WALTERBORO, S.C. — The last conversation Marian Proctor had with her sister, Maggie Murdaugh, Proctor encouraged her to go spend the night at the Murdaughs' Moselle property.
That night Maggie would be shot five times near the dog kennels on the 1,770-acre Colleton County family estate, known as Moselle, near where her youngest son, Paul, also was killed.
Alex Murdaugh, 54, Maggie’s husband, has been charged with her murders. He faces life in prison if convicted.
Holding back tears, Proctor said Tuesday — the 17th day of Murdaugh’s trial — that it was “just a normal day” when Maggie called her from her Edisto Beach house on June 7, 2021, to let her know that her father-in-law was being sent into hospice care. Although Maggie preferred Edisto to the family’s “hunting” property, Proctor said her sister sometimes found it emotionally difficult to spend time with her husband’s ailing parents.
“Go be with him if he needs you,” Proctor, the state’s 55th witness, told her younger sister by five years.
Proctor’s testimony was the first time she has spoken so publicly of her sister and nephew’s murders.
As the courtroom audience closely watched, Proctor recounted being a part of the Murdaugh family and shared moving portraits of her sister aiming to fit into her all-male family, with its passions for guns and hunting.
“Maggie was sweet. She was kind of a free spirit. She was always up for anything that was going on. She loved her family. She loved her boys” Buster and Paul, Proctor told lead prosecutor Creighton Waters. “Buster and Paul were her world. She loved my parents. We joked how we would grow old together and take care of them. She was just a really, really good person.”
Maggie was “definitely a girl’s girl,” Proctor said, but “she made the best of having two boys."
She also was “not at all” involved in the family finances and disorganized when it came to money, Proctor testified.
“Maggie’s (checkbook) was on the floor of her car, with all her bills thrown all over it,” she said. “Organization was not her best skill.”
Months before she died, Proctor said Maggie wanted Murdaugh to buy a new house in Bluffton or in Hilton Head, but Murdaugh, Proctor testified, “advised her that the time was not right with the boat case going on.”
Paul, Proctor said, was a “sweet, sweet boy,” who, she added, was “misrepresented in the media,” a nod to the media attention that swirled around him after the 2019 boat crash that killed Mallory Beach.
“It was good,” Proctor testified of her sister’s life. “It wasn’t perfect, but Maggie was happy.”
Waters has said he intends to rest the state’s case by Wednesday.
However, late Tuesday without the jury, Waters said one of the state’s key witnesses — a top law enforcement agent — was not able to testify because of a death in the family.
Proctor’s memory of June 7, 2021
The afternoon of June 7, 2021, Proctor said Maggie told her Murdaugh wanted her to come to Moselle.
Proctor said she assumed it was so they could visit Murdaugh’s sick father, a 15-minute drive from the family’s home.
She also testified that she was confused to learn Murdaugh had gone to visit his mother that night without Maggie.
“That was the only reason she had gone (to Moselle) that night,” Proctor said.
That night, Proctor said Murdaugh’s brother, Randy, called her to let her know a “tragedy” had occurred at Moselle.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Proctor said Tuesday. “I said, ‘There has to be a mistake. There has to be some explanation. It can’t be them.’”
Proctor had to break the news to her parents, traveling to stay with them at their home in Summerville.
“It was the worst,” Proctor said.
The next day, they traveled to the family’s rural estate, and Proctor said they spent nearly every day there leading up to her sister and nephew’s funerals. She said a couple moments struck her as odd about her brother-in-law after the killings.
When she asked Murdaugh if he knew who could have killed her sister and nephew, Murdaugh said he didn’t know, “but felt like whoever did it had thought about it for a really long time,” Proctor said.
“I didn’t know what that meant,” she testified.
She also remembers Murdaugh saying, in reference to the fatal 2019 boat crash, that his No. 1 goal was to clear Paul’s name.
“My No. 1 goal was to find who killed my sister,” Proctor said. “I know he must have wanted that too, but I don’t know how he could have thought about anything else.”
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Jim Griffin, Proctor said she didn’t begrudge Murdaugh for focusing on the boat crash, saying she knew he wanted to “honor” his son’s memory.
