How a Small-Town Clerk’s Misdeeds Upturned the Murdaugh Verdict
Key takeaways
- It seemed to have worked, until police caught him in a lie about his movements on the night of the crime, and his alibi fell apart.
- From the start, the case was marked by stunned hyperbole. “The scope of Murdaugh’s depravity is without precedent in Western jurisprudence,” one of many lawsuits against him declared.
- The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.
Photograph by Tracy Glantz / Zuma / Reuters Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story On March 2, 2023, the prominent personal-injury lawyer Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife, Maggie, and their son, Paul, at Moselle, their seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-acre hunting estate in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. Initially, the murders were thought to be the work of vigilantes with a grudge against the family, but investigators quickly came to focus on Murdaugh himself, speculating that he’d staged the crime, in which two weapons were used, in order to turn himself into an object of sympathy ahead of the looming exposure of a multimillion-dollar embezzlement scheme he’d been running for years. It seemed to have worked, until police caught him in a lie about his movements on the night of the crime, and his alibi fell apart. The large-living scion of a legal dynasty that had occupied the prosecutor’s office in South Carolina’s Fourteenth Circuit for generations, while also making fortunes as civil litigators, Murdaugh was found guilty of the murders and pled guilty to dozens of financial crimes. He was given two consecutive life sentences for the murders, along with various other federal and state sentences for his other crimes.
From the start, the case was marked by stunned hyperbole. “The scope of Murdaugh’s depravity is without precedent in Western jurisprudence,” one of many lawsuits against him declared. An attorney for some of his financial victims told me, “Alex Murdaugh is one of the darkest human beings our state has ever produced.” And, earlier this month, the South Carolina Supreme Court added a superlative of its own, overturning the murder verdict, vacating Murdaugh’s two life sentences, and ordering a new trial, on the ground of jury tampering by Becky Hill, the clerk of the court during the trial: “The breathtaking and disgraceful effort of Hill to undermine the jury process is unprecedented in South Carolina.” (Murdaugh remains incarcerated at the McCormick Correctional Institution for his financial crimes, which have not been vacated.)
The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.