Alex Murdaugh sentenced to 40 years for stealing from clients and law firm
For maybe the last time, the convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh – in a prison jumpsuit instead of the suit he used to wear – shuffled into a courtroom on Monday in South Carolina and received a prison sentence.
This time, it was for 40 years in federal court for financial crimes.
Murdaugh’s latest punishment was for stealing from clients and his law firm. The 55-year-old disbarred attorney is already serving a life sentence without parole in a state prison for killing his wife and son.
Federal agents had recommended a sentence from 17.5 to just under 22 years in the case for which Murdaugh was sentenced on Monday.
Murdaugh also pleaded guilty in South Carolina state court to financial crimes and was ordered to spend 27 years in prison. The federal sentence will run at the same time as his state prison term, and he will probably have to serve all 40 years even if his convictions in the murders of his son and wife are overturned on appeal.
US district Judge Richard Gergel said he sentenced Murdaugh to a harsher punishment than suggested because he stole from “the most needy, vulnerable people”, including a client who became a quadriplegic after a crash, a state trooper who was injured on the job, and a trust fund intended for children whose parents were killed in a wreck.
Murdaugh stole from people who “placed all their problems and all their hopes” on him, Gergel said.
The 22 federal counts are the final charges outstanding for Murdaugh, who three years ago was an established lawyer negotiating multimillion-dollar settlements in tiny Hampton county, where members of his family served as elected prosecutors and ran the area’s premier law firm for nearly a century.
Murdaugh will also have to pay nearly $9m in restitution.
“There is a staggering human toll to every cent,” said attorney Justin Bamberg, who represented several of Murdaugh’s victims.
Prosecutors asked the judge to give Murdaugh a sentence on the higher end of the range he faced because FBI agents think he is not telling the whole truth about what happened to $6m he stole and whether a so-far unnamed attorney helped his criminal schemes.
Murdaugh’s largest scheme involved the sons of his longtime housekeeper Gloria Satterfield. She died in a fall at the family home.
Murdaugh promised to take care of Satterfield’s family – then worked with a lawyer friend who pleaded guilty on a scheme to steal $4m in a wrongful death settlement with the family’s insurer.
In all, Murdaugh took settlement money from or inflated fees or expenses for more than two dozen clients. Prosecutors said the FBI found 11 more victims than the state investigation found and that Murdaugh stole nearly $1.3m from them.
Murdaugh again apologized to his victims at his sentencing on Monday, saying he felt “guilt, sorrow, shame, embarrassment, humiliation”. He offered to meet with victims so they can say what they want to say and “more closely inspect my sincerity”.
Murdaugh blamed nearly two decades of addiction to opioids and said he was proud he has been clean for 937 days.
Gergel scoffed at this explanation. “No truly impaired person could pull off these complex transactions,” the judge said of the maze of fake accounts, juggled checks and money movements that hid the thefts for nearly 20 years.
Prosecutor Emily Limehouse said
Murdaugh’s claims do not make sense because he told the FBI he was taking the same amount of pills as he did when his addiction started in 2008 – but the amount of money he stole increased rapidly in the years before his arrest.
Murdaugh was convicted a year ago of killing his younger son Paul with a shotgun and his wife, Maggie, with a rifle. While he has pleaded guilty to dozens of financial crimes, he adamantly denies he killed them and testified in his own defense. There will be years of appeals in the murder cases.
The case has captivated true crime fans, spawning documentary films, dozens of podcast episodes and thousands of social media posts.
Prosecutors want to keep many of the FBI statements secret, saying they are still investigating the missing money and who might have helped Murdaugh to steal it. They say making the information public would jeopardize an ongoing grand jury investigation.
The defense asked for a lighter sentence, comparing Murdaugh’s possible sentence with 25 years for the crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried or Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes’ 11 years for duping investors, saying they stole billions while Murdaugh’s thefts were in millions.
But lawyer Eric Bland, who represented the family of Murdaugh’s housekeeper, said there was a big difference.
“Those victims were investing money,” he said. On the other hand, Bland said, his clients “lost loved ones”.