Tales of intrigue and gossip encircling the Murdaugh dynasty continue to unfold in South Carolina’s low country where only six months ago, after a lengthy trial culminating in barely three hours of deliberations, jurors handed down guilty verdicts to Alex Murdaugh in the killings of his wife and son.
The speed of those jury deliberations, and what may have moved jurors to swiftly decide the six-week case, now lies at the heart of the most shocking twist in the saga yet – a claim of jury tampering brought by Murdaugh’s defense team against the court clerk.
Astonishingly that could result in the declaration of a mistrial and set the stage for another chapter in a case that has captivated America and the world, spurring intense media interest, endless headlines and multiple TV documentaries.
In a court filing last week, Murdaugh’s defense lawyers, Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, said they had spoken to three jurors and collected sworn affidavits by two alleging that the Colleton county clerk of court, Rebecca Hill, had improper discussions with jurors.
They called on appellate judges to order an evidentiary hearing that could, by turns, grant Murdaugh, 54, a new trial.
The attorneys allege that Hill improperly influenced the jury, telling jurors not to trust the defendant when he testified, but also holding one-on-one conversations with the jury foreperson in a bathroom, giving jurors reporter’s business cards, and pressuring them to come back with a quick verdict by denying them smoking breaks and threatening them with sequestration.
Hill, they claimed, told jurors “not to be fooled” by the evidence presented by the defense, to watch Murdaugh closely when he testified, to “look at his actions” and “look at his movements”, and had one juror, known as the “egg juror” (because they ate hardboiled eggs throughout the trial) thrown off the panel because she was supposedly wedded to Murdaugh’s claims of innocence and could have swung the verdict.
“She asked jurors about their opinions about Mr Murdaugh’s guilt or innocence,” the attorneys wrote. 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.”
After the verdict, Hill had travelled to New York with three of the jurors to do interviews soon after the verdict and had written a book based on her experience of the trial, Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders.
Hill has retained attorney Justin Bamberg, who has represented two victims of Murdaugh’s alleged insurance fraud schemes. Bamberg, a state representative, told the Guardian earlier this year that the power and influence the Murdaughs dynasty once had over the legal system in South Carolina’s low country had dissipated.
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But the challenge to the integrity of trial could test that assumption. On Thursday, the attorney general for South Carolina, Alan Wilson, asked for an investigation by the South Carolina law enforcement division, or Sled, into the allegations. “The state’s only vested interest is seeking the truth,” he said.
But Murdaugh’s attorneys also called on the FBI to investigate, and referred Hill to the US attorneys office – a move that could trigger a federal investigation and overturn Murdaugh’s conviction based on violations of his constitutional violations.
Six months after Murdaugh was convicted and sentenced to a life sentence, he sits in an 8x10 cell in the protective custody unit of South Carolina’s maximum-security McCormick correctional institution, separated from the general population due to the notoriety of the case.
Amid a series of documentaries on the case, surviving son Buster Murdaugh told Fox Nation last week “there’s a heck of a lot that still needs to be answered about what happened”.
Joshua Ritter, a former Los Angeless county prosecutor and now a criminal defense lawyer, says the speed at which the jury returned raises questions, indicating either that the jury was so convinced by the evidence they made up their minds before deliberations or potentially something else.
“It was a fairly complex trial and it wasn’t as if the defense just sat on their hands,” he says. The speed that verdict came back, he says, “was shocking to a lot of people”.
“In light of some of the evidence that’s coming out about jurors discussions with the clerk, and if those prove to be true, it raises suspicions,” Ritter says. “These are sworn affidavits so that’s a problem for the prosecution. This is bombshell evidence that could be grounds for a new trial.”
If nothing else, the claims of jury tampering build on a long-standing reputation for unequal justice in Hampton county that had long been seen as benefiting thje Murdaugh clan.
“The Murdoch family just seemed to get away with everything, and we had a trial in which the door seemed to have been shut on that for good,” says Ritter. “Now it looks like there’s an opening for the case to be revisited. Allegations of inappropriate conduct by the clerk, with sworn affidavits, are flooring.”
Before the start of the trial, a portrait of Alex Murdaugh’s grandfather, Randolph Murdaugh Jr, was removed from the courtroom. It has now reportedly been re-hung.
This article was amended on 11 September 2023 to clarify that Buster Murdaugh spoke to Fox Nation, not Fox News as previously stated.
