They say she killed ex-boyfriend to hide affair with SC coroner. What was revealed
After a nearly 10-month long affair with a long-time coworker, Meagan Jackson allegedly decided to shoot and kill her ex-boyfriend, before making her lover dispose of the body.
Jackson is in the midst of being tried for murder and criminal conspiracy in connection to the death of Greg Rice, the father of her four children.
Jackson’s trial started on June 10. Within the first week there was shocking testimony from her daughter, former Horry County deputy coroner Chris Dontell and his wife.
The trial will restart the morning of June 17.
Dontell, her co-defendant who she was having an affair with, pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact and criminal conspiracy in December 2024 after he admitted to dumping Rice’s body in the river.
Rice went missing in early October 2020 and his body was found wrapped in a tarp in the Little Pee Dee River early Nov. 8, 2020.
Dontell took to the witness stand during Jackson’s trial and answered many questions about his affair with Jackson, how he saw her shoot Rice and how he was allegedly coerced into dumping Rice’s body.
Here is the narrative and testimony Dontell and prosecutors have put together regarding Jackson’s relationship with Dontell, Rice and how she allegedly killed him.
Embedding herself in Dontell’s life
Dontell, a former Horry County deputy coroner, said he first met Jackson in 2018. At the time, they were both working at a body transportation company, which moved bodies from where they died to funeral homes or the morgue. They worked many calls, picking up bodies together.
They started off as work friends, but Jackson soon became close with his family.
Dontell said he and his wife, who have been married since June 2015, were in the process of moving from a condo to a home they bought at River’s Edge Plantation. During the move, Erica Dontell was pregnant and unable to lift heavy boxes.
“I just happened to be talking about it on one of our calls one day that, you know, I had a lot of work to get done,” Dontell said. “I didn’t have much help, and the defendant volunteered to help me lift the bus to move them downstairs.”
Dontell had also invited her to lunch sometime in 2018 or 2019 at Bricks, a restaurant where he was a regular. He went often, going out for drinks or bringing his family out to dinner. At that lunch, Jackson went on to get “hammered drunk,” he said.
As time went on, Jackson appeared to find reasons to be near Dontell. He testified that Jackson became a regular at Bricks and she would often already be there drinking by herself when Dontell arrived separately.
One night at the end of 2019, she paid her tab and then told him she needed to tell him a secret. Jackson had Dontell get into the passenger seat of her work van, then she pulled into the back of the restaurant and parked.
“She said, ‘Have you ever cheated on your wife?’ I said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘Well, you’re about to,’ and climbed over the console on top of me, started to kiss me,” Dontell said.
The married man pushed Jackson off and told her no. At work, she started teasing him, saying he was the only guy who had ever refused her. Jackson kept pursuing Dontell until he said yes and they began having sex on a regular basis.
Near Christmas 2019, Jackson moved into Dontell’s neighborhood with her four children, living only a few blocks from his home. Rice, her ex-boyfriend, lived elsewhere. She became friends with Erica Dontell, the co-defendant’s wife, and their children would spend time together.
After Erica Dontell started a lower-paying job and the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted the maintenance business Dontell owned, the couple began having financial problems, he testified. Combined with raising two small children, they entered a rough patch in the relationship.
During the pandemic lockdown, Jackson and her family began spending more time with the Dontells. Their children saw each other almost every day and the parents would often share meals or hang out.
Jackson even helped the Dontells financially at times. Despite not having a large salary, Jackson said she had inherited money and that is how she afforded everything.
“There were multiple times when she would help us with groceries. She would go to Sam’s Club or BJ’s or Costco and, like, anything she bought for her household, she would buy for our household,” Erica Dontell said at the trial. Jackson would also pay for the entire family’s meal at restaurants when they went out.
In late August, Jackson told Dontell she was pregnant with his child, which complicated matters.
In the fall of 2020, Erica Dontell received an anonymous text message stating that her husband was sleeping with Jackson and that she was pregnant. Erica Dontell could not believe it and said she was in shock. Dontell and Jackson denied the accusation.
Jackson believed Rice was the person who sent the text. At one point, an anonymous package was sent to Erica Dontell with a stack of printed-out screenshots showing texts between Dontell and Jackson. Dontell found the package first and hid it.
