Alex Murdaugh sentenced to life in prison after found guilty of murdering wife, son in 2021

Alex Murdaugh, the fourth-generation heir to a powerful Lowcountry legal, law enforcement and political family, was found guilty Thursday of murdering his wife and son in a case that brought the glare of international media attention to a long-secluded but corrupt corner of South Carolina.

A day later, Judge Clifton Newman sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences.

A jury of seven men and five women took less than three hours Thursday before unanimously finding Murdaugh, 54, guilty of two murders on June 7, 2021, at the family’s rural Colleton County estate, called Moselle.

The first was the execution-style slaying of his youngest son Paul, 22, with a shotgun inside the feed room at the family’s dog kennel, followed by the gunning down of his wife, Maggie, 52, with a high-powered rifle.

The jury’s verdict endorsed the prosecutors’ version of events: That hidden behind a facade of power and respectability, Murdaugh lived a unknown life of lies and betrayal, maintaining a decades-long painkiller addiction and embezzling millions of dollars from law partners, clients, family and friends. Prosecutors argued it was the pressure created by the imminent exposure of his secret world that drove him to slaughter his wife and son.

The verdict is a vindication for the state’s investigating body, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, and the S.C. Attorney General’s Office, who conducted perhaps the state’s highest-profile investigation and prosecution in a generation amid a whirlwind of scrutiny and criticism.

It was also a personal test for Attorney General Alan Wilson, a politician who oversees an office that rarely prosecutes murders.

The jury verdict was won by “blood, sweat and tears,” Wilson, a Republican, told a crowd of media in front of the Colleton County Courthouse after the verdict came down Thursday.

The verdict was also a refutation of Murdaugh himself, a successful former lawyer and family man.

As the verdict was read Thursday, Murdaugh stood stoic in the same courtroom where his father, Randolph, and his grandfather, “Buster,” brought cases as the circuit solicitor against thousands of accused criminals over the years. Murdaugh’s great-grandfather, the original Randolph Murdaugh, was solicitor from 1920 until his death in 1940.

After a poll of the jurors found the decision to be supported unanimously, Murdaugh’s defense team made one final move to have Newman set aside the verdict and declare a mistrial.

Newman refused.

“The evidence of guilt is overwhelming and I deny the motion,” he said. “All the evidence pointed to one conclusion, and that is the conclusion you all reached.”

After the verdict, deputies placed Murdaugh in handcuffs. A short burst of metallic clicks was heard around the courtroom.

Murdaugh was remanded to the custody of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office, which has held Murdaugh in the county jail throughout the six-week trial. He has been in custody since October 2021.

Unlike the prosecution, the defense did not hold a press conference outside the courthouse but planned to hold one Friday.

But defense attorney Dick Harpootlian, a state senator, said he was “disappointed.”

The verdict in Murdaugh’s trial marked the closing of one chapter in a sprawling story that has encompassed major financial fraud, drug trafficking, tax evasion and the fall of the Murdaugh political and legal dynasty, which for four generations dominated the five counties of South Carolina’s 14th circuit.

Murdaugh’s story has also raised questions about how law firms take care of client money. And it exposed the inner workings of Palmetto State Bank, whose former CEO cooperated with Murdaugh to steal and misuse the money of the lawyer’s clients.

The former CEO, Russell Laffitte, was convicted of financial fraud by a federal jury in November in Charleston.

Prosecutors overcome missing weapons, DNA

For six weeks, in the 201-year-old Colleton County Courthouse, some 90 miles south of Columbia, lead prosecutor Creighton Waters successfully argued a case with one major hurdle: no direct evidence.

The state’s case against Murdaugh was almost entirely circumstantial.

Prosecutors had no evidence, such as fingerprints or DNA, that would have clearly linked the defendant to the crimes and 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 in the minutes just before his wife and son were murdered.

Murdaugh had repeatedly told investigators that he hadn’t seen Paul or Maggie for at least an hour before they were believed to have been killed. Murdaugh’s alibi was that he was napping at home, before he drove to his ailing mother’s house in a nearby unincorporated community, Almeda, where he visited 30 to 40 minutes.

He then told investigators he drove back to Moselle, where he found the bodies of Maggie and Paul and called 911.

However, the digital data, along with Paul’s video, showed Murdaugh to be a liar and shredded his claim that he was not at the kennels the night of the killings, prosecutors showed.

Prosecutors also had to overcome the apparent lack of a motive.

