Murdaugh Seeks To Toss Homicide Indictments Before April Retrial

Lawyers ask judge to scrap the murder case

Alex Murdaugh's attorneys stood before a South Carolina judge on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, and asked her to throw out the original indictments charging him with killing his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul. The request, laid out in a memorandum filed Oct. 30, argues that the lead investigator in the case gave the Colleton County grand jury false forensic testimony before it indicted Murdaugh in July 2022.

Defense attorney Jim Griffin told Judge Debra McCaslin the false testimony wasn't a minor slip. "What we're asking, your honor, is to reboot — go back to square one," Griffin said, according to CBS News.

McCaslin did not rule from the bench. She said she would issue a written decision next week. Before adjourning, she asked lead prosecutor Creighton Waters a pointed question about timing: "If you had to go back to the grand jury, could you have it all done and ready to go by April 5th?" according to CBS News — a hint at how she may be thinking about the case even if she ultimately sides with the defense.

The killings at Moselle and the long road back to trial

Maggie Murdaugh and her son Paul were shot to death at the family's Moselle property in the South Carolina Lowcountry on June 7, 2021. Alex Murdaugh was convicted of both murders in 2023 and sentenced to life in prison.

The South Carolina Supreme Court later threw out that conviction, ruling that a court clerk had improperly influenced jurors during the 2023 trial. The case is now set for a retrial beginning April 5, 2027.

Murdaugh, 58, isn't going anywhere in the meantime. He's already serving decades in prison for stealing millions of dollars from his law clients and his own firm, and he has admitted in court to being a thief, an insurance cheat, a bad lawyer and a longtime opioid addict. He denies killing his wife and son. Whatever happens with the murder case, his financial-crimes sentence stands on its own.

"The blood from his murdered son sprang through the air — it's raining back on him — puts him there." — Jim Griffin, Alex Murdaugh's defense attorney

The two statements the defense calls false

The first disputed claim involves blood. Defense attorneys say lead SLED agent David Owen told the grand jury in July 2022 that an expert had identified Maggie's and Paul's blood spatter on the T-shirt Murdaugh wore the night he said he found the bodies. But a SLED lab report from November 2021 — months before that grand jury testimony — found no human blood in the tested sections of that shirt, according to the defense filing.

Bloodstain expert Tom Bevel initially concluded the stains on the shirt were consistent with a transfer, not back spatter from a gunshot wound. The defense says investigators withheld the negative blood results from Bevel and pushed him to revise that opinion — which he did, shortly before Owen presented the updated conclusion to grand jurors. No spatter evidence was ever introduced when the case went to trial.

The second disputed claim involves ammunition. The defense says Owen also told the grand jury that the specific buckshot-and-birdshot combination used to kill Paul Murdaugh was found loaded in guns elsewhere on the property — which, according to the filing, wasn't true.

Owen later acknowledged at trial that both pieces of grand jury testimony were inaccurate, according to WJCL, and that he had made a similar false statement directly to Murdaugh during an interview.

Who's involved in the fight over the indictments

Alex Murdaugh, 58, is the disbarred attorney already serving a lengthy sentence for financial crimes against his clients. He was convicted of murdering his wife and son in 2023, before the state Supreme Court overturned that verdict.

Maggie Murdaugh and Paul Murdaugh were killed at the family's Moselle property. David Owen was the SLED agent who led the murder investigation and presented evidence to the grand jury; he retired abruptly in 2024, shortly after being named State Law Enforcement Officer of the Year. Judge Debra McCaslin is overseeing the pretrial dispute, and Creighton Waters is the lead prosecutor arguing to keep the indictments intact. Jim Griffin is one of Murdaugh's defense attorneys, and Tom Bevel is the bloodstain-pattern expert whose shifting opinion is now at the center of the fight.

What the defense is actually asking the judge to do

The defense wants the indictments dismissed without prejudice — a distinction that matters. It would wipe out the current charges but leave prosecutors free to go back to a different grand jury and seek new indictments.

The defense memo also argues prosecutors misused a separate state grand jury to develop additional evidence for the murder case after Murdaugh had already been indicted, and contends that grand jury's jurisdiction doesn't reach a case like this one.

Prosecutors don't deny Owen's grand jury testimony contained errors. But they argue the mistakes fall well short of the bad faith required to dismiss an indictment, pointing to other evidence presented to grand jurors: a kennel video in which Murdaugh's own voice is heard near the time and place of the killings, the family's mounting debts, guns missing from the house that matched what could have been used, and the fact that Murdaugh's theft schemes were close to being discovered. "A single mistake is not bad faith," prosecutors wrote in court papers, according to CBS News and NBC News.

What each side told the court

Griffin argued the blood spatter claim was the only piece of evidence that ever put Murdaugh specifically at the kennels at the time of the shootings. "A phone call doesn't put him there. The video doesn't put him there," Griffin said, according to CBS News. "The blood from his murdered son sprang through the air — it's raining back on him — puts him there."

Waters pushed back, telling the judge Owen's testimony reflected "what the agent understood at the time" and wasn't enough on its own to have swayed the grand jury. "It's ultimately not something that would cause a substantial effect on the grand jury or cast grave doubt when we look at all the other evidence that was presented," Waters said, according to CBS News.

The defense has also leaned on a broader point throughout the case: no DNA or blood was ever found spattered on Murdaugh or his clothing, despite killings that happened at close range with powerful weapons that have never been recovered.

What happens next

Judge Debra McCaslin promised a written ruling within the week following Friday's hearing. If she dismisses the indictments, prosecutors have said they would seek new ones from a different grand jury in time to keep the April 5, 2027 retrial date intact; defense attorneys have said they won't try to stop them from doing so.