county fall on Christopher Dantell and Meghan Jackson.
It's an open secret they're having an affair, apparently, And
when Gregory Rice's body is found in the Little Pedee River,
there's enough evidence to charge murder. He's been shot five times,
(38:07):
he's been wrapped in a tart and tied up to
his cinder blocks and sunk right, but his body floats
back up anyway, and that's why we're here. So at
the Christopher d'antell's trial. They're getting ready to start. Jury
selection is finished, and as things are moving forward, Christopher
d'antell changes his plea from not guilty to murder and
(38:30):
accessory after the fact. He actually says, I'll plead guilty
to accessory after the fact. Give it to the murder charge.
They'll agree to it.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Boom.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Here is what was said by the senior Assistant Solicitor
Mary Ellen Walter to Circuit Court Judge Alex Hymon. I'm
gonna paraphrase Megan Jackson said to Christopher dantell. Essentially, it
was him or you. I need you to go get
(38:58):
him out of the cooler at the Myrtle Beach Funeral
Home and get rid of him. She then goes on
to say, we then have surveillance video of mister don
Tell at the Lowe's Home improvement store purchasing items that
were later found to be used to dispose of greg
Rice's body, specifically a tarp, ragets, straps, two cinder blocks,
and some zip ties. There you have it. It was
(39:20):
that and a few other things that make Christopher Dontell go, Okay,
I'm out. I'm tapped. I am tapping out. And that's
what he does. He is not going to testify at
Megan Jackson's trial coming up in February.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
It's going to be interesting, though, to see how this,
how this unwinds as we move forward, because this is
it's an unusual case. That's why I wanted to cover it,
you know, obviously, you know, from the perspective of an
old medical legal death investigator, and then from the perspective
of of these two that thought that they could get
away with the case. And finally one of the co
(39:56):
conspirators here, you know, has a change of heart at
the last moment. I guess he could potentially see the
light of day at some point in time, but you know,
South Carolina Penitentiary time's hard, Tom Dave, and he's got
a long road ahead of him. I'm going to be
interested if she decides to take maybe a plea going forward,
(40:18):
But at this point, she's still innocent until proven guilty.
She hasn't rolled over on anything. And we'll keep an
eye out for the upcoming trial of Megan Jackson, who,
again thirty nine years old, was working as a livery
driver for the Hory County Corner's Office and decided to
end the life of a man that she had created
(40:42):
for lives with. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
Bodybacks
Body does. But Joseph S. Gott More, Hory County, South Carolina.
You know, Hory County, and that area around coastal South
Carolina is arguably one of the oldest settled areas by
colonists in our United States. I can't say it's ancient
(00:26):
by American standards, but it is ancient in a sense
in a way that the laws of England migrated along
with those that would settle all of the colonies to
those colonies, South Carolina obviously being one, And when the
(00:50):
colonists came over, they had offices like the magistrate, the bailiff,
certainly the sheriff, but also one office they had was
the corner. The corner came over because that's really the
only method that was available at that point in time
for taking care of the dead, for trying to understand
(01:12):
what brought about an individual's end, if you will. Today
we're going to explore a case that has yet to
be fully adjudicated, but is just pure down home Southern Gothic.
It involves actually a lady who was still married trying
(01:35):
to work out the details of custody and divorce and
those sorts of things, and a fellow, a fellow who
worked in Horry County, A fellow who worked in Horry
County as a deputy corner. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and
this is Bodybacks Dave Mack, my good friend. I have
(02:03):
so many folks that come up to me and they
want to know, well, what in the world do I
have to do in order to become a corner? Really?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah, many of the time I've wondered what that'd be,
like Yoda, find an old body and.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Sitting around with a hot cup of coffee bottle or
in fire and sitting there, let me look at the dead. Yeah,
put down your copy of Dickens and just say, wow,
it just occurred to me. I want to be a corner. No,
But you know, in my kind of in my universe,
because of what I do and what I teach, I
have people that come to me all the time, and
(02:39):
generally it's students, and they'll say, hey, what do I
have to do in order to be one of those people?
