Lawyers representing Alex Murdaugh are seeking to have private DNA testing conducted on mysterious male DNA discovered beneath Maggie Murdaugh’s fingernails.
Defense attorneys Dick Harpootlian, Jim Griffin, and Margaret Fox have formally requested that this DNA evidence be analyzed by Othram, a Texas-based laboratory specializing in forensic genetic genealogy, according to a memorandum submitted on July 30 and shared with Oxygen.
The court documents reveal that this “unknown and unrelated” male DNA was found under Maggie’s fingernails on her left hand, subsequent to her tragic shooting on June 7, 2021, at the family’s Colleton County hunting compound, where her son, 22-year-old Paul Murdaugh, was also killed.
The memorandum supports a previous defense motion calling for an independent lab review of the DNA. It also elucidates that although the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) lab discovered the foreign DNA, they did not pursue further analysis to determine its origin.
Alex Murdaugh’s defense team is now pinning its hopes on Othram to perform single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) testing, which could scan numerous genetic markers, possibly enabling the team to trace the unknown DNA back to its origin using genetic genealogy.
The state provided Othram with “quantitation results” and “electropherograms” from evidence collected from the fingernails on both Maggie’s right and left hand after a virtual conference July 7 with prosecutors, the defense and Othram staff, according to the filing.
However, Murdaugh’s defense team argued that during a later conference between the state and the defense, prosecutors “disclosed for the first time” that they also had stored reserved samples of the fingernail evidence that “remain unprocessed,” per the memo.
Prosecutors allegedly plan to use those samples to conduct more short tandem repeat (STR) testing, which looks at repeating segments of DNA to create a unique genetic profile for a person, through the SLED lab.
Yet, his attorneys argued that the samples should be sent to Othram for SNP testing instead.
“STR analysis is well suited to confirming or excluding a known suspect,” they wrote in the memo, “but it cannot identify an unknown individual who has no profile already in the database, and it performs poorly on degraded, low quality of mixed samples.”
On the other hand, they argued that SNP testing “can extract usable information from degraded or trace amounts of DNA that STR analysis cannot, and it enables forensic genetic genealogy.”
“That capability is what allows Othram to potentially identify the source of the unknown male DNA on [the fingernail evidence] even though no direct match exists in law enforcement databases,” they argued in the filing, “and it is a capability SLED’s SRT methodology does not have.”
They cautioned that if SLED uses the samples to conduct its own STR analysis it could risk “consuming the very material Othram would need” to do its own testing.
They also argued that prosecutors have “offered no explanation” on why they would need to repeat testing they’ve already done.
South Carolina Attorney General’s Office Communications Director Robert Kittle told Oxygen that they plan to issue their response in court, saying “We will file a detailed response with the Court addressing all the defense claims.”
Alex Murdaugh Granted New Murder Trial
Alex—who has continued to proclaim his innocence—was convicted of the murders of Paul and Maggie in March 2023, but the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial for the former attorney in May.
The court found the new trial was warranted after his attorneys raised concerns that former Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca “Becky” Hill may have improperly influenced jurors, according to a decision provided to Oxygen.
As attorneys now prepare for a new trial, Alex remains behind bars serving out a 40 year federal sentence for fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes. He is also serving time for state-level financial crime convictions.