A visibly uncomfortable Alex Murdaugh grimaced as prosecutors played the 911 call in which he reported being shot in the head - in what turned out to be a botched hitman plot.
On the nineteenth day of Mr Murdaugh’s trial, juries heard a bizarre call he made to 911 dispatchers moments after being shot on the side of a road in Hampton County in September 2021. The shooting happened nearly three months after the murders of Mr Murdaugh’s son Paul and wife Maggie, which prosecutors say he carried out to distract from his many financial and legal troubles.
Mr Murdaugh initially claimed he was ambushed in the drive-by shooting while changing a tire on his vehicle, but soon after admitted to conspiring to pay a hitman to shoot him dead so that his surviving son Buster would inherit a $10m life insurance windfall.
“I’ve got a flat tire. Somebody stopped to help me, and when I turned my back, they tried to shoot me,” Mr Murdaugh can be heard saying in the 911 audio played in court on Thursday.
The disgraced legal scion said he was “bleeding a lot,” but remained alert and was even able to describe the weapon he believed was used in his assault and the supposed make of the vehicle his attacker was driving. His injury was ultimately described as a “superficial gunshot wound to the head.”
“It sounded like a shotgun. It was so loud. It didn’t sound like a .22,” Mr Murdaugh told a dispatcher.
The 911 audio was played in court during the prosecution’s questioning of South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) Senior Special Agent Ryan Kelly.
Mr Kelly described how Mr Murdaugh had helped an artist create a sketch of the purported shooter from his hospital bed. He had described the suspect as a white, 30-to-40-year-old man with cropped hair and facial hair.
Just a week after, Mr Murdaugh confessed to law enforcement that he had orchestrated the whole saga - and the true shooter was a man in his 60s.
He told investigators that he had paid Curtis “Eddie” Smith – a former law firm client, distant cousin and allegedly his drug dealer – to carry out the shooting. Mr Murdaugh said he provided the weapon used by Mr Smith.
The court heard Mr Murdaugh’s confession, recorded in a call with SLED agents and his attorneys, where Mr Murdaugh said that he had schemed the plot because he believed his family would be “better off without him.”
Mr Kelly testified that he found no debris that could have caused Mr Murdaugh’s vehicle tire to go flat. Instead, investigators responding to the scene found a knife across the street and noticed that the car’s rear-side tire had been cut.
The now-disbarred attorney allegedly contacted Mr Smith from the hospital, while his accounts were linked to deposits made to the alleged roadside gunman, Mr Kelly testified.
During the confession call with Mr Kelly and other SLED agents, Mr Murdaugh’s attorneys made it clear that they did not want to discuss Paul and Maggie’s shooting or Mr Murdaugh’s personal finances.
Mr Murdaugh told the agents that the shooting in Hampton County was not linked to his son and wife’s murders at their hunting state in Islandton before admitting to the roadside shooting plot, Mr Kelly told the court.
Mr Murdaugh also offered no explanation as to why he wasn’t straightforward with his motivations when first interviewed.
“I was in a very bad place. I thought it would be better for me not to be here anymore. I thought that it would make it easier on my family for me to be dead,” he said in a recorded interview with Mr Kelly. “...I don’t have a good reason. I was in a bad, bad, bad place.”
Mr Murdaugh was also heard telling Mr Kelly that his initial version of the story was mostly accurate, except for the very important detail “that it was arranged by me.”
Mr Murdaugh has maintained he did not kill Paul and Maggie and pleaded not guilty last June.
The trial for the double murders is now in its fourth week in Walterboro, South Carolina. It is far from Mr Murdaugh’s only legal problem. Besides the case, Mr Murdaugh is facing at least 100 other criminal charges over a string of financial fraud allegations.
