Murdaugh Murder Trial: Jury Finds Murdaugh Guilty of Killing Wife and Son (Published 2023) (2024)

Pinned

The verdict came less than three hours after jurors began deliberating.

“Today’s verdict proves that no one, no one — no matter who you are in society — is above the law,” the state attorney general, Alan Wilson, said at a news conference after the verdict.

In finding Mr. Murdaugh guilty, jurors rejected his claim that he had left the dog kennels where the crimes occurred several minutes before the shootings, an assertion Mr. Murdaugh made from the witness stand only as a fallback after prosecutors played a video contradicting his longstanding claim that he had not been there at all. The crucial, minute-long video recorded at the kennels happened to capture Mr. Murdaugh’s voice in the background. It was taken by Paul Murdaugh in one of his last living moments, an act that inadvertently helped to secure the conviction of his father.

Prosecutors contended that Mr. Murdaugh had killed his son with a shotgun, then gunned down his wife with a rifle when she ran over to see what had happened. Prosecutors said Mr. Murdaugh quickly set about creating an alibi, texting and calling his slain wife and visiting his ailing mother a short drive away.

Mr. Murdaugh stood silently in the courtroom as the verdicts were read. His older son, Buster Murdaugh, who had testified about how distraught his father had been after the killings, sat in the courtroom with a hand over his mouth.

The jury also found Mr. Murdaugh guilty of two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.

Judge Clifton Newman said he would sentence Mr. Murdaugh on Friday morning. The minimum sentence for murder is 30 years in prison, and prosecutors have said they will seek a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Dick Harpootlian, one of Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers, said he planned to appeal the verdict.

The trial was a reckoning for Mr. Murdaugh, who long avoided legal consequences for his stealing and lying — things he admitted to from the witness stand —as he led a life of privilege and wealth.

In addition to the stolen money, he raked in millions of dollars in genuine income in some years as a lawyer for his family’s firm.

Mr. Murdaugh once dreamed of following in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather and becoming the region’s top prosecutor, but instead he served only as a volunteer prosecutor, working on a handful of cases over two decades. Nonetheless, he kept a prosecutor’s badge on the dashboard of his car and had blue flashing lights installed —a sign, prosecutors said, that he viewed himself as above the law.

Mr. Murdaugh was disbarred last summer after being charged with multiple financial crimes including the theft, in total, of about $8.8 million. Mr. Murdaugh claimed he had taken the money to pay for an opioid addiction that was sometimes costing him tens of thousands of dollars a week.

A prosecutor, John Meadors, gave a brief closing argument in rebuttal on Thursday, urging jurors not to believe the claims of innocence that Mr. Murdaugh had made from the witness stand. The jury of seven men and five women began deliberating just before 4 p.m.

Motive had been a question from the beginning of the case. Prosecutors argued that Mr. Murdaugh committed the killings in a failed effort to gain sympathy and to keep his longtime embezzlement from being exposed.

But another of Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers, Jim Griffin, told jurors on Thursday that the notion that Mr. Murdaugh would try to evade scrutiny of his finances by placing himself in the middle of a murder investigation strained credulity.

“Why, why, why would Alex Murdaugh, on June 7, execute his son Paul and his wife, Maggie, who he adored and loved?” Mr. Griffin asked, noting the number of people who knew the Murdaugh family and testified about their loving relationship.

Creighton Waters, the lead prosecutor, noted that Mr. Murdaugh admitted on the witness stand that he had told many lies over the years to cover up his financial misdealings and addiction to painkillers. Mr. Waters urged the jurors to avoid becoming the next ones to believe his lies. “Don’t let him fool you, too,” he said.

Mr. Waters told jurors that a “perfect storm” had been approaching Mr. Murdaugh — and, by extension, his wife and son — on the day of the murders. Earlier that day, Mr. Murdaugh had been confronted by his law firm’s financial chief, who accused him of pocketing a six-figure check that he was supposed to pass along to the law firm.

