Dead Ringers: The Savage Murder of Jacqueline Vandagriff
Life’s Slender Thread
On the evening of September 13, 2016, twenty-four-year-old Jackie Vandagriff walked into a bar located across the street from the University of North Texas in Denton looking for a job. Early the next morning, her mutilated remains were found smoldering in a park some twenty miles away. What happened between the time she entered the establishment, and the moment that the grim discovery was made, is every woman’s nightmare.
Surveillance video taken at the bar showed that Jackie had been approached by another patron, a man later identified as Charles Dean Bryant. If the footage was any indication, the pair had quickly hit it off. After spending some time getting acquainted, they had left together.
Once outside, rather than going their separate ways, they had gotten into Bryant’s car and headed to another nightspot where they continued their impromptu date. At around 11:00 p.m., they were captured on video exiting the bar. These haunting images would be the last time Jackie was seen alive by anyone other than her killer.
The following morning, members of a maintenance crew in the city of Grapevine received word that smoke had been seen coming from Acorn Woods Park. When they went to investigate, they discovered what appeared to be remnants of a child’s plastic wading pool with various human body parts inside.
After extinguishing the flames, the workers phoned 911. When police and fire fighters arrived on the scene, they confirmed that the charred remains were those of a woman who had undoubtedly met with foul play.
At around the same time that the body was being transported to the morgue, reports were coming in that a junior from the Texas Woman’s University hadn’t been seen since the previous night. When fingerprints lifted from the remains were compared to those of the missing student, Jackie Vandagriff, they were a perfect match.
Though it was obvious that someone had taken great pains to destroy evidence of their wrongdoing, Jackie’s body had told a horrifying story. Despite the fact that she had been dismembered, the medical examiner was able to determine that stab wounds to her midsection had been inflicted while she was still alive. It was also evident that she had sustained blunt force trauma to the head prior to death, due to the amount of blood that had pooled around the wound.
To add to the grisly nature of the crime, Jackie’s chest had been cracked open and her heart removed. Whether her killer had kept the organ as a macabre souvenir or used it for other purposes was unknown.
An examination of her neck showed that her hyoid bone was fractured, a tell-tale sign that she had been strangled. The amount of bruising suggested that Jackie had been choked with some sort of ligature. With this in mind, her official cause of death was ruled homicide by strangulation.
When detectives retraced Jackie’s steps in her final hours, they learned that she and Bryant had mingled for a while with a group of friends who were enjoying a night out at the second bar. After their images were released to the public, the women had come forward to share what they remembered about the brief interaction.
In a stroke of luck, one of them was able to provide investigators with the name of the man who had stayed glued to Jackie’s side on the last night of her life. After learning that she was interested in physical fitness, Bryant — a part-time bartender and personal trainer — had given the woman his business card. As it turned out, their person of interest was no stranger to law enforcement.
Deadly Parasite
The path was paved for Bryant’s previous run-ins with authorities in June of 2016 when the twenty-nine-year-old began seeing a young woman eleven years his junior named Caitlin Mathis. Although his charming ways had initially swept her off her feet, it wasn’t long before cracks in his well-crafted facade began to show.
Caitlin recalled that they hadn’t been dating long when his possessive, controlling nature had begun to rear its ugly head. No longer able to come and go as she pleased, the teenager knew that she had to get out of the relationship before the last of her free will was eroded.
In August, she got up the nerve to tell Bryant that they were through. She had been worried that he wouldn’t take the news well and she was right. Instead of pulling himself up by his bootstraps and walking away, he had vowed to get her back at all costs. On the very night that she told him it was over, he had begun stalking her.
Within days of the break-up, Bryant began showing up at the University of North Texas where his ex-girlfriend was enrolled as a student. His presence eventually became so intrusive that administrators banned him from setting foot on the campus.
Undeterred, Bryant began turning up at Caitlin’s job. After management informed her that they couldn’t ensure her safety, she had no choice but to seek employment elsewhere and hope that he wouldn’t find her. Though they were no longer together, he was still controlling her life.
