WALTERBORO, S.C. — For the first time, the jury in the Alex Murdaugh double-murder trial heard directly from Murdaugh’s own family.
Murdaugh’s surviving son, Buster, 26, spent nearly two hours Tuesday morning on the stand as his father’s defense team tries to paint a different picture of the man prosecutors say murdered Buster’s mother, Maggie, and brother, Paul, the night of June 7, 2021.
Buster painted an idyllic life of the Murdaugh family growing up as a close-knit family, who kept in touch by cellphone every day.
“My father coached every Little League team I played on,” said Buster, the third defense witness, who now lives on Hilton Head Island.
Buster also told the jury that the deaths of Maggie and Paul devastated his father. “He was heart broken,” Buster said.
Buster grew up in Hampton, but when the family home there was damaged by Hurricane Matthew, he said the family mainly lived at Moselle, the 1,700-acre hunting estate the family owned in Colleton County.
His brother, Paul, would frequently misplace firearms and leave them laying around the house, Buster testified, adding he disliked sharing his AR-style rifle with Paul after Paul lost his because he would frequently take it out to shoot and leave it around the property somewhere. Buster himself frequently left guns loaded around the house, he said.
Prosecutors have tried to tie the shooting deaths of Paul and Maggie to the firearms the family kept on the property, two of which they believe have gone missing since the murders.
Buster also described his father’s struggles with an addiction to opioids.
Murdaugh had previously gone into a detox facility, and had done self-detox at home as well to try to kick his habit, Buster testified. Prosecution testimony has noted Maggie called Paul her “little detective” for his propensity to find pills hidden around the house. Data pulled from the phone also showed that Murdaugh was confronted about pills just weeks before the shootings.
However, Buster testified he was not aware of his father’s financial problems — what prosecutors have presented as motive for why Murdaugh allegedly killed his wife and son.
Buster described June 7, 2021, as “normal,” when he exchanged a series of mundane texts and phone calls with his father, mother and brother, right up until his father called and told him about the murders around 10:30 p.m. that same day.
Under questioning by defense lawyer Jim Griffin, Buster also testified that his family would often park in the back of his grandparents’ house when visiting, testifying to data from the movements of his father’s car the night of the murders. Prosecutors had earlier implied that Murdaugh drove the car to the back of the house to remove weapons from the car and hide them.
Buster also testified that he heard his father say, “They did him so bad,” during a taped police interview days after the murders.
The detective who conducted the interview earlier testified he believes Murdaugh said, “I did him so bad,” in reference to Paul’s killing — effectively a spontaneous confession. The defense has pushed back on that characterization, arguing that investigators seemingly never followed up on the statement.
During cross-examination, prosecutor John Meadors did not ask Buster to identify the voice on a cellphone video Paul shot in the dog kennels moments before the shootings are believed to have occurred, which multiple other witnesses have identified as belonging to Murdaugh.
Buster said his brother received threats after he was charged in the 2019 death of Mallory Beach in a boat crash, bolstering an alternative theory of who might have wanted to kill him.
“He was definitely being bullied on social media, from people sending random messages,” Buster said. “If he was walking down the sidewalk, a car would drive by and yell at him. If he goes to a bar, somebody would want to talk about it and make a scuff about it.”
On Friday, prosecutors rested their case after calling some 60 witnesses in 18 days of testimony, trying to exhaustively cover every detail of a largely circumstantial case that Murdaugh is responsible for killing his wife and son at the family’s rural Colleton County home on June 7, 2021.
Murdaugh’s defense team of Griffin and Dick Harpootlian worked to pick holes in that case, and Friday they called their first witnesses to directly undermine the case against Murdaugh.
Harpootlian told Judge Clifton Newman on Tuesday that he hoped to wrap up the defense’s case Friday.
Colleton County Coroner Richard Harvey testified that his rough estimation of Paul and Maggie’s time of death could overlap with the time Murdaugh was at his mother’s house that night. They also questioned the public information officer for the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office about a press release sent the day after the murders saying there was “no danger to the public,” an indication the defense says shows investigators never really considered any suspects except Murdaugh.
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Reporter John Monk contributed to this report.
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