And interestingly enough, for most if you want to be
a corner, and I'm talking about an actual corner, you
have to be elected. And it's that way in South Carolina,
and South Carolina's got a rich history of corners. They
(03:02):
have a pretty good corner system that set up. They've
had training in place that did not exist where other places,
you know, other states might not have training. They've had
training for a while. And interestingly enough, here's a little sidebar.
I actually used to know the corner in Charleston, and
(03:24):
she was this fantastic lady, and you talk about a
ball of energy. And what set her aside from all
other corners that I had encountered up to that point
was that she was a nurse and had maintained her license.
And guess what, dave All of the deputy corners and
investigators that she employed at her office, they were also nurses.
(03:46):
And I was always fascinated by the concept because I've
read reports that came out of that office and you
can see that the people that actually worked there had
medical knowledge that they went into great detail. And of course,
my old adage is that nurses make good investigators because
nurses are naturally nosy people. They ask you questions. You
(04:09):
might have a doctor that'll come into a room with you,
and you know, one of the big signatures of a
bad bedside manner is that they don't talk to you.
They simply ask you a few mumbled questions. But the
nurse is the one that's going to come in and
poke and prod and say, well, what did you eat
or what medications are you on? And they're going to
kind of size you up because the doctor's moving between
(04:30):
so they've made They're naturally good investigators. But in this case,
this case out of Hoary, South Carolina.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Which, by the way, Myrtle Beach is where whenever I
think of a county, it doesn't help me.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I have to have a city. And when I.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Looked at I had to look it up, and I
am very familiar with the Carolinas, and I still like
Horry County that I think that's Myrtle Beach.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
I gotta look.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
So if you know anything about the coast, it's Myrtle
Beach and that general area. But tell me about the
corner there.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
I want to pack.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
I got into this, Joe, because you were talking about
corners being elected. I mean, please tell me that in
an elected situation, you would actually have to have some
medical training, right. You can't just be like, no, I
could run for corner.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yeah you could, and that's sad and scary. Well, let
me let me tell you something that happened, and we
may have and I think we did. We we talked
about refreshment memory. We did talk about Michael Jordan's dad, right, yes,
a couple episodes back, and of course that was in
Marlborough County, South Carolina. And listen, this this fellow that
was a corner there is a lovely man. He truly is.
(05:34):
And he worked in construction and he was elected to
the office of corner in Marlborough County. And there's a
great piece on the frontline about him and the case
involving Michael Jordan's father, and the interviewers specifically ask him,
what's your educational background. I'm paraphrasing here. Yeah, I have
(05:56):
a I have a degree, a technical degree from a
community college and I don't knowfts drafting or construction or
something like that. And look, that's all fine. As a
matter of fact, I think that's a worthy, worthy occupation
to go into either one of those. But he it's
not like he had come up through the ranks as
an EMT paramedic, nurse, physician assistant. He was serving his county.
(06:22):
It's what he wanted to do. And there have been
a lot of instances, and they actually mentioned one in
that episode of Frontline or it's called death Investigation in America.
I think Frontline is from twenty eleven. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked.
They asked compointedly, was there actually a blind corner in
(06:46):
South Carolina at one point in time? And he says, yes, sir, Yes, sir,
there was, so someone that was actually legally blind had
been elected to the office of corner. I don't think
it's that way at all. When I was in Georgia
working in Atlanta, I knew that there were It was
at least related to me by those that worked at
(07:07):
the public Safety Training center that they had. I think
it was either two or three functionally illiterate corners in
the state of Georgia. And you know you're talking about
filling out death certificate with I'll just keep it simple,
with something like ATHT score at cardiovascular disease. Well, I
(07:27):
have trouble spelling that. And you know I stumbled through
graduate school. You remember how I was mentioning in Marlborough County,
how they contracted with a forensic pathologist that gives you
an idea as to the type of money or lack
thereof that people might have at a corner's office. Like
I'll give you for instance, what have you ever heard
(07:50):
the term in an old Western series called the livery Stable?
