Left to Die: The Chante Mallard Case and the Man in Her Windshield

0:00 October 26, 2001, Fort Worth, Texas. A certified nursing assistant leaves a nightclub on ecstasy. She's drunk and she's stoned. She hits a homeless man on highway 287. He goes through her windshield. Instead of calling 911, she drives home with him still alive and still lodged in her car windshield. Then she parks in her garage and closes the door. What happens next will make you question everything you know about the choices people make when they're afraid.

0:55 There are crime cases where you hear the facts and your brain tries to reject them because they sound too horrible to be real. This is one of those stories and the truly disturbing part is how ordinary it starts. October 26, 2001, around 2.30 in the morning. Chante Mallard leaves a Fort Worth nightclub called Joe's Big Bamboo Club. For the record, I don't own this club. But she's 25 years old. She works as a certified nursing assistant at a retirement home and she's completely wasted. We're talking drunk on multiple drinks that she's had. She smoked weed in the car on the way to the club and she was rolling an ecstasy that she split with her friend before they even walked inside the club. Her friend can see Mallard is messed up so she drives them both to her own apartment. That's the responsible move, the safe move, the move that saves lives. But Mallard makes a different decision. She then gets behind the wheel of her 1997 Chevrolet Cavalier and decides to drive herself home.

1:56 Now let me tell you about Gregory Glenn Biggs. He's 37, a skilled bricklayer who fell on hard times after losing his truck a couple years back. For tradesmen, losing your vehicle means losing your livelihood. He's been staying at a Fort Worth homeless shelter but he has a son named Brandon who loves him. He's a dad, a craftsman who builds things with his hands and knew the value of precision. That night Gregory was walking along Highway 287. It's dark on that stretch where loop 820 curves into US 287 and Mallard comes around that bend. Her vision is blurred from the ecstasy. Her reaction time is destroyed from the alcohol and suddenly Gregory Biggs is right there in front of her car. She hits him at highway speed. The physics of what happens are specific. The bumper strikes his legs and nearly severs his left leg completely. His body rotates up onto the hood. Then his head and torso go through the passenger side windshield. He doesn't get thrown onto the road or run over. He goes through the safety glass and becomes lodged in the windshield. His head and upper body end up inside the car. Resting on the floorboard and passenger seat. His legs are outside, draped over the hood in positions that don't look possible. It's at this point that it stops being a horrible accident. Mallard doesn't stop. She doesn't pull over.

3:23 She drives about one mile to her house with Gregory Biggs embedded in her windshield, still alive and bleeding. She pulls into her garage and closes the door behind her. The medical examiner later testified about what those injuries meant. Near amputation of the leg, multiple fractures, internal trauma. Calls of death was bleeding out and going into shock. But here's what matters. The medical examiner estimated Gregory survived one to two hours after the impact. If Mallard had called 911 when she got home even, even 30 minutes after she parked, paramedics could have applied turnipits and started fluid resuscitation.

4:04 They could have gotten him to surgery. He had a window where he could have lived. His death wasn't guaranteed by the collision. It became inevitable because of what happened in that garage. Mallard sat in the car with him. She heard him moaning. She heard him calling out and she cried. She apologized over and over. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. She tried to pull him out herself but she couldn't get him unstuck from the windshield. So she sat there with this dying man. A man she had actual medical training to help as a nursing assistant and she watched the clock run out on his life. Then she went inside her house and left him to die alone. By morning Gregory Biggs was dead. Mallard borrowed a different car and picked up her ex-boyfriend, Cleet Jackson, who'd gotten out of jail a few months earlier for burglary.

4:53 When he arrived at her house and saw what was in the garage, he later described the body as "grotesquely lodged in the windshield with a severed leg resting on the center console." They drove to her friend's apartment to try to figure out a plan. They were talking about burning the car with the body inside to destroy DNA. Jackson drew a line there. He said, "We ain't going to burn the body. We're going to put him somewhere so his family can find him so they can bury him because it was an accident." There's the strange morality at work here. They were willing to hide a corpse and destroy evidence, but cremating a body was somehow too far. That night Jackson brought his cousin to help. They spread a blanket on the garage floor and forcefully pulled Gregory out of the windshield. Jackson testified later that he apologized to the corpse while they worked. They loaded the body into a trunk and drove the cob park and fort worth and left him where he would be discovered. Then they removed the blood soaked passenger seat from the Cavalier and burned it and mallards back yard.