That confrontation, Mr. Waters said, was one of two inquiries into Mr. Murdaugh’s finances that led him to fear the walls were closing in. The other was an effort by another lawyer, Mark B. Tinsley, who had sued Mr. Murdaugh over his son’s involvement in a drunken boat crash in 2019 that resulted in the death of a 19-year-old woman. The authorities said the boat was driven by Paul Murdaugh, and Mr. Tinsley had been asking a lawyer to force Mr. Murdaugh to disclose detailed financial records so that he could go after Mr. Murdaugh’s personal assets.

Initially, prosecutors said, Mr. Murdaugh’s scheme worked: For several months after the murders, the inquiries into his finances were halted. But then, in September 2021, an employee at his law firm found a missing check in Mr. Murdaugh’s office, leading to the firm’s discovery that he had siphoned off millions of dollars. They forced him to resign.

The next day, in a bizarre series of events, Mr. Murdaugh reported that he had been shot in the head on the side of a rural road. It turned out, as Mr. Murdaugh admitted from a detox facility days later, that he had actually asked a distant cousin, Curtis Eddie Smith, to kill him. Mr. Murdaugh said he had wanted to frame his death as a murder so that his surviving son, Buster, could collect on his insurance policy.

Much of the trial focused on Mr. Murdaugh’s lies, including the one that he repeated to police in three interviews after the murders, in which he claimed to have not been at the family’s dog kennels.

Mr. Murdaugh made the risky decision to take the witness stand in his own defense last week and said, in tearful testimony, that he lied to the police because he feared he would become a suspect if he acknowledged being at the kennels that night. He said he had been there for a few minutes, but then had left and driven to check on his ailing mother who lived about 15 minutes away. He said he returned about an hour later to find his family dead.

Mr. Griffin addressed Mr. Murdaugh’s initial statements to the police directly on Thursday, saying that the video from the kennels turned out to be the backbone of a case that lacked any other evidence. But as a longtime drug addict, Mr. Murdaugh had become accustomed to telling lies, he said.

“Frankly, he probably wouldn’t be sitting over there if he had not lied,” Mr. Griffin said, pointing to his client, who sat at the defense table in a brown blazer and white shirt, intently watching the proceedings. Mr. Griffin added: “He lied because that’s what addicts do. Addicts lie. He lied because he had a closet full of skeletons.”

Throughout the trial, Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers argued that the police were sloppy in their investigation and had focused almost exclusively on Mr. Murdaugh instead of looking for other suspects. Mr. Griffin characterized the police investigation as being driven by the concept that “unless we find somebody else, it’s going to be Alex.”

In his testimony, Mr. Murdaugh said he believed the killings were probably carried out by someone seeking revenge over the boat crash.

Mr. Griffin had ticked through problems in the investigation in his closing arguments, including that the lead agent, David Owen of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, gave false testimony about guns found on the property to the grand jurors who indicted Mr. Murdaugh. He also noted that the police had for months wrongly believed that blood spatter had been found on Mr. Murdaugh’s shirt, when, in fact, more rigorous tests taken later showed no blood.

He also criticized the prosecution for its contention that Mr. Murdaugh’s inconsistent comments about the timeline of his movements suggested that he was the killer.

“Can you imagine what he saw?” Mr. Griffin said, choking back tears as he described Mr. Murdaugh returning home to find his wife and son killed. “And it’s evidence of guilt that he doesn’t remember what the sequencing was in that moment? Is that evidence of guilt, or is that evidence of trauma?”

But Mr. Waters hammered Mr. Murdaugh on his previous deceptions, asking Mr. Murdaugh repeatedly when he was on the stand if he had looked his clients in the eyes when he stole their money and suggesting that he was also lying to the jury.

“He’s fooled them all,” Mr. Waters said of the victims of Mr. Murdaugh’s deceit. “He fooled Maggie and Paul, too, and they paid for it with their lives.”

Here’s what cellphone and other data showed about the night of the murders.

8:44 to 8:45 p.m.: Paul Murdaugh records a video that captures Alex and Maggie Murdaugh’s voices near the dog kennels on their family hunting estate, where the shootings took place.

