Murdaugh’s ‘wild’ son
‘Drunk, disorderly’ following murders
Buster Murdaugh, the sole surviving son of Alex Murdaugh, had a wild side he displayed just two months after his family was massacred, according to a source.
Murdaugh, 26, was calm and stoic during his father’s six-week murder trial, which ended Thursday when the disbarred South Carolina lawyer was convicted of the June 2021 killings of his wife and son Paul.
In August 2021, Buster and Alex, along with Alex’s brother, Randolph “Randy” Murdaugh IV, and other members of the family’s law firm, showed up at the annual South Carolina Association for Justice convention in Hilton Head and most of them were intoxicated, the source said.
“They showed up en masse, and a lot of them got very drunk, including Buster,” the source said. “It got bad enough that some of us had to leave and go upstairs to get away from them. We didn’t want to wind up in some brawl under a pile of Murdaughs.
“It was kind of surprising to see,” he added. “Your whole family has just been slaughtered and you should be worried about assassins lurking around every corner but instead you’re whooping it up and drinking.”
The red-headed Buster also was photographed with his uncle John Marvin Murdaugh at a gambling table in Las Vegas in October 2021. He later complained to his father in a jailhouse call that his picture had been taken, and Alex advised him to “start wearing a hat” in public.
Alex Murdaugh, 54, was not charged with murdering his wife, Maggie, and 22-year-old son, Paul, until July 2022.
On Saturday, a grim-faced Buster left the $180,000 condo he shares in Hilton Head with his lawyer girlfriend to walk his dogs around their neighborhood, the Daily Mail reported.
The jury deciding his father’s fate announced its verdict after just three hours, and on Friday, Judge Clifton Newman sentenced Murdaugh to two consecutive life terms.
Newman delivered an extraordinary and highly personal 15-minute admonishment to the once-prominent lawyer before sentencing him. He suggested Murdaugh had a “monster” inside him and remarked that he must be “visited” by the ghosts of his wife and son every night.
The optics of watching Newman, who is black and grew up attending the state’s segregated schools, rule with such finality over the fate of the white scion of one of the most powerful legal families in the state was jarring.
“Judge Newman represents the best that we want in our jurists,” Eric Bland, a Columbia, SC, attorney who represents the sons of Murdaugh’s dead housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, whom Murdaugh allegedly tried to rip off for $4 million, said Saturday.
But Dick Harpootlian, one of Murdaugh’s two defense lawyers, was less glowing when asked about Newman. Harpootlian has said he plans a vigorous appeal.
“In general he’s a good judge,” he said. “But I think he made some errors in judgment in this case.”
Jim Griffin, another lawyer for Murdaugh, called the sensational trial a “miscarriage of justice.”
“There was six weeks of evidence and there was so little evidence on the actual murders. There’s no murder weapons. There’s no bloody clothes. There’s no motive to the murder,” Griffin told Chris Cuomo on NewsNation.
Griffin said he thought Murdaugh would not have issues in prison, predicting he’d be “the go-to jailhouse lawyer.”