The Last Meal:Bronwyn Meeks·Dominic Samuels·Brennan Thomas·Dylan Whetzel

Dylan Whetzel was twenty and from Stafford, Virginia. He had confronted Bronwyn Meeks, a local drug dealer he knew through mutual friends, after a friend of his overdosed, and told her to stop selling to him. Meeks, then twenty-one, had a court-ordered drug test coming that she expected to fail, and jail with it.

On the night of January 30, 2021, Meeks asked Whetzel out as though the two had smoothed things over. They stopped at a McDonald’s, which she later called his “last meal,” and then drove to a remote spot in Spotsylvania County with her boyfriend, Domonic Samuels, and their friend Brennan Thomas. Just after midnight he was shot several times as he tried to run. Two of them bought an axe at a Walmart the next day, went back and dismembered the body, then left the remains in four black trash bags in woods behind Thomas’s grandfather’s house. The grandfather found the bags and called 911 on February 1.

Meeks pleaded guilty in February 2022 to more than thirty counts, among them first-degree murder, abduction and defiling a dead body, and was sentenced in 2024 to forty-two years. A Spotsylvania jury convicted Thomas on all twenty-six of his charges in August 2023. Samuels was convicted that November, and both men were sentenced to life plus additional years.