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Insurance may all seem the same on the surface, but having insurance isn't the same as having State Farm.
It's like getting a granola bar with a candle in it when you wanted a three-layer birthday cake.
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When it comes to getting the help you need, State Farm is the real deal.
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Looking in the garage and examining the car, most of the windshield was bashed out.
That information to that 911 call brought the case back open.
And so what they found in the garage, I think, genuinely shocked them.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
Before we begin, we do want to warn you that today's episode has some graphic and gruesome content.
Here at Anatomy of Murder, we have a pretty good idea of what constitutes murder.
Most often, it is intentionally causing the death of another person.
But we also know that not all homicides are black and white.
Sometimes a murder is planned for weeks, other times just a few seconds.
And we often make a distinction between violent acts that are cold-blooded and calculated and those that are committed in the heat of the moment.
And the definition of murder can expand from there.
And today we're discussing a case that's a little different.
A case in Texas which began with a horrifying accident but, due to a truly shocking series of events, ended in murder charges.
It is a rare case of homicide being charged not because of what the offender did before the victim's death, but because of what they didn't do to prevent it.
Today, Cobb Park in Fort Worth Texas, is a 225-acre recreation area with a bike path, basketball courts, picnic table and swing sets.
But according to Tarrant County Prosecutor Richard Alpert, back in 2001, the park was known for considerably less wholesome activities.
Cobb Park is a place that is where crimes happen.
It was a park where there's a lot of drug activity.
There's a lot of crime occurred.
But even in Richard's experience, nothing quite compared to what occurred there in October 2001.
It was a Saturday morning and two elderly men were in the park and they made a truly awful discovery.
A dead body.
A short time later, Fort Worth police responded to the scene.
And in this park, which at the time had a less than stellar reputation, it would have been reasonable for the arriving officers to expect that the dead man might have been victim to drug activity gone wrong, a robbery, or maybe even an overdose.
But even at first glance, the man's injuries told a different story.
He had a leg that was nearly severed.
Just the fact that most of the injuries were in the lower extremities.
It just didn't fit the profile for your standard murder case, where more of the injuries would be in the chest area and the head area.
And the injuries that they detected they could tell he had were also consistent with pedestrian vehicle crashes.
Police also noticed lacerations and glass fragments in the man's face and even more glass in the man's bloodstained sweatshirt glass that could be from a car windshield or window.
Also curious was the fact that the man had no shoes or socks.
And your first thought might be, maybe someone came along and stole his shoes.
But investigators who have handled these cases where pedestrians were struck by vehicles at high rates of speed will tell you that it's actually pretty common for the force of the impact to cause the shoes, socks and other clothing to literally fly off a person's body.
The losing of the clothing that is to people that work these type cases.
The idea that clothes are knocked off someone at the point of collision is not news or a surprise.
So ultimately, the first detective that got this case was someone who focused on traffic collisions.
So I think that added knowledge they had helped them make that determination.
So it was looking like the person had been struck by a vehicle or been in some type of a car accident.
But there was one problem.
The body was found far from any roadway.
So how did he end up in the park?
They quickly determined there were marks that showed where it looked, consistent with the body having been dragged there.
They could tell that this wasn't a crime that occurred in the park.
They quickly came to the correct conclusion that it looked more like the victim who had been hit by a motor vehicle and the body had been moved and dumped in the park.
And whoever dumped this body wasn't trying to conceal the dead man's identity.
Police found a wallet in his pants with the driver's license still inside.
The man was identified as 37-year-old Gregory Glenn Biggs.
He was, at the time of this crash homeless, but they had a name on him and they were able to determine what shelter he had been staying at and connected with.
And they were able to notify his next of kin that he had been deceased.
The family member who was able to give police the most information about Greg Biggs was his 18-year-old son, Brandon.
Brandon told us the story of his father.
Gregory Biggs was a bricklayer.
That was what he did by profession.
He was an independent contractor.
He had a skill level and he had a truck.
He also admittedly suffered from some mental disorders.
He had schizophrenia.
He was bipolar.
But according to his son, those were all well-controlled by medications.
According to Greg's son, his dad had fallen on some hard times, first losing his truck when he fell behind in some payments, before losing his job and then his home.
But despite his setbacks, Greg was determined to get back on his feet.
But even after he was homeless, he still pursued work.
He was actually working part-time as a school bus driver, even when he had lost his home and his business.
That's what he was doing with his life up until the date of his crash.
