The Murdaugh trial refers to the legal proceedings surrounding the Murdaugh family, a prominent South Carolina legal family. Specifically, the trial pertains to the murder of Maggie Murdaugh, the wife of Alex Murdaugh, who was found shot to death along with their son Paul on their family property in June 2021.
Alex Murdaugh was initially considered a person of interest in the case, but later, he himself became a suspect in other crimes, including insurance fraud, theft, and embezzlement. On September 3, 2021, he resigned from his position at a law firm and entered rehab for substance abuse.
As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, no trial had yet begun in the murder case, and it is unclear when it will take place or what the outcome will be. However, the case has received significant media attention due to the prominence of the Murdaugh family in the legal community, as well as the twists and turns of the investigation.
A jury finds disbarred lawyer Alex Murdaugh guilty in the deaths of his wife and son
A South Carolina jury has found once-prominent attorney Alex Murdaugh guilty on all counts in the deaths of his wife and son.
Jurors deliberated for about three hours before convicting him on two counts of murder and two counts of using a weapon during the commission of a violent crime. Murdaugh showed little emotion as the verdicts were read.
Sentencing is set for 9:30 a.m. ET on Friday.
The 54-year-old took the stand in his own defense. He was found guilty of using a rifle to kill his wife, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and a shotgun to kill his son Paul, 22. They died on the night of June 7, 2021, at the family's sprawling Moselle hunting estate in South Carolina's Lowcountry region.
Before he was disbarred, Murdaugh was an influential attorney in South Carolina and belongs to one of the most prominent families in the state.
He faces a sentence of 30 years to life in prison for each murder conviction. Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty.
"Justice was done today," prosecutor Creighton Waters said after the verdict. "It doesn't matter who your family is. It doesn't matter how much money you have or people think you have. It doesn't matter what you think how prominent you are. If you do wrong, if you break the law, if you murder, then justice will be done in South Carolina."
Judge Clifton Newman described the evidence of guilt in the case against Murdaugh as "overwhelming" and denied a request from the defense to declare a mistrial.
The judge's comments concluded the six-week trial, which captivated South Carolina — and the nation. Media coverage included live broadcasts of the trial itself, true crime podcasts and a docuseries on Netflix.
Murdaugh admitted to lying about his alibi, but insisted he did not kill his wife and son.
Earlier in the day, Murdaugh's defense team made its final bid to prevent him from spending decades in prison, delivering their closing argument in the trial of the disbarred South Carolina attorney charged in the murders of his wife and son.
A defense attorney for Murdaugh sought to sow doubt about the work by police and forensics teams, saying they fell far short of preserving evidence from the crime scene. Murdaugh's lies and revisions to his alibi stemmed from paranoia induced by his opiate addiction, the defense insisted.
In response, the prosecution urged the jurors to pay attention to "common sense" and "facts," after hearing an abundance of testimony about Murdaugh's character.
Prosecutors said the once influential lawyer lied to those close to him when he stole millions of dollars from his colleagues and clients and — in an act of desperation, as his financial pressures were mounting — fooled his wife and son, too, when he killed them.
5 Key Takeaways From the Murdaugh Murders Trial
The jury on Thursday convicted Alex Murdaugh, a prominent South Carolina lawyer, of murdering his wife and son.
The murder case against Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced South Carolina lawyer accused of killing his wife and son, concluded with a guilty verdict on Thursday after a six-week trial that probed the mysteries, manners and machinations of a fallen legal dynasty.
With closing arguments complete, the jury began deliberating Thursday afternoon on whether Mr. Murdaugh, 54, fatally shot his wife, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and their younger son, Paul Murdaugh, 22, near the dog kennels on the family’s rural hunting estate in Islandton, S.C., in June 2021. They reached a verdict less than three hours later.
Prosecutors 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 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 confessed that he had lied about his whereabouts. In fact, he testified, he was at the kennels briefly that night, before the murders.
But the admission came only after a video confirming his presence, taken by his son Paul, emerged in court.
Taking the stand in his own defense, Mr. Murdaugh told his lawyer that he had been there for a few minutes, but then had left, laid down at the house, 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.
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The kennels where Paul and Maggie Murdaugh were murdered, in an evidence photo shown in court.
The kennels where Paul and Maggie Murdaugh were murdered, in an evidence photo shown in court.Credit...South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, pool photo by Andrew J. Whitaker
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 an admission that 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 their case has been hampered by a lack of physical evidence. Investigators haven’t 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, 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.
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People wait in line outside the Colleton County Courthouse during the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh on Thursday.
People wait in line outside the Colleton County Courthouse during the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh on Thursday. Credit...Pool photo by Andrew J. Whitaker
Defense lawyers also noted that the police had issued a statement in the days 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 lawyer fees that he was supposed to have deposited into the firm’s account.
Prosecutors have since accused him 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. That’s 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 targeted by an unknown assailant or assailants because of his involvement in the crash.
The prosecution leaned on Murdaugh’s lies to convince the jury not to trust him.
In addition to an array of financial misdeeds, Mr. Murdaugh testified to a longtime addiction to painkillers and a penchant for lying. The prosecution seized on that admission — how readily, and easily, he had lied to the police, his family and friends — in an attempt to convince the 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 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 — that 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, with his brother John Marvin Murdaugh testifying 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 also 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.
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Prosecutor John Meadors questioned Buster Murdaugh, the son of Alex Murdaugh, during his father’s trial at Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, S.C., last week.
Prosecutor John Meadors questioned Buster Murdaugh, the son of Alex Murdaugh, during his father’s trial at Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, S.C., last week.Credit...Pool photo by Grace Beahm Alford
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.”
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