Have you ever heard that? It was like on gun Smoke,
go down to the livery well and it's l I
v e r y well. Livery is actually an old
term for transport. And in both the states that I
(08:11):
worked in, they that's still that term is still used
as the livery, not delivery, but livery service. And so
what she was doing is working as a livery service
for the corner and she would contract and there might
be there might be I'm not saying her, but I'm
saying that there might be people that are equipped with
(08:33):
a van, okay, that has racks in it. Essentially, what
if you show up, you've got a you've got a
van with a rack. You go before the county commission
and you put a bid on the livery service for
that county, and you have to be available. You know,
you use communications. They might give you a radio and
I don't know if they'll supply with the book. They'll
pay your mileage and they'll pay you per body. Okay,
(08:54):
So if she catches a case that the corner calls
her on she has to go out and pick up
the body. Well, she's met there by a representative from
the local corner's office and then the body is placed
into the livery service van and the body is then
transferred back to back to the mord. The problem many
(09:16):
times that you have or that has occurred in the past,
not saying it occurs now, but you would have people
that would have questionable reasons for getting into the livery service.
You might have people that, uh, well, first off, you
can have people that work for a funeral home and
they want to have DIBs on a body. And for
(09:36):
anybody that's out there that's ever had to go through
the heartache of a death and paying for those expenses,
as you know, you know, if you if you're small
funeral home and you score three four funerals per month,
you're you know, you're walking in tall cotton, as they
say down here in the South, because that you know,
(09:57):
that amount of money can get you through months and
month and it's very mercenary when you think about it.
And then there you've got those other individuals that just
want to be associated with the death investigation. They want
to be associated with the police, and they might want
to be associated with forensics. Then you've got another stripe
of people that are out there that are just playing
weird because I've had I remember in New Orleans alone,
(10:22):
we contracted out to one livery service. We'd used a
same funeral home for years and years, and somebody underbid them,
an oh boy, what a clown show. They would show
up and there would be like three or four people
riding in the front of the van, one person seated
on the floor, and they were itching to get into
every scene, itching to get in there, to be around
(10:43):
us as we were working, and those sorts of things,
and the list runs a gamut. But just think about
how ghoulish this type of thing is, Dave.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
That's what kind of caught my attention, Joe, Oh, okay,
go ahead, no, because I'm well, because.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
I think we might be simpatico on Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I was like, Okay, he's a deputy corner and she's
picking up the dead. Okay, I get it, that's how
they met at work. Okay that I'm just thinking about
what kind of people are, you know, doing these things,
because obviously we're talking about body bags, so you know,
it ends really bad for somebody in here, and I'm
going to give it to you really straight. The person
it ends really bad for is not Christopher Dontell's wife.
(11:30):
It's Meghan Jackson's ex boyfriend. They're not even current male.
But they're not even a current couple, Joe.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
They were working through those details of custody issues, and
which is messy in and of itself, particularly if we're
in a you know, we've we've really the idea of
a you know, I was talking about British common law
a little while ago, the idea of a common law marriage,
those things in certain states, those have gone the way
of the Dodo bird. Now, you know, the actual concept
(12:02):
of a common law common law arrangement have kind of disappeared,
and so these things can end quite messily. And in
this case, in particular, it ended quite messily, all right.
It ended with a fellow wrapped in plastic and weighed
it down with two cinderblocks, you know, Dave. When I
(12:36):
met my wife, Kimmy, I viewed myself as a real romantic.
I still try to be, you know. I buy flowers.
I don't cook as much as I used to, but
I'll just say, Mama, throw something on decent. We're going out,
going out honky talking tonight, you know, whatever the case
might be, and we'll go kick our heels up as
(12:57):
best we can nowadays. But you know, romance comes in
all manner of sorts. I've never felt romantic as blue
lights are flashing in the background. I've never felt romantic
as the aromatic odor of house fire, which you know,
(13:20):
kind of through the air and you inhale it. I've
certainly never waxed poetic at the sight of a decomposing body.
But apparently in these circumstances, you know, in the face
of all this love or lust blossomed. And that's one
(13:40):
of the reasons, you know, I kind of wanted to
talk about this case because what the prosecutors are saying
is that that's how these two came together, was going
out on scenes together. Dave.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
It's boggling my mind, Joe, on some of our episodes
when we look at what people think is the good
thing to do. Okay, you've got all these decisions you
can make in life with what you're going to do,
and this was the best plan you could come up with.
