Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Stephen Smith Body Exhumation to Determine Cause of Death

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

More than eight years after the death of South Carolina teen Stephen Smith, a push is on to have his body exhumed to determine his cause of death.  A driver called 911 to report finding Smith's body in the middle of the road. Police say the 19-year-old had blunt force trauma to his head. At first police believed the injury to be a gunshot wound, but  the coroner's office later rules Smith's death a hit-and-run. Smith's car had run out of gas. His family say there's no way Smith would have been walking in the middle of the road.  Rumors and gossip about a Murdaugh family connection to this death have swirled for years, however nothing concrete has brought forward.  Today Nancy Grace talks with attorney Dale Carson about what could be learned from the investigation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Hi guys, Nancy Grace here. In the last hours, we learned that the Murdoch family furnishings are to be auctioned off. This is what we know. A Georgia auction house has announced it will be selling items from the Murdoch family home there in Colleton County, hosted by Liberty Auction. Wow.

All those furnishings, and now they're going on the block. And there's more as it relates to the Stephen Smith homicide, potential homicide investigation. The young teen found dead in the middle of the road near a Murdoch property. But first, let me introduce to you Dale Carson joining us. Dale, high-profile lawyer out of Jacksonville, but also former fed with the FBI as an FBI agent. You know, Dale, having just come from South Carolina courthouse where Murdoch, was living on a grand scale, Dale. And that's quite the dichotomy compared to his possessions being auctioned off at a public auction.

I mean, I don't know if I'd want to buy stuff that belonged to Alex Murdoch, but that said, that is quite the reversal of fortune, Dale Carson. Well, it absolutely is. And you think about this, that money derived from the auction should go to the victims that money was taken from, stolen from by his father. So you wonder if there's an estate that's set up, which certainly would be true for the mother and the other, his brother, then that money should reasonably go, if it becomes the Murdoch estate, go to those people who suffer the loss. Among the items that are listed for sale. Lamps, dishware, a leather

living room set, pillows monogrammed with Maggie Murdoch's initials. Oh my. Would you want to look over and see Maggie Murdoch's pillows? Well, the Bonnie and Clyde

car is used now to have people pay to view it, right? I mean, I'm looking at the household items. There's a very elaborate set of, it looks like, really fancy plates with like hunting scenes on them. There's like a giant picture. It looks like a deer has been hand painted on there. Scenes from the outdoors. Very, very elaborate. But I got a question. Who wants to have Maggie Murdoch's engraved pillows in their dinner living room? Well, you know, there's that entire

underground of serial killer memorabilia. It's called murderabilia. Murderabilia. Murderabilia. There you go. I wrote a whole chapter on it called Blood Money in my very first nonfiction called Objection. Yeah, okay, you're right. You're right.

People buy autopsy photos. They buy every odd thing you can think of connected to a murder investigation. But, you know, I guess part of the dichotomy that I see, Dale Carson, is that Murdoch's love of money and all that it could buy and all the opportunity it could open up for him and the power he had in Colleton County now it's just all on an auction block. I mean all that millions of dollars and now strangers are going to own some of his prized possessions belonging to him and his wife. I mean he killed for that money and now the things that bought are on auction.

Well, it's just amazing to me that it would end like this, but then absolute power corrupts. And we see this across our lives, certainly, that if people have too much power, they tend to think the world ought to revolve around them. And largely, it does, because we all seem to value money more than we should, family, of course, being the more important. I'm just thinking about everything, just the reverberations of the two murders and how they have affected everyone. As the furnishings for one of Murlock's three homes, and I predict they'll all be finally amassed together and auctioned. I'm sure this money is, as you said, Dale Carson,

going to pay off various victims. But they were living so high on the hog, Dale. I mean, three homes, none of them rented out for like rental property or anything like that. There was the Edisto Beach House where Maggie lived. There was the main home. And then there was the hunting lodge where the murders occurred. Well, the remaining sons liable to profit from most of that because, of course, the father is still in custody and will be for an extended period

of time. Forever? I thought that's what you were going to say, but you didn't? Well, clearly there are going to be appeals. Whether they bear fruit is another question altogether. So at the same time that Murdoch's possessions are being auctioned off, we also know that Buster Murdoch is busy right now. He is denying, as he calls them, vicious rumors of his involvement in the death of teen Stephen Smith. There have been a lot of rumors, and they were swirling all around the courthouse during the trial.

