North Texas, Grapevine Lake. September 14th, 2016, 6:30 in the morning. The Grapevine Fire Department received a call about something burning near the lake. When they arrived, they found a small blue children’s pool sitting out in the middle of the grass. The kind you can pick up at any big box store for $20.
The kind kids splash around in on summer afternoons. Inside it was a body. Uh that they located a body that had apparently been had had been set on fire. Uh the body uh there was some degree of dismemberment to the body. Uh investigators and crime scene technicians arrived on the scene and began investigating shortly thereafter.
Uh we requested the response of the FBI evidence removal and recovery team uh to assist us in that investigation. What those first responders found at Grapevine Lake that morning was so brutal, so deliberately cruel that seasoned detectives men and women who had spent decades working some of the darkest cases in Texas would later say they had never seen anything like it. Not once.
Not in all their years on the job. The body had been dismembered. It had been set on fire. The burns were so severe and so total that investigators standing over the scene in the early morning light could not determine the most basic facts about the victim in front of them. They could not tell if they were looking at an adult or a child.
They could not tell if the person had been a man or a woman. They had almost nothing to work with. Almost. There was just enough skin left on the fingertips. And through those fingerprints, investigators were finally able to put a name to what had been done. She was 24 years old. Her name was Jacqueline Ray Vandagriff.
Everyone in her life called her Jackie. She had no belongings on her, no bag, no phone, nothing to tell investigators where she had been or who she had spent her last hours with. What they did know was that she lived nearly 20 miles away in Denton, Texas. She had not been reported missing, which meant whatever had happened to her had happened fast.
It had happened within hours of her leaving home. The dismemberment alone would have been enough to make this one of the most disturbing cases in the county’s history. But investigators would later learn one detail that elevated this crime into something that seasoned law enforcement genuinely struggled to process. Jackie’s heart had been removed from her body, deliberately cut out.
A witness reported seeing what appeared to be a man standing over the fire before walking away from the scene. That was all they had. No description good enough to work with, no direction, no name. And then, a day after her body was found, something chilling happened. Jackie’s Twitter account became active.
A new post appeared on her profile. It read, “Never knew I could feel like this.” Investigators drew the obvious conclusion. Her killer had her phone. And now, somewhere out there, that person was watching, waiting, possibly even sending a message. The hunt was on. Hello everyone. My name is Jacqueline Vandagriff, but friends call me Jackie.
Um I am currently a junior here at Texas Woman’s University, and my major is nutrition with an emphasis in wellness. I chose this major because I realized while working as an aesthetician, which is skin care if you’re not familiar, um I realized the importance of nutrition and just overall health and decided that this is what I was going to study.
So, thank you for watching. I am really looking forward to learning about all of you and learning with you in this class. That was Jackie speaking directly to camera, relaxed and warm, full of the kind of quiet confidence that comes from someone who genuinely knows who she is and where she is going. She was 24 years old.
She was a junior at Texas Woman’s University. She was somebody’s best friend. She was somebody’s daughter. And she was somebody who had plans, real ones, the kind you can almost reach out and touch. Jacqueline Ray Vandagriff grew up in Frisco, Texas. From the very beginning, she was a kid who was curious about everything.
A voracious reader, the kind of child who devoured books not because anyone told her to, but because the world genuinely fascinated her and she wanted to understand as much of it as she possibly could. She was athletic, too. By the time she was 3 years old, she had already started gymnastics. 3 years old.
She would go on to compete at level five in state competitions. That number alone tells you something about her character. Her best friend shared her name. They called themselves Jackie Squared. Her best friend said she was the smartest person she had ever known in her life, that Jackie could have done absolutely anything she wanted with her future.
She had this rare and genuine gift for meeting people exactly where they were. You could be completely yourself around her without any of the performance that usually comes with meeting someone new. She was confident. She was outgoing. She was present. And at the same time, there was something disarming and calm about her that made a room feel warmer just by her being in it.
After graduating high school, Jackie became a licensed aesthetician. Skin care, as she explained in that video, because not everyone is familiar with the term. And then she enrolled at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, declaring her major in nutrition and food science with an end goal of becoming a qualified nutritionist.
