Disgraced legal dynasty heir Alex Murdaugh has pleaded not guilty to the brutal 2021 double murders of his wife and son as prosecutors hinted that his motive is tied to his string of white collar fraud and drugs scandals.
Sporting a newly shaved hairstyle and wearing a white face mask, the 53-year-old appeared in Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina, on Wednesday morning for the first time since being charged with the murders of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh.
He spoke to confirm his name and enter his not guilty plea as he was formally arraigned on two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.
When asked how he would be tried, he responded: “By god and by country.”
Mr Murdaugh’s legal team consented to him being held on no bond, in light of the fact he is already being held on $7m bond in a slew of other cases – an amount that the financially-ruined attorney has no way of meeting.
No further details were presented about what evidence had finally led prosecutors to charge Mr Murdaugh with their killings – coming more than 13 months on from the grisly crime.
However, prosecutors said that all the evidence pointed back to the victims’ husband and father as they indicated that the disbarred attorney’s string of other alleged crimes are all connected to the murder case.
“Much of the information gathered in the state grand jury case – all of the 81 allegations of white collar fraud and other crimes, drugs and the like gathered against Mr Murdaugh – a lot of that provides the background and motive for what happened on June 7 2021,” said the prosecutor.
Over the course of the “long and arduous investigation over 13 months”, investigators “explored all evidence and it all came back to one person and that person was Alex Murdaugh”, he said.
At one point, Mr Murdaugh’s attorney Dick Harpootlian pushed back at the prosecution’s claims of “substantial” evidence proving his client’s guilt.
“He’s wrong!” he exclaimed of the prosecutor.
Mr Harpootlian called for a speedy trial because he claimed Mr Murdaugh “is innocent” and “the killer or killers are still at large”.
The two sides both agreed to a gag order on the case and that details of the alleged facts would not be presented during Wednesday’s hearing, after Mr Harpootlian argued it could “pollute the jury pool” given the media attention surrounding the high-profile case.
Mr Murdaugh entered the courtroom in handcuffs and shackles, dressed in a white shirt and beige pants – before changing back into prison garb to be led back out of the courthouse to jail as he awaits his trial.
The 53-year-old self-confessed opioid addict is accused of shooting Maggie multiple times with an assault rifle and Paul once in the head and once in the chest with a shotgun back on the night of 7 June 2021.
He then made a dramatic 911 call, claiming that he had returned home from visiting his sick father and elderly mother to find their bodies by the dog kennels on the family’s sprawling hunting estate in Islandton, South Carolina.
In the dramatic call – placed at 10.07pm local time – the high-profile attorney cried and sobbed down the phone telling the dispatcher “my wife and child have been shot badly” as he begs them to “please hurry”.
Mr Murdaugh also tells the dispatcher that he hasn’t seen anyone on the property.
An autopsy for the two victims placed their time of death between 9pm and 9.30pm.
For more than a year, no arrests were made, no suspects were named and no charges brought over their killings.
The only person ever confirmed as a person of interest was Mr Murdaugh, all the while a slew of other investigations were launched and a string of other charges stacked up against him.
In the months after their deaths, Mr Murdaugh was arrested and charged over numerous alleged schemes including embezzling millions of dollars to fund his opioid habit and a bizarre plot where he allegedly hired a hitman to kill him.
Then – in the latest dramatic twist to the case – he was charged with the murders of Maggie and Paul last week after new evidence was presented before a grand jury.
Officials are remaining tight-lipped about what evidence finally led to the murder charges.
However, sources close to the investigation said that blood spatter on the 53-year-old’s clothing as well as cellphone footage placed Mr Murdaugh at the scene of at least one of his loved ones’ murders.
The source told FITS News that the high velocity blood spatter on his clothing shows he was in close contact with at least one of the victims when they were shot.
Meanwhile, Paul’s cellphone – which was discovered near his body – contained audio and video footage of Mr Murdaugh speaking to his wife just before the time that he and his mother were killed, the source said.
While investigators have given no motive for the murders, Mr Murdaugh’s finances were secretly in tatters and his marriage to Maggie was reportedly in ruins.
At the time of her murder, Maggie was living apart from her husband at the family’s beach house on Edisto Island and had been speaking with divorce attorneys.