I mean, you've got look, I tell people, do not
get married to get divorced. It's an ugly situation. If
(14:14):
you're not ready to get married, don't get married. Don't
do it just because you think it's the thing to do.
The part that gets me about this one is that
whether you agree or disagree with the lifestyle choice. Megan
Jackson was thirty nine years old with four children and
never married to the father of those children, Gregory Rice.
(14:36):
Now I am not judging either one of them on
that and just pointing it out that they were together
long enough to have four children to have a serious relationship,
but apparently there was something missing there that they didn't
want to get married, and they never were. When she
gets involved with Christopher d'ntel, he's married and has two children.
(14:57):
He's currently married, has two children. She is actually now
we don't know how long the relationship was going on.
We don't know. We just know, as you mentioned, Joe,
that you've never felt like you never felt romantic around
the dead bodies, and that's what these people actually were.
They actually came together as a couple because she's delivering
(15:18):
dead bodies and he's the deputy corner out there looking
at him. I don't know how much time they had
together over the dead bodies. But I have to assume
they had some and I just don't think that's a
place where love would be born.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
No, they would have, and it would have been very
intense situations you form with people that move bodies. I
formed friendships with a lot of people because we were
in very Listen, you're going to have this kind of
you have to talk to somebody.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Man, You're going to actually have situations that come up
where you really do need to talk to somebody.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
You will, and it's you're the only one. You're the
only one that truly understands what is going on out there,
and you're and I'm not saying this from a romantic perspective.
What I'm saying is these these folks that I've worked with,
males and females, never got involved with anybody I ever
(16:15):
worked with. It just knew that that was foreboden. It's
just not something I didn't want to It never ends, well, no,
it doesn't. Rabbits and pots and things like that. But
you know the.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Idea that I will not be ignored, Dan. But the
idea is that you've got this situation where you're in
very intense circumstances Listen, when you when you haul an
entire family out of the house and I don't know
if they did this as a result of say a
(16:48):
multiple homicide, there's a bond that's formed there that nobody
else can really understand. And you you do it over
and over again, and you I know people that I
have worked with that you warm this kind of unspeakable
language where you know what the other is going to
do because you have to move in concert with one another,
(17:09):
and you have to be careful. Now, if he's a
deputy corner, there are certain considerations he has to take
into account for a relative to security of the body.
And that's everything from making sure that, for instance, in
firearms related to this, that the hands are bagged. I've
had to bag heads before. You have to put them
in clean white sheets. You have to zip up, seal
(17:32):
the bag with a lock, make note of the lock number.
And you're trusting this person that's going to deliver this
body that they're not going to stop from point A
to point B, which is the morgue of the storage facility.
There are cases out there where people that worked as
livery drivers have driven through drive through restaurants through like
(17:56):
Burger joints with bodies in the back of the car
and have no respect whatsoever for the dead or the
continuity of the case. I mean, just think about it.
If you cannot communicate well enough, or if a person
is not on point with what they have to do,
do you realize that if you're seen from the moment
you leave the scene and you're trying to get back
(18:19):
to you know, to the Morgan, you spend through Duncan
to go get as my friend from Boston says, a
donkey says what he calls them a donkey's cup of
coffee on the way back, and you're seeing doing that,
do you realize what the defense can do to you.
They can wreck you on that case because you're you're
not technically breaking the chain, but it's very poor taste.
(18:40):
So it's a very intense relationship. You can see how
things might bubble up over a period of time. And
what's difficult for me to understand is how long this
relationship had been going on and how it intensified to
this point. Was he advertising? Was she advertising? Where they
just looking for something other than the norm which they
(19:03):
had uh at, you know, in their regular domestic situations.
I don't know, David, I actually scratcher.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
I did look it up and spend a little bit
of time on it, and it really was take out
the fact that he's a deputy coroner and that she's
a livery person, you know, take that out of it,
and this is your you work together and uh, you know,
grass is always greener. That's really what it amounts to.
Married guy, two kids, and he sees this girl over
(19:30):
here who's you know, available, and or says she is so.
