EXCLUSIVE: Alex Murdaugh's Sick Suicide-for-Cash Plot Exposed — Before Previously Convicted Killer Granted Shocking New Retrial 

Just three months after his wife and son were brutally murdered, disgraced attorney Alex Murdaugh, who had been convicted of their deaths, hatched a plan involving hiring a hitman to shoot and kill him, so his lone surviving son, Buster, could collect a $10million life insurance, Radaronline.com can report.

Murdaugh's plan was unsuccessful, and he was eventually sent to life in prison for the killings – until his conviction was overturned on Wednesday, May 13, on a bizarre technicality.

While the search for the killer of Maggie, 52, and their 22-year-old son, Paul, dragged on, Murdaugh put his plan into motion, asking a distant cousin named Curtis Edward Smith to help him kill himself.

On September 4, 2021, Murdaugh called 911, reporting that someone in a pickup truck drove by and shot him while he was trying to change a tire. It was later revealed that the man was Smith, and Murdaugh had hired him. But Smith said he never actually fired off a shot.

"I didn't shoot him," Smith said in an October 2021 interview. "I'm innocent. If I'd have shot him, he'd be dead. He's alive."

According to Smith, when they met up to carry out the plot, he had a change of heart and tried to back out. Murdaugh, holding the gun at the time, wasn't willing to take no for an answer, and the two got into a physical confrontation when the gun discharged during the struggle.

Murdaugh survived the shooting, although his lawyer said he suffered a skull fracture and minor brain bleeding.

Murdaugh's "attempt on his life" came after Maggie and Paul were gunned down, execution style, outside the lodge at the family’s 1,770-acre hunting grounds.

He was once a prestigious attorney at his family-run law firm. But that changed on June 7, 2021, when he was accused of fatally shooting his wife and son with an AR-style rifle. He claimed he stumbled upon their bodies upon returning home from a visit to his mother.

However, a cellphone video taken by his son on the night of the murders confirmed Murdaugh was at the crime scene. And footprints found outside the lodge's kennel matched Alex's sandals.

Despite maintaining his innocence, prosecutors painted a portrait of a desperate man who allegedly murdered his family to cover up a decade of financial deceit and drug addiction.

It took less than three hours of deliberation for a jury to return a guilty verdict. Murdaugh was handed two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

But that all changed on Wednesday, May 13, after the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed with attorneys for the 57-year-old who argued former Colleton County Clerk Rebecca Hill tampered with the jurors during the original March 2023 trial.

During the trial, Hill reportedly told jurors "not to be fooled" by Murdaugh's own emotional testimony in hopes that he would be convicted to help her make money from her self-published book, Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders.

Murdaugh's attorneys claimed the would-be crime author tried to influence jurors, and was heard by another employee rationalizing, "The best way to sell books was a guilty verdict. A guilty verdict would be better for the sale of books."

The corrupt clerk faced a flurry of accusations before she resigned in March 2024, including misconduct in office, obstruction of justice, and perjury. She also allegedly showed sealed crime scene photos to members of the press and lied under oath in a hearing.

Additionally, Hill was charged with taking more than $11,000 in bonuses and using her public office to promote the book.

Hill’s book was later pulled from publication after she reportedly admitted to plagiarizing part of it.

Meanwhile, Murdaugh's trial essentially goes back to square one, as the double murder case returns to a lower court for a retrial. It will eventually be up to the S.C. Attorney General’s Office to decide whether to prosecute.