Jackson’s flawed relationship with Rice
It is unclear how many years Jackson and Rice were together, but their eldest child, Savannah Rice, was a teenager when they split, Savannah Rice testified. She described her parents’ relationship as toxic, saying they fought a lot.
Savannah Rice described her father as a flawed man who tried his best. While the 19-year-old did not go into depth on her relationship with Jackson, at one point the young woman pointed at Jackson in the courtroom and laughed when the defendant appeared stressed out in the courtroom.
Both Dontells testified that Jackson had described Rice as an abusive man and drug user. Multiple police witnesses said they found no evidence of hard drug use in Rice’s home and his autopsy showed marijuana was the only drug in his system.
The Dontells never met Rice, knowing only what Jackson told them about the man. However, the ex-coroner said Rice’s children gave a different narrative on Rice.
“They spoke very highly (of Rice.) They spoke of him the way I want my children to speak of me,” Dontell said.
The prosecution appeared to imply that Jackson’s motive for killing Rice is the fact that he allegedly told Erica Dontell about the affair.
The night Rice died
Dontell said the night of Oct. 2, 2020, he had been hanging out with Jackson, going shooting and then out to dinner. At one point, Jackson said she needed to go see Rice but did not say why. Dontell drove Jackson to Rice’s apartment complex in Jackson’s work vehicle.
When they got to the apartment complex, Rice was standing outside. Jackson had Dontell make a U-turn and pull up next to the man before she opened the door and fired a gun at Rice multiple times, Dontell testified. Rice had gunshot wounds in his head, chest, hip and leg, a witness testified.
Jackson yelled at Dontell to help her load the body, which he did. They then took him to the Myrtle Beach Funeral Home and stored the body in the cooler until Dontell could dump the body the following evening.
“She said if I told anyone what happened, that she’d kill me and that we had to be in this together. She told me that I had to stay with her,” Dontell testified.
Jackson and Dontell left the funeral home and went back to her house, where they found Savannah Rice watching TV. Jackson took a shower while Dontell chatted with the teenager.
“I’m sorry, Savannah,” Dontell said while crying, with Savannah Rice sitting in the court room. “I tried to make small talk like I hadn’t just watched her mother kill her father.”
Jackson then had Dontell take her back to the funeral home so she could collect items from Rice’s body. The pair stayed together that night, appearing to split at about 8 a.m.
The morning of Oct. 3, Jackson told Dontell they needed to appear normal. She gathered her three youngest children to bring to Rice’s apartment, which Savannah Rice said was odd since Rice always came to Jackson’s house to pick up her siblings. At the apartment, Rice did not answer the door so Jackson called the police and asked for a welfare check.
At this time, it’s believed Jackson placed Rice’s keys and wallet in his home. A few days later, she filed a missing person report for Rice.
The morning after allegedly shooting Rice, Jackson told Dontell he had to get rid of the body. He did not want to and tried to convince her otherwise, he testified.
“I heard her say, ‘Do this or do that or I’m going to kill you.’ And I just watched her kill the father of her kids. I’m going to take it seriously,” Dontell said.
Dontell was not sure how he would dispose of Rice’s body, so he went to Lowe’s Home Improvement the afternoon of Oct. 3 and began gathering whatever he thought he could use. This included a tarp, ratchet straps, zip ties and a cinder block. The shopping trip was later used against him when these items were found on Rice’s body.
Between late Oct. 3 and early Oct. 4, Dontell decided to dump Rice into the Little Pee Dee River. Directly after, he went to Jackson’s home.
“I came in and she smiled at me. She said, ‘Did you do what you needed to do?’ I said yes, and she said, ‘Good boy,’” Dontell said.
Jackson came up with a story for the police, which Dontell followed because he did not want her to hurt his family, he testified. He said he did not feel comfortable divulging what happened the night of Oct. 2, 2020, until his lawyer arranged to protect his family.
When the defense cross examined Dontell, the lawyer called him a “scaredy cat” and asked why he would be afraid of Jackson, who is a small woman.
“I’ve answered this question twice already, and the answer is, because she told me she would kill me, and I have seen her kill the father of her kids, and I believe that she would kill me as well,” Dontell said.
