“I would never intentionally do anything to hurt them. Ever. Ever,” Alex Murdaugh said on Thursday, choking with emotion, as he took the stand to defend against charges that he murdered his wife and son in what prosecutors call a scheme to conceal his financial and addiction problems.
In a startling reversal, however, the once-powerful South Carolina lawyer admitted to lying for 20 months about a key detail in his account of the night that Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were killed on the family’s hunting estate. Contradicting his previous claims, Murdaugh said that he did, in fact, visit the kennels where they were later found dead of gunshot wounds.
He blamed his deception on paranoia brought by panic, compounded by his addiction to prescription painkillers, and described a cascading effect as lies mounted on each other. “What a tangled web we weave …” he said, adding that once he started lying he had to “keep lying”.
Murdaugh’s testimony in Walterboro, South Carolina, follows four weeks in which prosecutors worked to pick apart his narrative and prove him guilty, despite a lack of physical evidence including the murder weapons.
One of the prosecution’s witnesses, a caregiver for Murdaugh’s elderly mother, testified that she saw him carrying a tarp in the days following the killings. Prosecutors also said a rain jacket found on the property tested positive for gunpowder. Murdaugh denied any familiarity with the tarp or jacket.
In response to questions from his defense attorney, Murdaugh gave hours of testimony on Thursday describing the layout of the compound where the murders occurred, the family’s routines and his actions that day.
Previously he had denied being at the kennels. Yet in a video clip of the family’s dogs, which prosecutors say was taken by Paul Murdaugh about four minutes before he died, his father can be heard shouting, “Come here, Bubba!” to a dog.
Wearing a dark suit and white shirt, and sporting his family’s trademark red hair, Murdaugh cried and sniffed back mucus when asked what he discovered at the murder scene. “I saw what y’all have seen pictures of,” he said. “I saw that.” Asked to elaborate, he said that he could see his son’s “brain on the sidewalk”.
As Buster Murdaugh – Murdaugh’s surviving son, who testified earlier this week that his father was “destroyed” and “heartbroken” by the deaths – watched from the audience, Murdaugh described what he said was his confusion and panic. Thinking a killer might still be prowling the property, he said, he ran for a 12-gauge shotgun. He loaded it with a 16-gauge shell, which he said was indicative of his disoriented state.
During cross-examination on Thursday, prosecutors painted Murdaugh as someone who exploited his family’s legal reputation and coziness with law enforcement to act above the law. Murdaugh conceded that he carried a prosecutor badge and had police-style flashing lights installed on his car.
The Murdaugh trial, and the larger scandal-ridden saga around it, has gripped crime buffs across the country and brought low a legal dynasty with a century of influence over the South Carolina low country.
Generations of Murdaughs, whose ruddy faces and preppy clothing make them almost a caricature of white southern gentry, have been attorneys at a white-shoe litigation firm known for winning lucrative personal-injury lawsuits. Murdaughs have also often controlled the office of solicitor, a powerful prosecutorial position.
The wealthy family’s fortunes began to unravel in 2019, when Paul Murdaugh allegedly caused a boat crash while intoxicated. The family of a passenger thrown to her death, Mallory Beach, later brought a wrongful death suit.
Then on 7 June 2021, Alex Murdaugh called 911 to say that he’d just found Paul and Maggie unresponsive. During that call, and later, Murdaugh suggested that someone angry about the boat crash might be responsible.
In contrast, prosecutors have argued that Murdaugh killed Paul and Maggie to distract from the wrongful death suit, which would have compelled him to disclose incriminating financial information.
A few months after the homicides, Murdaugh reported surviving a roadside assassination attempt. After that story fell apart, he admitted it was a suicide-for-hire scheme. Prosecutors believe he wanted to secure a $10m insurance windfall for his son Buster.
Murdaugh was fired from his law firm in 2021 and last year disbarred. He has admitted to stealing millions of dollars from the law firm and from a settlement intended for the children of his former housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, who died after reportedly falling on the Murdaughs’ property.
In January, a grand jury also indicted him on five counts of tax evasion.