So Anasig, even though Greg Biggs was facing some challenges in his life, he was really attempting to pull himself out.
He was looking for steady work and also trying to find a place to live.
So for investigators, the key here is to retrace his steps and learn as much as they can about the people he may have been connected to.
Because his lifestyle was a homeless lifestyle.
It was a challenge to find people that knew Gregory and could tell us more about him.
But only hours into the investigation, police were operating on the theory that Greg Biggs was a victim of a hit-and-run collision.
If that was the case, then there were some obvious first steps to take.
As this was 2001, there weren't a lot of surveillance cameras along roadways.
So instead, patrol officers drove the nearby roads, searching for any signs of a recent collision, like broken glass or even skid marks.
They were hoping they would get lucky and come across a crash scene that was consistent with or had some tie to this incident or some evidence that was left at the scene.
But it was really just a shot in the dark.
They had no idea where this happened.
Another possibility was that the vehicle that struck Greg was disabled as a result of the impact.
After all, Greg was a grown man weighing about 200 pounds.
So police reached out to all the tow truck companies in the area.
They would also want to know if any tow trucks were recently dispatched to the crash scene.
But unfortunately, all that investigative legwork yielded very little information.
They did what they could do.
There was no usable physical evidence on the body that would connect us to a location or even to the vehicle.
Investigators hoped the autopsy would provide additional clues to not just how Greg died, but where.
The ME noted that Greg had suffered some pretty catastrophic injuries, including a broken right arm, a broken right thigh and two broken shins.
His left leg was virtually severed, almost amputated, just below the knee.
The doctor that performed the autopsy, who is actually the chief medical examiner, quickly determined in his opinion that this was consistent with a motor vehicle crash.
The ME determined Greg Biggs' cause of death was multiple traumatic injuries sustained in an auto versus pedestrian collision, the most severe of which was the nearly severed leg, which did cause him to bleed to death.
But until investigators knew more about the circumstances behind the accident itself and the person driving the car, the ME was unable to determine a manner of death.
In other words, whether it was an accident, a death by suicide, or even a homicide.
And identifying the car and the driver in a hit-and-run is never easy.
And in this case the ME found no other forensic evidence, such as a paint transfer from the car, that could provide any clue to the type of vehicle that struck Greg.
Despite law enforcement pleas to the public for any eyewitnesses and news reports in the media, no new clues were forthcoming, and so the case pretty soon went cold.
It's really not surprising that the case went cold the way it did, because there was no usable physical evidence on the body that would connect us to a location or even to the vehicle at that time that struck him.
After about two, three months, their investigation pretty much just ended.
But police knew there was someone out there with a dark secret.
Someone who hit Greg Biggs with their car and then dragged his body to the park to avoid taking responsibility for his death.
Now there was always the slim chance that the driver's conscience would get the best of them and they would turn themselves in
There was also the possibility that the person behind the wheel would confide in a trusted friend or family member and maybe that someone would tip off police.
And four months after Greg's death in February of 2002, that's exactly what happened.
There was a 911 call by a young woman whose name is Miranda and one basically describing that she had overheard a woman talking about how she'd hit some guy with her vehicle and had driven home with him, stuck in her car and left him in her garage where he died.
She thought that it was connected with this story, that she had heard about a body being found in Cobb Park and That information to that 911 call brought the case back open.
The detective assigned to the case asked the 911 caller to come to the station for an interview, and she agreed.
And what she described to detectives would turn this story of what appeared to be a tragic accident to one of cruelty, calculation and murder.
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It's like getting a granola bar with a candle in it when you wanted a three-layer birthday cake.
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So don't settle for just any insurance.
When it comes to getting the help you need, State Farm is the real deal.
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
In October of 2001, the body of Greg Biggs was discovered in a park in Fort Worth, Texas.
The 37-year-old father had apparently been the victim of a fatal hit and run before his body was dumped and the perpetrator fled the scene.
But four months later, police received a tip from someone who claimed to know the details of the accident.
The woman was in her mid-20s and sitting down with investigators.
She described partying with some girlfriends, including a woman she named T and another acquaintance named Shantae Mallard.
To her shock and horror.
She listened as Shantae Mallard casually described how she once hit a man with her car, sending him headfirst through her windshield.
According to the caller, Shante then described panicking and driving home with a dying man stuck in her windshield, face down, half in the car and half out.
Mallard described how she sped home, pulled into her garage and closed the door behind her.
