LAWYER’S SCHEME
Says shoot was fake to get son insurance cash
The strange saga of a prominent South Carolina family took another surreal turn on Wednesday.
State police have opened an investigation into the 2018 death of Murdaugh family housekeeper Gloria Satterfield — the latest skeleton in the closet for a powerful family that mesmerized the public after Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and her son Paul, 22, were fatally shot in June on their South Carolina property. The case remains unsolved.
The latest probe was announced the same day embattled lawyer Alex Murdaugh, 53, Maggie’s husband, admitted to orchestrating his own shooting earlier this month in a failed suicide-for-life-insurance gambit.
Satterfield had worked as a housekeeper for the Murdaughs for years before her death Feb. 26, 2018, when she reportedly took a fatal fall on the estate. Yet her death was never reported to the coroner, and no autopsy was performed.
On Wednesday, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division opened a probe after Hampton County Coroner Angela Topper revealed the missing autopsy — and that Satterfield’s deadly fall was listed as “natural.”
Topper’s explosive findings came after a lawsuit from Satterfield’s sons, Tony and Brian, who claimed Alex Murdaugh manipulated them after their mother’s death and stiffed them in a $500,000 wrongful-death settlement.
With his past dealings and personal life exposed, and his wife and son dead, Alex Murdaugh “believed that ending his life was his only option,” his lawyer, Dick Harpootlian, said Wednesday, hours after cops revealed the Sept. 4 roadside shooting was all a setup.
Murdaugh has now admitted he planned his own shooting so his living son could collect a life insurance payout of about $10 million, the state’s law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
Harpootlian, who is also a South Carolina state senator, argued the suicide scheme was a desperate move “on his part to do something to protect his child.”
“That Saturday morning, he was trying to get off the opioids; he was not taking any of them, was in a massive depression, realized things were going to get really, really, bad and decided to end his life,” Harpootlian said on NBC’s “Today” show.
According to Harpootlian, Murdaugh had started popping pills in June to handle the deaths of Maggie and Paul; it was Murdaugh who found them fatally shot on their Hampton County property. But as Murdaugh’s life unraveled — including his alleged theft of more than $1 million from his law firm to buy drugs — he saw a way out, the lawyer said.
Law enforcement officials said on the day of the botched suicide, the legal scion arranged a meeting with Curtis Edward Smith, provided a gun and told Smith to blast him in the head. Smith then followed Murdaugh to a rural road and shot him as he stood next to his car. Smith drove off and dumped the gun. Murdaugh, however, survived the shooting. On Monday, Murdaugh confessed to the scheme, according to police, telling officers he had planned the entire thing so his son, Buster, would get about $10 million from his life insurance payout.
Murdaugh believed suicide wasn’t covered under his policy.
But after surviving, Murdaugh came up with a tall tale for cops. saying he was pulled over on the side of the road to fix a flat tire when a man in a blue pickup truck drove up, shot him and drove off.
He was airlifted to the hospital after collapsing and “was blind for a while,” Harpootlian said. “He didn’t want law enforcement spending more time on this fake crime instead of focusing on solving the murders of Maggie and Paul,” the lawyer explained.
Smith, 61, has been charged with assisted suicide, assault and battery, pointing and presenting a firearm, insurance fraud and conspiracy to commit insurance fraud.
Murdaugh hasn’t yet been arrested or charged, but law enforcement officials said more charges are expected in the case. Harpootlian said Murdaugh is cooperating fully.