Alex Murdaugh awaits his verdict, Colleton County Court Clerk Rebecca “Becky” Hill reads the verdict sealing Murdaugh’s fate on March 2, 2023 (Law&Crime Network)
A book offering an insider’s perspective on the Alex Murdaugh double murder trial is being unceremoniously unpublished by its co-authors in the wake of plagiarism allegations, Law&Crime has learned.
Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca “Becky” H. Hill admittedly passed off the work of a BBC journalist as her own in at least one section of her book, “Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders,” according to co-author Neil Gordon.
Credited as the secondary author of the 238-page text, Gordon made the allegations in a Dec. 26 statement announcing both he and Hill made a “difficult decision to unpublish the book and cease sales.”
The revelation came when the Georgia journalist was reviewing thousands of emails released to the media via open records requests, Gordon said in a press release. In one such email exchange, the British journalist shared a lengthy passage from her forthcoming article about the Palmetto State’s longest-ever murder trial.
That passage, which goes on for some 12 pages, was later reprinted in the book almost verbatim — with seemingly just a few minor edits for purposes of style and convention. One example follows.
The draft article begins:
On the twelfth day of his murder trial, Alex Murdaugh looked bored.
Mr Murdaugh sat hunched at the defence table in the second-floor courtroom of the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina. He wore a dark blue suit, white shirt, and no tie, his thin, rimless glasses perched on the very end of his nose. Sometimes he looked up at the witnesses speaking ahead of him, but mostly he looked down. Months in prison had whittled down his formerly heavy frame. Once a towering figure, now Alex Murdaugh looked small.
The book’s preface begins:
On the twelfth day of his murder trial for the death of his wife Maggie and son Paul, Alex Murdaugh looked bored as he sat hunched over at the defense table in the second-floor courtroom of the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina. He wore a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and no tie with his thin, rimless glasses perched on the end of his nose. Sometimes he looked up at the witnesses testifying ahead of him, but mostly he looked down.
Months in prison had whittled down his formerly heavy frame. Once a towering figure, he now looked small.
“When I confronted Becky about this, she admitted she plagiarized the passage due to deadline pressures,” Gordon said in a statement provided to Law&Crime. “As a veteran journalist myself, I cannot excuse her behavior, nor can I condone it.”
In a follow-up email, a representative for Gordon pointed out that the passage sent to Hill by the BBC journalist was shared inadvertently.
“Her editor is also named Rebecca and it was meant for her,” the spokesperson said. “Hill’s previously released emails show the reporter asked her to disregard the draft, but clearly she didn’t.”
After making the discovery, Gordon immediately reached out to the BBC reporter and tried to salvage the book by requesting permission to use the passage. The reporter “declined” and referred the issue to her employer instead, the spokesperson told Law&Crime.
“This has blindsided me,” Gordon said. “Journalism has been my life’s work; my credibility and integrity are paramount to everything I do. I can’t be associated with anything like plagiarism and will no longer partner with Becky Hill on any projects. I’d like to apologize to our readers, and publicly to the BBC and the reporter.”
According to Gordon’s representative, there is very little inventory of the book left and those copies will not be sold. The title is also being removed from online retailers like Amazon. Because the book is self-published, there isn’t an issue about clawing back any payments. Gordon’s representative said the scandal is “so raw” that the co-authors “haven’t even had a chance to discuss whether refunds are in order.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the book was still available for purchase online. Law&Crime reached out to Hill and the BBC reporter whose draft was allegedly purloined for the preface but no responses were immediately forthcoming at the time of publication.
The plagiarism scandal comes amid a preexisting scandal for the first-term elected official. Hill faces an investigation into claims she engaged in several instances of jury tampering during Murdaugh’s trial.
In September, in a bombshell press conference and court filings, attorneys Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin highlighted several alleged instances of jury tampering by a court official during Murdaugh’s trial. In that proceeding, he was ultimately convicted of killing his wife, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52, with an AR-style rifle and their youngest son, Paul Murdaugh, 22, with a shotgun in the dog kennels at the family’s expansive hunting lodge known as Moselle. He was sentenced to life in prison.
However, the defense claims that the jury’s evaluation was tampered with due to Hill’s behind-the-scenes machinations. The motion for a new trial alleges that Hill “instructed jurors not to be ‘misled’ by evidence presented in Mr. Murdaugh’s defense” and “told jurors not to be ‘fooled by’ Mr. Murdaugh’s testimony in his own defense.”
Harpootlian and Griffin also claim the clerk worked to remove a seemingly pro-defense juror from the case entirely by elaborately fabricating evidence of that juror engaging in misconduct.
That juror’s removal was a final touch of drama in the proceedings, and there were predictions it would likely come up on appeal.
Hill hired two high-profile lawyers the day after Murdaugh’s attorneys accused her. In late November, Hill’s son was charged with wiretapping, reportedly related to the ethics complaint filed against his mother for allegedly using her position for financial gain. The clerk herself, in a November court filing, disputed the allegations leveled against her by Murdaugh’s defense team.
Until this week, however, Hill largely took those allegations in stride — and then some. In a public relations effort redolent of The CW’s controversial 2008 advertising campaign for “Gossip Girl,” Hill used the negative press generated by the jury tampering allegations as a sales pitch for her since-shelved book.
“Becky Hill has been villainized by Alex Murdaugh’s attorneys in the press and they’ve made very serious allegations of jury tampering against Ms. Hill,” the Amazon description for the book reads. “Thousands of words in Behind the Doors of Justice are dedicated to the 18 men and women who served on the jury or who were alternates. Read what Becky said that’s caused such a stir. Just remember, just because a lawyer says it’s so, doesn’t mean it is!”
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