Now, for those of you that don't get the Murdoch connection, Stephen Smith's body was found not far away at all from one of the three Murdoch homes. He was found in the middle of the road. At the time, it was deemed to be a hit and run, although there was no glass or plastic or any indication left on the road. No tire marks, skid marks, nothing to indicate Stephen Smith had been hit. In the last days, his mother has announced that thanks to a GoFundMe she launched, she now has enough money to exhume Stephen Smith's body. There have been a lot of rumors connecting Buster Murdoch, Murdoch's sole remaining child, to Stephen Smith. Buster Murdoch says that's not true unequivocally. So normally I would say something quippy like, methinks thou doth protest too much from Shakespeare, that why would Buster Murdoch suddenly jump up and say, I didn't have anything to do with that. He hasn't been charged

with it, so why deny it? But there have been a lot of rumors, and I think that is why Buster Murdoch is stepping forward and denying any involvement with Stephen Smith. And, of course, you know, hit and runs are fairly clear. You don't get hit in the back of the head or the front of the head, for that matter, without other physical injuries. If the car or truck strikes you from behind, you have damage consistent with a rear strike and the back of the head gets injured by the hood of the truck or the car. The reverse is true. If he's walking toward the car or truck, he gets hit in the abdomen. You're going to see swelling and breakage there. And so an autopsy, may a post-death autopsy that's 10 years old, may actually shed some light on whether or not it was actually a car strike. And then if it wasn't a hit and run, then you've got to ask yourself, why did the body end up with trauma,

significant cranial trauma in the middle of the woods near the Murdoch family home. Hi guys, Nancy Grace here. Our friends and partners at Fox Nation have an exclusive new movie out right now, Murder for Sale. In this new original movie, real estate agent Violet Becker is devastated when her best friend and fellow real estate agent dies at an open house. Violet is suspicious about the circumstances of the death and sets out to investigate. She soon finds herself in unfamiliar territory as she uncovers shocking truths about her friend's life and mysterious death. Starring Caitlin Clark, Julia Benson, and Matt Hamilton, Murder for Sale is available exclusively on Fox Nation. Fox Nation subscribers also have access to all kinds of exclusive programming, including the video simulcast of Crime Stories, our team's special investigations, original movies like Murder for Sale, and so much more.

Sign up for Fox Nation to watch. Just go to foxnation.com. Don't wait. Catch this movie. It's awesome. Go to foxnation.com now to watch. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Now, according to many sources, the Stephen Smith lawyers are saying, no, this is not a witch hunt for Buster Murdoch. This is trying to get a true COD, cause of death, on Stephen Smith.

They've been very clear about it. And it's disturbing to me when a mom who is in a, let's just say, she doesn't have a lot of money to throw around, okay, not a lot of free spending going on there. She raises money on GoFundMe to do this examination. A post-mortem costs about $2,000. I paid for one with an American Express card not too awfully long ago. And speaking...

Go ahead. No, and you do get a lot of information because the third-party examination is looking for something. The previous examination, the postmortem, the autopsy wasn't looking for anything specific. So if you're not looking for something, you know, guess what? You're not likely to find it. You know, according to Stephen Smith's mother, Randy Murdoch offered to handle Stephen Smith's,

I guess he would call it, a wrongful death. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. I think Randy Murdoch, one of the Murdoch adult males had coached a baseball team, I believe, that Stephen Smith was on. I think Buster may have been on that same team. That may be why there's that connection that people are gossiping about.

But Stephen Smith's mother does say, Dale Carson, that Randy Murdoch came and offered to handle Stephen Smith's wrongful death case. Now that conjures up all the images of Alex Murdoch. For instance, after the Mallory Beach boating death, Alex Murdoch was at the hospital offering to represent all the people that were the various people that were on the boat that didn't die and according to them trying to get them to change their stories and not talk to police then he shows up at the and as the Satterfield family hey I'll represent you when Gloria Satterfield fell to her death there at Moselle and both times he stole the money. He's injecting himself in cases. And here Randy is doing it. That's a real conflict of interest when you think about it. If they were somehow involved in the matter and then they're trying to inject themselves into representing the matter, you can cover anything up you want.

