Why Murdaugh Prosecutors Won't Test This DNA

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today.
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:16)
SLAD recovered DNA from underneath Maggie Murdaugh's fingernails at the crime scene. They tested it. They determined it belonged to an unknown male, no relation to the Murdaugh family. And then, according to defense filings, dated July 30th of 2026, they stopped, didn't try to figure out who it was, didn't send it anywhere else, didn't flag it for further analysis. Maggie Murdaugh was shot to death, by the way, and somebody else's DNA was under her fingernails. The state agency investigating her murder wrote it down and moved on. Cross your T's, dot your I's. We talk about this all the time on this show. This is how so many cases fall apart, not because the accused is innocent, but because the investigation fails upon thorough review. We're going to get into some of these arguments that are being made, as there is a civil case going on with Alex Murdaugh involving Becky Hill, and there's also the retrial that we're gearing up for next year. And if you follow court cases as we do here every single day, you'll know that a majority, in fact some of the biggest pieces of a trial happened before the trial actually takes place. The decisions that are made, the witnesses, the arguments, the evidence that's allowed in, that's not allowed in, the investigative routes, they're allowed to go down or not go down, all of that is litigated before the trial actually started and that's what's going on right now.
But Alec Murdaugh was already found guilty of murder. Doesn't matter, that's been wiped clean. It's as if it never happened. So they are starting from the ground up on the defense of Alec Murdaugh.
That's how this works. And that's what we are talking about. I certainly welcome your thoughts in the comment section and the substack in YouTube as we continue to dive deep into this case. The defense wants an independent lab to test what's left of that sample. SLED, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, basically it's like the state's FBI, if you will, the state version of the FBI, is fighting to run their own tests first using the same method that already failed to identify anyone. The defense says that process could consume or degrade the evidence before anyone else gets a shot at it. The defense also says they've watched SLED handle evidence in this case before, that the details of what happened are documented. That involves a white t-shirt, a blood spatter expert who changed his mind after a visit from the lead investigator, Photoshop, and a SLED captain who allegedly ordered her own people to bury results. We'll get there. Alex Murdaugh's murder convictions were overturned by the South Carolina Supreme Court after former Colleton County clerk, Becky Hill, was caught making prejudicial comments to jurors. The system that was supposed to protect the trial broke it instead. Retrial set for April 5th of 2027 The new judge, Debra McCaslin. Next pretrial hearing is August 14th. The defenses also filed a motion to move the trial out of the 14th judicial circuit entirely. Their argument, the Murdaugh name, has been synonymous with the local legal system for nearly a century. Alex's father, grandfather and great grandfather were all elected solicitors in that circuit. The population is small and interconnected. Documentaries, books and films that shape public opinion about this case were researched, filmed and produced right there. The defense, Sarputalin, Griffin, Barber, Fox and Hand is building a very different case this time around. They say they're bringing up to eight new expert witnesses. At the center of all this is the fight over Maggie's fingernail DNA. The defense wants the remaining reserve sample sent to Ortham, Inc., a forensic genetic genealogy lab out of the Woodlands, Texas. This is the lab that helped put a name to Bryan Kohberger in the Idaho student murders. Same lab that cracked the Lady of the Dunes cold case after nearly 50 years. A woman found dead in the sand dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1974, finally identified as Ruth Mary Terry. Ortham's technology was used in the Rachel Mooring case in Maryland and to identify one of the women connected to Gilgo Beach. When law enforcement DNA testing hits a wall, Ortham is where the hard cases go. Almost sounds like a commercial. When law enforcement needs DNA testing, when it hits a wall, Ortham is where the hard cases go. And when you want Ortho to clean the bugs out of your home, it's a totally different spelling, totally Ortham versus, yeah, anyway. We see Ortham used all the time. It's a good lab. The reason Ortham matters here is because Sled's method already hit that wall. Sled runs STR testing, short tandem repeat analysis. It checks DNA against known criminal databases like CODIS. They ran it on Maggie's fingernail sample, got a partial profile, too incomplete to submit to CODIS. So is a dead end. That's where they left it. Ortham uses a fundamentally different technology. SNP testing is what it's called. They can pull usable information from degraded or traced DNA that STR can't touch. And it checks against public genealogy databases, not just the criminal system. That's a technology that identified Kohberger. Because his parents weren't in the system. But they identified him through the genetic genealogy. Which, by the way, whether you've ever filled one of those things out or not from 23andMe or Ancestor or whatever, you're in there. That's how it works. If you have a family member that's done it, in any sort of circle near you, you're in there. Or you can be traced. That's how genetic genealogy works. It's like, it's the full picture.