The night of her killing, the 52-year-old had texted a friend saying that her husband had asked her to meet him at their estate that night so they could go to visit his dying father together, FITS News reported.
Maggie told her friend she believed Mr Murdaugh was “up to something” and was acting “fishy”.
Hours later, she was dead.
Paul, meanwhile, was awaiting trial on charges over the death of 19-year-old Mallory Beach in a 2019 boat crash. Paul was allegedly drunk driving a boat when he crashed it, throwing his friend Ms Beach to her death.
He was charged with boating under the influence and faced up to 25 years in prison. Rumours instantly swirled that the incident was in some way connected to Paul’s death.
Mr Murdaugh has had a spectacular fall from grace over the last year and found himself at the centre of a twisted tale involving unsolved murders, millions of dollars of allegedly embezzled funds, a suicide-for-hire plot and several mysterious deaths that are now under investigation.
The dramatic step to charge him with his wife and son’s murders marks the latest bombshell twist to the sprawling mystery that has rocked the community of Hampton County.
Three months after his wife and son’s deaths, Mr Murdaugh allegedly hired a hitman to fake his own murder.
On 4 September, the attorney called 911 claiming he was ambushed in a drive-by shooting while he was changing a tire on the side of a road in Hampton County.
Mr Murdaugh was shot in the head and taken to hospital with superficial injuries.
One day after the shooting, Mr Murdaugh entered rehab for a 20-year opioid addiction and announced he had resigned from his law firm Peters, Murdaugh, Parker, Eltzroth, & Detrick (PMPED).
Days later, his law firm partners accused him of stealing millions of dollars from its clients going back years.
The partners had confronted Mr Murdaugh about the allegations and ousted him from the firm just one day before the shooting.
Mr Murdaugh’s version of events around the shooting rapidly fell apart and he confessed to police to paying an alleged hitman to shoot and kill him in an assisted suicide plot so that his surviving son Buster could get a $10m life insurance windfall.
Both Mr Murdaugh and his alleged accomplice Curtis Smith – who the attorney had previously represented – were charged over the incident.
Mr Murdaugh was released on bond on the promise that he enter rehab for his opioid addiction.
He was then arrested on his release from rehab in October on charges of stealing funds from the wrongful death settlement over the mysterious trip and fall death of the family’s longtime housekeeper Gloria Satterfield in 2018.
Mr Murdaugh is accused of siphoning off $3.4m of the $4m settlement meant for Satterfield’s sons to a fake company called Forge.
Questions have been swirling around Satterfield’s death ever since and investigators reopened a probe into her death.
Earlier this month, officials announced plans to exhume her body.
Satterfield worked for the influential Murdaugh family for more than 20 years when she was found at the bottom of some stairs at the family’s home. She died weeks later from her injuries.
At the time, her death was regarded as an accidental fall – though her death certificate cited her manner of death as “natural”.
Mr Murdaugh reached an agreement to pay her family $4m in a wrongful death settlement – money he is now accused of swindling from his insurance company to help fund his drug habit.
An investigation was also reopened into a third mystery death connected to the Murdaugh family.
Stephen Smith, 19, was found dead in a road from blunt force trauma to the head in 2015.
His death was officially ruled a hit-and-run but the victim’s family have long doubted this version of events and said that rumours swirled in the community that a “Murdaugh boy” may have been involved.
As well as the murder charges brought Thursday, Mr Murdaugh is already facing more than 80 criminal charges from 16 indictments around the suicide-for-hire plot and schemes to defraud the Satterfield family and other victims out of millions of dollars. He is also facing 11 civil suits.
He is being held on $7m bond at Richland County’s Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center.
Throughout the legal saga, his surviving son Buster has stood by him.
In prison phone calls leaked last month, Mr Murdaugh is heard laughing to Buster that he has “allegedly done illegal things”.
Mr Murdaugh was now been disbarred from practicing law in South Carolina by the state’s Supreme Court.
“Based on his admitted reprehensible misconduct, we hereby disbar respondent Richard Alexander Murdaugh from the practice of law in South Carolina,” the Supreme Court said on the same day murder charges were announced.
Prior to his dramatic fall from grace, Mr Murdaugh was a powerful figure in Hampton County.
For almost a century, his family members have reigned over the local justice system with his father, grandfather and great-grandfather all serving as the solicitor in the 14th Judicial Circuit solicitor’s office.
