South Carolina state police investigating the gruesome double murder earlier this month of a prosecutor’s wife and son have uncovered information leading them back to an unsolved death from 2015, ThePost and Courier reports. A spokesman for the State Law Enforcement Division confirmed on Tuesday that investigators are probing the death of 19-year-old Stephen Smith as a result of information learned while trying to determine who killed 22-year-old Paul Murdaugh and his mother, Maggie, on June 7. The shocking killing outside the Murdaughs’ 1,700-acre Islandton home reportedly came after Paul Murdaugh received numerous death threats for a drunken boating accident in 2019 that killed 19-year-old Mallory Madison Beach. At the time of his murder, he was awaiting trial on a charge of boating under the influence causing death. Rumors had reportedly run rampant on social media that Murdaugh was somehow also connected to the death of Smith, who was found dead on a rural road in June 2015 in what investigators thought at the time may have been a hit-and-run. It was not immediately clear what information surfaced during the Murdaugh investigation to steer police back to Smith’s death.