It made perfect sense for someone who had always cared deeply about health and wellness, who had spent years thinking about how the body works and what it needs. She wasn’t just studying it academically, she was living it. She was becoming it. Things were going well. Life was moving in exactly the right direction.
Jackie was happy. And by every account from everyone who knew and loved her, she had every single reason to be. In the weeks leading up to September 13th, 2016, Jackie had been doing some thinking about her personal life. Like a lot of people her age, she had been using dating apps. But recently, she had told her friends that she wanted to come off the apps and get back out into the real world.
Meet someone face-to-face. Feel things out in person, the old-fashioned way. She was also keeping an eye open for part-time work, something flexible that would fit around her studies. So, on the evening of September 13th, with both of those things in mind, Jackie got ready and headed out into Denton.
She was going to put herself out there, maybe ask about job openings at a few places, see who she met. It was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday night. It was the kind of thing that millions of young people do every single week without a second thought in towns and cities all over this country. Detectives were later able to trace her movements precisely through surveillance footage and witness testimony.
She made her way toward the strip of bars near the University of North Texas campus. The first place she walked into was the Fry Street Public House bar. She She a seat at the bar and fell into easy conversation with the bartender, the kind of natural low-stakes chat that happens in bars all the time.
Then, a man sat down two seats away from her. He joined the conversation and Jackie and this man seemed to connect almost immediately, laughing together, showing each other things on their phones, ordering drinks. By the time they left the bar, they were leaving at the same time, side by side.
They walked into a second bar just down the block, Shots and Crafts. They took a seat together and were joined by a group of women. The group hung out for about half an hour, easy and social, just people on a Tuesday night. Jackie seemed completely comfortable, happy even. She had absolutely no reason not to be.
At 9:45 in the evening, Jackie and the man left the bar together. No one followed them out. No one appeared to be watching them or paying them any particular attention. They got into his car and he drove to a nearby gas station where a camera caught one final image of Jackie Vandagriff alive, sitting in the front passenger seat, relaxed, perfectly calm, perfectly at ease with the man sitting next to her.
That was the last footage of her ever captured. After that gas station, their trail went cold. And less than 9 hours later, her body would be found burning at Grapevine Lake. Investigators needed to identify the man Jackie had spent her final hours with and this is where the case caught its first real break.
A couple of the women the pair had met at Shots and Crafts that night remembered the man clearly. One of them had been given his business card. He had been talking about fitness, about training, and had handed it over the way personal trainers sometimes do when they think they found a potential client.
The name on that card was Charles Dean Bryant. 30 years old personal trainer, bartender. Running his name through the system turned up a few things. A forgery charge, marijuana possession, a misdemeanor assault, the kind of record that raises an eyebrow but doesn’t immediately set off the loudest alarm bells on its own.
But then there was one entry that stood apart from everything else. Charles Bryant had been arrested three times for stalking and harassing a young woman. And just 3 days before Jackie’s body was found, 3 days, a protective order had been issued against him. So who was this woman? And what had Charles Bryant done to her? Her name was Caitlyn.
She was 18 years old when she started dating Charles Bryant in June of 2016, just 3 months before Jackie was killed. He was 29 at the time, more than a decade older than her. By Caitlyn’s account, he was charming in the beginning. Attentive and funny, frequently showing up with flowers. One of their regular spots, their go-to date location, was Grapevine Lake.
The same lake where Jackie would later be found. Caitlyn’s mother met him once. Once was enough. Call it a mother’s instinct. Call it the kind of knowledge that bypasses the rational brain and lands somewhere deeper. She took one look at Charles Bryant and felt something cold and certain settle in her gut.
She told her daughter directly, “He’s going to hurt you. He’s going to do something bad.” Those words would come back to haunt them both in ways neither of them could have anticipated. It didn’t take long for Caitlyn to start noticing the signs herself. Controlling behavior dressed up as affection. A suffocating kind of attention that shifted the air in any room.
The kind of relationship where the boundaries start contracting so gradually that by the time you realize how small your world has become, it already feels normal. She made the decision to end things. It was the right call. Charles Bryant did not accept it. He was relentless. He created fake email accounts to bypass any blocks she had put up.
He turned up wherever she was. He ran a parallel campaign to anyone who would listen, telling them that Caitlyn was unstable, that she was overreacting, that she was the problem. The classic well-worn playbook of someone who cannot tolerate being left, who would rather rewrite the story than face the reality of it.