I again, there's so many strings to pull out here,
but obviously obviously he believed that he couldn't have her
if her ex boyfriend was still in the mix, and
(19:52):
she believed they couldn't be to you know that that's the.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Billy goods that's being sold.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
My ex boyfriend here, the father of my four children,
has to be dead for us to can you on.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
That's what it amounts to. Yeah, and that's I think
that that's what prosecutors are alleging, and what what makes
this case. I think I don't know if I ought
to use the word silatious, but I think I will.
It adds this kind of salacious, uh a bit to
this whole thing because it's first off, you know when
you see people that work in the morgue. First off,
(20:23):
if you know, I've had this experience when you tell
people that you work around the dead. You either people
are either really intrigued or they find it completely repugnant
want nothing else to do with you. But there's a
level of salaciousness to it that. You know, some dime
store novelist that writes trashy romance novels, they might pick
(20:43):
up on a thread and probably have at some point
in time written some kind of you know, narrative that's
that's similar to this, that's got that kind of ghoulish
twist on it. And I think a lot of people
are curious about that sort of thing. Uh. And in
this case, you've got an individual who is wrapped up
(21:05):
in this event that works specifically as a deputy corner.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
What is a different than a corner? When you say corner,
deputy corner, I'm guessing he's second in command.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Well, there could be. You can have multiple deputy corners, Okay,
And this is kind of how it breaks down. And
I'll give you for instance. Let me use Louisiana for
an instance. Because in Louisiana, the corners are physicians. They're
not like, they don't have an associate's degree in woodworking. Okay,
they're physicians. You have to be a physician to run
(21:39):
for the office. And in order to be a deputy
corner in one of the parishes there which they have
multiple deputy corners, those are all also physicians. You can
have forensic pathologists that are appointed as deputy corners. In Louisiana,
for instance, the corner's office does all the psych ater
(22:00):
or commitment, so you have deputy corners that are psychiatrists.
You have deputy corners that are sexual assault people that
are physicians like obgyns, and then under them you have investigators.
But you get to a state like South Carolina, we
have an elected corner those deputy corners, and we have
them here in Alabama as well. One of my good
(22:22):
friends that I teach with is a local corner and
he has deputy corners and there's three of them, I
think there's three of them, and he's the only full
time employee for the office because they can't afford any
more people. They don't have investigators, So my friend can't
work all the time day, he can't. He has to
have time off, and so he's not gonna you know,
(22:42):
you're talking about where he works. It's like a county
of I don't know, probably one hundred thousand people. He
can't just go, you know, willy nilly all night long
and work as a corner and then he's a professor
during the day. So he has deputy corners. Well, they
assume his position, but they are not elected. Deputy corner
are appointed by the elected corner and so that's how
(23:03):
you get into that position. And most of the time
you'll find a deputy corners unless it's some kind of
inappropriate relationship where they're just drinking buddies. You'll have people
that will be either current or former police officers, EMTs, paramedics.
You'll even have firefighters or mortuary attendants that will be
deputy corners as well. And that's what happens. And they
(23:26):
have full full authority when they're deputized corners. They carry
a badge. In most states they carry a gun. A
lot of states do and under a corner law. I
know in Georgia, in and out, I think in Alabama
you can carry a firearm probably in South Carolina as
well as a corner. So it's an interesting history, and
it's an interesting way for an office to be run
(23:49):
and to take care of the dead. But here's the thing.
I guess if if you enter into an agreement with
another person that happens to work peripheral to what you do,
and they have asked you, look, I can't, we can't
if you want me, we can't continue on this way.
(24:14):
My boyfriend ex boyfriend who's given me hell, which we
don't know if he did or not. He's making custody
issues troublesome. We have to be shd of him. It
gives I think that it would give any prosecutor and
certainly any home side detective pause to think, well, did
she use this individual because she thought that he might
(24:34):
have special knowledge? Faith then you work in the field
as a corner investigator, deputy corner, medical, legal, death investigator,
(24:58):
emmy investigator. Look, the names are the list is long,
but they all essentially do the same job. We try
to determine what happened to the dead. Okay, when you
do that, you you know, I'm not trying to sound
like Liam Neeson and Taken, but we do have a
(25:19):
particular set of skills, Okay that you know people find
value in a lot of people. Do insurance companies, police departments.