She didn't call the police or an ambulance or render aid to the man in any way, despite the fact that the man was still alive, moaning in pain and ultimately bleeding to death while still caught in the windshield of her car.
The 911 caller said she was shocked and deeply disturbed by the story Shantae Mallard told.
It really traumatized her.
Just this kind of, just the description of driving somebody home stuck in your car.
And she went and talked to her mother about it.
And her mother encouraged her to call the police.
She encouraged her to call 911.
There was some hesitation.
It was a reluctance to kind of throw people that she knew under the bus in terms of this.
So who was Shante Mallard, the 25-year-old woman who supposedly admitted to friends she had hit Greg Biggs with her car?
Her background may surprise you.
She was a nurse's aide, someone who was trained to help the sick and injured, which makes it all the more shocking that she would allegedly fail to either help Greg or get him assistance, and instead left him to die.
Based on Miranda's affidavit, the detective in the case quickly got a judge to sign off on a search warrant for Mallard's home.
He put together a crew and got a search warrant and pretty quickly went out there to serve it.
On February 26, 2002, more than a dozen police officers descended on Mallard's house.
She lived less than three miles from Cobb Park, where Gregory Biggs' body had been found.
When they got the search warrant and they went out there, there was some chance in their minds that they were going to find out that this was just talk, because it just seemed so unlike anything they'd ever heard before.
But within moments after police knocked on Mallard's door, they knew their investigation was on the right track.
She was home, and she didn't seem surprised to see them.
She immediately, you know, was making, I didn't mean to kill him kind of statements.
According to detectives, Mallard broke down and admitted to the accident, telling officers that she wasn't a bad person and that she had never even had a speeding ticket.
So I mean, even before they got to the garage there was pretty much some verbal corroboration that this tip was a valid tip.
But what they would discover in the garage would not just corroborate what the 911 caller had said.
It would also raise serious doubts about Mallard's truthfulness as well.
And so what they found in the garage, I think, genuinely shocked them.
There in the garage in plain sight was Mallard's 1997 gold Chevy Cavalier which had a giant hole in the passenger side of its shattered windshield.
In examining the car, most of the windshield was bashed out.
There was still flesh and blood and hair and stuff on the windshield.
And they also found that some seats had been removed from the car and were in the backyard.
And it appeared that she had poured some kind of accelerant on them and had been burning the car piece by piece.
I mean, it's one thing to claim that in the aftermath of an accident, she may have panicked and not gone immediately to the authorities.
But removing the seats and burning them, that would have taken time and effort, not to mention a clear consciousness of guilt.
And so, while crime scene technicians processed her house and car for more evidence, detectives questioned Mallard, looking for details about the night she struck and killed Greg Biggs with her car.
They didn't arrest her.
They invited her to come down and talk about what happened.
And she came down and she gave a statement to Detective Owings that same day.
Mallard led police through her version of events on the night she struck Gregory Biggs with her car.
She basically described that she had been at a bar, she'd been out with a friend and she claimed that she thought someone must have slipped or something.
So right away she's saying she's intoxicated, supposedly by a substance that someone else put in her drink without her knowledge, that she said she was roofied or given some kind of mickey.
When she was driving home from the bar, she started feeling lightheaded and, just out of nowhere, Greg Biggs is in front of her and she hits him with her car.
She admits that he went through her windshield, that she, quote, didn't know what to do.
Try to picture this.
The upper half of his body was inside the car.
And his lower half was outside of the car.
He was face down.
But she claimed she wasn't strong enough to move his body.
And at 3 a.m., there wasn't anybody on the road to help.
And that she was only about a mile and a half from her home.
So she just drove home and... put the car in the garage.
And she does describe him moaning and making noise while he was in the windshield, still in the car, in her closed garage.
If she was indeed drugged, like she claimed, or if it was a half-truth, the true part being that she was under the influence of something, well then, whatever was in her system may have temporarily impacted her ability to make good decisions, or maybe even to help the man dying in her garage.
But what she does do by her own words indicates, at least to me, that she wasn't so out of it not to know what was happening.
And she does describe coming in and out of the house initially into the garage and apologizing to Gregory Biggs.
Mallard told police she wanted to take him to the hospital, but was scared.
And then at some point hours later, she checked on Gregory Biggs and discovered he was dead.
So we just have to stop for a second because this is an unbelievable scenario, right?
You're used to hearing about people dying by gunshots and knives.
