Maggie and Paul Murdaugh: The Killings at Moselle and the Retrial

Maggie and Paul Before Moselle Became a Crime Scene

Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh was 52. Her family obituary remembers a University of South Carolina graduate who kept friendships from college, welcomed people into her home, and enjoyed time on the water with her two sons. She and Alex raised Buster and Paul in Hampton, with summers at Edisto. Those details come from the family’s remembrance of Maggie, a personal account of the life her relatives wanted remembered.

Paul Terry Murdaugh was 22 and a University of South Carolina junior. His family’s obituary describes a young man who enjoyed the outdoors, hunting at Moselle, and following Gamecock sports with friends and relatives. Maggie was his mother; Buster was his older brother. Their names belong to individual lives, even when a court file groups their deaths into one prosecution.

June 7, 2021: The Killings at Moselle

Maggie and Paul were shot and killed at Moselle, the family’s property in Colleton County, on June 7, 2021. The South Carolina Attorney General’s July 2022 charging announcement identifies both deaths as the basis for the murder case against Alex Murdaugh. The later trial focused on the area around the property’s dog kennels and on what happened during the final minutes of their lives.

For relatives, the loss was immediate. For investigators and, eventually, jurors, the difficult task was to reconstruct events from records made before and after the shootings. A phone recording, a witness’s memory, a laboratory result, and a lawyer’s explanation are different kinds of material. They need to be evaluated in their own context before they can support a conclusion about who killed Maggie and Paul.

The Indictments and the First Trial

On July 14, 2022, a Colleton County grand jury indicted Alex on two counts of murder and two counts of possessing a weapon during a violent crime. The original indictments are charging documents. They establish what the state accused him of doing, not a jury’s determination of guilt. The four case numbers run from 2022-GS-15-00592 through 2022-GS-15-00595.

The first trial took place before Judge Clifton Newman in 2023. One of its central disputes concerned Alex’s account of where he had been that evening. As NPR’s chronology, carried by South Carolina Public Radio, recounts, witnesses identified his voice in a video Paul recorded near the kennels. Alex then testified that he had lied about having been there, while continuing to deny killing his wife and son. An admitted false account was part of the prosecution’s evidence; his denial remained the defense position.

On March 2, 2023, the jury returned guilty verdicts on the murder and weapon counts. Alex received life sentences the following day. Those events are documented in the Supreme Court’s June 8, 2026 order. They remain part of the history. They cannot be presented as the final legal outcome now that the case has been sent back for a new trial.

Instructions and Public Juror Accounts

The jury had to decide each charge separately and apply the state’s burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. A published reproduction of Judge Newman’s final charge describes those directions. Contemporary courtroom reporting also records his limits on using other wrongdoing as evidence. The charge was also checked directly against the filed Record on Appeal, Volume XV, PDF pages 439–454 (record pages 7137–7152). Read the report on the first jury’s instructions and verdict.

After the verdict, jurors gave public interviews about their experience. Craig Moyer told ABC News that the kennel recording and Alex’s voice were central to his decision. Other jurors appeared in interviews published by TODAY and Court TV. Those individual accounts are distinct from the later sworn testimony about outside influence. Follow the dated public interviews and their limits.

Financial Crimes and a Disputed Theory of Motive

Prosecutors argued at the first trial that impending exposure of Alex’s thefts created a motive for the killings. The Supreme Court later described the state’s theory as an effort to explain why he would seek to redirect attention and gain time. That was the prosecution’s proposed explanation for the murders. Proof that someone committed financial crimes does not, by itself, prove that the same person committed a killing.

Alex’s financial convictions have their own legal record. The U.S. Department of Justice’s April 1, 2024 announcement documents a 40-year federal sentence following his guilty plea to 22 financial crimes involving client money. The 2026 Supreme Court opinion also records his separate 27-year state financial sentence. The new-trial ruling in the murder case did not erase those financial-crime convictions.

The justices did not impose a blanket ban on financial evidence at the retrial. They said some evidence could be relevant to motive, while finding that the first trial went too far into details that carried a danger of unfair prejudice. That distinction gives the new trial judge a concrete task: decide what genuinely helps answer the murder charges, and what instead invites jurors to decide them because of other wrongdoing.

