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Alex Murdaugh’s lawyers revealed the new evidence they’ll introduce at retrial to argue the disgraced legal scion’s innocence in his wife and son’s murders – including never-before-heard DNA findings.
“There was DNA under Maggie’s fingernails, male DNA that was not DNA of Alex or any other family members,” Murdaugh’s lead attorney, Jim Griffin, told “NewsNation” anchor Chris Cuomo Thursday, one day after the South Carolina Supreme Court shockingly overturned Murdaugh’s double murder conviction.
“They were never put into CODIS,” Griffin said, referring to a database utilized by law enforcement to compare DNA profiles. “That has never been followed up on.”
Murdaugh, 57, had been serving two consecutive life sentences without parole for the grisly executions of his wife, Maggie, and their 22-year-old son, Paul, after a jury unanimously found him guilty of the slayings following a dramatic six-week trial in 2023.
The mother-son duo was found gunned down near the outdoor dog kennels at the family’s sprawling hunting estate in Colleton County on June 7, 2021.
“As we pointed out in the first trial…the state law enforcement investigators were singularly focused on Alex Murdaugh and ignored evidence of other potential murderers,” Griffin continued. “I mean, Chris, there were tire tracks driving away from the murder scene that were never followed. In fact, they were trampled over.
“I’ll tell you, since the first trial, we have been provided information that gives us a list of other potential suspects,” the lawyer said.
Griffin insisted the prosecution has no proof that his embattled client “was there at the time of the murders” – instead, “he was there before and he was there after.”
However, “we don’t even know when the murder happened,” he said.
“The state’s evidence and their whole theory of the time of death is cessation of use of cell phones, and we know Paul’s cell phone’s battery was running out…and there’s no eyewitnesses. I mean, there’s nothing to set the time of death.
“You may remember the coroner who gave an estimate of time of death. What was his test? He put his thumb under the armpits of Maggie and Paul to guesstimate what time of death it was,” Griffin charged.
Murdaugh initially told investigators that the last time he saw his wife and son alive was when they ate dinner together around 8:15 p.m. that night, then found their bodies when he returned home from visiting his ailing mother at just after 10 p.m.
A county coroner who arrived on the grisly scene initially put the time of deaths between 8 and 10 p.m., based on the bodies’ temperatures and joint stiffness, but later narrowed the window to between 8:50 and 9 p.m.
Murdaugh’s original alibi unraveled in court when prosecutors played a video clip taken by Paul at 8:44 p.m. that revealed three voices – which a longtime family friend testified were those of Paul, Maggie and Alex.
Griffin admitted Thursday that Murdaugh “lied about the circumstances” surrounding that evening.
“He was standing there with a shotgun in his hand by his truck with his dead wife and his dead son” when police arrived, Griffin said. “And he had a pocket full of pills. He was a drug addict.”
“He said he [was overcome with] drug paranoia and he lied. And once he started to lie, he continued to lie…that was his explanation.
“I’ll tell you what, that explanation holds more water than the state’s theory of motive that he would have gone home and executed his son and his wife because they were asking him and his law firm, ‘Where is $750,000 dollars?’” Griffin said.
Prosecutors argued that Murdaugh, the heir of a storied legal dynasty, killed Maggie and Paul to cover up his extensive financial crimes and over stresses related to a lawsuit by the family of 19-year-old Mallory Beach, who died after Paul drunkenly crashed a boat into a bridge in December 2019.
A pre-trial hearing in the boat crash case, which had been scheduled to take place just three days after the murders, would have exposed Murdaugh’s criminal financial dealings, prosecutors said.
During an interview with “Fox and Friends” on Wednesday, Griffin blasted that motive as “manufactured” and “ludicrous” – and insisted again that the defense is sitting on “multiple alternative theories” about the murders.
“I can tell you generally we received tips about where the murder weapons are. We’ve received tips about who was in the area that night and what motives they have,” he said during the segment.
Another member of Murdaugh’s defense team, Dick Harpootlian, insisted former Colleton County Clerk Becky Hill’s jury tampering, as well as the amount of time prosecutors focused on Murdaugh’s financial crimes, were solely responsible for the outcome of the first trial.
“If you strip all that away, what do [prosecutors] have? They don’t have any forensics tying [Murdaugh] to the murder scene. No DNA, no blood, no fingerprints. They have no weapons. They have no ballistics…matter of fact, there is technical evidence that would indicate he wasn’t there,” Harpootlian said.
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said Thursday that his office has “credible evidence that supports the conclusions that we came to the first time, and we intend to pursue those again.”
Despite the overturned conviction, Murdaugh will remain behind bars serving concurrent 40-year federal and 27-year state sentences for financial crimes for stealing from his clients.
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