WALTERBORO, S.C. — Jurors on Thursday heard directly from Alex Murdaugh on the night his wife and son were shot, via law enforcement body camera footage from the first responders who arrived at the scene of the murders the night of June 7, 2021.
It was the first day of witness testimony in the hotly anticipated murder trial in Walterboro, and the first time jurors saw footage of the scene for themselves.
Sgt. Daniel Greene with the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office was one of the first responders to the scene at 10:26 p.m. the night Paul and Maggie Murdaugh were killed, where Greene described finding the bodies and a clearly upset Murdaugh.
Greene described finding Maggie and Paul each lying in a “pool of blood” near the rural property’s dog kennels. He said Murdaugh, the only other person on the property, was upset, although at prosecutor Creighton Waters’ prompting, Greene said he did not see Murdaugh crying tears at the time.
At times during Greene’s testimony, Murdaugh could be seen weeping at the defense table, and his attorneys periodically covered displays of the crime scene photos in front of him.
Greene said that upon walking up to the scene, Murdaugh “immediately started talking about an incident his son was involved in with a boating accident,” which Greene had not yet asked him about.
Paul in 2019 was on a boat that crashed in Colleton County waters, in which friend Mallory Beach was killed. The case was the subject of a lawsuit and criminal charges against Paul, and many initially speculated the incident may have had something to do with the murders.
Greene took into deputies’ possession a shotgun Murdaugh said he had grabbed when he found the bodies. Jurors saw images of that shotgun and saw Greene’s body camera footage from the scene. Although the audio could be heard by the public in the courtroom, no images could be seen.
An audibly upset Murdaugh on the tape told the deputy that Paul had received threats over the boat crash, and had been “hit and punched” previously. Murdaugh told the deputy, on the night of June 7, 2021, that he had gone to see his mother, who has Alzheimer’s, and asked the deputy if Paul and Maggie were hurt. The deputy confirmed that they were dead.
“Any reasonable person who came upon those bodies would have come to the conclusion they were deceased,” Greene told the court Thursday.
A second witness testified Thursday, Colleton County Sheriff’s Office deputy Chad McDowell, who is also a K-9 handler. McDowell was the second person who arrived at the scene the night of the shootings. On the body camera footage shown in the courtroom, Murdaugh can be heard reacting to when he sees the bodies of his wife and son being covered.
At one point on the tape while he’s identifying his deceased wife, Murdaugh pauses to offer a friendly sounding, “Hey, how you doing,” to McDowell. Dogs can be heard barking in the background.
In testimony, McDowell, who first identified the .300 Blackout rounds on the ground around Maggie’s body, said that Murdaugh appeared “upset.”
Greene noted several sets of tire tracks on the scene, saying it appeared more activity had taken place that night than Murdaugh “just leaving for the house and coming back.”
While searching Paul’s body, the deputies searched for a possible weapon under the body, “to rule out the possibility he had killed Maggie and then himself,” Greene said.
In cross-examination, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian focused on the tire tracks seen that night. Greene said he could not tell if the tracks were made by one or multiple cars. Greene also said he did not know whether the tracks were preserved by first responders or photographed for evidence, saying he also didn’t ask for either to be preserved or photographed because it was not his responsibility.
Greene said that Murdaugh was “very concerned” that first responders check Maggie and Paul for signs of life, despite the deputy’s assessment that they were dead.
Harpootlian expressed concern that deputies could have contaminated the crime scene that night and “destroyed” evidence that may have led to another perpetrator.
“No expert could have looked and said that’s a Suburban, that’s a pickup truck?” Harpootlian said.
Under redirect from the prosecution, Greene said the deputies there followed standard procedure for protecting a crime scene. Waters also replayed a portion of the body camera footage, where Murdaugh can be heard identifying the tire tracks as his.
Two lives ended, one unraveled
Murdaugh, once one of the most prominent attorneys from one of the most well-known families in the Lowcountry, is accused of killing Maggie, 52, and Paul, 22, at the family’s rural Colleton County estate Moselle on the night of June 7, 2021.
Since the murders, Murdaugh has been fired from the Hampton law firm founded by his great-grandfather a hundred years before. He was disbarred by the South Carolina Supreme Court, and charged with stealing millions of dollars from his former law firm and clients whose settlement accounts he was supposed to safeguard.
For more than a year now, Murdaugh has been held without bond at the Richland County detention center, first on a slew of financial crime charges, and then for the murders of his wife and son.
Prosecutors have alleged concerns his financial activities could be exposed — including in response to the lawsuit over the boat crash — motivated Murdaugh to kill his wife and son, using two different firearms.
On Wednesday, prosecutors laid out their evidence against Murdaugh, including a raincoat coated with gunshot residue found at the home of Murdaugh’s Alzheimer’s-stricken mother, and cartridges fired by a gun the state believes Murdaugh previously purchased for Paul, which they say match those from the gun that killed Maggie.
The extensive injuries of Paul and Maggie were detailed in earlier court filings. On Wednesday, Harpootlian described to jurors how Paul was shot in the neck at close range, causing his brain matter to shoot out the back of his head and fall at his feet.
———