And clearly, the senior Murdoch did that very thing. I mean, he had information that led to massive settlements that the families were never able to receive. I mean, the whole thing is just a manipulation of power. But of course, I'm not extending that. I'm not extending that manipulation to Randy Murdoch because I don't know that. And before we cast him in a nefarious light, this guy, Stephen Smith, was on the

league team that he coached. That's my understanding. It could be an act of actual kindness. Randy Murdoch is not Alex Murdoch. But that echo is there. That's right.

The echo is there. And I'm not suggesting anything untoward about Randy. I know nothing of that individual. He may be an excellent attorney. But it occurs to me that blood is a lot thicker than water. Now, according to the lawyers that are connected to the exhumation of Stephen Smith's body, they say point blankly, this is what they say, their words, we don't accept, lawyers for Stephen Smith's family say, we don't accept the original cause of death, that being a hit and run.

And they've got to have a reason for that because even though Dale Carson, the mom, has cobbled together the money for the exclamation, a private autopsy, that means somebody like Dr. Cyril Wecht or anyone, Dr. Michael Bodden, an independent medical examiner can now come in and be paid to perform a private autopsy. But in order to exhume a body, even if the state's not paying for it, a judge still has to approve it. Isn't that true? That's absolutely true. You go to a court and ask for an exhumation order,

and clearly all of that takes time and money, and the lawyers that are handling the case would, of course, manage that. But it's sad that a grieving mother should have to exhume her own child to determine the manner of death. Now, the cause may ultimately just be blunt force trauma, but the cause is an entirely different matter, which relates to anything nefarious. And you can find all sorts of things. You can find defensive wounds, perhaps. This would be limited typically to the bone structure today, since it's been 10 years. And we don't know the nature of the burial, what was their formaldehyde involved or not. Those kind of things are critical. But clearly, you will be able to tell if the investigators in the original case, the first investigators and the autopsy,

post-mortem autopsy, really revealed the truth truth or did they make some gross error and that gross error might lead to an idea by investigators now that a murder actually occurred and not a hit and run this is going to be a very very complex autopsy it's hard enough to do an autopsy without an exclamation being thrown in as a factor. But you've got the exhumation and the implications of a body that has been buried for several years now. The autopsy process, as you mentioned, from aldehyde. But they're looking for something specific. They're looking for, as you said, maybe defensive wounds on the arms.

Are those bruises, I mean, were they preserved? Can they be preserved? Will they still be there? You will have to look inside the skin, literally, and look at the bone structure of the head to determine what, if anything, caused his death. It's going to be a very complicated matter. Now, the mother said at the very beginning,

Dale Carson, she did not accept that this was a hit and run. Well, what mother would? If it were one of our children, we certainly wouldn't accept that. Well, I mean, if the cops thought it was a hit and run, I believe it was a hit and run, but she never did. Yeah, if there's sufficient evidence to support this, but we don't know that there was. And obviously, if the mother's having to use a GoFundMe account to fund the excavation, they're not in the power system of South Carolina. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace SLED, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division,

based on information that they gathered, as they say, I want to quote it, during the course of the double murder investigation, have reopened the case of Stephen Smith. What about that? Well, like you said, like you said, similar occurrences, right? Something happened during the double murder case of Maggie and Paul that made them reopen the Stephen Smith case. I smell a rat. And it's not just $2,000.

That's just the price of the autopsy. There's a $40,000 price tag attached to the exhumation of her son's body plus a private autopsy. That's a lot of money, Dale Carson. You can't just charge that on your MasterCard. No, but it's interesting. If SLED reopened the investigation, you'd think they would fund the exhumation. And you would think they would put an actual ME in with the private autopsy

to review all the evidence if SLED is running the matter. And to have a private but as you know you're going to have a thing where the chain of custody is going to be interesting it's got to be proven and i'm not worried about the chain of custody i know where his body's been i want to find out why he was killed and the hunch that the mother had on day one that her son did not die of a hit and run. Now, they're using the fact that he still had his shoes on as proof. That is neither here nor there for me. Some hit and run victims have on their shoes, and some of them don't. Some of them are literally not out of their shoes.

He had his shoes on. But the routine evidence, and I don't mean standard SOP, standard operating procedure, typical evidence. I mean evidence of routine. In my mind, it's very persuasive. She said her son would never have been walking down the road. Let me tell you something, Dale Carson. Many times I went to the Colleton County Courthouse, very often I was driving at night because I wanted to be with the children until they went to bed, my children. And then I drive in the night to get there to the

courthouse. Those roads, Dale Carson, are pitch dark. There are not any streetlights. I mean, I grew up in the country, so I was used to it. But I'm telling you, if I lived there, I would not be walking down the middle of the road because you cannot see your hand in front of you. The mother said, day one, he would never walk in the middle of the road. She would know. We know about our children and what they're inclined to do and what they're not inclined to do. And walking down the middle of a road in South Carolina in the middle of the night, where's his car? Does he have a car?

