Private investigator recorded video of Moselle property, Paul Murdaugh days before murders
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Murdaugh murders in Colleton County
Two members of a powerhouse legal family were shot and killed June 7 in Colleton County, SC. Read more of our coverage.
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A private investigator has turned over video footage to authorities she allegedly took of Paul Murdaugh days before his murder last June, and of his family’s Moselle property where Paul and his mother’s bodies were found, according to a transcript of a court hearing.
The investigator, Sara Capelli of the Inquiry Agency, was hired by a firm personally representing Greg Parker, owner of a Lowcountry convenience store chain that allegedly sold Paul Murdaugh alcohol the night he allegedly crashed his family’s boat, killing Mallory Beach.
Capelli was tasked with following Paul Murdaugh for more than a year to capture him on video and did so “within three days of his murder,” attorney Mark Tinsley alleged at a March 16 court hearing for one of his lawsuits against Parker’s.
Tinsley is representing the Beach family.
That video and video where Capelli or other investigators “caused a camera to be placed at the driveway to Moselle” — the family property where Paul Murdaugh and his mother, Maggie, were found shot to death on June 7, 2021 — were turned over to the S.C. Law Enforcement Division, which is investigating the murders, according to Tinsley.
It’s not clear from the hearing whether the Moselle camera was in place on the day of the murders.
The video evidence turned over to SLED is new information on what the agency might be looking at as SLED has been quietly investigating the killings of two members of the prominent Lowcountry family for more than nine months.
The public knows little more about the killings than they knew in the weeks after it happened and next to nothing about what evidence and knowledge police have. The murders remain unsolved, though Alex Murdaugh, husband to Maggie and father to Paul, has been reported to be a person of interest.
The case where the video evidence came to light is a volatile offshoot from the original case brought by Tinsley on behalf of Beach’s family. Beach was killed in the 2019 boat crash in which Paul Murdaugh was accused of driving drunk and crashing the boat.
They allege in the case that Parker’s, which is being sued originally for negligently selling alcohol to Paul Murdaugh, engaged in a civil conspiracy to defame the Beach family and improperly sold confidential materials from a mediation video.
At the March 16 hearing, the issue at hand was whether information gathered by third party private investigators, employed by a law firm representing Parker’s CEO, Parker, should be subject to release to Tinsley’s subpoenas.
Debbie Barbier, a Columbia lawyer for Parker’s, who also is representing Alex Murdaugh’s former associate who was recently indicted, argued that the information fell under attorney-client privilege and protected “work product.”
“There is no greater harm than invading the attorney/client work product privileges. That’s a substantial harm,” Barbier said at the hearing. “That would taint the rest of this litigation and create an issue that could not be fixed.”
Tinsley has asked the court to enforce the subpoenas.
“If there’s one thing this case has shown us is that lawyers can do bad things. And just because you’re a lawyer, you’re not cloaked with immunity that they would like a lawyer to be cloaked with when they’re violating the rules of professional conduct, violating the rights of third parties ... and violating the rules of the court,” Tinsley said, referencing dozens of criminal charges involving financial wrongdoing brought against Alex Murdaugh in the past year.
On Monday, Circuit Judge Bentley Price ruled that the information sought “is not protected” and ordered it to be turned over to Beach’s lawyer.
Video evidence and the double homicide?
Now that lawyers for Parker’s have been ordered to comply, the March 16 hearing gives some insight into what that information might include, and how it relates to the murders investigation.
“Mr. Parker wanted three things: He wanted video of Paul Murdaugh drinking, partying and talking about killing that girl, and I assume that’s Mallory Beach, and he wanted to prove that Buster Murdaugh (Paul Murdaugh’s brother) was gay,” Tinsley said at the hearing. “And so they hired Sara Capelli.”
The information on Buster Murdaugh’s sexuality is tied to a prominent rumor — which has never been verified — in the death investigation of Stephen Smith, opened by SLED two weeks after the Murdaugh double homicide.
Stephen Smith, a 19-year-old Hampton teen who was openly gay, was killed in July 2015 under suspicious circumstances.
Tinsley has alleged that Parker wanted that information in order for a jury to rule against the Beach family in the original boat crash negligence lawsuit.
Capelli was “videoing Paul Murdaugh in excess of a year” and did so within three day of his murder, he said.
“In addition to her surveillance, they had also caused a camera to be placed at the driveway to Moselle,” he said in the transcript.
The judge asked Tinsley whether it was confirmed that there was a camera placed at the Moselle entrance.
According to Tinsley, he said that the state Attorney General’s Office “has confirmed that SLED has received some video that was taken by Miss Capelli. Whether it was that camera or it was shot by a hand-held camera, I do not know.”
Additionally, Tinsley has alleged that Capelli “bought alcohol for some underaged people in Columbia in order to get information about Paul Murdaugh” and that Parker’s reimbursed her for that.
At the hearing, Parker’s lawyers Barbier and Ralph “Ned” Tupper, who is also a local Beaufort judge, did not address the specific allegations of what Capelli was looking for.
Barbier derided the motion as a “transparent attempt to gain advantage in the Beach versus Murdaugh case and to push some type of settlement.”
This story was originally published March 30, 2022 at 4:03 PM with the headline "Private investigator recorded video of Moselle property, Paul Murdaugh days before murders."
