Disgraced legal scion Alex Murdaugh won two significant legal victories as he prepares to go to trial a second time over the murders of his wife and son.

In a hearing on Friday, the 58-year-old cut a much calmer figure than his last court appearance, and was allowed to appear unshackled and change out of an orange prison issued jumpsuit.

Murdaugh even laughed and smiled with his legal team and Judge Debra McCaslin throughout the hearing, donning a blue jacket and gray pants, a white shirt and a pink and blue striped tie, glasses on and gray hair neatly cut.

He was convicted of both murders in 2023 and jailed for life, but the South Carolina Supreme Court threw that verdict out in May after finding Colleton County clerk of court Becky Hill had tampered with his jury to boost sales of a book she was writing.

In two major wins for the former attorney Friday, McCaslin ruled that his second murder trial must be moved out of Colleton County and cleared his lawyers to test DNA found under his murdered wife's fingernails.

She ordered the retrial to be transferred out of South Carolina's Fourteenth Judicial Circuit, accepting the defense case that the publicity around the killings and the conduct of the former court clerk had poisoned the local jury pool.

'I believe the defendant cannot receive a fair and impartial trial in Colleton County,' she said. 'I'm transferring it not only from Colleton, but out of Colleton County completely.'

She called Becky Hill's involvement 'presumptively prejudicial', and pointed to the longstanding association between the Murdaughs and the area, and to the fact that fewer than one in seven prospective jurors qualified to serve at the first trial.

Alex Murdaugh appeared at the Marc H. Westbrook Judicial Center in Lexington, South Carolina Friday dressed in street clothing for a hearing ahead of his retrial

Paul, Maggie, Alex and Buster Murdaugh. Alex was found guilty in 2023 of murdering Maggie and Paul two years earlier, but that conviction was sensationally overturned in May

She did not say where the retrial will be held instead, reserving that decision for a written order.

Murdaugh's lawyers are seeking to have the trial in Charleston. Prosecutors have offered Spartanburg, Newberry, Lancaster, York, and Florence.

Pushing for Charleston, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian went as far as offering to give up any appeal over where the trial is held.

'Know what else you get with Charleston?' he said. 'No appeal. We will never appeal.'

'The only person in this courtroom that has the right to a fair trial is sitting right there,' Harpootlian said, pointing at his client.

On the cost, he came back to his client's finances. 'We won't be staying at nice hotels or restaurants for this,' he said. 'He's broke. He hasn't had a job for four years.'

Murdaugh, who stole roughly $12 million from his clients, smiled at that.

In a bizarre moment during the three-hour hearing, Harpootlian called his own co-counsel, Phil Barber, who was sworn in and cross-examined by the prosecutor about hotel rates, parking garages, and the price of fast food.

'We may stay in one of those budget hotels,' Harpootlian said. 'We're on a budget.'

On Friday Judge Debra McCaslin agreed to move the upcoming new trial outside of Colleton County

Defense attorney Dick Harpootlian (pictured on Friday) argued that Murdaugh could not get a fair retrial in Colleton County

Asked whether it was the most expensive part of South Carolina, Barber allowed that real estate was pricier, 'but I don't think that's relevant here'.

Charleston has more fancy restaurants, he said, 'but the prices at McDonald's are the same'.

Harpootlian also pointed the judge to a ruling handed down two days earlier, in which Judge Keith Kelly moved a Murdaugh-linked civil case out of Hampton County after concluding that years of publicity made a fair trial unlikely anywhere in the Fourteenth Circuit.

That case, brought by the family of Mallory Beach against convenience store magnate Greg Parker and several private investigators, is a spinoff of the litigation over the 2019 boat crash that killed her. Judge Kelly sent it 175 miles away to Spartanburg.

'Colleton County is poison,' Harpootlian said. 'The courthouse is the scene of the crime. We can't go back there. The Murdaugh case is a local freak show.'

'He's vilified. Convicted of murdering his wife and child, horrendous. Stealing $12 million, horrendous,' Harpootlian said. 'Most people would run like a scalded dog from this case.'

'It takes a village to get this case transferred,' McCaslin said, listing security, transportation, the size of the courthouse and lodging.

Though money is likely to be the deciding factor, because Colleton County must pay for the retrial even though it is losing it.

'It is not a rich county, it's a poor county,' the judge added. 'So that will be at the foremost of my thoughts.'

At his last hearing in June, Murdaugh stood in the same building in a jumpsuit, chained at the waist, hands and feet

From left: Buster, Maggie, Paul and Murdaugh in a photo posted by Maggie for Father's Day in 2020

Earlier in the same hearing the judge granted a second legal win for Murdaugh, allowing the defense the independent DNA testing it had been fighting for.

The sample taken from under Maggie Murdaugh's fingernails is 99 per cent hers and one per cent that of an unknown man, the court was told.

His lawyers want it examined by Othram, the genetic genealogy lab that identified convicted murderer Bryan Kohberger as the killer of four University of Idaho students.

Defense attorney Jim Griffin told the court it could build a family tree from the sample and test the unknown man's Y chromosome to establish his ancestry.

The decision hands Murdaugh's lawyers a path to argue at the retrial that another man was at the dog kennels the night his wife, 52, and their younger son Paul, 22, were shot dead.

Prosecutor Creighton Waters did not oppose further testing but warned it would use the last of what the state has left, and wanted the work done alongside South Carolina Law Enforcement Division's (SLED) own scientists.