When Caitlyn enrolled at the University of North Texas, a genuine fresh start, a new city, a new chapter, she believed she might finally be able to breathe. She had never told Charles where she was going to be living. Then, he knocked on her dormitory door, carrying flowers, carrying a letter, having somehow talked his way past the security desk.
Caitlyn hid in a closet and called 911. He was arrested, and then, within the same day, he was back on campus. Caitlyn did you see he hates Charles inside before you? You know for sure it was him? Yeah, I know it’s him. Sure 27, myself and 443 on a vehicle. You have a spill here? No. What’s your name? Another woman who had gone on a few dates with Bryant described an almost identical pattern.
They had barely spent any real time together. They had never even kissed, and yet he had told her he loved her. She described it as overwhelming, too much, too fast, with an intensity that had no basis in what they had actually shared. He had talked to her about his childhood, told her he had been sexually abused as a young boy. She said something in the way he spoke about it made her believe it was true.
Whether it was or not, it was being deployed, weaponized almost, as a way to create emotional intimacy before it had been earned. With a name in hand and a history that was already deeply troubling, investigators began building a timeline of the night of September 13th. And what that timeline showed was a portrait of a man moving with methodical, deliberate purpose toward something catastrophic.
Cell phone records placed Charles and Jackie together from the moment they left the bar. Their phones tracked in sync, moving south from Denton toward Haslet, the area where Charles lived. At 10:56 that night, Charles was active on Facebook, posting with the casual, swaggering tone of someone who had not a care in the world.
His post read, “Teach you tricks that will blow your mind.” Jackie’s phone was detected near his home at approximately 1:30 in the morning. At 4:41 in the morning, surveillance footage at a Walmart in Haslet showed Charles Dean Bryant walking calmly through the store. He selected a shovel. He paid for it. He left.
Less than 2 hours after that transaction, the Grapevine Fire Department arrived at the lake. If that sequence alone wasn’t enough to put Charles Bryant at the center of this investigation, what came next was. The very next day, the day after Jackie’s burned and dismembered body was discovered, he posted on Facebook again. His post read, “Full moon.
Let’s see what trouble I can get into.” And he tried to contact Kaitlin. He was now the unambiguous primary suspect. Investigators reached out to Kaitlin to check on her safety. Before they had confirmed a single detail, before they had given her any information at all, Kaitlin asked them, “Is this about the murder in Grapevine? Is this about Charles?” She already knew.
Because Charles had made contact with Kaitlin, he had violated the conditions of his protective order. That gave investigators exactly what they needed. They arrested him. And for the first time, Charles Dean Bryant was sitting in a room where they could ask him directly, formally, about Jackie Vandagriff. September 18th, 2016.
Four days after Jackie was found. Charles Bryant sat down at Grapevine Police Department. Investigators showed him a photograph of Jackie Vandagriff. He said he might have seen her at a bar at some point, but claimed they had no real interaction, and that he didn’t know her personally. While Charles was being interviewed, a separate team was methodically going through his property.
They were finding significant things. But there was still a critical gap. Investigators still could not confirm with certainty how Jackie had died. And without that, building a murder charge was going to be harder than the mountain of circumstantial evidence might suggest. As the interview continued, Charles was beginning to close down, to become guarded, to feel the shape of where things were heading.
That is when the decision was made to bring in Texas Ranger Jim Holland. Jim Holland was not a standard detective. Over the course of nearly three decades in law enforcement, he had worked hundreds of homicide cases with a specific focus on what he described as psychopathic and sociopathic crimes. He had sat across from people who had done things that most of us genuinely cannot bring ourselves to fully imagine.
And over all those years, he had arrived at an insight that most people find surprising. Given the right conditions, most of them want to talk. They want someone to know what they did. They want to tell the story. Jim Holland’s entire method was built around that truth. Hey, how you doing? It’s good to see you, sir. Jim came in as the good cop.
Not in a theatrical transactional way, but with genuine warmth, genuine patience. He wanted Charles to feel understood. He described wanting Charles to see him almost as a friend. You know, you’re not a violent dude. You haven’t haven’t really been in trouble. You know, you obviously work out. I mean, you’re a stud, right? As someone in his corner, someone who was not there to judge him, but to listen.
