The Re-Trial Of Alex Murdaugh

Alex Murdaugh's defense wants to know if prosecutors are investigating a police officer friend who allegedly reached Moselle before other officers, and the state won't say. Eric Faddis joins me to cover that fight, the October 16 hearing, and a second case with police at its center: Sandra Birchmore.

Judge Debra McCaslin let Murdaugh's lawyers test unknown DNA from Maggie Murdaugh's fingernails and phone, corrected Dick Harpootlian's polygraph claim, and ordered the state's crime-scene scans handed over.

In Boston, Matthew Farwell is on trial for Sandra's death. Prosecutors say his DNA was on the strap, and...

Alex Murdaugh's defense walked out of the October 16 hearing with permission to test the unknown male DNA tied to Maggie Murdaugh. Eric Faddis joins me to weigh whether it's a real lead or a long shot.

The samples come from under Maggie's fingernails and from her cellphone. Prosecutors said any new testing could use up everything left. Judge Debra McCaslin let it happen anyway.

The defense also says prosecutors suggested a police officer who was friends with Murdaugh got to Moselle before other officers and could have helped hide the guns and bloody clothes. The...

The judge corrected Dick Harpootlian in open court. Harpootlian had claimed Alex Murdaugh passed a polygraph with flying colors. Murdaugh failed it. The polygraph measured whether he hid assets — it had nothing to do with the deaths of Maggie and Paul. No test about the murders was ever administered. The judge warned Harpootlian that when he makes a representation to this court, it must be truthful and accurate. The hearing's other battle: evidence dumps. The defense laid out what the state delivered before the first trial — 73 gigabytes three days before jury selection. And a SLED ballistics expert's testimony that he'd...

SLED told the first jury about unknown male DNA under Maggie Murdaugh's left fingernails and left it at that. The defense now says the same unknown male profile appears under her other hand and on the cell phone discarded from the car after she was killed. Alex Murdaugh is excluded from all of it. A federal prisoner's sworn statement also sat untouched in the state's files — Ryan Spencer North detailed $15,000-a-week pill sales to the family and a $165,000 debt owed by Eddie Smith to a violent drug gang. The statement landed in an evidence dump three days before the fi...

Alex Murdaugh's retrial has opened a new battle over evidence that never made it into the first trial. His defense is demanding records tied to allegations that local law-enforcement officers may have handled the missing guns used to kill Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. The State has not adopted those allegations, and the officer most prominently named in the reporting denies them.

The September 30 motion asks for grand-jury material, witness interviews and investigative files concerning the alleged movement or concealment of weapons and clothing. It focuses in part on Yemassee Police Chief Greg Alexander, a Murdaugh family friend...

On October 6, 2026, the State filed its response to the defense's motion to compel cell phone discovery — and attached the defense's own correspondence as exhibits. Exhibit H is Jim Griffin's January 19, 2023 email to Creighton Waters calling the State "very accommodating and cooperative" on cell phone production and acknowledging the timing problem was the defense's own making.

The defense's September 28 motion claims the data arrived January 30. Griffin's email is dated January 19. Harpootlian's email acknowledging a prior delivery to Maggie Fox is dated January 20. The motion builds its argument on a timeline the defense's own paper trail contradicts by ten da...

At Alex Murdaugh's trial, prosecutors said he hid both murder weapons at his parents' home in Almeda and moved them in a blue raincoat. Police searched three months after the killings. The guns weren't there. A grand jury is investigating whether the weapons went to a different location entirely — into the possession of Police Chief Greg Alexander, a Murdaugh family friend who was at the Moselle crime scene the night of the murders. Alexander was acquitted of misconduct charges with the Murdaugh family's backing. Alex paid him $5,000 by check after the killings. Alexander gave conflicting accounts of when the ch...

Alex Murdaugh’s retrial has a new home and a new evidence fight forming around it. Judge Debra McCaslin ordered the murder case moved to Sumter County after concluding that the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit could not provide the kind of impartial jury the Constitution requires. During the original 2023 selection process, fewer than one in seven prospective jurors qualified. McCaslin said that figure likely understates the problem now because the first convictions were overturned, Becky Hill was criminally convicted, and the case generated another wave of national attention.

