The Tragic Murder of Rhonda ‘Chantay’ Blankinship | Bloodline Detectives with Nancy Grace | Forensic Files

[TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Brown County, Texas, May 13, 2016. 25-year-old Rhonda Chantay Blankinship
disappears without a trace. Any time you have a situation where someone has gone missing,
in the back of your mind, there's always the concern that something terrible has happened.
NANCY GRACE: Police and the local community launch a search for missing Rhonda Chantay.
MICHAEL MURRAY: She's such a sweet girl. Everybody wanted to do their best to help
and try to find Chantay. NANCY GRACE: Friends and family continue to search for Rhonda.
Days later, their worst fears come true. [PHONE RINGS] SCOTT BIRD: Getting to the cellar
is when the awful things start happening, when we see Chantay laying on the steps.
MICHAEL MURRAY: The level of injuries inflicted on her, it was beyond overkill. NANCY GRACE: Police cannot immediately identify a suspect.
We had no idea who committed this crime. JASON SHEA: All leads had been followed up.
Tips slowed down. NANCY GRACE: Police will eventually turn to a groundbreaking new forensic science
to help them catch a killer. We had already spent a lot of money on DNA. Our budget was empty.
NANCY GRACE: This is the story of the brutal murder of a very vulnerable, at-risk young woman,
and the search for her killer. I'm Nancy Grace. This is "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC]
Brown County, Texas, May 13, 2016. Local authorities are notified a young woman goes missing.
It's 25-year-old Rhonda Blankinship, known to family and friends as Chantay. SCOTT BIRD: She lived in a community called
the North Lake community. It's up around the lake. Probably a couple thousand people live out there.
There's Tamarack Mountain, Thunderbird Bay, and Harbor Point. They're all connected.
And it's-- it's just a community where people live to be close to the lake. NANCY GRACE: Brown County sheriffs are notified two days
after Chantay Blankinship vanishes from her small lakeside community. JASON SHEA: In May 15 of 2016, I was contacted by the Brown
County Sheriff's Office and requested to assist with a missing person. Everyone knew and loved Chantay, everybody that I had
talked to that had seen her. She was always waving at everybody who was driving down the road.
She was always smiling. She was a joy to be around. She was just a good person. NANCY GRACE: Chantay, facing lifelong challenges
because of injuries she suffered in childhood. ELISHA BIRD: Chantay was unable to care for herself well
enough to live independently. It had mostly come about as a result of her childhood,
and some abuse that she had suffered as a young child. NANCY GRACE: Despite her challenges,
Chantay Blankinship has a steady presence in her life-- her grandfather, Charlie.
He takes responsibility, and he cares for her and her siblings. ELISHA BIRD: Charlie had taken over responsibility for her,
even though Charlie was quite old himself. MICHAEL MURRAY: He was a very neat guy
to talk to, and interesting, and had a nice background. He was former law enforcement.
Charlie was a stand-up guy. And I think Charlie would have did anything he could for his family.
I would describe her as kind of like, you know, your four- or five-year-old, in terms of abilities.
It'd be easy to trick Chantay. Easy to, you know, fool her. But she was just such a good-hearted person,
and she would trust anybody. Chantay's sweetness, kindness, ended up being her demise in the end, of her willingness
to trust somebody. [SOMBER MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: May 13, 2016. Chantay Blankinship goes out for an evening walk.
Her grandpa becomes concerned when Chantay doesn't come home. JASON SHEA: Chantay went for her normal walk
that she normally does in the evening. ELISHA BIRD: She went to the cafe that she liked to frequent.
She walked around in that area that evening and was seen by several people. MICHAEL MURRAY: The family got worried right away,
and Charlie took it upon himself to drive around all night looking for her in an effort to find her,
hoping that, you know, maybe she was just hanging out with a friend or wandered off.
JASON SHEA: Mr. Barnett started looking for her and couldn't find her, and then contacted law enforcement.
MICHAEL MURRAY: The law enforcement took into consideration all the factors that existed here,
with her intellectual disabilities and her lack of ability to really live independently.
