Alex Murdaugh’s defense attorney shares story of SC serial killer in new book
Two years after Alex Murdaugh’s murder conviction, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian still believes the disgraced lawyer is innocent in the murders of his wife and youngest son.
Murdaugh, 56, is serving a life sentence for fatally shooting his wife, Maggie, and youngest son, Paul, in June 2021 on their family’s hunting estate in Colleton County, South Carolina.
“Do I believe he did it? No,” Harpootlian told Fox News Digital. “I got hired when Paul was charged with the boat case a year before the murders. And in the office I’m sitting in right now, at least once every two weeks, Alex and Maggie and Paul would come and we’d meet and talk about the case and what was going on and what we needed. Every time Maggie and Alex left this office, they were holding hands. Paul was the apple of his eye. There’s no way in hell that he would have executed that kid.”
Prosecutors argued that their murders were an attempt to distract from Murdaugh’s mounting financial crimes, which were beginning to come to light around that time, and which Harpootlian wholeheartedly believes Alex is guilty of committing. The disgraced South Carolina lawyer was also sentenced to 27 years for his financial crimes in a state case in November 2023.
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Dick Harpootlian represented Alex Murdaugh during his 2023 double murder trial. (Tracy Glantz/The State/Tribune News Service)
“Remember, the state says he concocted this plan to distract from the money he stole. Alex would … confess it if he thought it would protect Paul anyway and Maggie,” Harpootlian said. “Whoever shot Paul, and this is public testimony, put a shotgun to the top of his head and literally blew his brains out. His brains hit the ceiling. The head exploded. There’s no way in hell, in my opinion, Alex would have done that. Now, his knowledge of who may have done it, that’s another matter altogether.”
“Do I believe he did it? No.”
There are still a number of lingering questions in the case, Harpootlian said, number one being: “Who killed them?”
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“I think…we’ve learned some things since the trial that perhaps will help us lead to — we don’t have to prove who killed them,” he said. “We just need to give the jury a reasonable doubt as to [Murdaugh] killing [Maggie and Paul], and there are plenty of them. I mean, forensically, before you ever get to any testimony, whoever killed Paul would have been covered in blood and brains from head to foot. There’s no evidence whatsoever that was a single drop of blood on Alex Murdoch. And he is with other people … within an hour of the time that the prosecutor said Maggie and Paul were killed.”
Alex Murdaugh sits in the Colleton County Courthouse with his legal team, including Dick Harpootlian, middle, and Jim Griffin, right, as his attorneys discuss motions in front of Judge Clifton Newman in a December 2022 hearing. (Tracy Glantz/The State/Tribune News Service)
Harpootlian is optimistic that they will get a new trial based on the “misconduct of the clerk of court,” he said. He still talks to Murdaugh once a week, he said.
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“He really takes everything in stride and when you consider where he was and how far he’s fallen,” Harpootlian said of Murdaugh. “I mean most folks would be curled up in a fetal position in their cell refusing to come out. That ain’t Alex.”
While Harpootlian is known for defending Murdaugh in the double murder trial, his professional experience in the courtroom dates back to the 1980s. When he graduated from Clemson University in 1975, Harpootlian said he was a “sort of a long-haired hippie” who opposed the death penalty and the Vietnam War.
Dick Harpootlian began his career as a prosecutor in the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Office in the 1980s. (handout)
When he began his career as a prosecutor in the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Office, his perspective on the death penalty began to shift. He has since prosecuted hundreds of murder cases and 12 death penalty cases, including the prosecution of Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, who was South Carolina’s most notorious serial killer.
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Harpootlian discusses the case and his shifting perspective on the death penalty in his new book, “Dig Me a Grave: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer who Seduced the South,” co-authored with Shaun Assael.
Gaskins — nicknamed Pee Wee because of his short stature at 5 ft. 2 in — confessed to 13 murders in an attempt to receive a life sentence rather than the death penalty in the 1980s,. He disposed of his victims’ bodies in the swamplands of coastal South Carolina.
Harpootlian discusses the Pee Wee Gaskins case and his shifting perspective on the death penalty in his new book, “Dig Me a Grave: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer who Seduced the South,” co-authored with Shaun Assael. (handout)
However, he was eventually sentenced to death after being hired to kill a man in prison. In 1982, a man named Tony Cimo of Murrells Inlet hired Gaskins to kill Rudolph Tyner, who was on death row for murdering Cimo’s adoptive parents. However, the South Carolina Supreme Court reversed the decision to sentence Tyner to death, declaring “the death penalty statutory construct” prosecutors were using at the time to be “unconstitutional,” Harpootlian said.
“When [Gaskins] said he liked killing, he really did.”
“The Department of Corrections knew that [Gaskins] had skills as an electrician, a plumber, and they made him the head trustee of the cell block to the most secure cell block at our central correctional institution, and death row was one of the tiers … in that cell,” he explained. “Cimo was upset that Tyner had not been executed, and it had been almost a decade. And so he, through an intermediary, contacted Gaskins by phone, and arranged for Gaskins to poison him.”
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Dick Harpootlian pursued the death penalty for Pee Wee Gaskins. (handout)
The poisoning did not work, so Gaskins arranged over the phone to get explosives smuggled into the prison where he was staying. In the call, which Harpootlian played from his phone for Fox News Digital, Gaskins can be heard asking in a heavy southern accent for “one electric cap,” “as much of a stick of damn dynamite that you can get,” and a “damn radio.”
“That son of a b—h will go off, and there won’t be no damn coming back on that,” Gaskins can be heard saying in the recording.
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“The tapes obviously were damning, and the jury sentenced him to death, and he was executed in 1991,” Harpootlian said. “By then, I was the DA, or the solicitor, and he had a plot to have his son kidnap my 4-year-old daughter, which was uncovered two weeks before his execution. When he said he liked killing, he really did, and the week that was discovered, and my family and I lived with armed guards for a couple of weeks until he was only executed in the electric chair.”
Dick Harpootlian arrives at the Beaufort County General Sessions Court in South Carolina on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023. (The Image Direct for Fox News Digital )
After Gaskins successfully executed Tyner, prosecutors again sought the death penalty for the serial killer.
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Harpootlian recalled a moment he shared with Gaskins when the serial killer told him, “You like killing.”
“And I said what do you mean I like killing? And he said: ‘You like killing me. I can tell that you’re enjoying killing me,'” Harpootlian recalled. “It became clear to me, especially after he was executed, that I participated in and take responsibility for killing him. And then the question is, did I like it like he said? Was he right? Or was I just … doing my job that society, the community … hired me to do?”
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Harpootlian discusses what he described as that “moral dilemma” in his new book, which he said was “cathartic” to write. The book comes out on Dec. 16 but is currently available for pre-order.