I mean, but this, it is so gruesome.
And again apologies to all of you for getting so graphic in some of the details, but we do think it goes into the understanding of the complexities of this case.
Yeah, I mean this is one of the best examples I've seen in quite some time, where the cover-up is worse than the crime.
I mean, it appears that it started off as an horrific accident with somebody who should not have been behind the wheel.
So, of course, there is a criminal element there.
But this is some of the most unusual circumstances I think we've dealt with.
So here we have obviously no definitive proof of actually what happened.
Was she drugged?
Was she not?
But Mallard claimed that after the man died she called a friend she knew as Vaughn, who picked her up and drove her to her friend T's house, where she proceeded to pass out.
Then she finally returned to her home days later, and she claimed that the man in a windshield was gone.
Vaughn told her that he and an associate named Terrence had taken it upon themselves to get rid of the body.
As for the burned seats from her car, Mallard owned up to trying to burn them herself because she feared getting caught and going to jail.
At the end of her statement, police have to decide what, if any, charges to bring.
Given that her statement was full of remorse and she was describing being a victim of someone giving her something, she had minimized her involvement significantly in this.
If we weren't able to fill out the picture any greater, All we were left with was a very sympathetic defendant who had hit somebody who wasn't going to probably have a lot of community members and family coming down to the courthouse demanding justice on his behalf.
And so what we really had was a very strong tampering with evidence case and even a shaky fail to stop and render aid case.
When the interview was over, prosecutors arrested Mallard and charged her with failure to stop and render aid.
Failure to stop and render aid is basically a hit and run charge.
After an accident, the law requires a driver to stop and help the injured party.
Usually that means by like calling 911 or getting emergency responders to the scene.
Following her arraignment, Mallard posted a $10,000 bond, and then she was released from jail.
Considering the horrific death Greg endured, it might have seemed like a relatively minor charge.
But prosecutors were just beginning their investigation into Shante Mallard's story and they were prepared to bring more serious charges if they were warranted and if they could prove them.
By the time I took this case upstairs and ran it by the chief of the felony division and it was confirmed that I'd be handling it, he allowed me to put together a team.
And so the first thing I did was get two investigators that I'd worked with extensively, that I trusted, and that was their mission.
Investigators were determined to confirm every detail of Mallard's story, compare it with any forensic evidence collected and determine if this really was a terrible, tragic accident, as Mallard had claimed, or was there much more to the story than she was letting on?
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It's like getting a granola bar with a candle in it when you wanted a three-layer birthday cake.
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When it comes to getting the help you need, State Farm is the real deal.
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Shante Mallard had claimed that she had hit Greg Biggs by accident and his death was the result of genuine panic.
But in her statement, Mallard had named several friends that helped her that night.
Now investigators were curious if they would offer up the same story.
So I was able to use the grand jury and just started calling people before the grand jury, starting with her friend T.
One of the things strategically that we were able to do was and it's a tool that we were able to use quite often in Tarrant County because we always have a grand jury in session prosecutors put T in front of a grand jury.
She admitted under oath to hearing the same story that the 911 caller had heard, but denied any contact with Mallard on the night of the incident, claiming to have been at work.
But investigators couldn't just take T's word for it, even though it was sworn testimony.
So they tried to corroborate her story without much luck.
We subpoenaed phone records and we subpoenaed T's employment records.
And we quickly discovered that she had lied.
The story she gave was not corroborated by her work schedule and it wasn't corroborated by her phone records, which showed repeated conversations with Shantae when she had told the grand jury that she had not heard him do anything about this or talk to her until well after the fact.
It seemed clear that T had lied, which also equaled perjury, because she had sworn to tell the truth to the grand jury and investigators could use that to try and get her to come clean and be honest.
So using that leverage brought T back in and said, you're about to go before a grand jury again.
And we know you're lying to us.
And here's your options.
We can indict you for perjury.
And that's a third degree felony in Texas.
And you can face charges and trial for that.
Or you can tell us the truth.
And we will promise to give you immunity and won't charge you with lying to the grand jury.
She said, OK, I'll tell you what really happened.
In her let's just say new version of events.
T said the night of the accident began at 11 pm, when she and Mallard smoked marijuana and split a tab of ecstasy before heading out to a nightclub where they drank heavily and partied until closing time.
When they left the club at about 230 am, T thought Mallard was too intoxicated to drive, so she drove Mallard's car to her apartment with Mallard in the passenger seat.