ELISHA BIRD: When she went missing, no one really had any idea where she disappeared from.
Nobody saw the moment when she left her neighborhood community. And so it just appeared that a person who
had an intellectual disability had just disappeared, and no one had any idea where she went.
The Friday night when she was last seen, well, just by coincidence the pastor of North Lake Community
Church, Ron Keener, and his wife Elaine, well, they had been out driving around.
They saw her walking. They waved at her, and she waved at them. That would have been the last time that they ever saw her.
ELISHA BIRD: May 13, the search was fairly limited because nobody really realized that she
was completely missing until it became late in the evening. On May 14, the community started to get more heavily involved
in the search and it expanded. JASON SHEA: That is remarkable. That just shows the tight-knit community
that we have here in Brown County, that everybody started looking for her. There were groups that were providing
food and water for searchers. Everybody came together for a common goal, to find Chantay.
ELISHA BIRD: Any time you have a situation where someone has gone missing, especially someone with the disabilities
that Chantay had, that's always the fear, that the worst has happened. You hope and pray that they'll be found
and nothing will be wrong. But in the back of your mind, there's always the concern that something terrible has happened.
NANCY GRACE: The massive search by members of this close-knit community goes on into a second day.
As that day comes to a close, friends and family cannot ignore-- something awful must have happened to Chantay.
SCOTT BIRD: Part of the search party, Charlie Radle and his wife, decided to go away from the immediate area.
They found an old abandoned house which kids would go to for parties. It was known as the party house out in May.
MICHAEL MURRAY: Two volunteers came to the old party house. The driver decided he was going to pull in there,
and they would do a check real quick there. And so as he pulled up to the gate, it's a locked gate.
There had been fresh tire tracks. So he could see that somebody had been there recently as well.
So he got up to the gate to climb over, noticed a big clump of hair, obviously stood out.
When they were standing there looking at the fence, they saw a multi-colored bracelet and then they went
into the property through some tall weeds to the house to try to locate Chantay.
ELISHA BIRD: They kind of just followed a trail and saw a cellar that was overgrown and covered over,
but thought, maybe that's a place that we should look. Maybe she fell down in there.
Maybe if something bad happened, maybe she is there. SCOTT BIRD: Getting to the cellar
is when the awful things start happening, when we see Chantay laying on the steps.
MICHAEL MURRAY: He had opened the cellar and looked in there, and that's where Chantay's body was lying with her head
further down into the cellar and her feet more up close to the top. So obviously appearing that Chantay had been dumped down
into the cellar at that point. [PHONE RINGS] SCOTT BIRD: That's when my phone rang, that we didn't
have a missing person anymore. We had a murder. NANCY GRACE: Tragedy strikes this tight-knit community.
A missing person case is now a murder investigation, with very few clues. That's next on "Bloodline Detectives."
[DRAMATIC MUSIC] [DRAMATIC MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Brown County, Texas, 2016. Law enforcement and the community search for a missing
25-year-old woman, Rhonda Blankinship, known as Chantay to family and friends. Chantay never comes back from an evening walk,
and then the discovery of her body launches a murder investigation. SCOTT BIRD: She was unclothed from the waist down.
You could see massive injuries to her face and neck and upper torso that was not clothed.
You could see scrapes and bruises down her legs. Um, all her clothes were thrown in there as well.
She was just bloody from massive trauma to her body. JASON SHEA: We found a lawnmower blade close to the body,
and it appeared that that might have been the murder weapon. MICHAEL MURRAY: Chantay's of a slight build.
She's less than 5 foot tall, you know, maybe 90 pounds at the most. And to see the level of injuries inflicted on her,
it was certainly over the top. You could just see, you know, the person that did it wasn't just trying to kill her
but was definitely making a statement. And it was beyond overkill. [TENSE MUSIC]
NANCY GRACE: The Brown County Sheriff's Office has a complex homicide investigation on its hands,
and they have limited resources to handle it effectively. We are a small jurisdiction, so we don't have a crime
scene team or a coroner. In our jurisdiction, it would be more likely that the law enforcement officers and the investigators
responded, and that they handle their own crime scene investigation. JASON SHEA: Everything's important at a crime
scene, because you don't know what will be important later on. So everything that is collected, from the lawnmower
blade to her clothing to her body-- anything that would connect whoever did this to this horrible crime is collected.
