When Gregory Rice died in 2020, his longtime partner, Meagan Jackson, quickly became a suspect in the case. However, the case got even more complicated when it was revealed that Jackson was having an affair with a coroner who may have been involved in the killing. Investigative reporter Kristin Thorne breaks down the case in the latest episode of Luxury Handbag Shopping’s Uncovered.
Rice went missing in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in October 2020, and his body was found about a month later by a woman who was fishing. After she called 911, police arrived and discovered that Rice had five gunshot wounds in his body.
Upon the discovery, police first went to Jackson amid the investigation. “They had been separated from each other for a while, but they had four kids together,” Thorne explained of Rice and Jackson’s relationship dynamic.
When Jackson was asked where she was the night that Rice disappeared, she said she was with her boyfriend, Christopher Dontell. It was soon discovered that Dontell was a coroner in Myrtle Beach, and he happened to be married. Additionally, it was revealed that Jackson and Dontell had been having an affair for about one year at the time of Rice’s disappearance.
The case got more complicated when police found surveillance footage of Dontell walking out of a hardware store as he carried the exact items used to dispose of Rice’s body.
Both Jackson and Dontell went on trial for Rice’s murder, and the coroner quickly insisted he had nothing to do with shooting Rice. He told authorities that Jackson committed the murder alone and he agreed to testify against her. However, he remained accused of disposing of Rice’s body.
As Thorne dug deeper into the story, she spoke to Sun News reporter Alexa Lewis about attending the trial. Lewis noted that prosecutors brought up that both Dontell and Jackson were familiar with transporting bodies due to their work at the coroner’s office. “They essentially knew what they were doing when it came to getting the body from point A to point B,” she said.
When it came to Dontell’s testimony, he said “that he helped her dispose of the body because she had threatened to kill him and that he was worried she would follow through on that.”
“He’d said that in the past, she had, kind of in passing, mentioned wanting to kill Greg Rice or her children or him, but it seemed, I guess, just kind of like a joke. Like, he didn’t think much of it,” Lewis recalled of Dontell’s testimony. “[After] the shooting of Greg Rice, he started to take it more seriously. And then, essentially, he said he just carried out what she asked him to do because he feared for his own life and his family.”
Also during the trial, Rice’s daughter spoke directly to Dontell.
“She spoke a lot about just how she and her siblings would, like, never get to live a normal life after this and how they essentially lost both of their parents through this process,” Lewis said. “She did speak a lot about how Christopher Dontell had become close to, like, her mother and she and her siblings, and that he had, like, comforted her while she was crying about the fact that her father was missing. And then later, when she found out that he was actually involved in that, that just made it hurt 10 times worse.”
The daughter also claimed that Dontell offered Rice’s children to “have them come visit” and offered them “any kind of closure he could.” However, the daughter wasn’t “ready” to have that experience and seemed to feel “betrayed” by Dontell for his involvement in her father’s death.
Dontell eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and accessory, and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2025. Meanwhile, Jackson was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