And it worked in a way that none of the previous interviews had. Charles became talkative. He smiled. He relaxed into the conversation in a way he had not done before. He clearly trusted Jim in a way that would ultimately prove to be his undoing. And as the conversation deepened, and Jim began to lean in, literally, physically, the space between them shrinking, the room growing smaller in the way rooms do when something important is about to be said, Charles began to move inch by inch toward the truth.
Jim got him to admit that he had been with Jackie that night. He said he had overheard her asking the bartender about job openings and jumped in to talk. He said when they eventually left, it had started raining, so he offered her a ride home. It made sense it was raining, and I offered her a ride home.
She had been grateful and happily accepted. He framed it as a simple kind act on a rainy night. Jim ordered pizza. He poured coffee. He set two slices down on a paper plate with all the casualness in the world, and then, almost as an afterthought, gently steered the conversation toward Caitlyn. Whether Jackie had reminded him of her, whether some version of that obsession had come into play in what happened.
Was there a time that you pictured her as this girl from the gym or did anything like that come into play? Mhm. Mhm. Okay, so so something happens. Bam, there’s there’s a snap, and we need to figure out what that is. And maybe you you know, she got mad. Maybe she’s giving you all the signals, and and then cuts you off.
I mean, there could be all kinds of different things going on here, right? I mean, chicks, right? You know chicks? Charles went quiet. He deflected. And then, 3 hours into the conversation, he finally offered his version of events. He said the two of them had been hooking up in his car, completely consensually, he insisted.
He said Jackie had asked him to choke her with a cable tie. He claimed that neither of them had tightened it intentionally. He said he didn’t remember it happening, and then he looked down, and she wasn’t breathing anymore. She didn’t fight you in any way when So, you think it just tightened up on its own, basically? I don’t think she had a way to get her hands on something or Okay.
Then what happened? I tried to wake her and then she kind of just froze up. She couldn’t And nothing. Jim Holland said he knew immediately that this account was a fabrication from start to finish. The medical examiner had found no evidence that any sexual activity had taken place between them. None at all. There was nothing in the physical evidence that supported even a fragment of the story Charles was telling.
What he was constructing in real time, in that room, on camera, was a narrative designed to do exactly one thing, cast himself not as a predator who had made a deliberate choice, but as someone who had been caught up in a tragic accident he couldn’t have prevented. Jim had seen this exact pattern before. In all his years interviewing people who had committed extreme violence, he said they almost never give you the complete story from beginning to end.
They leave out everything that makes them look calculated and intentional. They bend every detail toward victimhood, toward accident, toward the sense that things just happened around them rather than because of them. The goal is always the same, to be the person something terrible happened to rather than the person who made something terrible happen.
Jim said the sheer volume of dishonesty that came out of Charles Bryant’s mouth during that interview was, in his considerable experience, astonishing. He was clear about his belief. Charles killed Jackie Vandagriff intentionally. And he believed it had been ignited and driven by his obsession with Caitlyn, an obsession that had been feeding on itself for months, growing darker and more dangerous with every arrest, every restraining order, every rejection.
And what do you see in the pool? I don’t It was just flames. I don’t know. Tell me exactly what you see occurring after that. I don’t know. I couldn’t tell what it was. And what happens next? It exploded on fire. The fire? Why do you burn the body? Just to get rid of it. While Jim Holland worked Charles Bryant in the interrogation room, investigators were working his property and what they found there assembled piece by piece into a complete and devastating picture.
Inside the house, a large hunting knife consistent with the type of weapon that could have been used in the dismemberment of a body. Jackie’s Texas Woman’s University bag was found stuffed in his rubbish and a white plastic zip tie with Jackie’s hair still caught in it. Inside his car, Jackie’s cell phone battery separated from the handset itself as though someone had wanted to prevent the device from being tracked or located.
And a stun gun. Jackie’s DNA was present on the electrodes. The blue plastic children’s pool that Jackie’s body had been found burning inside. It had come from his own backyard. In that same backyard, there was evidence that someone had tried to dig a hole large enough to bury a body. The reconstruction that investigators arrived at was this.