SCOTT BIRD: There was a lot of hair that had been pulled out of her head, from the fence all the way to the cellar.
Of course, we collect blood evidence for DNA. There was quite a bit of blood evidence we found.
It had rained since Chantay's body had been dumped in there. You couldn't see a lot of it, but
in the corners and cracks and places, we were able to find blood. MICHAEL MURRAY: Chantay was unclothed from the waist down,
clearly indicative that there had been some kind of sexual assault that had taken
place as part of this crime. In this case, there was also a shoe print that was across Chantay's chest that
was a pretty distinct pattern. ELISHA BIRD: Autopsies are always important, so that when we go to court we can prove a cause of death
and prove what happened. In this particular case, the autopsy was critical because there were a lot of injuries
that we didn't know what caused them and we were uncertain where they came from or how they got on the body.
MICHAEL MURRAY: She obviously had several blows to her head from what appeared to be consistent with the lawnmower
blade. She had been stomped on. You could see the clear indication of that through the shoe prints left on Chantay.
And then, of course, the recovery of the semen likewise showed the sexual assault occurring as well.
ELISHA BIRD: She was beaten to death, in layman's terms. The medical examiner determined that her larynx had been crushed
and that she suffered blunt force trauma to her head and body, and that the combination of those things
killed her. [SOMBER MUSIC] SCOTT BIRD: We talked with Charlie and Michelle, her mother.
We told her that she was killed with blunt force trauma, and she was sexually assaulted.
We did not tell any other information. And that's hard to do, looking at a mother and a grandfather
who have a lot of questions. But we can't tell them because they will tell somebody else in the family, who
will then tell somebody else. And we've got to keep that information guarded. JASON SHEA: You never know what kind of reaction
you're going to get from a loved one when you tell them that their family member has been killed
or is deceased. It's a hard thing because there's lots of emotions involved in that.
NANCY GRACE: Chantay Blankinship's family now has the heartbreaking task to plan her funeral
and say goodbye to their loved one. It was devastating to the community to find out that she had been murdered.
Not only murdered, but murdered in such a brutal way. Even without the community knowing
the details of the murder, they knew that it needed to be a closed casket. They knew that she had been dumped in a rural location.
And it was so much more traumatic because of how violent it was, that the damage to the community
from going through that type of a situation was extreme. NANCY GRACE: The extent of Chantay's injuries
reveals the enormous suffering she endured before she finally dies. Meanwhile, homicide investigators
are overwhelmed with well-meaning tips from the local community. ELISHA BIRD: There were so many leads
and so many different tips that were given to law enforcement. The hardest part, I think, was sorting
through all of the different tips and leads and eliminating people. SCOTT BIRD: We had tips from people from New York
to here to all over the place. We had a psychic call us and try to tell us she was killed by a woman.
NANCY GRACE: One of the first steps for investigators is to talk to Chantay's boyfriend.
He became a suspect during a portion of the case, for a while. They had been dating for a couple of years
and he was obviously a suspect very quickly in the investigation. SCOTT BIRD: He had an airtight alibi.
He was at work and that work had cameras, so we knew where he was the day and the evening Chantay
went missing. MICHAEL MURRAY: Any time you start an investigation like that, you want to be thorough.
An obvious starting point would be the sex offender database. ELISHA BIRD: Law enforcement look
at anyone in the community in that area, who would have known Chantay, that she would have trusted enough to get
into a vehicle with, because Chantay was not likely to go with someone that she didn't know.
So initially the focus was on people close to her. JASON SHEA: May 20, 2016, there was
a funeral at North Lake Church. Appeared to be about over 400 people attended, with law enforcement also having a presence there.
ELISHA BIRD: During the funeral, law enforcement was looking to see if there was anyone at the funeral who might
be acting in a way that would give us a clue about who had committed the crime. NANCY GRACE: Investigators are now
considering two possibilities. One, Chantay's killer is someone she knew, and two,
the suspect is an outsider, someone simply passing through Brown County who lures Chantay to her death.