A fateful night which could have ended there, with Mallard sleeping it off at a friend's house.
But instead, she got behind the wheel to drive herself home.
Driving under the influence is obviously a crime, but more importantly, incredibly dangerous.
Less than an hour later, at 330 am T, got a frantic phone call from Mallard asking to be picked up right away.
It was then that Mallard confessed that she had struck a man with her car and killed him.
So based on the statements made by both T and Mallard herself, the ME revised his autopsy report.
He had previously classified Greg Biggs' manner of death as unknown.
Now he can rule it for what it was, a homicide.
The charges against Shante Mallard were upgraded and her bail was raised to $250,000.
She's charged with tampering with evidence...
And she was charged with felony murder.
And we allege that, in the course of committing a felony and in this case the felony was what we call fail to stop or render aid she committed an act clearly dangerous to human life, namely after hitting Gregory Biggs with her car, transporting him and secreting him in the garage until he died.
So I think this is really interesting that people are going to be like, wait, what?
How is this murder, right?
So, first of all, by her own admission, the man on the windshield, which we know is Greg Biggs, didn't die immediately.
His death came as a result of Mallard refusing to render aid.
And it's not even so much what she did when she hit Greg with the car.
It's what she didn't do afterwards, right?
She didn't help him.
In fact, she sped home and hid her car, preventing anyone else from helping Greg.
As he now lay, you know, embedded in her windshield.
She made that choice to let him die over the course of what must have been more than an hour.
I think her friend said it was at least two.
Her murder weapon was not the gun or knife, but it was her passiveness in the face of medical emergency.
You know, murder goes hand in hand with motive.
So again Scott obviously, if we talk about the motive, everything seems to point to she's under the influence, didn't want police to know it.
So maybe she panicked, fled to her garage, but then let Greg Biggs die.
Rather than own up to what she'd done.
She knew that she'd had this mix of ecstasy was partying marijuana, and now there was a man dead in her garage on her car.
So we have firsthand testimony from the people who were with her and who witnessed her activity that night.
I mean, they corroborated so much information between all of them that she was absolutely high as a kite and she gets behind the wheel of her car and she does drive away.
And unfortunately for her, she met Greg Biggs at an intersection and took his life right there.
But then she really did have the opportunity.
She could have drove to a police station to save him.
She could have drove to a hospital, but instead she drove into her garage, closed the door and walked away.
While he was still alive, she closed the garage door, went inside her home to take care of herself, instead of saving his life.
So now Mallard was facing felony murder charges in addition to tampering with evidence.
But a key part of the investigation still remained.
And so who were the men who helped her hide Gregory Biggs' body from the car taking it to Cobb Park?
Would they corroborate Mallard's claim that she had nothing to do with moving the body?
Mallard said that she knew one of the men as Vaughn, but no one who knew Mallard had heard of Vaughn.
Police believe Mallard gave them a fake name, to make things really worse here, to throw them off.
When investigators scrutinized her phone records, they knew that the first call she made after killing Greg Biggs was to her female friend T, But among the other calls was one to a man and his name wasn't Vaughn.
The guy's name was actually Cleet Jackson.
And he was someone that had been out with her that she'd had an intimate relationship on and off from time to time.
And he had some history, criminal history.
Through an informant, investigators learned Cleet Jackson got help from moving the body from his younger cousin, Tyrone Cleveland.
We reached out, we got them both arrested, and they got attorneys.
At first, neither Jackson or Cleveland were willing to talk about their involvement in the cover-up.
But in the face of mounting evidence, ultimately they both accepted a plea.
So we made them both 10-year offers and would cap their punishment at that if they would tell us what happened.
And so they laid out the story.
They laid out how they were called by Shante that night, that they went into the garage.
And according to them, he was dead by that time.
Jackson described seeing the body face down, with its lower extremities sticking out of the windshield and upper half inside the car over the shifting console.
Jackson also admitted to poking the body with a rake to confirm that there were no signs of life.
And then he and his cousin began the process of removing the body from the car and wrapping it in a blanket.
They described wrapping it up and they borrowed a car of a girlfriend of one of them and they moved the body in that car.
We actually found that car too, by the way, and were able to find traces of blood in it to corroborate that it was used in transporting the body and just dragged it and dumped it and caught part.
Like Mallard's friend T, both Clee Jackson and Tyrone Cleveland agreed to testify against Mallard in court.