8:48: Paul Murdaugh and a friend text back and forth about movie recommendations.

8:49:01: The last moment when anyone unlocks Paul Murdaugh’s cellphone, which had a passcode. Prosecutors said this suggested that he was killed at or shortly after this moment.

8:49:31: The last moment when Maggie Murdaugh’s phone is unlocked.

8:53 to 8:55: Maggie Murdaugh’s phone records 59 steps.

8:53: Someone appears to activate the voice assistant on Maggie Murdaugh’s phone very briefly by holding the lock button.

9:02 to 9:06: Alex Murdaugh’s phone records 283 steps.

9:04: Alex Murdaugh calls his wife’s phone. No one answers.

9:06: Alex Murdaugh calls Maggie Murdaugh again. No answer.

9:06: Alex Murdaugh shifts his car out of park.

9:07: The car leaves the vicinity of the house.

9:08: Alex Murdaugh’s car passes by an area where his wife’s phone was later found on the side of the road. The car does not slow down.

9:08:58: Alex Murdaugh texts Maggie Murdaugh: “Going to check on Em be rite back.” (Em is Mr. Murdaugh’s mother.)

9:10: Alex Murdaugh calls Buster Murdaugh, his older son, and they speak for one minute. Buster Murdaugh testified that his father called to say that he was driving to check on his ailing mother, and that he sounded normal on the phone.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

The jury made an unusual visit to the vast estate where the killings took place.

Mr. Murdaugh admitted on the witness stand that he was at the kennels minutes before the killings, but he said he drove a golf cart back to the main house before the shootings took place.

It is rare for juries to visit crime scenes during a trial. Experts said that taking the jurors out of the tightly controlled courtroom environment and into the real world carried significant risks for both the prosecution and the defense.

“There are a lot of dangers with this,” said Nancy S. Marder, a law professor and jury expert at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.

For example, experts said, lawyers are not allowed to point things out or speak with the jurors during such visits. “You don’t know what jurors will see when they get to the place,” Ms. Marder said. “They might focus on very different things.”

Even so, a visit can help jurors visualize a crime scene, and jury visits have been conducted in several high-profile cases, including the sentencing trial of the gunman in the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.; the trial of a Louisville, Ky., police officer who was charged over the fatal Breonna Taylor raid and, perhaps most famously, the O.J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles.

Prosecutors say Alex Murdaugh killed his wife and son to conceal his own financial crimes.

It seemed to work at first, prosecutors said. Condolences poured in, and people wondered who might have targeted his family. But there was soon even more scrutiny of his finances, leading to indictments on dozens of financial crimes — and then to murder charges.

“He had been stealing for over a decade,” Creighton Waters, the lead prosecutor in the murder trial, said in court, adding that the financial malfeasance Mr. Murdaugh was eventually accused of could have sent him to prison for life. “That’s the significance of what he was trying to prevent from being exposed.”

To Mr. Murdaugh and his defense team, the suggested motive was absurd and was not supported by the evidence.

“His theory is that he knew the jig was up, so he went home and butchered — blew the head off his son — and butchered his wife,” Dick Harpootlian, one of Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers, said in court as he derisively recounted the prosecution’s theory. Mr. Harpootlian said there was a wealth of evidence — texts, pictures, witness testimony and at least one video from the day of the crimes — showing that the Murdaughs were a happy family.

“There is no dispute anywhere that they were the perfect family, in terms of their relationships,” Mr. Harpootlian said.

Prosecutors pointed to two specific events in the week of the murders that they suggested may have led Mr. Murdaugh to kill his wife, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and their younger son, Paul Murdaugh, 22.

The first related to a lawsuit that had been brought against Mr. Murdaugh after a fatal boat crash in 2019 involving Paul Murdaugh. The son was criminally charged with drunkenly crashing the boat, killing a female passenger. A lawyer for the woman’s family asked a judge to order Mr. Murdaugh to disclose details about his finances, and a hearing was scheduled for June 10, 2021. It was canceled after the killings on June 7, 2021.