When he was found on university grounds after being warned to stay away, Bryant was arrested and charged with trespassing. He was out on bail in a matter of hours.
Realizing that he wasn’t going to stop, Caitlin had applied for, and was granted, a restraining order. To their credit, officers who had witnessed Bryant’s obsessive behavior had been on the victim’s side from the start. Convinced that he was capable of anything, they were invested in keeping her from harm.
In direct violation of the order of protection, Bryant had shown up at Caitlin’s dorm on September 6, banging on the door and insisting that she let him in. Overcome with fear, she had hidden in a closet and called 911.
When police arrived, they found Bryant lurking in the parking lot. He was placed under arrest and charged with stalking. In what was quickly becoming a pattern, he posted bail the same day and was released pending trial. Six days later, Jackie Vandagriff would be in the wrong place at the wrong time and pay for it with her life.
On September 18, four days after the murder, Charles Bryant was picked up once again for violating the restraining order. The complaint stemmed from his attempts to contact Caitlin on social media using fraudulent accounts.
While they had him in custody, detectives decided that it would be a good time to have a talk with him about what happened to Jackie. Initially, he had feigned ignorance, claiming that he had never met her and had no involvement in her death.
After being informed that he and Jackie had been captured on security cameras at two different bars on the night she died, he walked back his denials. His memory suddenly jarred, he said that they had shared some conversation and a few drinks, but that was all. Once they walked out the door, he had gone his way and she had gone hers.
As the interview was being conducted, search warrants were being executed on Bryant’s residence, vehicle, cell phone and computer. By the end of the day, over a hundred items had been removed and entered into evidence, including a hacksaw with what appeared to be hair clinging to the blade, a bone fragment, a tote bag with Jackie’s ID inside and a cache of guns and ammo. A hunting knife, a large zip tie and a stun gun were also confiscated, all of which tested positive for the presence of Jackie’s DNA.
When the exterior of the home was searched, a circle of dead grass in the backyard suggested that an object that had sat on the spot for quite some time had recently been moved. After speaking with several of Bryant’s acquaintances, detectives determined that the object in question had been a blue kiddie pool.
Since it was apparent to everyone involved that Bryant was someone who needed to be handled with kid gloves, famed Texas Ranger Jim Holland, who also happened to be a criminal profiler, took over the interrogation. After spending some time shooting the breeze in an effort to establish trust, he had gotten down to business.
After hearing a rundown of the evidence against him, including the revelation that security footage from a popular chain store showed him purchasing a shovel at 4:00 a.m. on September 14, Bryant had admitted that it didn’t look good. He had even gone so far as to say that he must have killed Jackie but couldn’t remember how or why.
Adept in the art of getting people to talk, Holland had suggested that Bryant search his memory for clues that he may have unknowingly suppressed. After a period of reflection, he suddenly recalled that he and Jackie had engaged in consensual sex in the backseat of his car. He added that, at her urging, he had placed a large zip tie around her neck and pulled it to heighten the experience. Though he was careful to not cinch it too tight, things had gotten out of hand, and she had stopped breathing.
According to him, he had tried to revive her but it was no use. In a panic, rather than calling for help, he had taken her back to his place where he dismembered her body and stuffed the parts into trash bags. He had then driven to Grapevine where he used the kiddie pool from his yard as a receptacle to burn Jackie’s remains.
When asked why he had gone to such drastic measures if her death had been accidental, Bryant blamed his poor judgement on alcohol consumption. The way he remembered it, he simply hadn’t been thinking straight.
Though Ranger Holland had listened intently as Bryant spun his yarn, he had taken the account with a grain of salt. An expert in his field, he was convinced that the man sitting before him was a serial killer in the making.
Although the sloppy way he had disposed of her body had revealed his inexperience, the fact that he had dismembered the corpse when such extreme action wasn’t necessary, indicated that he had taken pleasure in butchering his victim. Any law enforcement agent worth their salt will tell you that a perpetrator who’s willing to cut a human body into pieces isn’t apt to stop killing once they get started.