But between the two men who were part of the crime and Shante's friend T, who had already perjured herself in this case, these were not the strongest witnesses to build a case around.
It's one of those cases where they all had baggage.
They were all involved in a cover-up.
They were all liars, some of them under oath liars.
Nevertheless, 20 months after Greg Biggs was found dead in Cobb Park, Mallard was finally going to face a jury to answer for her role in his death.
Juries are unpredictable.
I wasn't going to make the mistake of underestimating the talent of the two defense attorneys that we were dealing with.
Lead prosecutor, Richard Alpert, aimed to prove felony murder by arguing Greg Biggs had survived the crash but was ultimately killed by Shante Mallard's deliberate refusal to get him life-saving medical treatment after the fact.
She then took additional steps to actually hide him.
In other words, she killed him by doing nothing as he bled out for hours.
Our theme was we had a young woman that was extremely self-centered.
She, immediately right after this crime, went into protecting herself, covering up the crime, creating a circle of conspiracy.
The trial was front page news in Fort Worth and national media swarmed the courthouse.
They were calling it the windshield murder.
High profile cases are stressful and we knew we were going to be judged evaluated, on how this went, and We knew that the whole world was going to watch what we did here.
And the trial started with a bang, with Mallard actually pleading guilty not to murder but to the lesser charge of tampering with evidence.
Well, I think that was a good strategic move on her attorney's part just to say look, she's willing to take responsibility for what she did.
Mallard's defense was going to put all their energy into fighting the felony murder charge.
I think a big part of their case that was that we were overcharging.
I think they were trying to say this is not what the legislature intended when they came up with the murder statute.
This is not somebody who set out to kill someone who meant to kill somebody.
This is just a tragic situation that at most is failure to stop and render aid.
Prosecutors anticipated.
The defense might even go so far as to argue that Greg Biggs died on impact and that Mallard's actions after the fact were irrelevant.
If they could convince the jury that he had died at impact, we don't have felony murder.
He's got to be alive until he gets in the garage for us to get felony murder.
Like he says, you have to show that it was later on, that it was her deliberate steps, her intentional steps to hide him in her garage.
She said he was still moaning, which would go to him being alive.
But you almost have to prove that to say that now it rose to such indifference to human life that it's going to ultimately equal this felony murder charge, as opposed to whatever the charge would be if he had just died, based on her hitting him with the car, which again may be a crime in and of itself because she was under the influence.
So to counter any defense claims that Greg Biggs died on impact, the prosecution put an independent crime scene expert on the stand who they believed could prove Greg survived the initial collision.
We actually had him do his own investigation of the vehicle and he uncovered a bloody fingerprint in the kind of door grasp inside the car and proof that Gregory Biggs had aspirated blood while he was in the windshield.
Because if he was aspirating blood, he was still breathing.
Not only that, the bloody fingerprint found on the inside door handle actually belonged to Greg Biggs.
So if you just think about what that is for a moment, it means that he was still conscious enough to use the door handle to hang on, I'm sure for dear life, as he lay face down in that car with his legs still partially outside the shattered windshield.
All while Mallard sped home at who knows what speed.
I cannot imagine the terror that Greg Biggs was experiencing at that moment.
My belief was that he hit the windshield.
Most of his body went through the windshield.
That he was supporting himself with one hand his left arm because that's the only way you can explain the bloody fingerprint in the grip part of the door.
And his face had to be hanging somewhere over the center console because that's where there was aspiration of blood.
And that basically he was trying to support himself in that position while he was wedged in the windshield had nearly severed or caused at least a significant gash in his leg.
If the prosecution had a star witness, it would have been the medical examiner in this case.
He testified that every decision Mallard made after the impact worsened Greg Biggs' condition and contributed to his death.
Right because by driving away from the scene with Greg stuck in her windshield, the motion of the car's acceleration and turning would have shifted Greg's body and caused more injury to his unsupported and nearly amputated lower left leg.
And then if Mallard actually pulled over and tried to extricate Greg from the windshield, as she said that she had done well, that too could obviously have made things worse.
One of the things that we found out.
Before she took him home, she had driven somewhere and tried to pull his body out of the car, hoping to be able to leave it somewhere.
So I think her actively pulling on the body obviously did nothing but aggravate his condition.
The prosecution also made the point that along the way to her house there were several places Mallard could have stopped for help.
Part of our investigation we had noted on that exhibit every payphone, every fire station, every place that she could have gotten to in the same amount or less time as it took her to get home.
