Maggie Murdaugh's Fingernails Held Something the State Logged and Then Never Tested

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Alex Murdaugh, lots of motions being filed, and as you know, in any sort of case, most of what matters in a trial happens before the trial even officially starts. Well, the defense is asking the court to test, and why the lab and the case they cite change everything.
That's what we are getting into here today as we look at the Alec Murdaugh retrial. When Maggie Murdaugh was killed, she had another man's skin under her fingernails, her left hand. Investigators collected it at the, is seen the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, logged it in the evidences, item number 70 They tested it. They determined the DNA came from a male who was unknown and unrelated to anyone in the family. Not Alec, not Paul, not one person they could attach a name to. DNA like that is the kind of thing investigators usually chase down because of how it tends to get there. A struggle, a grab, somebody's hands on a person in their final moments. The state had it and then according to the motion the defense filed, ahead of the retrial, no further analysis was attempted.
Interesting.
That might be the most direct physical trace there is of whoever was close enough to Maggie to leave skin under her nails if it was an Alec. And the people working her murder set it down and moved on.
That sample sat in an evidence locker for years. Murdaugh's lawyers wanted pulled out and tested by an independent lab at his own expense, of course. They named one specific lab and in the same set of filings, they pointed to a murder case from another state in a man who lost his entire family. The lab they chose and the case they cite are for full reason. This matters. And most of the coverage drove right past it. The murders happened on June 7th of 2021 Maggie was 52 Her son Paul was 22 Both were shot to death at the family's hunting property near Islington, South Carolina, down at the dog kennels on the land is where it happened. Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murder in March of 2023 and sentenced to two life terms. Then the South Carolina Supreme Court threw the convictions out. The court reversed the convictions.
Over several issues. The loudest being jury tampering by the former Colleton County Clerk of Court, Becky Hill. So Murdaugh gets a new trial. With the conviction erased, he heads into that trial, presumed innocent, the way the law requires. He stays locked up regardless because he's also serving a 40-year federal sentence for financial crimes and the Supreme Court's decision did nothing to that. A new judge, Debra McCaslin, has been assigned to the case. Murdaugh is headed back to court for the first status conference of the retrial just ahead of that hearing. His attorneys, Dick Harputalin, Jim Griffin, Phil Barber and Maggie Fox have filed three motions. Two of them are housekeeping. One of them is a bomb. We're gonna take the two housekeeping ones first. And as we go through this, your thoughts in the comment section and sub stack in YouTube we'd love for you to weigh in. Links are in the description. Because even the housekeeping ones say something. The Defense wants to trial move not just out of Colleton County, but out of the entire Fourteenth Judicial Circuit. That is five counties in the area.
Their argument is that this is among the most heavily publicized prosecutions in the history of the state. The Murdaugh name, they write, has been tied to the local legacy, to the local legal system. For nearly a century, the population is small and interconnected. The documentaries, the books and the films that shaped how everyone already feels about Alec Murdaugh were researched and filmed and produced right there. Moving the trial to a neighboring county in the same circuit, they argue, would not cure the problem. This was not a surprise play. Harputalin had said publicly for months that he intended to ask for a change of venue. The first trial was held in Waterborough, the heart of Murdaugh country, and played out over weeks of televised testimony followed across the country. The defense does not want to roll those dice again. The second motion sounds even more ordinary. They want Murdaugh to have a laptop in prison, specifically a secure one, encrypted, password protected, no Internet, no cell connection, no way to record audio or video, locked in the warden's office when he is not using it. The reason is the sheer size of this case. The discovery is so volumous that printed out, they say it would fill numerous bankers boxes, much of it sealed or under a protective order. Strip away the legal language and the defense is telling the court the evidence against their client is so vast, it needs a computer just to see all of it. Not an unreasonable request. The third motion is why anyone is talking about this at all. It asks the court to order the state to hand over that DNA from beneath Maggie's fingernails so an outside lab can run it. To understand why that request lands as hard as it does, you have to back up to what actually turned the public against Alec Murdaugh in the first place. It was not DNA. It was a white t-shirt. The state's theory was that the shirt Alec wore the night of the killings carried Paul's blood. It was sprayed onto him in a fine mist. The kind you only get from standing right next to someone when they're shot.