The defense wanted Charleston badly enough to offer a permanent wa...

On June 7, 2021, somebody used a 12-gauge shotgun and a .300 Blackout rifle to kill Maggie and Paul Murdaugh at the family’s Moselle hunting estate in Colleton County. Both weapons disappeared that night. Alex Murdaugh was convicted of both murders in March 2023 without either gun in evidence. He was granted a retrial, now scheduled for April 2027.

FITSNews reported on September 25, 2026, that the missing weapons are now at the center of a statewide grand jury investigation. SLED investigators and prosecutors are looking into allegations that Greg Alexander — the police chief of Yemassee, South Carolina, and a close friend of Alex...

The defense wanted Charleston so badly that Harpootlian offered to permanently waive all venue appeals if McCaslin agreed. She didn't agree. Instead, McCaslin's eight-page order landed on Sumter County, a location roughly eighty-six miles from Walterboro with three times the population of Colleton County. Nobody on either side had suggested it. The order traces the problem back nearly a century. The Murdaugh family held the prosecutor's seat across five counties from 1920 to 2006. McCaslin found that the dynasty left the entire 14th Circuit incapable of producing an impartial jury. Hill's criminal convictions for tampering with the original jury made the...

Alex Murdaugh's lawyers have accused a SLED agent of fabricating evidence used to charge him with murder in the first place. That motion is now sitting in front of Judge Debra McCaslin, one of several bombshells to come out of an August 14 pretrial hearing. Tony Brueski and retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer cover the full hearing, start to finish. McCaslin pulled the retrial entirely outside the 14th Judicial Circuit, ruling that a county where Murdaugh's family ran the prosecutor's office for three generations can't seat an unbiased jury. She ordered independent lab testing on unidentified male DNA recovered...

Alex Murdaugh's defense raised something in the Lexington County courtroom on August 14 that Creighton Waters did not see coming. The defense told Judge Debra McCaslin that weapons from a recent Allendale County murder may connect to the Murdaugh murder weapons. Waters told the court he had never heard a word about it, despite daily communication with SLED.

Jennifer Coffindaffer, a retired FBI Special Agent, joins Tony Brueski to cover the August 14 hearing and what it tells an investigator about how SLED managed the evidence in this case.

McCaslin ordered SLED to release fingernail DNA from...

A motion filed on August 10 asks Judge Debra McCaslin to dismiss Alex Murdaugh's murder indictments entirely. The defense alleges SLED's lead case agent gave false testimony and presented fabricated blood evidence on a T-shirt to the Colleton County grand jury that charged Murdaugh in 2022. No prosecution response has been filed and McCaslin has not ruled.That pending motion was the backdrop for an August 14 hearing where the defense gained ground on every other contested issue. McCaslin granted a change of venue out of the 14th Judicial Circuit, citing the high rate of jurors disqualified in the original trial and...

Alex Murdaugh's defense wants independent DNA testing ahead of his retrial. Prosecutors are fighting that request. Tony Brueski and retired FBI Special Agent Robin Dreeke dig into why the state doesn't want a second lab involved, and what it's asking for instead. 
Prosecutors are also seeking a fresh review of digital evidence and moving to admit Murdaugh's own 2023 testimony at the retrial, including his admission that he lied to investigators for about eighteen months about being at the kennels the night Maggie and Paul were killed, and his denial of the killings themselves. The state is renewing two p...

Alex Murdaugh's defense wants a South Carolina judge to order something rare: a full search of every file, agency, and personnel record connected to his case, across ten categories, with prosecutors swearing in writing that nothing favorable to Murdaugh remains hidden. Judge Debra McCaslin hears arguments on that motion August 14, 2026. Tony Brueski breaks down what's actually being asked for, and why. 
The motion leans on the record of lead investigator David Owen, who led the Murdaugh case and, years earlier, a separate 2015 murder investigation a judge later quashed after ruling the state withheld favorable evidence for nearly a d...