The second event was a confrontation that prosecutors said Mr. Murdaugh had on the day of the murders with a staff member at his law firm, who demanded that Mr. Murdaugh explain why nearly $800,000 in legal fees had not been deposited into the firm’s bank account, as it was supposed to have been. Mr. Murdaugh had already spent that money and more, prosecutors said, and was no longer able to move enough money around to cover his tracks.

The murders put a temporary end to the inquiries, but that changed in September 2021. Mr. Murdaugh’s law firm discovered a copy of a check made out to Mr. Murdaugh that was supposed to have been made payable to the firm, leading to the discovery of more problems with the books.

The firm forced Mr. Murdaugh to resign, and before long he was charged with a series of financial fraud crimes — and eventually the murder of his wife and son.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Here’s what to expect at the Murdaugh sentencing hearing.

Prosecutors have previously said that they would seek life in prison without the possibility of parole, and not the death penalty.

At the sentencing hearing, people who wish to speak about the damage caused by Mr. Murdaugh or in support of showing him leniency will have the opportunity to do so. Judge Newman said on Thursday that he would not begin this phase of the trial until Friday, partly because of “what I anticipate to be a number of people who might have something to say.”

In South Carolina, prosecutors can seek the death penalty in murder cases, but the office of the state attorney general said in December that “after carefully reviewing this case and all the surrounding facts, we have decided to seek life without parole for Alex Murdaugh.”

Mr. Murdaugh’s legal team welcomed the prosecutors’ decision at the time.

The Death Penalty Information Center reports that there have been no executions in the state since 2011. South Carolina has said obtaining lethal injection drugs is too difficult. In January, the State Supreme Court ordered the state government to provide information on how it had attempted to obtain the drugs, as part of a lawsuit against its execution methods.

Alex Murdaugh testified in his own defense, a strategy that failed.

Mr. Murdaugh was convicted on Thursday of killing his wife and son in June 2021 in the hope of halting the expanding inquiries into his finances and into reported thefts from clients and his law firm.

Ms. Fiset said that she believed Mr. Murdaugh decided to testify despite the risk, because it gave him a chance to “personalize his story.”

“He is a skilled lawyer who thought he could tell this story best in his own words,” Ms. Fiset said, adding that he probably wanted to speak to jurors in a manner that would resonate with them. It was a strategy that clearly failed: The jury unanimously decided to convict Mr. Murdaugh after less than three hours of deliberation.

Mr. Murdaugh admitted during his first day of testimony that he had lied when he told the police that he was not at the dog kennels with his wife and son on the night of the murders. That came after a video emerged showing that he had indeed been present at some point when his wife and son were out checking on the dogs.

Ms. Fiset said that Mr. Murdaugh probably felt that “he had no other option than to admit he was there, given all of the testimony placing him there that night.”

“Maybe he had nowhere else to go but up,” she added, “and that was what influenced his decision.”

Patrick O’Keefe, a criminal defense lawyer in Michigan, said that courts are “pretty exhaustive” in instructing jurors that a defendant’s silence and refusal to take the stand cannot be used against them.

“But sometimes, there’s no silence more deafening than a defendant invoking his right to remain silent,” Mr. O’Keefe said, adding that the decision for a defendant to testify is never clear-cut. A defendant testifying at his own trial, he said, was like “walking between raindrops without getting wet.”

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

The Murdaugh murder case prompted investigations into two earlier deaths.

Mr. Smith’s mother, Sandy Smith, has questioned that determination in interviews with South Carolina news outlets and has complained that the authorities changed their story and failed to answer many questions.

She has said that on the night of her son’s death, he was driving home from a night class at a technical college where he was training to become a nurse. Police files have suggested that Mr. Smith ran out of gas on the side of the road, several miles away from where his body was found.

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division helped with forensics in the initial investigation, which was led by South Carolina Highway Patrol. But in June 2021, about two weeks after Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were killed, the law enforcement agency said that it was opening a new inquiry based on information gathered during investigations into the double homicide.