To show the jury why a seemingly happy family man might kill his wife and son, Waters introduced the “family annihilation” theory in hopes to show that an outwardly successful person who has lived a hidden life and suddenly faces exposure might suddenly kill those closest to him.

To prove this theory, Waters introduced some nine witnesses, who testified that Murdaugh for years had lived a secret life of fraud, stealing from friends, family, colleagues and his law firm, bilking them of millions of dollars. He also showed that Murdaugh, on the day of the murders, was on the verge of being exposed as a debt-ridden criminal instead of a prosperous, respected lawyer.

Evidence showed Murdaugh lured both Paul and Maggie to Moselle the night of the killings.

In hopes of countering that theory, defense attorneys Harpootlian, Jim Griffin, Phil Barber and Margaret Fox introduced witnesses who told the jury a different story: Murdaugh had been a loving, devoted father and husband, and such a man would have been incapable of carrying out murder.

Witnesses also gave undisputed testimony that the Murdaugh family had a seemingly idyllic life at Moselle, creating a kind of a Lowcountry Camelot, teeming with game that was a magnet for Paul and his older brother, Buster, and many of their friends.

At Moselle, the sons and their friends had limitless ammunition to hunt turkeys, ducks, hogs and deer at any of the many game stands and duck blinds dotting the property.

Maggie, although not enamored with life in the country, enjoyed being with her two sons and their friends at Moselle, and going on trips with Murdaugh and the boys, witnesses said.

Murdaugh’s lawyers also attacked purported flaws in the prosecution’s case.

In a jury argument Thursday morning, Griffin criticized SLED for alleged numerous errors, including “manufactured” evidence.

Griffin called the jury’s attention especially to a SLED agent’s testimony before a grand jury that Murdaugh had a shirt stained with blood spatter, ostensibly from the back spray of a shotgun blast to Paul. But the spatter evidence turned out not to be true.

He also argued that the evidence, from the two guns to the placement of bullet holes and spent shell casings, supported the argument that there were two shooters at the scene of the crime.

In the end, what may have been Murdaugh’s Achilles heel was himself, and his admitted lies on the witness stand.

Murdaugh takes the stand

In testimony that was in turn tearful, defiant and litigious, the disbarred attorney denied killing his wife and son.

But in five hours of cross-examination by Waters, Murdaugh offered a stunning series of admissions.

He confessed, for the first time, to lying about his alibi and to a decade’s worth of thefts from his clients and his law firm, which he said was driven by a need to cover a $50,000-a-week addiction to prescription painkillers.

Even before he took the stand, Murdaugh’s defense team had little room to maneuver.

Newman granted the prosecution’s wish list of motions.

He allowed them to introduce a landslide of witnesses who testified about Murdaugh’s financial crimes, leading Harpootlian to protest that it was more of a “Madoff trial than a murder trial.” Bernie Madoff was imprisoned for orchestrating a $64.8 billion Ponzi scheme, the largest in history.

While not required to prove motive, Waters repeatedly accused Murdaugh of being a “family annihilator,” driven to commit a biblical act of destruction when the facade of his successful life began to crack.

Ballistics experts also matched a family gun to the weapon that killed Maggie, and the state used family’s phones and data from Murdaugh’s car to map out a minute-by-minute timeline of events, casting doubt on the defense’s improbable claim that Murdaugh missed the killings by mere minutes.

Many of the witnesses were drawn from the inner circle of the Murdaughs’ close knit and clannish world, among them Murdaugh’s surviving son, 26-year-old Buster, who testified in his father’s defense.

Their testimony threw back the curtain on an insular world of privilege and power.

Since the 2019 boat crash allegedly caused by Paul that killed Mallory Beach, the family has gained international prominence through podcasts, documentaries and a zealous community of online sleuths.

Crusading lawyers, including Mark Tinsley and Eric Bland, have filed lawsuits leading to exposure of Murdaugh’s financial crimes and heightened public awareness of the story.

In court, the 6-foot-4 Murdaugh often appeared gaunt, his once red hair turned almost white.

He frequently rocked back-and-forth and openly wept during testimony.

It was hard to connect the man at the defense table with the image of well-fed, affluent contentment, who beamed out from family pictures that have been featured heavily in nearly four years of coverage of the case.

“It doesn’t matter who your family is, it doesn’t how much money people think you have, it doesn’t matter how prominent you are,” Waters told reporters Thursday. “If you break the law, if you do wrong, if you commit murder, the state of South Carolina will hold you accountable.”