Just to show all those options.
She could have driven to the fire station where her own brother was currently working and gone to him and gotten help, and she didn't do it.
Perhaps the most devastating testimony the medical examiner gave was his estimate of how long Greg Biggs likely lived while stuck in Mallard's windshield concealed inside her garage.
He estimated Greg survived two hours before bleeding to death and that during that time he was likely in incredible pain.
And two hours plenty of time for Mallard to call 911, for first responders to arrive and for life-saving medical care to be given to Greg.
Instead, she used the time to do nothing.
Nothing except plot to get rid of his body and cover up her crime.
And that's why part of the goal for me was we weren't just going to tell the story of how Greg died.
We were also going to tell the story about how Greg could have lived.
It was our position that and we gathered witnesses to support this, to prove to the jury Gregory Biggs did not have to die.
And calling witnesses that were capable of saving him to actually talk about how they would have saved him.
After four days of testimony, the prosecution believed it had proven its case.
This is just a person that is immoral, that took a situation that could very easily have turned into an accident where nobody died, and because of her own selfish actions, elevated it to a murder.
It took the jury less than an hour to reach a verdict.
Shantae Mallett was found guilty of felony murder.
But because the case was tried in Texas, the jury's work didn't end with the verdict.
And of course, the jury was going to decide punishment too.
And that's one of the advantages of being a Texas prosecutor is we have jury punishment, not judge punishment, available.
The defense argued for leniency.
The defense was more focused on how regretful she is and it was an accident and she was under the influence of drugs and drugs made her do it.
But the prosecution dropped a penalty phase bombshell they hoped would convince the jury to give Mallard the maximum sentence.
Mallard's friend T returned to the stand to testify that just a week after Mallard had left the nightclub intoxicated and struck Greg Biggs with her car, she went back to that very same nightclub where she partied, danced and drank again.
If you're going to say you're remorseful, you've got to back it up with actions.
And Shantae just did not do that.
And I think that was devastating to her in the punishment phase.
The jury took two and a half hours to decide Mallard's punishment.
The range of punishment in Texas for murder is five to 99 years or life.
In the end they gave the maximum sentence on the tampering of 10 years and they sentenced her to 50 years in prison on the murder charge.
Shante Mallard will serve both sentences concurrently, which means at the same time.
She's scheduled to be released in 2054, but she's eligible for parole in 2027.
I'll be thinking about the facts of this case for some time, not because the murder is any more gruesome or disturbing than the other cases we cover, or what the defendant did.
It's what the defendant didn't do, a selfish pass to save a man's life.
When she parked her car and closed that garage door, Gregory Biggs was still alive.
And that is a fact.
When someone hurts another and then doesn't stop to help, it's not a cold calculation.
It's a scramble between fear, shame and the urge to protect yourself while someone else's life hangs there.
First comes the shock, then the gut punch of fear.
If I admit this, my life is over, or what if I get blamed?
Shame and self-preservation in those moments look like a mental survival book gone sideways.
Instead of facing what happened, a person's brain immediately shifts into damage control.
If I admit this, I'm ruined, or it wasn't that bad.
They start rationalizing, minimizing and mentally distancing themselves so they don't have to feel the full weight of guilt.
That's moral disengagement in full display.
During the penalty phase, Greg's son told jurors that his father was a loving hardworking, friendly man who unfortunately did not have many friends.
I am so glad that we are sharing this story.
It's obviously a very different type of crime, but that still led to murder.
It's important to see how law enforcement and prosecutors worked tirelessly to build this case.
Greg Biggs, at least on paper, was someone living on the fringes of society.
He had life struggles that led him to losing his home.
And someone termed as quote unquote homeless is someone who too often can be overlooked.
But that is definitely not what happened here.
Richard and his team worked to get Greg the justice he deserved.
We will leave by remembering Greg as a hardworking person who pushed through his struggles as best he could.
He was a dad who loved his son and, at the time of his death, was working to try to get his life back on a better track.
He will never get to hold the grandson who came a few years after his death.
A boy who was given the middle name Gregory as a way to honor and remember the grandfather he will never get to meet.
Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.
Anatomy of Murder is an Audiochuck original.
Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Fresetti Media.
Ashley Flowers is executive producer.
This episode was written by Paul Sayre.
Researched by Kate Cooper.
Edited by Ali Sirwa and Philjean Grande.
I think Chuck would approve.
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The 9-1-1 universe expands to Nashville.
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