Yahoo Autos "Murdaugh Murders:" There Is a Break in the Case of Stephen Smith's Mysterious Death
Content warning: This article contains references to murder some may find upsetting. Reader discretion is advised.
UPDATE 3/22/23: Per People, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) confirmed in March 2023 that Stephen Smith was the victim of a homicide, not a "highway vehicular manslaughter" as was reportedly assumed at the time of his death in 2015.
Stephen's body had not been exhumed in order to confirm he was murdered, but SLED officials "will be present and participate in any exhumation of Stephen's body to gather more evidence," said attorneys Eric Bland and Ronnie Richter, from the Bland Richter Law Firm that's representing Stephen Smith's mother, Sandy, in a joint statement.
Sandy started a GoFundMe to raise money to exhume Stephen's body and do an independent autopsy. In the description of the GoFundMe, it says:
"While the state can elect and fund an exhumation and new autopsy, it is our understanding that it would be carried out at MUSC, where his death was initially classified as hit-and-run despite no evidence to support it. We need a new, unbiased look at his body and an accurate determination of his cause of death based on facts. There was no debris in the road, and his injuries were not consistent with a hit-and-run."
At the time of this writing, the crowd-sourcing garnered over $87,000. The GoFundMe's goal was only $15,000.
ORIGINAL POST: The past few months have been a whirlwind of pure chaos for both the Murdaughs and followers of their insane true crime story, which was recently explored in a three-part docuseries on Netflix called Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.
The family patriarch, Alex Murdaugh, a now-disgraced lawyer from South Carolina who was recently convicted for the murders of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, is going to spend the rest of his life in prison with no possibility of parole. (This was not a death penalty case, so received the maximum sentence he could.)
The Netflix series went into extensive detail about the 2021 double homicide of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh and the death of 19-year-old Mallory Beach, who died when the boat Paul was driving crashed into Archers Creek Bridge in 2019. All the teens in the accident survived, except for Mallory; she suffered blunt-force trauma to her head and then drowned.
However, there were two other mysterious deaths associated with the Murdaughs, both covered in episode 3 of the docuseries: longtime Murdaugh family housekeeper Gloria Satterfield and 19-year-old Stephen Smith.