WALTERBORO, S.C. — Alex Murdaugh, the fourth-generation heir to a powerful South Carolina legal, law enforcement and political family, was found guilty Thursday of murdering his wife and son in a case that brought the glare of national and international media attention to a long-secluded but corrupt corner of the state's Lowcountry region.
A jury of seven men and five women took less than three hours before unanimously finding Murdaugh, 54, guilty of two murders: the execution-style slaying of his 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 on June 7, 2021, at the family 1,770-acre rural Colleton County estate, called Moselle.
Murdaugh, a disgraced lawyer who faces life in prison, stood stoic as the verdict was announced 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.