ELISHA BIRD: The DNA was sent to a forensic laboratory, where a DNA profile was obtained for the unknown suspect.
NANCY GRACE: Investigators hope they can identify Chantay's killer with the DNA sample recovered
from a sex assault kit. ELISHA BIRD: That DNA profile was entered into the CODIS
system to see if a match could be obtained, so that we could determine a suspect to look into further.
JASON SHEA: CODIS is the Combined DNA Index System. So all unsolved crimes, DNA profiles
that are collected in those are uploaded into CODIS and compared to known offenders.
SCOTT BIRD: We were looking at some of the people we deal with quite frequently that we
knew had contact with Chantay. If we had any kind of feeling that somebody wasn't being
completely honest, the guys would ask for a DNA sample just to see if they agreed, or if maybe they
had something else to hide. We were really looking for that one person to tell us, no, you're not getting my DNA.
If you had something to hide, then maybe you wouldn't give your DNA. ELISHA BIRD: Unfortunately, there were no hits through CODIS
for any DNA matches, and there were no hits through CODIS on any familial DNA matches either.
NANCY GRACE: All the initial suspects are ruled out. Investigators turn to the public, determined
to get a break in the case. ELISHA BIRD: When they offered the financial reward for tips,
there were several Crime Stoppers tips that were provided to law enforcement. None of them panned out upon investigation.
NANCY GRACE: Despite the Crime Stoppers reward and DNA testing of potential suspects, detectives have
little to nothing to go on. ELISHA BIRD: Since all of the DNA samples that were provided for top suspects
came back not matching anyone, and so we started wondering, could it have been someone who is not from this area,
who was traveling through? Especially given the gruesomeness of it, there was a real concern that this
was someone who had potentially murdered and raped before. And so part of the investigation was thinking about,
are there other crimes similar to this that have happened in other locations, by someone who travels around
and commits these types of crimes? After that DNA profile was entered into CODIS,
and there was no match, tips slowed down. It's not like the community lost sight of it.
They were just-- all leads had been followed up at that time. ELISHA BIRD: Almost a full year and a half where we had no idea
who committed this crime. It was considered unsolved in our office, waiting for further investigation.
And it was in a cold case status for law enforcement, just looking for some tip to be able to break it back open
and be able to restart the case. MICHAEL MURRAY: A year out, when they were commemorating
or memorializing a year having passed since Chantay's death, I know that that kind of hit everybody and took everybody
back as a reminder of, we need to double down and get back to looking. Is there something else we can be doing,
and relooking at some of these stuff that's already been looked at? When we come back to "Bloodline Detectives,"
investigators now turn to a new forensic science to help them catch a killer. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]
[DRAMATIC MUSIC] [TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Detectives in Brown County, Texas, investigating the violent murder and brutal sex assault
of a vulnerable young woman, 25-year-old Rhonda Chantay Blankinship, her brutalized body discovered in an abandoned
cellar on May 15, 2016. Investigators have very few leads, so they turn to cutting-edge forensic science
to help crack the case. There was a television show that had caught one of the deputies' attention,
and that deputy brought it to the attention of investigator Scott Bird, that there is the possibility of doing DNA testing
using something that was new to us, called phenotyping, to develop a picture of the suspect.
Kind of like a crime scene sketch photo from an eyewitness, but using DNA to create that picture.
SCOTT BIRD: So I had to get on the computer just to try to wrap my head and see what it is.
I read quite a bit about it and thought, this could be very helpful. And I called Parabon and spoke with the president of Parabon,
and tried to get him to explain to me how he could take DNA and get me a computer image of a person.
I was very skeptical, so I asked him to give me some references, give me law enforcement agencies that
have actually used your system. CECE MOORE: Phenotyping is predicting somebody's physical traits and their ancestry from their DNA
alone. It is looking at hundreds of thousands of genetic markers across the genome, called SNPs, that
can help to predict someone's eye color, skin color, hair color, and other physical traits,
like shape face. ELISHA BIRD: Phenotyping was new in our field and the cost was a lot, especially for a small agency.