Alex Murdaugh's lawyers want a signature from the prosecution, and the reason sits in a case most people have never heard of. Tony Brueski takes the listener mail with retired FBI Special Agent Robin Dreeke.

The defense filed a supplemental motion under Brady and Giglio. It asks the court to order prosecutors to search again for favorable and impeachment material generated since the 2023 trial, then certify in writing that the search was diligent and current. Thirty days.

Now the case that gets a fraction of the coverage. Last spring a circuit court judge quashed the...

Alex Murdaugh is getting a second trial because of a court clerk. That is the whole reason any of these new filings exist, and it is worth keeping in front of you. Tony Brueski takes listener questions with retired FBI Special Agent Robin Dreeke.

The South Carolina Supreme Court vacated Murdaugh's 2023 murder convictions after jurors said Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill told them to watch his body language and not be fooled by his testimony. The justices ruled that amounted to a suggestion he was guilty. Hill later pleaded guilty to perjury, obstruction of justice...

The Brady motion filed August 5, 2026, is the widest evidence demand of the Alex Murdaugh retrial so far, and this breakdown goes category by category. The filing renews the defense's July 2022 discovery request and stacks ten new categories on top: new or modified witness deals, statements that contradict old ones, updated disciplinary and internal affairs files, DNA and forensic developments down to analyst proficiency tests and software, fresh search warrants, and post-trial material touching the verdict's integrity. It reaches SLED's Eddie Smith roadside-shooting file and the narcotics investigation. And it asks Judge Debra McCaslin to make prosecutors certify in writing — wi...

South Carolina taxpayers are about to fund a second Alex Murdaugh murder trial because Becky Hill talked to a jury while selling a book about the case. That means a new prosecution, courthouse security, and months of court time. On August 5, a federal judge ruled Hill owes Murdaugh nothing for the first one. His $600,000 lawsuit against the former clerk is dismissed, on the logic that he'd have paid his defense lawyers whether she tampered or not. She pleaded guilty in December to obstruction, perjury, and misconduct: charges about a book photo, bonuses, and sealed exhibits, not the tampering. She...

The unidentified male DNA found under Maggie Murdaugh's fingernails has been sitting untouched for eight years, and Alex Murdaugh's prosecutors are fighting to keep an independent lab from finishing the job SLED never did. One test, one conclusion that it wasn't family, and then nothing. No effort to find out who it actually belonged to. The defense wants a forensic genealogy lab, the same kind of lab that identified Bryan Kohberger in Idaho, to test what's left before it degrades. The state wants first access, running the same process that already fell short, in a procedure the defense says...

Becky Hill's text messages and emails from the weeks she managed Alex Murdaugh's jury have never been examined by anyone outside the state's closed investigation. Murdaugh's lawyers wanted them, and the federal lawsuit they filed in May 2026 was the only legal instrument that could get them. A civil defendant can be subpoenaed and deposed. A private citizen who took a plea deal cannot be touched by a criminal defendant's discovery at all.

Judge Gergel's dismissal on August 5 cut off the records, the deposition, the trace on the anonymous email that removed a juror mid-deliberations, and the chance...

Alex Murdaugh's defense team filed a memorandum on July 30th, 2026, demanding that Judge Debra McCaslin allow an independent forensic lab to test DNA evidence recovered from Maggie Murdaugh's fingernails — before SLED can run tests that the defense says could consume or degrade the remaining sample. SLED identified the DNA years ago as belonging to an unknown male with no relation to the Murdaugh family. The defense says no further analysis was ever attempted. The lab they want involved is Othram, Inc. — the same forensic genetic genealogy operation whose technology helped put a name to Bryan Kohberger in the Idaho stud...

Alex Murdaugh's retrial finally has a date, April 5, 2027, and a stack of defense motions that go straight at the evidence that convicted him the first time. Start with the shirt. Blood-spatter analyst Tom Bevel's original report reportedly described the marks on Murdaugh's white T-shirt as transfer stains, not gunshot spatter, before that finding changed following what defense filings describe as color adjustments made in Photoshop. The state never called Bevel to testify. Then there's the DNA. Investigators recovered an unknown male's genetic material from under Maggie Murdaugh's fingernails the night she and Paul were killed, and that sample was...

