Two of the jurors from Alex Murdaugh’s blockbuster murder trial are speaking out for the first time to share their doubts over the guilty verdict.
Myra Crosby – the infamous ‘egg juror’ – and Mandy Pearce – ‘juror Z’ – relived the trial in Fall of the House of Murdaugh, a new documentary airing on Fox Nation today.
The documentary, fronted by Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, includes sensational claims of jury tampering and external pressure to reach a guilty plea, throwing into doubt the final verdict.
Pearce was the sole juror who claims her guilty verdict was swayed by court clerk Becky Hill.
She said her doubts initially stemmed from the lack of a murder weapon.
As the trial wore on, she became concerned that police ‘had in their minds he was guilty’ and ‘didn’t try to look for anybody else’ during the investigation.
‘She made it seem like he was already guilty,’ Pearce said of Hill. ‘What Becky did wasn’t right.’
‘She came into the juror room, and was talking and interacting with all of us.’
But Pearce revealed she didn’t realise this conduct would be considered improper until she was contacted by Murdaugh’s lawyers after the trial.
MacCallum asked Pearce if she ever would have raised concerns about Hill’s actions if it weren’t for her discussion with Murdaugh’s lawyers.
‘Probably not,’ she accepted.
Murdaugh is serving two life sentences for the deaths of his wife and son on a family estate in 2021.
The 56-year-old has maintained his innocence and his lawyers have since accused Hill of telling jurors ‘not to be fooled by him’, in a bid to secure his conviction so she could make money from a book about the case.
She denies any wrongdoing, but has since left her job as an investigation is underway.
The South Carolina patriarch had a small victory in court just two weeks ago, when judges agreed to consider whether Hill interfered in the case, and whether it swung the jury.
As a result, the Supreme Court will now consider whether Murdaugh has a case for a retrial.
Even if he is eventually granted a new murder trial, he’s still serving 40 years in prison for stealing millions of dollars from clients of his law firm.
This punishment is being served at the same time as his 27-year sentence for his separate state fraud convictions.
While Pearce is so far the only juror who deliberated in the case to express concerns about Hill, Crosby has also detailed feeling like she was ‘targeted’ because she was undecided throughout much of the trial.
She said the decision to remove her from the jury felt like a mistake.
‘I had a real hard time because there wasn’t more evidence saying ”okay you did it”, there was a lot of ”what ifs”, ”possibly”,’ Crosby said.
Crosby was eventually removed from the jury panel, accused of sharing an opinion on Murdaugh with her ex husband and tenants during the trial.
She claimed in the documentary that this was untrue, and that she first heard about the allegations via Hill.
‘Me and Ms Becky went into an office outside, she closed the door behind me and she asked me if I had an ex husband, and I said ”well, yeah I do. I haven’t seen him in over 10 years” and she said there was a post… on a social platform that said I had been drinking with him and that I had offered an opinion.
‘I told her, no, I have not seen him, I haven’t talked to him, I sure as hell haven’t been talking with him, can I see the post. Well, she couldn’t find it. She asked me, ”well, do you have an opinion on Mr Murdaugh’s guilt”?’
Crosby said she told Hill she was undecided and wanted to hear more information.
She was later removed from the jury over a separate matter, which she claims also didn’t happen.
Crosby said the judge told her he’d received an anonymous email accusing her of speaking about her opinion of the case with her tenants.
‘That did not happen,’ she said.
She claims she later found out, two weeks after the trial had concluded, that her ex husband had never posted anything accusatory toward her.
‘Apparently they found somebody with a similar name to my ex-husband that made an apology post,’ she said.
‘I feel like I was targeted. I don’t know why.’
Pearce claimed on the day Murdaugh was due to take the stand, Hill told jurors ‘not to be fooled by his actions… don’t believe what he’s saying.’
His six-week trial heard that both his wife and son were shot in the head after initially being wounded near dog kennels on the family’s rural estate in Islandton.
Paul was shot twice with a shotgun, each round loaded with different sized shot, while his mother, apparently running towards her son as he was slaughtered, was shot multiple times with a .300 Blackout semi-automatic rifle.
The murders of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh shocked South Carolina, where the family were well known as a political and legal dynasty.
Members of the family had served as solicitor and district attorney for the Low Country region for 85 consecutive years.
Murdaugh claimed he found the bodies of his wife and son after returning home from a visit to his parents, but prosecutors based their case on damning cell phone evidence that showed him at the crime scene near the time of the murders.