Prosecution wraps its case at Alex Murdaugh murder trial
Alex Murdaugh’s theft of millions of dollars was about to be revealed so he killed his wife and son to buy time to figure a way out, a prosecutor said Wednesday during closing arguments in the disgraced South Carolina attorney’s murder trial.
Fearing his years of stealing from his law firm and clients would be exposed and hoping to maintain his lofty standing in the community, Murdaugh killed his wife and younger son in the hopes it would make him a sympathetic figure and draw attention away from the missing money, prosecutor Creighton Waters told jurors. Aided by his knowledge of how criminal cases are constructed, he hatched a clever plan to make sure they were at the family’s Colleton County property on the night they were killed, June 7, 2021, he said.
“The pressures on this man were unbearable. And they were all reaching a crescendo the day his wife and son were murdered by him,” Waters said. The defense will get to sum up its case on Thursday.
Murdaugh, 54, faces 30 years to life in prison if he is convicted of either murder count. Investigators said his 22-year-old son, Paul, was shot twice with a shotgun and his 52-year-old wife, Maggie, was shot four or five times with a rifle outside of the kennels on their property.
Jurors began the day with a visit to the crime scene, where a pool reporter said at least one of them carefully inspected the door frame of a storage closet where Paul Murdaugh was standing when he was killed.
The key piece of evidence connecting Alex Murdaugh to the killings is a video Paul Murdaugh shot from the kennels about five minutes before he last used his cellphone. It took more than a year for federal agents to hack into the young man’s locked iPhone and find it.
Alex Murdaugh repeatedly told everyone, starting with the first investigator to respond to the killings, that he hadn’t been at the kennels that night. But while testifying in his own defense, he admitted that he lied and that he had been there.
“Why in the world would an innocent, reasonable father and husband lie about that? And lie about it so early?” Waters said.
Although the weapons used to kill the victims haven’t been found, an expert testified that the markings on the bullet casings found near Maggie Murdaugh’s body matched those found on casings at a shooting range on the family’s property.
But there was no blood spatter linking the killings to Alex Murdaugh or anyone else, and prosecutors didn’t spend much time laying out how they think Murdaugh could have killed his family, cleaned himself up, disposed of the clothes and weapons, and composed himself in the 15-minute window before GPS data shows he left the property to visit his ailing mother.