Woman killed her ex - then her lover helped hide the body in a morgue

Meagan Jackson and Christopher Dontell embarked on an affair which ended in murder

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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.

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.