Charles had attempted to bury Jackie in his yard first. When that plan changed for whatever reason, he moved her remains to Grapevine Lake and set the pool on fire. The Walmart footage showing him buying a shovel at 4:41 in the morning fit precisely into that sequence. And then, there was what was found on his phone, child abuse material.
Texas Ranger Jim Holland surveying the full picture of what Charles Bryant had done and the kind of person he was revealing himself to be was direct and unsparing in his assessment. Jackie’s case, he said, bore all the hallmarks of a serial killer committing their very first murder. The improvised chaotic crime scene, the mistakes, the evidence left behind in the panic of someone who was still learning.
He said, “I think this was his disheveled murder. Was he going to stop? Why would he? There is no doubt in my mind that if Bryant had not been arrested by the Grapevine Police Department, he would have continued to kill. And I think as he got better and better at it, it would have become almost impossible to catch him.
Charles Dean Bryant was charged with a capital murder of Jackie Vandagriff. The night Charles was arrested, Caitlyn logged onto Facebook. She had spent months living with the specific relentless fear of this man. The unexpected knocks at her door, the fake email accounts, the protective order that never quite felt like enough protection.
The awareness that somewhere nearby he was still thinking about her, still watching, still waiting. And now, scrolling through her feed in a state of shock, reading the early reports of the arrest, she searched a name she had never heard before. Jackie Vandagriff. And Caitlyn froze. Because they were already Facebook friends. In the hours after killing Jackie, Charles had taken her phone.
He used it to post on her Twitter, and he used it to send a friend request from Jackie’s account directly to Caitlyn. The woman he had been stalking for months. The woman for whom a protective order had been issued. The woman he was legally forbidden from contacting in any way. Sit with that for a moment. He had just killed a 24-year-old woman.
And his very next act was to use the dead woman’s phone to reach across to the one he hadn’t gotten to yet. Caitlyn said, “I think he really wanted to kill me. I think he wanted me dead. I don’t know if he wanted to send me a message or just express his anger. He just took things way out of hand.” Jim Holland’s read on the night of September 13th was this.
Charles Bryant walked into that bar in Denton in what Jim described as mission mode. He was going to kill someone that night. He had made that decision before he sat down at that bar. Whether the intended target was Caitlyn specifically or someone who looked enough like her to carry the weight of his obsession. Jim believed it didn’t matter to him.
He had locked onto Jackie Vandagriff. And Jackie, who had walked into that bar with nothing but hope and ordinary human curiosity, had been in the wrong place at the wrong time in the path of the wrong man. Tonight, family and friends are mourning the loss of Jackie Vandagriff, the TWU student murdered last week. A vigil has just begun in Frisco and NTTV’s Blake Holland is here with more.
Blake Drake and Shelby, tonight friends and family of Jackie Vandagriff are gathered here at Frisco Common Park not to remember the horrific crime that occurred last week, but to look back on the life of a young woman gone too soon. Yeah, you don’t ever think something like this could happen to somebody you know.
Friends like Olivia Reyes, who recently started living with Jackie, were shocked to hear the news this week that a body found burned and mutilated last Wednesday in Grapevine had been identified as Jackie. Disbelief. I was I was really shocked. Um it’s really difficult news to process and I’m still going through that process right now. Um but it’s upsetting.
On Sunday, police arrested this man, 30-year-old Charles Bryant, on a charge of capital murder. Surveillance video shows the pair at a Denton bar just hours before her body was found. Cell phone records also show the two traveled from the bar to Bryant’s Haslet home. A purse belonging to Vandagriff was found by police in a trash can at the home on Sunday and in the hours before Vandagriff’s body was found, Bryant is seen purchasing a shovel at an area Walmart matching up with evidence in his backyard that someone had tried to dig a hole. Despite
the large amount of evidence, those who knew Van NeGriff were still left with questions into the murder of a selfless friend who they say did not deserve this. Something like this should never happen. And we do know tonight that Charles Dean Bryant does remain in jail on $1 million bond on that charge of capital murder.
Tonight’s candlelight vigil is set to get underway in around sunset. Charles Bryant pleaded not guilty. His defense had a single line they were going to hold, no matter what. This was a tragedy, but it was an accident. Two people who had been drinking heavily, who engaged in what the defense called consensual sexual activity. An accidental death followed by a man who panicked and made a catastrophic series of decisions trying to cover it up and protect himself.