The Challenge to the Jury Process

After the verdicts, Alex sought a new trial based on former Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill’s contacts with jurors. A post-trial hearing in January 2024 examined what jurors and others said had happened. The motion was denied, and the dispute went to the Supreme Court along with issues from the original trial.

The Supreme Court’s opinion carefully separates evidence of outside communications from jurors’ descriptions of their private thought processes. It explains that rules protecting jury deliberations limit how a court may question jurors about why they voted as they did. Those protections do not prevent a court from examining improper information or pressure brought in from outside.

May 13, 2026: A New Trial Is Ordered

On May 13, 2026, the South Carolina Supreme Court concluded that Hill’s improper external influence deprived Alex of a fair trial before an impartial jury. The court reversed the denial of his new-trial motion and returned the case for retrial. Its decision rested on the integrity of the jury process, not on a finding that another person had committed the murders.

The court applied a presumption of prejudice after finding that the contacts were more than harmless interventions. It held that the state had not carried the resulting burden of showing no reasonable possibility that the communications affected the verdict. It also concluded that the trial judge’s ordinary instructions could not cure improper comments that had not come to the court’s attention during the trial. These are holdings in Opinion 28329, rather than a characterization supplied by either legal team.

A new trial is neither an acquittal nor a new guilty verdict. The state must present its case again through the proper process. Alex continues to deny the killings, and the pending charges must be treated as allegations. The right to that process belongs to a defendant even when separate crimes have been admitted and punished.

Read why the Supreme Court ordered a new trial, including its findings on outside influence and its limits on financial-crime evidence.

A Different Judge and a Different County

After the appellate mandate returned the case to the trial court, the Supreme Court assigned Judge Debra R. McCaslin to handle the four indictments and related matters. The assignment order, dated June 8, 2026, confirms that the remittitur was sent on May 29.

A subsequent venue decision moved the retrial to Sumter County. ABC News reported the September 8 order and the April 5, 2027 trial setting. The change concerns where a fair trial can be held and the facilities needed to conduct it. It does not settle the evidence or decide the charges. Pretrial proceedings have continued in Lexington County while preparations for Sumter proceed.

October 16: Testing and Access to Evidence

At the October 16 hearing, Judge McCaslin allowed independent DNA testing of remaining samples and declined a broad request for information about other shootings involving .300 Blackout ammunition, according to WCSC’s courtroom report. Testing permission is a procedural decision, not a laboratory result or an identification of a perpetrator.

Faces in the Footnotes covered that hearing in its original October 16 article. That dated report remains part of this case’s reporting record. Later testing, disclosure decisions, or signed orders can change what is known, so a description of what lawyers requested should never be silently turned into an account of what testing proved.

November 13, 2026: The Hearing Ahead

A defense memorandum filed October 30 supports the motion filed August 7 seeking dismissal of the indictments without prejudice. It alleges that inaccurate or fabricated forensic claims were presented to the grand jury, including claims about blood evidence and ammunition. These are the defense’s allegations. Dismissal without prejudice would leave open a further prosecution; it would not itself amount to an acquittal.

Prosecutors dispute the accusation of fabrication, as reported by WCSC/WMBF on November 9. WCSC’s November 10 report, published by WIS, describes a new defense response. The parties’ disagreement is unresolved in the record checked for this page. No finding that investigators fabricated evidence is attributed to Judge McCaslin.

The scheduled pretrial hearing is November 13 in Lexington County, with the retrial set for April 5, 2027 in Sumter County. South Carolina Public Radio’s November 4 report confirms both dates. Associated Press reporting published November 13 previews the dismissal arguments. This account is checked through that pre-hearing report and does not claim a hearing outcome. Read the Lexington hearing preview.

The continuing questions concern both the killings and the process used to try them. Maggie and Paul remain the people whose deaths the murder charges address. The new trial must determine those charges on admissible evidence before an impartial jury, with the unresolved issues described accurately along the way.