“I just think his priority should have been on finding who killed Maggie and Paul,” she said. “He never talked about it. He never focused on it. It was odd. We were all living in fear thinking this awful person was out there.”
“We thought that up until September, and then things started to change a bit,” Proctor said.
Labor Day shooting
Griffin did not ask Proctor to elaborate, but prosecutor Creighton Waters seized on her response — a reference to the Labor Day weekend 2021 shooting when Murdaugh was shot in an apparent botched suicide attempt.
Griffin objected, and Judge Clifton Newman sent the jury out of the room as attorneys debated whether, because of Proctor’s testimony, the shooting could now be mentioned to the jury for the first time.
Proctor told the judge she was about to mention that Murdaugh was fired from his law firm over allegations he stole money from his law partners and clients, something she said was mentioned to her by Griffin himself.
“That’s hearsay, your honor,” Griffin objected, provoking laughter from the courtroom audience.
Newman ultimately ruled Proctor could testify to her own assessment of the situation, and what led her to change her opinion about Murdaugh’s behavior.
She said the shooting caused her to fear more for the family’s safety, until the story Murdaugh told about the shooting — that he had been targeted by a stranger while on the side of the road — turned out “not to be true,” she said.
Late Tuesday afternoon, lawyers raised the possibility of Curtis “Eddie” Smith testifying for the prosecution. Smith is alleged to have fired the gun in Murdaugh’s botched September 2021 suicide attempt. Waters declined to say whether Smith would be called as a state witness.
Smith is also a possible defense witness. Murdaugh attorney Dick Harpootlian told Newman that Smith has given “no less than” six different explanations of what happened that day.
Proctor also elaborated on her concerns about Murdaugh’s drug use, saying that Maggie would call Paul her “little detective” because he would turn in any unprescribed pills his father might have been taking in the house. Murdaugh has blamed some of his behavior at the time on a lengthy opioid addiction.
In his second interview with law enforcement, on June 10 2021, Murdaugh said Paul was “really an incredibly intuitive little dude. He was like a little detective.”
Newman’s ruling to allow the September evidence and evidence of Murdaugh’s reported opioid addition was one of several rulings, including alleged financial crimes, since the trial started that have allowed prosecutors to get evidence before the jury. He said he allowed such evidence because the defense opened the door on cross-examination.
Newman, however, declined to allow testimony about an alleged extramarital affair, an incident 15 years ago.
Newman said the testimony was “too remote in time” and would tend to “confuse the jury.”
Testimony focuses on hose at dog kennels
An early witness, Roger Dale Davis Jr., described Tuesday how he cleaned the Moselle kennels on June 7, 2021, and carefully put away the hose.
He testified that, as he had almost every day for four years, he carefully unrolled the hose, cut the water off to let it drain and then carefully rolled it back up so it wouldn’t kink.
When asked to review a crime scene picture taken of the kennels the night Maggie and Paul were murdered, Davis told a courtroom Tuesday, “somebody used that hose after I did, because it’s twisted and (the) nozzle is too far up.”
But on cross-examination, defense attorney Griffin played a video from the kennels taken from Paul’s phone, which the prosecution has said was shot around 8:45 p.m. the night of the murders. The prosecution has asked several witnesses to identify three voices that can be heard in the background of the video. All of them have identified Murdaugh, Paul and Maggie with “100%” certainty.
With the sound off, Griffin asked Davis to identify an object that can be seen in the upper left corner of the video for a few seconds. Davis identified the hose, uncoiled and lying on the wet ground.
Both the prosecution and the defense have repeatedly brought up puddles of water surrounding Paul’s body at the kennels, but neither side has offered an explanation for where they came from.
Davis testified he usually cleaned the kennels twice a day, every day, a routine that usually took him about 45 minutes. He was especially careful with how he treated the hose.
“I’m very particular with how I did it,” Davis testified, explaining how he meticulously rolled the hose to prevent kinks that could lead to tears. Davis testified that water didn’t usually stay on the concrete around the kennels because it would evaporate in the sun or run off the angled floor.
———
