Jurors get their first look at Alex Murdaugh and his alibi
During opening arguments in the Alex Murdaugh double-murder trial last week, I was grateful not to be a member of the jury. The 12 citizens seated for what’s expected to be a three-week grind are the only ones in the courtroom who will see photos of the gruesome murder scene, per court orders. It’s hard to unsee that sort of thing.
In his opening statement, lead prosecutor Creighton Waters took jurors to the scene at the family’s 1,700-acre hunting compound, Moselle, where Murdaugh’s son Paul, 22, and wife, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52, were killed near the dog kennels. The first blast from a 12-gauge shotgun entered Paul’s chest and exited under his arm, suggesting that his arms had been raised. The next one entered his skull cavity and “exploded his head.”
“All that was left was the front of his face,” said Waters.
Paul’s mother was running when she was shot with a .300 Blackout weapon. “Pow, pow. .
. . And he took her down,” said Waters. The shooter then administered the kill shots to the back of her head.
Who could do such a thing? Surely not a loving husband and father, as defense attorney Dick Harpootlian described Murdaugh, the scion of a century-old South Carolina legal dynasty. Harpootlian, a seasoned trial lawyer who at times spoke to jurors in a near-whisper, said it was an honor to represent Murdaugh. When he asked the defendant to stand and face the jury, it was as though he was introducing a dear friend. On his feet — imposing, proud and unflinching — Murdaugh seemed like a man with nothing to hide. His family, who filled the row behind him, looked composed and serious. From time to time, Murdaugh would turn to nod at his two brothers and check on his remaining son, Buster.
Opening statements are often soliloquies full of fury and bluster. But they also set the stage for what each side hopes to deliver. Waters promised cellphone evidence that will reveal down to the minutes and seconds exactly what transpired on the night of June 7, 2021, when mother and son were slain.
He offered a sampling: Their phones locked at precisely 8:49:01 p.m. and 8:49:33, respectively, meaning they were shot 32 seconds apart. Paul was killed first.
At 9:02 p.m., Murdaugh, who was allegedly at the house napping while the others were down at the dog kennels, called Maggie’s phone. No answer. He called again at 9:06. No answer. Within the same 60 seconds, he texted her that he was driving to Almeda to see his mother, who has advanced Alzheimer’s. His father had been taken to the hospital that day. At 10:01 p.m., Murdaugh returned to Moselle, went to the house and, finding no one home, drove down to the kennels. About five minutes later, having discovered his wife and son lying dead in pools of blood and brain matter, he called 911.
You might have heard the recording. If so, did you detect the voice of a man out of his mind with horror, or was it a man performing a weak impression of someone in distress? “Please hurry,” he pleads with the forlorn cadence of a stray cat meowing for milk.
So, let’s pause here a moment and presume, as we must, that Murdaugh is innocent. What would an innocent person do?
We know that people respond to trauma in various ways. Some go numb, as Harpootlian suggested. Others become hysterical. In shock, they might not behave as you or I think they should. I can’t say for certain what I would have done in similar circumstances, but our deeply evolved fightor-flight response isn’t usually equivocal. Nothing about a son’s exploded head or a murdered spouse would tell me to wait and see. Maybe men are built differently, but I also don’t hear in Murdaugh’s voice the brawn or courage that would compel him to hunt down the killer(s).
Yet, according to Murdaugh, he drove back to the house to get a gun, a shotgun that he misloaded with two different types of buckshot. Harpootlian would have the jury see this as evidence that Murdaugh was traumatized. The jurors will have to decide whether they would have lingered at the scene waiting for police or leaped back into the car and sped out of Moselle as though escaping the gates of hell.
For all Murdaugh knew, the killer or killers were still on the property waiting to finish him off. That is, unless he knew there were no other killers.
It would be hard to weave a web more tangled than the one Murdaugh has been working on for years. He’s an admitted opioid addict and is charged with being heavily involved in drug trafficking. In addition to murder, he has been indicted on nearly 90 charges of fraud, theft and a slew of financial crimes. After his sins began to surface, he tried to orchestrate his own murder by hiring a shooter with a lousy aim. He allegedly stole from clients and also tried to snatch $4.3 million intended for the survivors of his housekeeper, who died in a slip-and-fall accident at the Moselle house. And then, there was the boating crash involving an intoxicated Paul as driver and the death of 19-year-old Mallory Beach, who was thrown from the boat when it collided with a bridge.
Murdaugh was quick to tell first responders that the killings were about the boat accident. “I know that’s what it is,” we hear Murdaugh say on Sgt. Daniel Greene’s body-cam. Greene testified Thursday that although Murdaugh appeared “upset,” he shed no tears and kept asking, “Are they dead?” Was he addled or was he acting? He knew they were dead, of course, because he told the 911 operator they were. As Greene said, “Any reasonable person would know they’re dead.”
Among the evidence promised by Waters is a Snapchat video Paul made shortly before he was killed that shows Murdaugh at the kennels before the murders despite his claim to the contrary. There’s also the question of what was inside a blue “tarp” he was carrying when he got to his mother’s house. The tarp turned out to be a raincoat that was covered inside with gunshot residue. Thus far, it appears that neither murder weapon has been recovered. In another twist, Maggie’s cellphone was discovered tossed on the roadside about a half-mile from Moselle. Why would an unknown murderer grab her phone or toss it?
Harpootlian attempted to plant doubt that it would be possible for someone to do what Murdaugh is alleged to have done within the 10 minutes Waters’s timeline allowed — that is, kill his family, go to the house, change clothes, get in his car and leave the compound. But by my count the actual time was 17 minutes, which seems adequate, especially given that it took only one minute to dispatch the two victims. No one imagines the killer dawdled.
Still, doubt often lingers on the threshold of our convictions. And circumstantial evidence, though treated as equal to direct evidence in South Carolina courts, might trouble the conscience of the single juror needed to allow a possibly guilty man to walk.