You know, it varies because we are the ones that
are out there moving bodies around, examining bodies, interacting with families,
(25:40):
all these sorts of things, and it takes a certain
level of training, Dave, And this is what makes this
story so very unique, I think, and out of all
of those that we kind of cover, I think in
this particular case, it's quite fascinating.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
You brought up something earlier when we were just talking
and I hadn't thought about it. Okay, when we look
at the situation here, we have thirty nine year old
Meghan Jackson, mother of four, the father of her four children,
Gregory Rice, and Christopher Dantel, forty one year old, married
(26:15):
father of two. Meghan and Christopher are having an affair.
Meghan and Gregory are a former couple with four children,
and they are battling out over custodial issues. It never
occurred to me that Meghan might have chosen to involve
(26:38):
herself in a relationship with somebody she thought might have
a better idea on how to kill and get rid
of somebody. And to be honest with you, now that
You've opened up that door of my brain. That's all
I can think about. Do you know how to kill it?
I mean no, not you, Joe, just in general. I mean,
if you're looking for somebody, I mean, you want to
get rid of them, who are you going to look for? Well,
(26:59):
a deputy corner would be a good place to start,
I would think, but based on what happened here, he
was the wrong one.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah, and listen, I can't tell you how many times
I've been the button of jokes relative to that. It's
it's a door that people like to work through comically
and walk through comically. I think they, you know, it's
always wink wink, nudge, nudge, you know about Well, we've
got the guy here that knows how to get rid
of a body, you know, and that that'll happen, you know,
very you know, with some frequency. I hear. I've heard
(27:27):
that joke for years and years. But let's face it.
I mean, it's it's not so much the knowing how
to do it as it is the observation of how
people have previously done it and how they screwed up.
And that's the.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Big piece of this, you know, the last several years
of doing Nancy Grace doing crime stories with Nancy Grace
doing it on when she was on hl N, CNN,
and all the other incarnations. You and I have been
on those shows. You've been on every network there is
talking about Usually it's a crime, somebody's dead and you're
having to break down all the things that happened. And
(28:05):
I've been on these shows listening to you over the years,
and you would be amazed at how many times I
sit there and I think, I really wish I had
paid attention in biology class. I had no clue. I
have to look words up most of the time when
you're talking about stuff. Oh lord, it's just it's amazing
to me. But here's the thing I didn't really know
(28:26):
until I was watching the TV show Ozark that if
you even when you puncture the lungs when you try
to think a body and they tend to float up anyway.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, yeah, they do. I got to tell you. It's
there's any number of ways that I have borne witness
to people attempt to get rid of bodies and failed miserably.
And of course, and I saw this played out a
lot in my career in New Orleans, in particular because
(28:56):
you're It always fascinated me, and this comes back to
to this area as well. It always fascinated me that
we have the I guess you could get into an
argument with a wildlife biologists to say what is the
actual apex predator in North America and some would argue, well,
perhaps a brown bear or a grizzly bear. My money
(29:17):
is always on an alligator. And so being in swampy areas,
I was always fascinated by people that would go to
a swamp and wrap bodies in plastic and then walk
away from them and get rid of a body that way,
as opposed to going out and seeking out an area
where you might have the apex predator on the North
(29:38):
American continent that is an eating machine and you you know,
and I would see that many times. So it played
out many times in cases that I'd worked, thinking if
you had just gone, you know, like half a mile away,
we wouldn't be here. A matter of fact, people would
still be saying, well, you know, we're gym at or
you know where Susie at because we haven't seen a
(30:00):
long time. Well there's a reason I ain't seen her. Uh,
there's Sometimes it almost appears as though, that people overthink things,
and Nancy has actually asked me questions, David, I got
to say this kind of a personal confession here. Nancy's
actually asked things of me on on air before, and
(30:20):
I've been hesitant to say them because because I don't
know who's listening and he's watching, and it's and I've
had people ask me that question. They'll say, does it
ever bother you that you're teaching people? You know, these things?
