The court clerk who helped steer the murder trial of South Carolina’s Alex Murdaugh and has since been hit with accusations of jury-tampering – potentially leading to a retrial – is now embroiled in a plagiarism controversy.
Soon after the trial, in which Murdaugh was convicted of killing his wife and son near a dog kennel at their Low Country home, Becky Hill published a book named Behind the Doors of Justice: the Murdaugh Murders.
But her co-author Neil Gordon said on Tuesday that the book had been unpublished and sales suspended after revelations that Hill may have plagiarized passages from a BBC article about the case.
Gordon told South Carolina’s WCIV he discovered the plagiarism while reviewing thousands of Hill’s emails that were released through the federal Freedom of Information Act and compared them to a 12-page portion of the book’s preface.
“When I confronted Becky about this, she admitted she plagiarized the passage due to deadline pressures,” Gordon said in a statement.
Gordon said that as a veteran journalist he could neither “excuse her behavior nor … condone it”. He said Hill’s plagiarism had “blindsided” him, adding: “I can’t be associated with anything like plagiarism and will no longer partner with Becky Hill on any projects.
“I’d like to apologize to our readers, and publicly to the BBC and the reporter.”
Attorneys for the broadcaster are said to be investigating.
In a foreword to Behind the Doors of Justice, author Rona Rich described how Hill ran the Colleton county court “with an iron fist deceptively wrapped in the softest silk”.
Hill has been submerged in controversies since Murdaugh’s conviction and sentencing.
In September, defense attorneys for Murdaugh demanded a new trial. They said they had spoken to three jurors and collected sworn affidavits by two panelists alleging Hill had improper discussions that hastened their deliberations, which lasted three hours after a six-week trial.
The attorneys allege Hill improperly influenced the jury, telling its members to not trust Murdaugh when he testified.
She also was accused of holding one-on-one conversations with the jury foreperson in a bathroom, giving reporters’ business cards to jurors, and pressuring them to come back with a quick verdict by denying them smoking breaks as well as threatening them with sequestration.
“She asked jurors about their opinions about Mr Murdaugh’s guilt or innocence,” the attorneys alleged in writing. Hill, they said, “instructed them not to believe evidence presented in Mr Murdaugh’s defense, including his own testimony. She lied to the judge to remove a juror she believed might not vote guilty. And she pressured jurors to reach a guilty verdict quickly so she could profit from it.”
Murdaugh’s defense team, led by Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, also filed motions demanding a new judge for the case based on what they described as improper statements by the presiding judge, Clifton Newman, during sentencing and in public appearances and media interviews.
Newman then requested to be removed from all post-trial matters related to Murdaugh’s murder cases. Judge Jean Hoefer Toal has since been appointed to assume jurisdiction over matters related to Murdaugh’s convictions and a motions for a new trial.
Hill has also been caught up in a separate scandal after state investigators found evidence linking her to a public corruption case involving wire-tapping charges against her son and former Colleton county employee Jeff Hill, 34, who is accused of abusing his position to illegally intercept and listen to a phone conversation in July.
A state police investigation uncovered evidence of a plot to listen in on internal county discussions about the formal ethics complaint against his mother for potentially abusing her role as clerk of court for financial gain, according to the local news station WYFF.
Earlier this month, South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, announced his office would assume jurisdiction of the investigation into Jeff Hill as part of a broader corruption inquiry. The investigation into Hill’s actions took another turn when his employment termination letter also cites “sexual and other forms of illegal harassment”.