Terrible decisions? Without question. Criminal? Absolutely. Tampering with evidence for certain. But deliberate murder with intent? They said, “No.” The prosecution had a different story entirely. And the evidence they were working with told it far more powerfully than any argument ever could. The medical examiner had found no evidence of sexual activity. None.
The defense’s foundational narrative, the entire premise of the accidental death, rested on a claim that the physical evidence flatly contradicted. Jackie’s belongings were found at his home and in his car. Items he had clearly tried to dispose of. Her DNA was on the electrodes of the stun gun. Her hair was on the zip tie.
The kiddie pool came from his backyard. The shovel purchase was on camera, timestamped at 4:41 in the morning. And then there was the dismemberment. The prosecution did not let the jury look away from that. If this had been a genuine accident, a panicked tragic situation with no criminal intent behind the death itself, why was the body taken apart? What does dismembering someone have to do with covering up an accidental death? And then there was the heart.
The prosecution asked the jury to hold that image, to really hold it. If Jackie died by accident, why was her heart cut out of her body? What does that tell us on a fundamental human level about the person who did that? The prosecution’s theory of motive aligned exactly with what Jim Holland had put forward.
Jackie was victim number one. Caitlyn was intended to be victim number two. The stalking, the harassment, the obsession that had consumed Charles Bryant for months, it was all connected. It didn’t begin with Jackie Vandagriff. And without this arrest, without this trial, it would not have ended with her.
That’s right. Testimony started today in the trial of Charles Bryant Jr., the man seen with Jackie at the bar that night. Our David Goins has been tweeting and updating us from the courtroom. He joins us now live with the latest from the court today. A good afternoon, Cynthia. Testimony wrapped up here about uh 10 minutes ago.
Jurors so far have heard descriptions but have not yet seen surveillance video at a variety of Denton businesses that show Jackie Vandagriff with the man prosecutors say killed her hours later. Despite the orders, Jackie On the stand today, Ricky Vandagriff says it wasn’t like Jackie to not call or to make plans for her mom’s birthday.
It was on that day, just a few hours later, the couple learned that Jackie was dead. During opening statements, defense attorneys admit that Bryant did commit a crime by attempting to dispose of her body, but they told jurors that she died during what the defense called consensual sex in Bryant’s car. He’s taking a wig out.
He is in the car with a young lady who has died in the during the course of sex. However, prosecutors plan to lay out Jackie’s final hours for jurors to show how Bryant took the vibrant 24-year-old out of a bar and away from her loved ones forever. Tragically, an evil, destructive figure stepped in front of her on that path.
Jurors on Tuesday are expected to see a lot of surveillance video in the courtroom. This trial is expected to last all week. Charles Bryant faces life in prison if he’s found guilty. Live in Fort Worth, David Goins, Channel 8 News. The cell phone testimony was particularly powerful. An FBI expert walked the jury through the digital trail with clinical precision.
Both phones moving in perfect sync from Denton southward to Haslet. Jackie’s device pinging towers progressively closer to Charles Bryant’s address through the early hours of the morning. The signal eventually going silent at the time investigators believe she was killed. It was like watching a map being drawn in real time, in retrospect, across the final hours of someone’s life.
The next activity I have is on the victim’s phone from 12:58 to 1:32 a.m. And the phone the bar is right about right here. So, we started moving south. And so, 12:58, we lost this tower sector. It shifts, goes farther south at 1:16 a.m. And then at 1:10 a.m., so kind of somewhere between 1:10 and 1:16, I’d say there’s overlap between these two towers.
During the proceedings, there was one significant blow to the state’s case. The judge had to rule on whether Kaitlin’s testimony, her full and detailed account of the stalking, the harassment, the months of fear, the protective order, the dormitory door, could be placed in front of the jury. Kaitlin sat on the stand without the jury present and told her story.
All of it. Bravely and completely. The judge listened and then ruled that her testimony could not be admitted. That was a hard blow to absorb. The full context of who Charles Bryant was, the documented pattern of his behavior, the specific obsession that investigators believed had ultimately led to Jackie’s death.