The police have not accused the Murdaugh family of wrongdoing in Mr. Smith’s case, and have not said exactly what prompted them to open an investigation into his death.

Ms. Satterfield worked as a housekeeper and nanny for the Murdaughs for about a quarter-century, until the day she was reported to have fallen down some stairs outside of the family’s home. Ms. Satterfield had a brain hemorrhage and died at a hospital on Feb. 26, 2018, a few weeks after she fell. Alex Murdaugh referred her two sons to a lawyer.

In September 2021, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division opened an investigation into the circ*mstances of Ms. Satterfield’s death after the coroner in Hampton County raised questions about the fact that her death had been attributed to natural causes, despite the fall, and that no autopsy had been conducted.

Ms. Satterfield’s sons said in a 2021 lawsuit that they had never been told about a $4.3 million settlement that had been negotiated for them by a lawyer who was a friend of Mr. Murdaugh, and that they never received the money. During a bond hearing in December 2021, Mr. Murdaugh agreed to pay $4.3 million to Ms. Satterfield’s family.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Here are 5 key takeaways from the Murdaugh murders trial.

Prosecutors had argued that Mr. Murdaugh committed the murders to divert attention from his own financial improprieties, which they said were about to be revealed. Testifying in his own defense, Mr. Murdaugh admitted on the stand that he had stolen millions of dollars from his law firm and from clients, but maintained his innocence in the deaths of his wife and son.

Here’s what to know about the case.

Murdaugh was at the crime scene.

After denying for more than 20 months that he was at the dog kennels where his wife and son were found shot to death, Alex Murdaugh admitted that he had lied about his whereabouts. He testified that in fact, he was at the kennels briefly that night, before the murders took place.

But the admission came only after a video confirming his presence, taken by his son Paul, emerged in court.

Mr. Murdaugh told the court that he had been at the kennels for a few minutes, but then had left, lain down at the house for a while, and driven to check on his ailing mother who lived about 15 minutes away. He said he returned about an hour later to find his family dead.

He blamed his lies to the police on paranoia spurred by opiate dependency, as well as his distrust of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, a state investigative agency. Mr. Murdaugh testified that he had feared that admitting he was at the kennels before the murders would cause the police to consider him a suspect.

“I lied about being down there,” he said, “and I’m so sorry that I did.”

There is not much physical evidence in the case.

Prosecutors used telephone calls, text messages, videos, car navigation data and even step counts based on cellphone tracking to call into question Mr. Murdaugh’s account of his whereabouts on the night of the killings.

But they offered little physical evidence. Investigators have not found the family-owned rifle that they say was used to kill Mrs. Murdaugh, nor have they found the shotgun used to kill Paul Murdaugh.

No blood was found on the white T-shirt that Mr. Murdaugh was wearing when police arrived after he called 911 — it would have been covered in blood and body matter if he were guilty, his lawyers argued — and the DNA of an unknown man was discovered under Mrs. Murdaugh’s fingernails.

Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers sought to portray the police investigation as sloppy, mentioning that some location data on Mrs. Murdaugh’s phone from the day of the killings had been overwritten. Two deputies from the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office admitted that tire tracks from the crime scene had been driven over and stepped on, while another deputy said he had walked near one of the victims’ bodies without covering his shoes.

Defense lawyers also noted that the police issued a statement after the killings saying that no immediate threat to the public existed. That was an indication, they argued, that the authorities were investigating only Mr. Murdaugh.

One defense lawyer, Jim Griffin, said that the police “failed miserably in investigating this case.” Mr. Murdaugh would have been vindicated, he added, “had they done a competent job.”

Murdaugh has been charged with dozens of financial crimes.

On the day of the killings, the chief financial officer of Mr. Murdaugh’s law firm confronted him, accusing him of pocketing about $800,000 in legal fees that he was supposed to have deposited into the firm’s account.

Prosecutors have since accused Mr. Murdaugh of stealing about $8.8 million in all. He confessed under oath to many of those crimes, including embezzling about $3.7 million in 2019. Thatwas the same year that his son Paul was charged with drunkenly crashing a boat into a bridge, killing one of his passengers, 19-year-old Mallory Beach.

