Disgraced legal scion Alex Murdaugh gave a detailed account of how he spent his final day with his son Paul as he testified in his own defence at his double murder trial.
Taking the stand at the Colleton County Courthouse on Thursday, Mr Murdaugh recounted spending the day of 7 June 2021 planting fields with Paul before the 22-year-old and his wife Maggie were murdered at the family’s estate in Islanton, South Carolina.
“We rode around and we spent time together on the property,” Mr Murdaugh told the court through tears. “We went to the duck pond where we stayed for a minute.”
“Paw Paw had planted the duck pond by himself and he was making a really big deal to me about how much better the corn was doing,” he added, referencing his nickname for Paul.
The disbarred attorney said his son loved hunting, fishing and all things outdoors and they spent their final day together working on the sunflower, corn and dove fields in their Moselle hunting estate. Mr Murdaugh said he couldn’t be any closer to “Paw Paw” and that it was always “delightful” doing activities with him.
Throughout his testimony, the defence tried to undo the prosecution’s attempts to paint Mr Murdaugh as a manipulative killer who planned his son and wife’s murders to divert from the legal and financial scandals that surrounded his family.
Instead, Mr Murdaugh told the court about his purportedly happy family life, his struggles with opioid addiction — which he blamed for his ever-changing alibi — and his despair after finding his wife’s body and his son’s “brain by the sidewalk.”
Mr Murdaugh said on the day of the murders his wife had left the Islandton estate to go to a doctor’s appointment in Charleston. She then spent some time in the family’s Edisto Beach home before Mr Murdaugh asked her to return to Moselle, which he said he would often do and was not unusual.
“I always asked Maggie to come back and stay with me,” Mr Murdaugh said.
The defence also asked Mr Murdaugh about a video recorded by Paul around 7.38pm on 7 June, in which Mr Murdaugh can be seen standing by a tree swaying in the wind while Paul laughed in the background.
“What you see me doing is fooling with a fruit tree,” he recounted. “You could not be around Paul, you could not be around him and not have a good time.”
Mr Murdaugh said that he changed the clothes he is seen wearing in the video because he had spent the day working in them. After taking a shower, he changed to the white shirt and green shorts that he is shown wearing in bodycam video of deputies responding to the murders, he said.
He also testified that he and Maggie had dinner together before she reportedly asked him to help her in the dog kennels, but he declined.
Mr Murdaugh addressed a Snapchat video recorded by Paul around 8.40pm on the night of the murders, which placed him in the dog kennels shortly before the shooting. The accused killer confessed that he had lied to investigators previously when he said he wasn’t at the kennels because he had developed “paranoia” due to his opioid addiction.
“As my addiction evolved over time, I would get any situations or circumstances where I would get paranoid thinking,” he said. “It might be a look somebody gave me, it might be a reaction somebody had to something I did, it might be a policeman following me in a car.”
“That night, June 7th, after finding Maggs and Paul … I wasn’t thinking clearly. I don’t think I was capable of reason. And I lied about being down there. And I’m so sorry that I did.”
Asked why he kept up with the lie for months, Mr Murdaugh answered: “Once I told the lie, and I told my family, I had to keep lying.”
Mr Murdaugh said he was briefly at the dog kennels, where he took a chicken out of his dog Bubba’s mouth before heading back inside the main property. He then decided to visit his ailing mother in Alameda.
Because of his mother’s poor health, it was not unusual for Maggie to avoid visiting her, Mr Murdaugh said. He added that he tried to call Maggie to let her know that he was leaving the property but could not reach her.
“At that time, it didn’t concern me at all,” he said in court. “She was with Paw Paw.”
Mr Murdaugh’s mother’s caregiver Mushelle “Shelly” Smith previously cast doubts on part of Mr Murdaugh’s alibi on the night of the murders on his 6 February testimony– revealing he had lied about how long he had spent at his sick mother’s house.
She said a “fidgety” Mr Murdaugh showed up at the house for a brief 20-minute visit on 7 June 2021 but later asked her to tell authorities he had been there double the length of time.
The disgraced attorney said on Thursday (23 February) on his way back to Moselle, he headed directly to the dog kennels to check on Maggie and Paul.
From his car, he said, he could see Paul and Maggie’s bodies.
“I’m not exactly sure of what I did,” Mr Murdaugh said as he broke down in tears. “I know I got out of my car and then went back in my car to call 911.”
“I was trying to tend to Paw Paw, I was trying to tend to Maggie. I was going back and forth between them.”
Mr Murdaugh said he tried checking for a pulse and turning Paul’s body, but acknowledged that he knew he was dead.
“I don’t know why I tried to turn him over. I mean, my boy is laying face down and I knew he was gone the way he was,” Mr Murdaugh said as he sobbed. “I could see his brain laying on the sidewalk, I did not know what to do.”
As jurors have previously heard, the crime scene was especially violent and bloody, with Paul’s brain shot out of his skull and both he and Maggie lying in pools of their own blood, fuelling the prosecution’s theory that Mr Murdaugh killed his wife and son and then changed his clothing – disposing of the bloody clothes.
The court has previously heard testimony from multiple law enforcement officers on the scene that – despite his claims that he touched the victims’ bodies – Mr Murdaugh did not appear to have any blood on his hands or clothing.
The decision for Mr Murdaugh to testify comes as the defence plans to wrap up its case on Friday – a case that seeks to present the alleged killer and financial fraudster as a loving family man who would never have murdered his wife and son.
So far, jurors have heard from 11 defence witnesses including experts who testified about mistakes in the preservation of crime scene evidence, a ballistics expert who claimed Maggie’s shooter was 5’2” tall and not the 6’4” Mr Murdaugh, and the accused killer’s surviving son Buster.
In total, 61 prosecution witnesses covered a trove of circumstantial evidence, including cellphone and car data, a damning video allegedly placing Mr Murdaugh at the crime scene and apparent holes in his alibi for the time for the murders.
Mr Murdaugh’s decision to testify will also give the prosecution a major opportunity to cross-examine him on the plethora of scandals that surround the murders of his son and wife.
Mr Murdaugh, once a scion of a legal dynasty in his home state, is now facing at least 100 other criminal charges over a string of financial fraud allegations from his former law firm. He has also allegedly conspired to pay a hitman to shoot him dead so that his surviving son Buster would inherit a $10m life insurance.
The 54-year-old is facing life in prison on the murder charges.
