Murdaugh found guilty of murdering wife, son
WALTERBORO, S.C. — Alex Murdaugh, the fourth-generation heir to a powerful South Carolina legal, law enforcement and political family, was found guilty Thursday of murdering his wife and son in a case that brought the glare of national and international media attention to a long-secluded but corrupt corner of the state’s Lowcountry.
A jury of seven men and five women took less than three hours over days before unanimously finding Murdaugh, 54, guilty of executing his son Paul, 22, with a shotgun inside the feed room at the dog kennels before gunning down his wife, Maggie, 52, with a high-powered rifle on June 7, 2021, at the family’s 1,770-acre rural Colleton County estate, called Moselle.
The verdict was announced in the same courtroom where Murdaugh’s father, Randolph Murdaugh III, was the elected solicitor, or criminal prosecutor, from 1986 to 2006, and his grandfather, Randolph “Buster” Murdaugh Jr., the elected solicitor from 1940 to 1986, brought cases against thousands of the county’s accused criminals over the years. And Murdaugh’s great-grandfather, the original Randolph Murdaugh, was solicitor from 1920 until his death in 1940.
For six weeks, lead prosecutor Creighton Waters pulled together a case with one major hurdle: no direct evidence.
In the case brought against Murdaugh, the S.C. Attorney General’s Office had no direct evidence, such as fingerprints or DNA, that would have allowed the state to conclusively prove Murdaugh’s guilt. Even the weapons used to kill Paul and Maggie were missing — hidden or destroyed by Murdaugh, prosecutors contended.
To overcome that hurdle, prosecutors introduced hundreds of pieces of evidence, ranging from police interrogation videos, gunshot residue tests, car and cellphone data and — most importantly — a cellphone video taken from Paul’s phone that showed Murdaugh at the dog kennels just before his wife and son were murdered.
To establish an alibi that he was somewhere else when the killings took place, Murdaugh quickly drove to his ailing mother’s house in a nearby unincorporated community, Almeda, where he visited with a caregiver and lay on his mother’s bed for 20 minutes as a game show played on the television, prosecutors contended. Then he drove back to Moselle where he pretended to discover the bodies and called 911, prosecutors told the jury.
All this digital data shredded Murdaugh’s alibi of being somewhere else at the time of the killings, prosecutors contended. After nearly three hours of deliberation on Thursday, the jury agreed.