Mr. Murdaugh has maintained that he believed that his son was killedby an unknown assailant or assailants because of his involvement in that crash.

The prosecution leaned on Murdaugh’s lies to persuade the jury not to trust him.

Along withan array of financial misdeeds, Mr. Murdaugh testified that he hada longtime addiction to painkillers and a penchant for lying. The prosecution seized on that admission — ofhow readily, and easily, he had lied to the police, his family and friends — to persuadethe jury that he was lying about not having killed his wife and son.

At one point, the lead prosecutor, Creighton Waters, held up a stack of papers relating to clients whom Mr. Murdaugh stole from.

“Every single one of these, you had to sit down and look somebody in the eye and convince them that you were on their side, when you were not, correct?” he asked Mr. Murdaugh,while looking directly at the jury.

“What I admit is I misled them, I did wrong, and that I stole their money,” Mr. Murdaugh responded.

In turn, Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers portrayed his acknowledgment of his lies as a willingness to come clean, sayingthat he recognized his shortcomings, but had never been violent and would never have carried out the murders.

Surviving relatives were among Murdaugh’s most ardent defenders — to a point.

Friends and relatives said Mr. Murdaugh was devastated by the killings. His brother John Marvin Murdaugh testified that he “would have to create a new word to describe how distraught he was.”

Alex Murdaugh’s surviving son, Buster Murdaugh, testified that his father was “destroyed” and “heartbroken” after the killings. He said that when he spoke with his father about 20 minutes after prosecutors say the murders took place, Alex Murdaugh sounded “normal” — at a time that Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers say he had yet to discover the bodies of his wife and son.

But Mr. Murdaugh’s sister-in-law, Marian Proctor, who testified for the prosecution, said he seemed more concerned with protecting Paul’s reputation than with learning who had killed his son. She said she began questioning her brother-in-law’s account about three months after the murders, when Mr. Murdaugh’s firm fired him and accused him of stealing millions of dollars over many years.

When Ms. Proctor asked him who might have murdered his wife — Ms. Proctor’s only sister — and his son, Mr. Murdaugh offered a cryptic response, she said.

“He said that he did not know who it was, but he felt like whoever did it had thought about it for a long time,” Ms. Proctor said. “I just didn’t know what that meant.”

Alex Murdaugh is the scion of a South Carolina legal dynasty.

Alex Murdaugh worked as a partner at a law firm that was founded by his great-grandfather more than a century ago. The firm, formerly named P.M.P.E.D. for the initials of its partners, was one of the state’s leading tort litigation firms and a powerhouse on the state plaintiffs’ bar. Its headquarters, a red brick Colonial Revival building in Hampton, S.C., is second in grandeur only to the nearby county courthouse.

In the South Carolina Lowcountry, old family names can carry significant weight. To some residents, the Murdaugh name had come to stand for a domination of the legal system so pervasive that people asked whether the family had the power to skew the trajectory of justice in its favor.

As his life unraveled in 2021, Mr. Murdaugh was accused of stealing millions of dollars from his law firm and millions more from a settlement intended for the children of his longtime housekeeper, who died after falling down stairs on the family’s property in 2018. He resigned from P.M.P.E.D. in 2021 and was indicted in December 2022 on nine counts of tax evasion. The law firm changed its name to the Parker Law Group.

In a television appearance on the ABC program “Good Morning America” shortly after the murders, Mr. Murdaugh’s brother, Randy Murdaugh, said that too much attention was being paid to the family’s connections, as opposed to its losses.

“You see words like ‘dynasty’ used, and ‘power,’ and I don’t know exactly how people use those words,” he said. “But we’re just regular people, and we’re hurting just like they would be hurting if this had happened to them.”

The regional prosecutor, Mr. Stone, recused himself from the double-homicide case in August 2021; it has since been taken up by the State Attorney General’s office. The former regional prosecutor, Randolph Murdaugh III, died of natural causes three days after his grandson and daughter-in-law were found dead.