There's no budget or line item for doing phenotype testing. SCOTT BIRD: We had already spent a lot of money on DNA
and our budget was empty. So I went to the district attorney and said, look, will you split this with our office so we can get this done?
Well, the district attorney had never heard of that, or was not real familiar with phenotyping either.
So he was skeptical of whether it be admissible in court, whether it would work or not, and he was hesitant on it.
It took a while of me talking to both the sheriff and the district attorney to get them both to agree
to split the cost of it. ELISHA BIRD: When you have a cold case-- especially in a world where you are convinced that someone who
does something that brutal, this isn't going to be their only crime, it's not going to be the only time
they hurt someone-- any expense that you can possibly pay is worth it to try to figure out who committed the crime,
and to hold them responsible, and to protect the community from whatever they may do in the future.
MICHAEL MURRAY: When you start thinking outside the box, and you pick a new-type technology,
it's like you have to evaluate, is this the best new technology for us to take a chance on?
So it's not the skeptical of the science. It's just, is that the best, you know, angle for this?
And I think in the end we decided it was, and so decided to move forward on that.
JASON SHEA: The sheriff's office contacted the lab and requested SNP testing. And so that STR profile, or that DNA extract from the same exam,
was sent to Parabon for the phenotyping. ELISHA BIRD: That DNA evidence that was collected through the swabs of Chantay's body
was then submitted to Parabon, through methods that contained documentation about how the evidence was transferred,
who transferred it, and making sure that it wasn't altered or changed in any way.
SCOTT BIRD: When we gave them the permission or gave them the authorization to do this,
I believe I had the image in about three weeks. CECE MOORE: November 6, 2017, Parabon reached out
to the agency to let them know that the snapshot, phenotyping, imaging, and predictions were complete.
SCOTT BIRD: I'm in my office and I get an email from Parabon. I open it and it gives, first, a description
of what the person's eye color would be, whether they have freckles. Are their earlobes attached?
What color is their hair? They couldn't give us big things. Couldn't give us age.
Of course, can't give you weight. And then you scroll down and there is a computer-generated image from DNA
of a white male with a few freckles, light skin tone, at about age 25. ELISHA BIRD: It's kind of hard to express what you feel when
you see just the composite sketch by itself, because you don't have any measure or any standard
to say this is accurate or this is not accurate. You're just relying on this technology.
It sounds great and it sounds really exciting, but you've never seen it in action before.
So it-- it looks like a person. It looks like a young man that could be anybody that you
could run into on the street. STEVE NASH: The sheriff's office had sent out word to the local media to ask if we
could be there for this press conference related to the Chantay case. So we got there and it was myself
and some of the local radio people. TV media was-- was there. That's when Sheriff Hill displayed what
the suspect might look like. JASON SHEA: Once that snapshot was released we had some tips that had come in,
and they believed they had identified whoever the potential suspect might be. CECE MOORE: When law enforcement showed the snapshot phenotype
to Chantay's family, one of her brothers stated that it looked like a young man named Ryan Riggs.
He was a 21-year-old neighbor of theirs. He wasn't close to the family, but he had attended school
with some of Chantay's family members and he was an acquaintance of her current boyfriend.
ELISHA BIRD: The number of people that confirmed that this looked like Ryan Riggs, not even as part of the investigation,
just as part of the community chatter that was going on, it felt like confirmation before I even saw the photo of Ryan
next to the composite photo. NANCY GRACE: Finally, bloodline detectives get a huge break.
The use of DNA phenotyping produces an image that Chantay's relatives and neighbors immediately recognize.
Police now have a prime suspect, Ryan Riggs. Who's he? That's next on "Bloodline Detectives."
[DRAMATIC MUSIC] [DRAMATIC MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Brown County, Texas, 2017. Bloodline detectives have a breakthrough
in the search for a killer. A new forensic science called DNA phenotyping identifies
a suspect in the brutal rape and murder of 25-year-old Chantay Blankinship. The suspect's name, Ryan Riggs.