But I guess you could say that. I guess you
could say that if you were an accounting professor at
Jacksonville State University where I teach. You know, well, if
(30:43):
if you're an accounting professor, or do you think that
they're teaching people how to cook the books, how to
under money? Well, well, part of it maybe I don't.
I don't know, But it all comes down to what's
in the heart of the person, right how they're going
to use that information.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Look at the television shows over the last thirty years. Yeah,
and you're talking about crime dramas and dramas about the
health you know, in the hospital from the Yard of
Grey's anatomy to the relationships that go on in those situations.
You had dead people all the time to crime dramas.
I mean, that's what we are fascinated with, those things
that are on the other side, that crime, the other
(31:20):
side of what we see as polite society and right
and wrong. And the next step is, Okay, once you've
killed somebody, if you want to get away with it,
what are you going to do? And what we end
up reporting on most of the time is what somebody
did that led to them getting caught and spending the
rest of their life in prison. And what boggles my
mind is how people decide to kill somebody so flippantly
(31:44):
that they can't even stay out of jail for a month.
You took a permanent solution, and you didn't plan to
get away enough to be gone for a month.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, Yeah, And that's that is the fascinating part. And
I think that that plays in deeply with this case,
in particular with mister Rice's homicide. And I'll go ahead
and plainly say that this is a homicide and it's
a continuing homicide investigation to you that has yet to
be adjudicated, except for one part that I want to
get to here very quickly. That is fascinating. We don't
(32:16):
see this happen very often. But back back to our
primary focus when we think about these circumstances, what we
got involved, well, two major pieces of evidence in this case, Dave. Obviously,
I've kind of buried the lead here because we do
have a body that has been discovered, that has been
(32:37):
wrapped in a tarp and has been weighted down with
center blocks. But also that old bit of evidence that's
kind of new evidence that keeps popping up is digital evidence.
We've got this individual that has assisted, if you'll allow
me to say that, in the taking of the life
of another person, and his digital fingerprints are all over
(33:01):
this thing.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Dave, unbelievable that forensic data recovery is a I know
it's been ongoing pursuit for the last twenty years, but
now we've gotten to this point where in this particular case,
it wasn't just the fact that they had text messages
from Ms Jackson to mister John tell say I'm gonna
cut his brakes, which, by the way, cutting breaks on
(33:23):
a car really, come on.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Do they watch Mannix? I know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, wow, Barnarie, Harry O, Mannix and Rockford were all
out in the garage Barby Jones. Yeah, yeah, Barnardy did.
But the bottom line is, who really know? Really you're
going to cut breaks? Which one? Do you even know
where to begin with that?
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Right?
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Most people don't look maybe in the movies or TV shows,
but it doesn't I mean, if that's your thing, really
go ahead, you know. Do you really think they're not
going to figure that out when they look under there
and say, gee, this break line has been cut.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
You know precisely? And if your deputy corner you should
know better than that, because yeah, the car is not
a dead body. However, you are around enough people in forensics,
trust me, you know them. And there's a thing called
tool marks. And if you were to even attempt to
do that, uh, and not involving in a homeside I
guess I guess you're going to The whole idea is
(34:19):
that in one of the flattest areas of the country, right,
you're going to cut the brake line on somebody so
that their brake sail and they, I don't know, run
down the one hill that might be in Hory County
and slam into a building or tree. It's it's not
going to profit you much at that point time. So
you look at that that train of logic there, and
(34:40):
you see that these are not individuals that are really
for thinking, as you mentioned just a second ago. They're
they're not They're not able to see the long game here,
because the fact is is that, uh, you know, we
we've got we've got this individual whose phone, whose phone
(35:01):
is literally approximating the same location as the deceitent.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
How was the guydad, Joe, I meant to ask you
that a minute ago. How did he actually die? I
know we had him wrapped up and put in the water,
but was he shot stabbed?
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Well, we shot, he's executed. Yeah, he's he's been executed
and shot in the back of the head apparently, And
of course by the time he's recovered, he's he's in
again in a moderate to advanced state of decomposition. At
this point, I've been dead for a month in the swamp, yeah, river.
