COLUMBIA, S.C. — Disbarred Hampton County attorney Alex Murdaugh has been formally indicted by a Colleton County grand jury in the June 2021 murders of his wife and youngest son.
The indictment was announced Thursday by the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office, two days after news broke that the State Law Enforcement Division was planning to charge Murdaugh, 54, in Maggie and Paul’s shooting deaths.
The murders, which have generated widespread attention across the state and nation, had remained unsolved for more than a year as state law enforcement refused to comment publicly on their investigation, rarely releasing any information in the case.
At the time of the murders on June 7, 2021, law enforcement said that the community was not at risk.
Maggie, 52, and Paul, 22, were found shot to death — Maggie by an assault rifle and Paul by a shotgun — in the evening on their 1,700-acre hunting lodge estate in rural Colleton County, which locals referred to as Moselle.
Since the shootings, Murdaugh’s attorneys, Jim Griffin and Dick Harpootlian, have maintained that their client said he was away from the estate at the time of the shootings, is not guilty and that he has evidence supporting his alibi.
Duffie Stone, the 14th Circuit solicitor, was originally the lead prosecutor on the case, but recused himself from the investigation, which initially prompted speculation that investigators had honed in on a suspect.
The case was later taken over by prosecutors in Attorney General Alan Wilson’s office.
Even without the murder indictment, Murdaugh stayed in the news plenty as financial charges against him stacked up.
Murdaugh is now the target of 16 indictments containing 81 charges for fraud and money laundering, as well as 10 civil lawsuits that together allege he stole nearly $8.5 million from his firm, clients and associates in various financial schemes.
Months after Maggie and Paul’s deaths, in September 2021, Murdaugh was kicked out of his law firm for allegedly stealing millions of dollars out of the firm’s client trust account. The state Supreme Court later suspended his law license, and on Wednesday officially disbarred him.
That same month, Murdaugh was charged with staging a botched suicide attempt in what authorities said was a failed effort to collect on a $10 million life insurance policy for his sole surviving son Buster. The alleged shooter, close friend and relative Curtis “Eddie” Smith, also was charged. At the time, Harpootlian said Murdaugh was in a “massive depression.”
Two of his longtime friends — Beaufort County lawyer Cory Fleming and former Hampton County banker Russell Laffitte — are alleged to have helped Murdaugh carry out his thefts, according to state grand jury indictments.
In June 2022, days after the one-year anniversary of Paul and Maggie’s deaths, Murdaugh and Smith, 62, were indicted on new charges that included drug trafficking oxycodone and running a longtime money laundering scheme involving $2.4 million in stolen money.
It all adds up to not just a long-running murder mystery, but also a stunning fall from grace involving Murdaugh — a once-esteemed, now-disgraced fourth-generation lawyer from one of South Carolina’s most prominent legal dynasties known for big-money verdicts and criminal case wins in the five-county Lowcountry area.
Murdaugh was also prominent in his own right, being a past president of the S.C. Association of Justice, a statewide organization of trial lawyers.
The night of, days after the shootings
Around 10 p.m. last June 7, Murdaugh, father and husband of the victims, called 911 to say he had found their bodies.
Later, with his surviving son Buster, Murdaugh offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.
The Colleton County Sheriff’s Office was the first police agency to respond before SLED took over as lead investigating agency.
Paul, 22, a student at the University of South Carolina, was shot in the head and upper body with a shotgun, while his mother, 52, was killed with what appeared to be an assault rifle, sources familiar with the investigation said, adding that casings were recovered at the scene.
Their bodies were found separated from one another near the dog kennels on the property.
It is believed that neither weapon used in the killings has been recovered, sources had said.
Investigators had a black Chevrolet Suburban towed from the Murdaugh property the morning after the killings, the owner of the towing company told The Island Packet at the time. The SUV, which sources said was owned by Murdaugh’s law firm and driven by him, was parked near the dog pens, the towing company’s owner said.
That same day, police found Maggie’s cellphone on the road near the home, about a quarter of a mile from the entrance to the estate. Paul’s phone was found near his body.
His student apartment in Columbia’s Olympia neighborhood was searched on June 8 after a property manager noticed the door was open and called police. Evidence was collected, but there were no signs of forced entry or anyone inside.
On June 17, Murdaugh’s brothers, John Marvin Murdaugh and Randolph “Randy” Murdaugh IV, appeared in a pre-recorded interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” saying Paul received threats from strangers leading up to his murder, but that the family didn’t believe the threats were valid.
John Marvin also described how he got one of the first phone calls Murdaugh had made after discovering the bodies.
“He said, ‘Come as fast as you can. Paul and Maggie have been hurt,’” John Marvin told ABC. “It was the worst phone call because of his voice, the fear. ... He was only able to tell me it was very, very bad. He said he thought they were dead.”
Cascade of legal troubles
The murders also reignited interest in two other cases involving violent death tied to the Murdaugh family.
There are a fatal boat crash in 2019 that implicated Paul as driving the boat while drunk, and the still unknown circumstances that led to the death of Stephen Smith, 19, whose body was found on a rural road in 2015.
The 2019 boat crash off Beaufort Bay had sparked a lawsuit by the mother of Mallory Beach, 19, who died in the crash, against Murdaugh and others that Beach’s mother alleged were responsible for her daughter’s death. The lawsuit is still ongoing.
About three months after the murders, on Labor Day weekend when Murdaugh survived allegedly being shot in the head during a botched murder-for-hire suicide scheme, Murdaugh’s lawyers released a statement saying he had been distraught because of two reasons.
One, he had just been fired from his family law firm after the firm discovered evidence he had been stealing from it, and he had a longstanding opioid drug addiction he was battling.
Weeks later, in November, Murdaugh was indicted by the state grand jury on charges of defrauding clients and associates, including the $4.3 million estate of his former housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, who died of injuries received in a fall at Murdaugh’s country estate in 2018.
More indictments against Murdaugh alleging theft from clients and other types of fraud followed in December through April. Charges included obtaining property by false pretenses, money Laundering, computer crimes, forgery, and criminal conspiracy.
Murdaugh is currently in custody at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Richland County, unable to post a $7 million bond.
Altogether, the state grand jury has issued 16 indictments containing 81 charges against Murdaugh for schemes to defraud victims of roughly $8.4 million, according to the state Attorney General’s office.
In addition, two longtime friends of Murdaugh’s —former Palmetto State Bank CEO Russell Laffitte, 51, and Beaufort County attorney Cory Fleming, 53 — were named as defendants in some of the indictments as being part of his fraudulent schemes and are now facing various charges including criminal conspiracy.
Investigations now swirling around Murdaugh have also raised questions about how South Carolina law firms keep track of clients’ money. The FBI is also probing how Murdaugh used the Palmetto State Bank, a bank in his former law firm’s hometown of Hampton, to execute alleged illegal money transfers.
One of the biggest unanswered questions still remaining is what Murdaugh did with the millions of dollars he is said to have stolen.
Murdaugh’s lawyers have said much of it went to buy drugs for his addictions, and indictments said he also used stolen money to buy cars, pay off loans and give money to family members.
Others say much remains unaccounted for.
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