SCOTT BIRD: When we pulled up his social media and saw a picture of him, it was nearly
identical to the Parabon phenotyping image that they gave us. Ryan was from that same community.
So he lived out there close to Chantay, had a family that lived out there at the lake,
and somebody that obviously had known family members. The brother of Chantay had been friends with him at some point.
They had went to school together. So he definitely had the connections, would have known
Chantay. Chantay would have been familiar with him, which would have given him an easy in at Chantay.
JASON SHEA: When he was a juvenile, he had stolen a gun from a residence. So really, that's about the only criminal history
that we had on him. [TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Now investigators must obtain, somehow,
a sample of Ryan Riggs's DNA. At this point, they don't want him to know he's the prime suspect.
They come up with a plan to obtain Riggs's DNA without tipping him off. MICHAEL MURRAY: It was discovered
that within the community, he'd been dumping bags of trash out in the community without properly disposing of them.
So we thought, you know, it would be a good way to get him in front of some officers
to talk with him. SCOTT BIRD: He did violate the law by dumping trash, so we got an arrest warrant for him for illegal dumping.
We were just going to arrest him at his home, bring him into the office, get him into the office,
and then I was going to interview him. Officers went out there. He was home, but he would not answer the door.
He said he knew when he saw four deputies knocking on his front door that we were on to him.
And he went on the run. ELISHA BIRD: Ryan was gone for about three days, and no one knew where he was during that time frame.
NANCY GRACE: Brown County sheriffs began to track down Ryan Riggs. JASON SHEA: We did have a phone number.
And we were going to start using cell phone data to try to identify and locate where this individual was at.
SCOTT BIRD: Everybody in the office, on patrol, everybody was looking for Ryan. My wife and I were in the kitchen fixing supper,
about to start cooking, and I look over and my phone's ringing and it's the sheriff.
I answer the phone, as I always do, hey, boss. And he said, get to the office. Ryan Riggs has just confessed at the church in North Lake.
NANCY GRACE: It's a very bizarre, but welcome, twist for investigators. Has the prime suspect in Chantay Blankinship's murder
really confessed? And is he really the killer? We find out next on "Bloodline Detectives."
[DRAMATIC MUSIC] [DRAMATIC MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Brown County, Texas, 2017. A year has passed since the gruesome murder of 25-year-old
Rhonda Chantay Blankinship. An advanced forensic science called DNA phenotyping IDs a prime suspect named Ryan Riggs, and Riggs is on the run.
Before police track him down, he makes a very bizarre confession. CECE MOORE: On November 15, 2017,
Ryan went to North Lake Community Church, stood up in front of the congregation, and proclaimed,
I am a murderer. I killed Chantay Blankinship. JASON SHEA: Ryan wanted to confess to the congregation.
So I think the pastor allowed him to do that. Maybe that he just needed to get that off his chest.
I was surprised that he did that. I'd never seen a confession, or somebody get in front of a church and make a statement like that.
MICHAEL MURRAY: Certainly, he had all the makings that you would see anytime you look at serial killer studies.
He had that seed to be a serial killer one day. I think the only thing that kept that from coming to fruition
was the fact that he got caught on his first time out. NANCY GRACE: 21-year-old Ryan Riggs is taken into custody.
Investigators want to know exactly what happened the day Chantay is murdered. JASON SHEA: Ryan came in.
We set him down. This was a non-custodial interview. He wasn't under arrest. We wanted to know everything we could get.
We wanted to know how, why, when, and where that this all happened. SCOTT BIRD: I told him, I understand you have
something you want to tell us. And he just started talking of how he killed Chantay, how he
was a demon, how he'd always wanted to rape and murder, and with no emotion at all.
MICHAEL MURRAY: When he saw Chantay standing by the mailboxes, he figured that was a good, easy time
to get her, and so he took advantage of the fact that they knew each other. JASON SHEA: He picked her up, asked
her if she wanted to go listen to some music in his truck. They drove up to a secluded area and sat
there and listened to music. SCOTT BIRD: He put his arm around her, and then he strangled her unconscious.