The first retrial hearing in the Murdaugh case produced a moment that deserves more attention than it received. Dick Harpootlian presented the court with transcripts from interviews conducted with the first people to arrive at the Moselle property after Maggie and Paul were found dead. He told Judge McCaslin the accounts contain conflicting information about who was present at the property that night — and that the defense has received tips from people claiming to have case information that were forwarded to SLED with no confirmation they were ever investigated.

That revelation came alongside a barrage of defense mo...

For case followers tracking every strategic detail: the prosecution’s position heading into the April retrial is fundamentally different from 2023. The 12.5 hours of financial crimes testimony that defined how the first jury understood Alex Murdaugh — before they heard any murder evidence — has been restricted by the Supreme Court. The motive theory faces a jury that knows Murdaugh already pleaded guilty to the financial crimes and is serving concurrent state and federal sentences.

Bob Motta examines whether the death penalty threat is genuine or leverage, whether Creighton Waters can present a streamlined motive case that still lands, and what t...

The first retrial hearing produced a ruling that goes directly to the defense’s ability to prepare. Judge McCaslin denied Murdaugh a laptop after the prison warden refused. The conference room compromise means every discovery review session requires his attorneys to physically visit the facility with their own equipment. Harpootlian warned the court that without better access, preparation could take longer than the April 5 deadline allows.

For case followers: the defense revealed its hand at this hearing in ways that hadn’t been public before. Transcripts from first responders with conflicting accounts about who was present at Mose...

The defense is building Alex Murdaugh’s retrial around evidence SLED collected and never fully analyzed: DNA from an unknown male found under Maggie Murdaugh’s left-hand fingernails. They want Othram — the lab behind the Kohberger identification — to run an independent analysis on a rush order.

Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke take the audience’s hardest questions head on. Is a proven liar’s denial worth anything? Does his voice on Paul’s phone at the kennels prove he’s the killer, or just that he was concealing something? The first trial stayed in his home county, and he was convi...

Alex Murdaugh's murder convictions were overturned, and the retrial is now moving forward in front of a newly assigned judge. Before the first hearing, his defense team made its opening moves — and they tell you a lot about how this second trial is going to be fought.

There are three motions. The defense wants the trial moved out of the five-county circuit where the Murdaugh name dominated the courts for generations. They want Murdaugh given a secure laptop to work through a mountain of sealed discovery. And they want the court to release DNA recovered from under Ma...

When the Supreme Court erased Alex Murdaugh’s murder convictions, Blanca drove straight to Maggie’s grave. Twenty years inside that household. Not staff — family. The person Maggie cried to behind closed doors. Blanca fixed Alex’s collar the morning of June 7th. She found the wet towel the next day. She gave every detail to a jury that convicted in three hours. Then Becky Hill destroyed the verdict.

In her most revealing interview since the reversal, Blanca goes where the trial never went. She describes what the house looked like the morning after. The things that were mov...

The kennel video convicted Alex Murdaugh the first time. His voice at the dog kennels minutes before Maggie and Paul were shot. Multiple people identified that voice under oath. He admitted he lied about being there. The jury came back in three hours. Now Dick Harpootlian says his team has a counter. He won’t say what it is. But he said it on national television, which means he wants the potential jury pool to know it’s coming.

On the other side, Creighton Waters just lost the narrative that told the first jury why. The Supreme Cour...

The retrial hasn’t begun and the prosecution is already losing the people who built its case. Ryan Kelly, the SLED agent who testified as one of the state’s final witnesses at the 2023 murder trial, was fired from the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office on June 8, 2026. Kelly had been running the office’s internal affairs unit — investigating other officers’ misconduct — when allegations of harassment, unbecoming conduct, and improper procedures ended his tenure after a little over a year.At SLED, Kelly was the lead investigator on Alex Murdaugh’s staged roadside shooting. His testimony helped prosecutors argue that Murdaugh’s lies...

The retrial of Alex Murdaugh for the murders of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh is being shaped right now — in press conferences, in federal court filings, and in strategy signals neither side would normally make public. Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta reads all of it through a lens most commentators don’t have.