5:56 October 27th, Gregory's body was found in the park. The autopsy showed injuries from a high-speed impact, but there was no glass at the scene and no skid marks nearby. Police knew someone had moved him. They had a victim but no vehicle, no suspect and no leads. Four months passed. Then in February 2002, mallard goes to a party and she starts talking. She tells someone named Marla O'Donnell that she hit a white man with her car. Whether this was guilt or some weird form of bragging, we don't know. But O'Donnell went to the police. When detectives executed a search warrant on Mallard's house, they found the Cavalier sitting in her garage with the shattered windshield and the missing passenger seat. They found the charred seat frame in the backyard. Blood and hair inside the car matched Gregory's DNA. The trial started June 2003, Mallard pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence but not guilty to murder. The prosecution had to prove intent when the initial impact was accidental. They used felony murder doctrine. Mallard committed a felony by failing to stop and render aid. While committing that felony, she did something obviously dangerous to human life by hiding Gregory in the garage and denying him medical care. The prosecutor said in his closing arguments, quote, "A man is laying in her car, moaning and bleeding and she needs someone to tell her what to do.

7:22 Any decent person would call for help." The defense tried to paint Mallard as a terrified young woman who panicked while high in drunk. They argued the drugs prevented rational thought. But Cleet Jackson's testimony was too detailed and too disturbing to dismiss. He described the smell, the positioning of the body, and Mallard's hysteria in the garage. The jury deliberated for less than one hour. Guilty of murder. She was sentenced to 50 years. Mallard, of course, appealed, arguing that you can't be held criminally liable for failing to act. The appeals court said Texas law requires drivers and accidents to stop, render aid, and contact authorities. Her failure to do that, combined with driving home and hiding the car, made her guilty.

8:09 They also ruled that even if the crash injuries were severe, withholding medical care was a major factor causing Gregory to die when and how he did. This case disturbed people because we understand accidents and we understand panic. But sitting in a garage with a dying human being and choosing your own freedom over their life is something else entirely. Mallard wasn't born a monster. She was a nursing assistant who liked going out and like dancing. But high on drugs and paralyzed by fear of prison, she made a choice that turned a tragic accident into one of the cruelest murders in Texas criminal history. Chante Mallard is now 49 years old and incarcerated at the Marie units in Gatesville, Texas. She becomes eligible for parole on March 4, 2027. In two years, the parole board will decide if 25 years is enough payment for what she did. Gregory Biggs never got to see a son brand and get married. Never met grandchildren. Never got to share the moments that his son testified about missing. Brandon said the hardest part is knowing all the life milestones his father should have been there for. The distance between a tragic accident and murder was less than one mile of road and two hours of time. Gregory Biggs died because Chante Mallard was more afraid of what might happen to her than she was capable of saving a stranger's life. She had the training, she had the time, she had a phone, all she needed was the courage to make one call. She chose silence instead,

9:44 and a man bled to death in the dark while she cried in her house and hoped the problem would disappear. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Benjamin True Crime Stories. I'm Joe, I'm the host, and let's get to an email, subject hardest part. Joe, what's the hardest part of doing a true crime podcast for you? Beth in Appleton, Wisconsin, and I'll tell you Beth, to be frank, I'd have to change my name, but it's knowing that what I'm reading about when I'm researching and telling these stories about it's the worst moment, the worst time, and all of these people's lives. And I'm speaking about the victims and the victims' families here. Because sometimes these psychopath killers, they don't feel remorse, they don't, they don't even care that they've done these things. So I'm not, I'm not talking about them, but the families and these victims, this is the worst thing ever in their life, and they've got to live with this forever. And I'm reading about this day in and day out, and that kind of weighs on me. I am what you would consider an empath, and I feel things a little differently than some other people do, which is ironic because I do a true crime podcast, and that's the opposite of what I should be doing when I have these big feelings. But here we are. Which also, by the way, is the same reason that I am against the death penalty. I've talked about that in the past of this podcast. I'm not going to go into it again right now, maybe again in the later episodes, I might talk about it again, my stance on the death penalty, but I'm anti. But that's the hardest part

11:19 of doing this podcast for me is knowing that this, the situations that I'm discussing these stories are the worst moment some people ever have, and their families just never recover. And I'm reading about it day in and day out. Beth, thank you again for the email and have some cheese for me. Hey, if you're a new listener to the podcast, welcome. Make sure you go back and listen to the back episodes of this podcast, and subscribe wherever you're listening right now. You can also go to 10minutemurder.com. Contact me like Beth did. Also, sign up for the newsletter, read the blog, all kinds of things. Links, galore in there on 10minutemurder.com. I think I just said murder like old timey peepit moida, 10 minute moida. Sound like a 1930s gangster. All of you OG listeners, I really appreciate you listening. I appreciate your dedication to this podcast and sharing it with your friends and your family. All right, that's going to do it. That is your episode for today.

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