He said he then sexually assaulted her. And he knew he had to get rid of her body,
so he took her out to that abandoned house where her body was found in a cellar.
ELISHA BIRD: She did survive the initial attack. He was clear in his interview that she was still moving
after the initial brutality. MICHAEL MURRAY: He felt that he needed to finish her off to make sure that she didn't go tell on him.
When he got her out of the truck at that abandoned house, he heard her breathing.
And she was moving, so he knew she was still alive. He first tried to cut her throat,
but his knife was dull so it wouldn't cut. And he remembered the lawnmower blade in the back of his truck,
so he took it out and beat her to death with it. MICHAEL MURRAY: In that process, he
admitted that he had stomped her chest as just part of that overall effort, and trying to inflict
enough injuries to her to make sure that she was dead by the time he left her. SCOTT BIRD: I believe he had fantasized about it for years
and he knew Chantay would be an easy target. NANCY GRACE: Investigators now have
their own version of Ryan Riggs's church house confession. Local prosecutors prepare to take him to trial.
We talked through all of the options that we had, whether to go forward with the death penalty
or to choose to resolve the case through an agreement for life without parole. Once you hear the confession, the next half
of that investigation is fixing to start. And that's delving into the background and history
of this particular defendant to see what the real likelihood of us, you know, uncovering enough bad
acts to actually make him one of the worst of the worst, to qualify him for the death penalty.
ELISHA BIRD: Ryan pled guilty on February 15 of 2019 to capital murder and received life without parole.
That means that he will never be able to leave the prison system in Texas. SCOTT BIRD: It was a mixed reaction.
We had a lot of people wondering why the death penalty was not sought, but there were also a lot of people that were just
thankful that he was going to prison and he is not eligible to ever get out. He will die in prison.
[SOMBER MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Thanks to DNA phenotyping, investigators can now solve a case once thought unsolvable.
CECE MOORE: I think it's very likely Ryan would have killed again, just based on his own statements.
And so in this case, I feel confident saying that the snapshot phenotype predictions got
a very violent criminal off the streets and potentially saved lives. SCOTT BIRD: It solved the case for us.
I don't know how much longer it would have taken for us to find Ryan, but it's the one that led us to Ryan.
NANCY GRACE: It's written in the Bible, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Ryan Riggs and Chantay Blankinship
attended the same church, the same church where Ryan Riggs confessed to the entire congregation
he killed Chantay. The same church whose pastor ministered to Riggs in his guilt, and to Chantay's mother in her grief.
At his sentencing, Chantay's mother showed her own compassion. She looked Ryan Riggs in the eye and said,
amazingly, I forgive you. But I don't. I'm Nancy Grace. Thank you for joining us here on "Bloodline Detectives."
[DRAMATIC MUSIC] [DRAMATIC MUSIC] [THEME MUSIC]

When a beloved young woman in Brown County, Texas is brutally murdered and left in an abandoned house, Investigative Genetic Genealogy could be the key to finding the perpetrator.

Now in its fifth season, Bloodline Detectives is the leading true crime series that explores how police departments harness genetic genealogy to solve crimes that were once considered "unsolvable," bringing long-awaited answers to victims' families.

Brief Summary

Rhonda Chantay Blankinship's murder leads to Ryan Riggs's confession through DNA phenotyping and community efforts.

Key points

The Disappearance of Chantay Blankinship. Rhonda Chantay Blankinship, a 25-year-old woman, vanishes from her community, sparking a massive search.
Tragic Discovery. Days later, Chantay's body is found, leading to a murder investigation.
The Brutality of the Crime. Chantay's body reveals signs of severe trauma and sexual assault, shocking the community.
DNA Phenotyping Breakthrough. Investigators use DNA phenotyping to identify a prime suspect in Chantay's murder.
Ryan Riggs's Church Confession. Ryan Riggs confesses to the congregation about killing Chantay.
Life Without Parole. Ryan Riggs pleads guilty to capital murder and receives life without parole.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Chantay's sweetness, kindness, ended up being her demise.

Reflecting on Chantay's trusting nature.

4:48WatchJun 29, 2025

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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