On the defense side: a stated plan for the kennel video, unknown male DNA under Maggie’s fingernails that was never submitted to CODIS, new forensic cell phone experts, eight thousand pages of locked testimony from the first trial, and a federal lawsuit against Becky Hill t...

There’s a reason the defense filed this lawsuit in federal court instead of state court. Federal rules let them run their own investigation in a way the murder case never allowed. They can force sworn interviews. They can demand documents that haven’t been made available through the criminal process. And they can pull in anyone connected to the Colleton County courthouse during the first trial — not just Becky Hill.

Hill already pleaded guilty criminally. That established what she did. This lawsuit is about finding out what everybody else knew. If Hill gets put under oath in the...

The first time Creighton Waters stood in front of a jury and talked about Alex Murdaugh, he had twelve and a half hours of financial destruction to work with. Stolen money from vulnerable clients. Insurance fraud. A man who lied to everyone who ever trusted him. By the time the jury considered the murder evidence, they already knew exactly what kind of person was sitting at the defense table.

The Supreme Court just shut that down. The justices said the financial crimes presentation was excessive and the retrial must be efficient. They specifically singled out testimony that...

Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin are doing something unusual for a defense team heading into a retrial — they’re telling everyone what they plan to do. Harpootlian said on national television that his team has a strategy for the kennel video, the single most damaging piece of evidence from the first trial. That video placed Alex’s voice at the Moselle kennels minutes before Maggie and Paul were killed. It forced Alex to admit he lied about his whereabouts. The first jury heard it and convicted in under three hours.

Griffin went further. He pointed to unknown male D...

The defense team says other suspects committed these murders. Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson — twenty years inside the Murdaugh household, a key prosecution witness at the first trial — agrees that other people were involved. And her agreement is the worst thing the defense could hear. Because Blanca isn’t saying someone else did it. She’s saying Alex always used someone else to do everything — and the murders fit the same pattern.
Blanca’s theory is specific. She believes Alex had a Plan A that involved another person being at Moselle the night Maggie and Paul were killed. When that plan fell apart...

The woman now overseeing Alex Murdaugh’s retrial reportedly rented office space from his defense attorney and named him under oath as a lawyer who shaped her career. Judge Debra McCaslin was handed exclusive jurisdiction over every Murdaugh proceeding by the South Carolina Supreme Court — the same court that reversed his murder convictions and ordered a new trial in the killings of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. Nobody has filed a motion to remove her.
Defense attorney and former felony prosecutor Eric Faddis examines whether McCaslin’s reported connection to Dick Harpootlian is a genuine problem or a headline, what h...

Years before the South Carolina Supreme Court handed her the most closely watched murder retrial in the state's history, Judge Debra McCaslin stood before legislators and named the lawyers who left a mark on her career. One of them was Dick Harpootlian — the man who will stand at Alex Murdaugh's side when his double murder case goes back to trial for the killings of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh.
The connection runs deeper than a compliment on the record. McCaslin reportedly rented office space from Harpootlian when she was building her practice. They collaborated on a class-action involving video po...

The Murdaugh retrial doesn't just affect Alex. It touches every case, every family, and every unresolved question connected to the Murdaugh name. Eric Bland represents the Satterfield sons whose testimony the Supreme Court dismissed. He represents Sandy Smith whose son's homicide investigation was reopened because of the Murdaugh murders. And he built the financial crimes case that prosecutors are now being told to scale back.

In this full-length interview, Bland takes the long view. He covers the ruling — what it means for his clients and whether the court got it right. He covers the retrial — whether the stat...

The Murdaugh name appeared more than forty times in the original investigation of Stephen Smith's death in 2015. Stephen was a former classmate of Buster Murdaugh. He was found dead on a road miles from the Murdaugh family's hunting property. When SLED reopened the case six years later, they said it was because of evidence found during the Murdaugh murder investigation. They never revealed what that evidence was.

Eric Bland has said publicly that he has no evidence the Murdaugh family was directly involved in Stephen's death — but that they may have known something. That's a specific claim fr...