The jury would not hear any of it directly from Caitlyn. They would have to reach their verdict based on the physical evidence and the timeline alone. The prosecution also made a strategic decision around Jim Holland’s six-hour recorded interrogation. Rather than playing the full recording for the jury, they made a calculated choice.
They told the defense that if Charles wanted the jury to hear his version of events, he was welcome to take the stand and tell it himself. In his own words, under oath, subject to cross-examination. It was a bold move, but it was a smart one because Charles on the stand trying to reconstruct and maintain his story, trying to remember which version he had told and in which sequence, trying to hold the timeline together across six hours of recorded conversation that prosecutors had sitting right there in
front of them, would have been an extraordinarily precarious position. Every contradiction would have been waiting for him. Charles Bryant declined to testify. Two hours. That is how long the jury deliberated before returning their verdict. Two hours to weigh everything that had been placed before them.
The surveillance footage, the cell phone data, the DNA evidence, the zip tie with her hair caught in it, the shovel, the kiddie pool from his backyard, the attempted burial, the stun gun, the dismemberment, the heart. And to arrive at the only conclusion that all of that evidence taken together supported.
We the jury find the defendant Charles Dean Bryant Jr. guilty of the offense of murder. Guilty. Charles Dean Bryant was convicted of capital murder because the prosecution could not prove additional aggravating factors beyond reasonable doubt. No confirmed sexual assault, no kidnapping charge that could be fully substantiated. He avoided the death penalty.
In 2018, he was sentenced to life in prison. An additional 20 years were added for tampering with evidence to run concurrently with the life sentence. He showed no reaction when the verdict was read aloud in court. And in a statement, Jackie Vanger’s parents said this is the day they’ve waited more than 19 months for.
However, it certainly doesn’t ease any of the grief over the loss of their daughter. Her convicted killer, Charles Bryant, today in court showed no reaction when the jury convicted him of murder and then sentenced him to life in prison. Now, during closing arguments for for the sentencing phase, prosecutors brought up the fact that Charles Bryant had a stalking incident with a previous girlfriend and that investigators had also discovered child pornography on his phone.
Two additional reasons they told jurors to sentence him to the max of life in prison. After the verdict was read, Vanger’s family, who sat through days of horrific and graphic testimony surrounding her murder, shared that they are starting an endowment at TWU in Denton where Jackie went to school to, in their words, build on her legacy of kindness and compassion.
What would Jackie say if we could talk to her? We believe she would say, “Remember me. Remember my hopes and dreams for the future and my plans to get there.” It was a hard case. It was hard for the state. It’s hard for the defense, but I think that um our system works. Bryant’s attorneys added they’ve already appealed the decision.
He also was convicted of 20 years in prison for tampering with evidence. That will be served at the same time that this life sentence that the jury handed down this afternoon. Live in Tarrant County, David Goins, Channel 8 News. Charles Bryant is eligible to be considered for parole after serving 20 years of his life sentence.
That is not a guaranteed release. It is a hearing, a review, a decision that will be made by people who will look at everything he did and everything he is and determine whether he should ever be permitted to walk freely in the world again. Time will tell what that decision looks like. Jackie Vandagriff was 24 years old with an entire life stretched out in front of her.
She was studying to help people feel well in their own bodies. She was the kind of friend who met you exactly where you were, no performance required. She had started gymnastics at 3 years old and had never stopped reaching for the next thing. She was someone’s Jackie squared. She was the smartest person her best friend had ever known.
She left a beautiful legacy in the people she loved and who loved her back. Her family established an endowment at Texas Woman’s University in Jackie’s name, building, in her own words and her own field, on what her friend described as her beautiful legacy of kindness and compassion. Her uncle asked what Jackie would say to us now if she could.
He believed she would say, “Remember me. Remember my hopes and my dreams for the future. Remember the plans I was making to get there. So, remember her not as a case number, not as a crime scene photograph, not as a headline, but as a 24-year-old woman who walked into a bar on a Tuesday evening in September with hope in her chest and everything still ahead of her.
That is who she was, and that is who she deserves to be remembered as. If this story affected you, and I believe if you’ve made it this far, it has, please share it. Pass it on. These victims deserve to be remembered by far more than a case number. And every person who learns Jackie’s name keeps a part of her story alive in the way she deserved.
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