It was three miles away. His car was three miles away. He, Stephen, was found with a large wound to the right side of his forehead lying in the middle of the road, three miles from his car. He also had a dislocated shoulder and cuts to his left hand. Now, police initially stated that Stephen Smith's death, quote, appeared to be a homicide. An autopsy was performed the same day he was found,

and it was ruled he was the victim of a hit and run. Right, I've heard this, and the suggestion is that he was hit by a truck's mirror. Well, if you're going to get hit by a truck's mirror, you're likely to have glass on the ground. As you mentioned, there was none. And clearly, there was not an excessive, a normal investigation into the death. There just wasn't. If there had been, we'd have found other evidence. And by the way, you know, when you're struck by a car, you leave physical data on the car or the vehicle.

You leave physical data, not only your DNA, but you leave clothing in print. You leave maybe fingerprints. You leave maybe body tissue. So there was no evidence that I'm aware of that there was a drive toward finding the vehicle that was involved or interviewing people or looking for the camera footage that might exist. And as you say, this is a very rural area. I still have questions as to why he was there. Was he picked up by somebody? If he was, then that person is a likely suspect. Now, of course, if there was any DNA on his body, that's gone.

Because his body would have been cleaned at the funeral home. Correct. I wonder if during the autopsy they did x-rays well don't you think they would actually keep his clothing as evidence if they thought it was initially a murder and if they didn't why didn't they

but at this hour we know that Buster Murdoch has just released a statement apparently because the slew of outlets have gotten a hold of him, denying vicious rumors surrounding the death of his classmate, Stephen Smith. A lot has been made about the fact that Stephen was openly gay. The allegations connecting him to Murdoch, in my mind at this point, are just gossip and rumor and innuendo, to the point where Buster Murdoch had to come out and deny the

rumors. Now, this is after he loses his mother, his brother. His father is now in jail for the rest of his life. And now he is being accused of having something to do with Stephen Smith's case. I think the best thing right now, Dale Carson, is to let the investigation take its course and leave Buster Murdoch out of it. Well, of course, connecting them is going to be difficult. Ten years, almost, is a laugh. Well, what got everybody so stirred up is that his body is found close to Moselle,

where Satterfield, Gloria Satterfield died, where Maggie died, where Paul died. And now you've got the body of a young teen that was a classmate of Buster's dead out in the street. I mean, people are just putting together those facts and coming up with the theory that Buster was somehow involved. I think it's much too soon to jump to any kind of allegation like that. I would agree, but the allegations are going to persist until the matter is solved. You know what's not really an allegation? It's gossip. It's gossip. You can't build a case on

gossip. You know what I hate? It's when I would get a case to prosecute and the friends or relatives or neighbors would go, well, everybody knows he did it. You know what? That and a quarter won't buy you a thing. Everybody knows. That's total BS, technical legal term. Everybody knows that that means nothing to me.

Well, it means they haven't concluded all the investigations is what it means, because there are always many people who could be responsible for a given crime. And that's the effort of the defense attorneys to point that out where it's applicable and for the state to wash it away, making it unreliable. And that's the process that we enjoy. One of the unfortunate disadvantages to our criminal justice system is that not many trials anymore. And if you've been in courtrooms, which you certainly have, you look around in the peanut gallery and there's nobody there. We, as Americans, have found other things to entertain us

rather than the criminal trials that are the basis for our democracy. Oh, here he goes with the basis of democracy. I'm going to leave on that note before I get you cranked up on the Constitution. So the latest is the autopsy is moving forward. Stephen Smith, Buster Murdoch, has now denied any connection to the death of Smith, his former classmate. And Murdoch's furniture and Maggie's pillows

are being auctioned off in about 72 hours. Murder bill you. Yeah. I'm not touching it with a 10-foot pole. That's the last thing I want in my house is Maggie Murdoch's pillows. Goodbye, everybody. The evil that was there. What?

The evil that was there at one point. Yeah. Don't want that around. Bye, buddy. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.