'They had five years. They did all the testing they wanted to do,' Griffin said. 'Now we want to test it, and they want to take control of our testing? That's not fair.'

Judge McCaslin ordered the defense to quantify the sample first and report back before going on to the genealogy testing, and said the work has to start at once. She also ordered that they return to court before deciding on any further testing.

The Murdaugh family's 1,700-acre Moselle estate where Maggie and Paul were shot multiple times

The dog kennels on the Murdaugh family's Moselle estate where Maggie and Paul were murdered

In a blow to the defense, the judge ruled that Murdaugh's own testimony from his first trial, including his admission that he lied about his alibi, can be used against him when he is tried again in April 2027.

He took the stand in 2023 and conceded he had lied about never going down to the kennels, after a video recorded on Paul's phone captured his voice at the scene minutes before the shots were fired.

Waters argued the retrial was 'still the same indictment, still the same testimony, still the same evidence, still the same case', so the testimony travels with it.

Defense attorney Phil Barber seized on the fact that Waters had told the court minutes earlier, on a different motion, that the retrial was a new case.

'Everything is new,' Barber said, arguing the one thing the state wanted to survive was his client's decision to take the stand.

McCaslin was unpersuaded.

'When you testify in a case there are consequences,' she said. 'It's sworn testimony. So I'm going to allow it in.'

How much can actually be played will depend on how much the new jury hears about Murdaugh's frauds.

In a second legal win for Murdaugh on Friday, the judge agreed to allow testing for mystery male DNA found under wife Maggie's fingernails - which could potentially allow the defense a path to argue at the retrial that another man was present on the night of her and Paul's deaths

The South Carolina Supreme Court, in ordering the retrial, said those other crimes had made up too much of the state's case the first time.

McCaslin said it was far too early to rule on how much of Murdaugh's fraud the new jury can hear, and that she will probably not take up the motive evidence until the beginning of next year.

The defense bid to throw out the indictments was also deferred, because Harpootlian has not yet filed his supporting memorandum.

Both will be argued at the next pre-trial hearing, in Lexington at 10am on November 13.

'Way things have gone, that's our lucky day,' Harpootlian said, as Murdaugh laughed alongside him.

It was the first time Murdaugh has appeared without handcuffs or prison orange since he was convicted of murdering his wife and son.

His only surviving son Buster, 30, was again absent from court, having also skipped the last hearing in June.

He has said nothing publicly since his father's conviction was overturned, and recently named his newborn son after him.

Buster sued Warner Bros Discovery and other media companies in 2024 over claims linking him to the unsolved 2015 death of Stephen Smith, settling for an undisclosed sum in February. He has never been named a suspect.

At the last hearing in June, Murdaugh stood in the same building in a jumpsuit, chained at the waist, hands and feet, while his lawyer told the judge: 'This is not Ted Bundy.'

He rocked back and forth in his chair through much of the morning, at one point jigging his leg, at another turning his tie over in his fingers and looking at it.

Griffin also demanded to know whether prosecutors had cut a secret deal with Curtis 'Cousin Eddie' Smith, who allegedly shot Murdaugh at the roadside in September 2021 in what prosecutors say was a botched plot to win a life insurance payout for his surviving son.

Harpootlian went further, telling the court the state had given Smith a polygraph about the murders, that he failed it, and that he was not offered a deal as a result. Murdaugh himself passed a polygraph with the same examiner, he said.

Waters said there had never been any sort of deal with Smith, and that the charges against him remain pending.

McCaslin then ruled polygraphs out of the retrial altogether. Results cannot go before a jury, she said, and nor can anyone's willingness or refusal to take one.

'You don't want me to hold you in contempt,' she told Harpootlian. 'And I might mistrial it if you start screaming polygraph without letting me know beforehand.'

Griffin told the court that shell casings from a recent murder in Allendale County, which he said was rumored to be tied to Murdaugh, could match one of the two weapons used at the kennels. Maggie was shot with a .300 Blackout rifle, and neither gun used that night has ever been found.

But Waters later confirmed that SLED's general counsel had reached him during the hearing: a .300 Blackout was used in Allendale, but the casings had gone through the national ballistics database with no match. Harpootlian pointed out that no match is not an exclusion.

'I never question Mr Waters,' Harpootlian said. 'But as a result of this case I cannot help but question SLED and the agency. We were lied to, and the grand jury was lied to by SLED, and he was lied to.'

McCaslin also ordered the release of sealed records from the first trial, with jurors' names and identifying details redacted.

The application was made by Columbia attorney Joe McCulloch, who acts for Juror 785, the woman known around the world as the egg juror.

She is Myra Crosby, removed from the panel by Judge Clifton Newman on the morning of March 2, 2023, over misconduct allegations, hours before the jury convicted Murdaugh. She walked out of the courthouse carrying a dozen eggs.

Questions about why she was dismissed led directly to the revelations about Becky Hill's contact with the jury, which brought the conviction down. McCulloch has been fighting to unseal the material from those private hearings ever since, and was turned down by the state Supreme Court.

Maggie and Paul were gunned down at the kennels on the family's 1,700-acre Moselle estate in Islandton on the night of June 7, 2021.

Murdaugh called 911 claiming he had come home to find the bodies, and was arrested 13 months later.

He has always denied the killings. He has not walked free at any point, and is in a maximum security prison serving a 40-year federal sentence alongside a concurrent 27-year state sentence for his frauds.

Griffin and Harpootlian are working the retrial for nothing, having told the Daily Mail there is 'no more money left' after a first trial that cost $600,000.