Murdaugh faces financial, drug charges

At the heart of the widespread media interest in the latest generation Murdaugh was a long-running “whodunit” mystery that quickly attracted international attention because of the brutality of the Maggie and Paul’s execution-style killings, the prominence of the victims’ family and the seeming helplessness of SLED to identify a suspect for more than a year.

For 14 months — until Murdaugh’s indictment on murder charges in July 2022 — neither SLED officials nor prosecutors from the S.C. Attorney General’s office would comment on evidence in the case or law enforcement’s highly publicized failure to make an arrest.

Interest in what became known as the “Murdaugh murders” case was heightened when, three months after the killings, in early September 2021, Murdaugh was fired by his law firm, which publicly accused him of misappropriating client funds.

At the murder trial, one of Murdaugh’s law partners revealed the Murdaugh had embezzled more than $10 million from the law firm and its clients. Although insurance had compensated some of the firm’s clients for their losses, firm members had to borrow money to reimburse other clients.

A day after he was fired by his law firm, Murdaugh staged what SLED later called a fake suicide in a botched attempt to have his life insurance pay $10 million to his only surviving son, Buster. Murdaugh was charged with financial fraud.

In late 2021 and into 2022, Murdaugh was repeatedly indicted on multiple counts of financial fraud by the state grand jury.

Members of his former law firm, formerly known shortly as PMPED, created a new firm and rebranded themselves as the Parker Law Group — a sign that the Murdaugh name, once respected and even feared around the Lowcountry’s 14th Judicial Circuit for more than 100 years, was now tainted.

The full extent of Murdaugh’s alleged financial frauds still are not known.

He also faces charges of evading some $486,000 in state taxes on the millions of dollars he stole, as well as drug trafficking charges, according to indictments.

No one ‘is above the law’

Standing in front of the Colleton County Courthouse, Attorney General Wilson read a series of thank-yous.

He thanks Waters, prosecutor John Meadors and others on the prosecution.

He thanked the media, the FBI, and the Colleton County and Orangeburg County sheriff’s officers.

He special mention of SLED, its agents who worked the case, and its leader, Chief Mark Keel. He also thanked Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill, who he affectionately called “Becky Boop,” who peered down at the crowd from a balcony.

“Our criminal justice system worked tonight. It gave a voice to Maggie and Paul Murdaugh, who were brutally mowed down and murdered the night of June 7, 2021, (by) someone that they loved and trusted,” Wilson told the crowd.

“They couldn’t be here to testify for themselves tonight,” Wilson added. “We can’t bring them back, but we can bring them justice.”

The verdict, Wilson said, underscored that in America “no one, no matter who you are in society, is above the law.”

Wilson — he is the heir to his own South Carolina legacy, his father is U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, and is rumored to be considering a run for higher office — declined to answer a question shouted by a reporter who asked why he didn’t seek the death penalty against Murdaugh.

The case was transferred to his office after 14th Circuit Solicitor Duffie Stone recused himself on Aug. 11, 2021.

Stone occupied the same office that had been held by Murdaugh’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

South Carolina attorney Justin Bamberg, a state lawmaker, who represents several clients from whom Murdaugh stole millions of dollars, said Thursday “the jury easily saw through Murdaugh’s lies.”

“The only way a jury could return a verdict that fast was they thought Alex was full of crap an lying to them,” he said.

This story was originally published March 2, 2023 at 7:08 PM with the headline "Alex Murdaugh sentenced to life in prison after found guilty of murdering wife, son in 2021."

Ted Clifford

The State

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Ted Clifford is the statewide accountability reporter at The State Newspaper. Formerly the crime and courts reporter, he has covered the Murdaugh saga, state and federal court, as well as criminal justice and public safety in the Midlands and across South Carolina. He is the recipient of the 2023 award for best beat reporting by the South Carolina Press Association.

JM

John Monk

The State

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John Monk has covered courts, crime, politics, public corruption, the environment and other issues in the Carolinas for more than 40 years. A U.S. Army veteran who covered the 1989 American invasion of Panama, Monk is a former Washington correspondent for The Charlotte Observer. He has covered numerous death penalty trials, including those of the Charleston church killer, Dylann Roof, serial killer Pee Wee Gaskins and child killer Tim Jones. Monk’s hobbies include hiking, books, languages, music and a lot of other things.