But but here we go. We're back to my old
(35:34):
term of cocooning. And so you wrap a body up
and they did this with zip tized. By the way,
they zip tied both ends of the bag and secured
it with cinder blocks. Listen, I mean, I guess and principle.
It's a great idea if you're, you know, watching a
movie and you're writing a script, but is it practical.
(35:55):
There is a high probability they're going to find the
decedents remains, and when you do find them.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Day.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
One of the reasons I like to use that term
cocooning is that you are containing that body in total.
Now you might have water that has entered into the back,
but anything that's there, some of that fine particulate matter
that might be there, You're going to prevent perhaps any
kind of aquatic life from attacking areas where you might
(36:27):
have injuries. They won't be as much as degraded as
they would have been otherwise if they left the body
completely exposed. So, you know, for all of your care
and your preparation of ending this man's life, a man
who by the way, was the father of four children,
(36:50):
you know you've failed miserably.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Day, Yeah, Joe, to try to tell this story timeline,
thumbnail sketch, what everyone you know? Very sure?
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Here we go.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Gregory Rice is forty six years old. He has four
children with Megan Jackson, who is thirty nine. Four children.
They never got married during their long relationship, but have
four children. Now that they are broken up, they're negotiating
visitation and support. Christopher Dantell works as a deputy corner.
I meant to mention Megan Jackson has a contract with
(37:22):
the county to pick up dead bodies and take them
to funeral home or to the corner or whoever needs
the body. That's what she picks up and takes. That's
how Meghan Jackson and Christopher Dantell get to know one another. Again.
He's deputy corner, So there you go. Person delivering the
dead bodies would get to know the deputy corner. When
Gregory Rice is reported missing in the midst of this
(37:46):
support and visitation negotiation with Meghan Jackson, the suspicious eyes
of the county fall on Christopher Dantell and Meghan Jackson.
It's an open secret they're having an affair, apparently, And
when Gregory Rice's body is found in the Little Pedee River,
there's enough evidence to charge murder. He's been shot five times,
(38:07):
he's been wrapped in a tart and tied up to
his cinder blocks and sunk right, but his body floats
back up anyway, and that's why we're here. So at
the Christopher d'antell's trial. They're getting ready to start. Jury
selection is finished, and as things are moving forward, Christopher
d'antell changes his plea from not guilty to murder and
(38:30):
accessory after the fact. He actually says, I'll plead guilty
to accessory after the fact. Give it to the murder charge.
They'll agree to it.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Boom.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Here is what was said by the senior Assistant Solicitor
Mary Ellen Walter to Circuit Court Judge Alex Hymon. I'm
gonna paraphrase Megan Jackson said to Christopher dantell. Essentially, it
was him or you. I need you to go get
(38:58):
him out of the cooler at the Myrtle Beach Funeral
Home and get rid of him. She then goes on
to say, we then have surveillance video of mister don
Tell at the Lowe's Home improvement store purchasing items that
were later found to be used to dispose of greg
Rice's body, specifically a tarp, ragets, straps, two cinder blocks,
and some zip ties. There you have it. It was
(39:20):
that and a few other things that make Christopher Dontell go, Okay,
I'm out. I'm tapped. I am tapping out. And that's
what he does. He is not going to testify at
Megan Jackson's trial coming up in February.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
It's going to be interesting, though, to see how this,
how this unwinds as we move forward, because this is
it's an unusual case. That's why I wanted to cover it,
you know, obviously, you know, from the perspective of an
old medical legal death investigator, and then from the perspective
of of these two that thought that they could get
away with the case. And finally one of the co
(39:56):
conspirators here, you know, has a change of heart at
the last moment. I guess he could potentially see the
light of day at some point in time, but you know,
South Carolina Penitentiary time's hard, Tom Dave, and he's got
a long road ahead of him. I'm going to be
interested if she decides to take maybe a plea going forward,
(40:18):
But at this point, she's still innocent until proven guilty.
She hasn't rolled over on anything. And we'll keep an
eye out for the upcoming trial of Megan Jackson, who,
again thirty nine years old, was working as a livery
driver for the Hory County Corner's Office and decided to
end the life of a man that she had created
(40:42):
for lives with. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
Bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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