A South Carolina judge has cleared the way for Alex Murdaugh’s defense team to run a new round of DNA testing that will consume the last remaining testable material from key evidence in the case, over the objections of prosecutors who called the move “high risk.”
Judge Debra McCaslin ruled Friday in Colleton County that the defense may proceed with testing on swabs taken from Maggie Murdaugh’s cellphone and on clippings from under her fingernails. McCaslin said due process entitles a defendant to “a meaningful opportunity to present a full and complete defense.”
Murdaugh was convicted in 2023 of murdering his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, at the family’s Moselle property in Colleton County. The South Carolina Supreme Court later threw out those convictions after finding that former Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill had improperly influenced the jury. His retrial is set to begin April 5, 2027. Murdaugh continues to maintain his innocence.
A Y-Chromosome Test
The defense has hired the forensic genetics firm Othram to run a Y-STR test, a technique that isolates DNA from the Y chromosome to build a profile of a male contributor even when a sample is dominated by female DNA.
Murdaugh’s attorneys say all three samples — the fingernail clippings and the phone swabs — contain unidentified male DNA, and they want to know whether a single man is the source. Defense attorney Phil Barber said the results could eliminate certain people as contributors and might yield ancestry clues, though the method cannot distinguish between men who share the same paternal line. The process is expected to take about 90 days.
Prosecutors Call It a Gamble
Lead prosecutor Creighton Waters told the court the testing was unlikely to turn up meaningful evidence and cited the defense’s own expert in making that case.
“When we talked to their expert, he said, yeah, that’s pretty much a sole source sample. This would be high risk and unlikely to generate anything, and [it] appears that that’s the case, because when we got back the quantification from [Othram], it’s goose eggs on the Y chromosome,” Waters said.
Barber defended the decision, arguing that a pattern has emerged across multiple pieces of evidence that is difficult to dismiss as coincidence.
“Maybe it’s different male DNA. Maybe it’s the same. Maybe it’s red herrings … But as we keep progressing from one hand to two hands and now the phone, you know, it’s starting to look less and less like a red herring,” Barber said. “If you have an unknown person under both her fingernails and throwing the phone out the side of the road after she’s murdered and it’s not him. I mean, that’s extremely important to the defense.”
No Second Chance
Both sides agreed that once the new test is run, there will not be enough DNA material left for any additional testing in future post-trial proceedings. Barber told the court that Murdaugh has agreed to waive any right to such retesting.
“To perform the test, there is enough to perform the test, but there’s not enough to perform the test and then have enough left over,” Barber said. “My client just informed me that he will waive that.”
Former prosecutor Joshua Ritter told Fox News Digital that the strategy carries real risk for the defense, since leaving the DNA unidentified could have been more useful at trial for raising doubt about who committed the killings.
“They could make an argument, hey you found samples, it was unknown male DNA. That DNA did not come back to our client, correct? There’s somebody else out there who could potentially be linked to this crime,” Ritter said. “Now, unless it comes back that it’s a person who does have some reason to be suspicious, they’ve got a problem because if it comes back to a person with a rock solid alibi or a person with an innocent explanation as to why their DNA would end up underneath her fingernails, they’ve foreclosed any argument that they could have made.”
“It’s one of those situations where sometimes it’s better left unknown for the defense, but they seem to be determined to try to figure out who that DNA belongs to,” Ritter added.
Murdaugh is scheduled to appear in court again on Nov. 13.
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