Holland also knew that — contrary to Bryant’s claims — there was no semen present in or on Jackie’s body, nor had there been anything else to indicate that she had engaged in sex of any kind prior to her death. These findings led investigators to believe that Bryant had made up the story of their kinky sexual encounter as a way of explaining the presence of the victim’s DNA on the zip tie found at his residence.
The Next Best Thing
As the interrogation was coming to a close, Holland had decided to test a theory that had been brewing in the minds of detectives from the moment they first laid eyes on Caitlin. Diving in headfirst, he asked Bryant if perhaps Jackie’s uncanny resemblance to his former girlfriend had prompted him to pick her out of the crowd. He had even broached the possibility that he had taken his anger out on her when he couldn’t get to the actual target of his aggression.
Bryant had scoffed at the notion, even though it was apparent from his stunned reaction that the question had hit home. While he might not have been willing to admit that the two women could have been sisters, everyone else could see it as plain as day.
Coincidentally, of the dozens of bars he could have gone to that night, he had chosen the one that sat directly across the street from the college Caitlin was attending. What’s more, he was aware that she had frequented the establishment in the past.
Confident that they had their man, detectives placed Bryant under arrest for the murder of Jackie Vandagriff. After entering a plea of not guilty, he was remanded to custody awaiting trial. With him safely locked away for the time being, prosecutors delved further into the suspected killer’s past.
When they took a look at his dating history, authorities learned that Bryant was someone who had a habit of falling fast and hard for the women in his life. While he had initially won them over by playing the role of the ideal boyfriend, he was never able to keep the ruse going for long. Within weeks, and sometimes days, his true colors would show through. When his partners got a glimpse of the manipulative, demanding side of his personality, they wasted no time putting distance between themselves and the man who was not the nice guy he pretended to be.
Eight months after his murder indictment was handed down, Bryant faced a grand jury once again, this time for possession of child pornography that had been found on his cell phone during the search for evidence in Jackie’s slaying.
While the child pornography case was still in the works, Bryant’s murder trial got underway in April of 2018. After a week of listening to testimony from both sides, the jury found the defendant guilty of murder and evidence tampering. He ultimately received a sentence of life in prison plus twenty years. He will be eligible for parole in 2048.
The convicted murderer appealed his sentence on the grounds that the state had not met its burden of proof. According to his defense team, since no direct evidence of his involvement had been presented, his guilt had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
After a thorough investigation into the matter was concluded, the court ruled that the evidence clearly showed that Bryant had “knowingly and intentionally” caused the death of Jacqueline Vandagriff. Convinced that she had perished as a result of “homicidal violence,” not rough sex gone wrong, the justices had denied his appeal.
No Conscience, No Regret
Lest there be any doubt remaining as to the depravity that dwells within Charles Bryant, Caitlin would later share that she had received a friend request from Jackie Vandagriff’s phone on the day after she was murdered. Since the correspondence couldn’t have come from the victim, the only conclusion that could be reached was that Bryant was using the identity of the woman he had just stabbed, strangled and chopped into pieces to get close to Caitlin.
Along those same lines, a message had been posted on Jackie’s social media on the morning after her murder that read “Never knew I could feel like this.” While their meaning is unclear, it’s believed that the chilling words had been those of her killer, Charles Bryant.
Jackie Vandagriff had dreams of completing her education and becoming a nutritionist and wellness specialist. Her desire to help others had been a driving force in her life. Sadly, her trusting nature and innate goodness had made her the perfect victim of a man who was consumed with displaced rage.
Unbeknownst to her, Jackie — whose delicate features and long blonde hair made her a dead ringer for Caitlin Mathis — had walked right into Bryant’s trap. All things considered, there is little doubt that even as he laughed and smiled along with her, he had already decided that she was going to die before the night was over.
While the word monster gets tossed around frequently in the world of true crime, few could argue that it suits Charles Bryant to a T.
Resources:
·NBC Dallas-Fort Worth
·cbsnews.com
·denonrc.com
·ksat.com
·law.justia.com
·Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Images used under provisions of the Fair Use Act for purposes of reporting and education.