The former South Carolina court clerk accused by the Alex Murdaugh defense team of tampering with the jury has been summoned to a State Ethics Commission hearing to answer to more than 75 ethics violations uncovered during the course of the investigation.
Becky Hill, at the time the Colleton County Clerk of Court, resigned from her position in March. Hill denied at the time that her departure was related to the ongoing ethics investigation, as CrimeOnline reported.
Murdaugh’s lawyers accused Hill of pressuring the jury to convict him of the murders of his wife and son, but the state investigation and the judge in the case did not find that to be true. Murdaugh is serving two consecutive life sentences for those murder but insists he is innocent. He pleaded guilty to multiple financial fraud charges.
The state investigation into Hill’s activities didn’t stop with the jury tampering claim, however, and investigators eventually found 76 potential violations, WCBD reported. Among those are complaints that she misused Department of Social Services child support funds, including writing herself checks for nearly $10,000 from that account.
The complaints also say she allowed filming to take place at the courthouse when court was in session for personal gain, took donations and deposited them into her personal account for tours of the courthouse, and neglected her job to promote her book on the Murdaugh trial.
That book suffered an ignominious death when it was learned that she had plagiarized much of it.
One of the complaints centers around a photograph of Murdaugh in the courthouse holding cell taken moments before his verdict was read, Court TV reported. That photo came from a secure camera feed that neither the public nor the media had access to, yet it was shared on social media by photographer Melissa Gordon, who was later hired to help with Hill’s book. The book was co-written by Gordon’s husband, Neil Gordon.
The Gordons told the commission they got the photo from Hill.
The ethics commission hearing on the complaints is scheduled for December 19 in Columbia.
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[Featured image: Becky Hill swears in Alex Murdaugh before his testimony on Feb. 23, 2023. (Joshua Boucher/The State via AP, Pool), File)]
