Lawyer grilled in his murder trial

Alex Murdaugh faces intense scrutiny after changing his story on wife and son’s slayings.

Disgraced South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh faced intense questioning Friday as the prosecutor in his double murder trial challenged his accounts of his movements on the night his wife and son were killed.

A day after he revealed he was at the family’s dog kennels shortly before his wife and son were gunned down there, Murdaugh returned to the stand, and prosecutor Creighton Waters grilled the once-prominent lawyer over his “new story” about the evening of June 7, 2021.

Waters asked Murdaugh whether he meant it when he told the jury Thursday that he had tried to help police find the killers.

“Other than lying to them about going to the kennels, I was cooperative in every aspect of this investigation,” Murdaugh said.

“Very cooperative except maybe the most important fact of all: that you were at the murder scene with the victims just minutes before they died,” Waters replied.

Murdaugh had previously said he was not at the kennels. But his son’s cellphone contained a video with Murdaugh’s voice, taken under five minutes before the victims stopped using their phones and are believed to have been killed.

The iPhone video ended just before 8:46 p.m., and both Paul and Maggie Murdaugh stopped using their cellphones about three minutes later.

Alex Murdaugh, 54, is charged with murdering his wife, Maggie, 52, and their 22-year-old son, Paul, but has denied any involvement. He faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted.

Murdaugh testified that he couldn’t remember how long he was at the kennels or his last words to his wife and son. Waters said it appeared that Murdaugh remembered a lot of specifics when the details were crucial, but not when they might get him in trouble.

For the first time, Murdaugh blamed the killings on anger aimed at his son over social media. Paul Murdaugh had been charged with boating under the inf luence after a boat wreck that killed a teenager. Alex Murdaugh said his son had been the subject of vile “halftruths, half-reports, halfstatements, partial information” online.

“I believed then and I believe today that the wrong person saw and read that, because I can tell you for a fact: The person or people who did what I saw on June 7 — they hated Paul ... and they had anger in their heart,” Murdaugh said.

Waters said it defied logic that Murdaugh’s wife and son were killed by random vigilantes who knew “they would be at the kennels alone on June 7, knew that you would not be there, but only between the times of 8:49 and 9:02.”

Murdaugh said Friday that after his brief kennel visit, he returned to the family’s house about 1,150 feet away, lay down for a few minutes and then got up to get ready to visit his ailing mother around 9:02 p.m., a time verified by step data on his cellphone, which he hadn’t taken to the kennels.

Waters suggested that Murdaugh’s flurry of steps and unanswered phone calls he started making to his wife and son at 9:02 p.m. were meant to help the lawyer avoid suspicion.

Prosecutors say he killed his wife and son to gain sympathy and buy time because his financial misdeeds were about to be discovered.

He is charged with about 100 crimes besides murder, including stealing from clients. Even if he is found not guilty of murder, he could spend decades in prison if convicted of most of the financial crimes.