Just an hour after Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murdering his wife and one of his sons, the court clerk who had read the verdicts to the world was standing on the courthouse balcony with her dog, beaming as the South Carolina attorney general singled her out for praise.
“I call her Becky-Boo, that’s her nickname,” said Alan Wilson, the attorney general, whose office led the prosecution, calling up to her from his news conference.
Three years later, the court clerk, Becky Hill, was singled out by South Carolina’s top court as it tossed out the conviction of Mr. Murdaugh, the scion of a family of lawyers in a rural corner of the state.
Calling it “shocking jury interference,” the South Carolina Supreme Court laid out in a unanimous opinion on Wednesday how Ms. Hill had told jurors not to let Mr. Murdaugh’s arguments “convince you,” and how she had wanted a guilty verdict because she believed it would help her sell more copies of a book about the trial — maybe even enough to buy a lake house. The justices quoted a lower-court ruling that found that Ms. Hill had been “attracted by the siren call of celebrity.”
Indeed, the Murdaugh trial had drawn huge attention, riveting an international audience and putting the small towns of South Carolina’s Lowcountry region and their longstanding structures of power and clout under a spotlight. As the sudden reversal sank in on Wednesday, residents reeled at the prospect of another trial, another airing of painful events, another turn in the spotlight for the region.
The reversal of Mr. Murdaugh’s conviction was in some ways a “huge irony” that undercut the legend of the Murdaugh family’s influence, said Joe McCulloch, a lawyer in Columbia, the state capital.
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