WALTERBORO, S.C. — Only one person had the motive and the means to murder Maggie and Paul Murdaugh the night of June 7, 2021, South Carolina prosecutor Creighton Waters told the men and women of the jury who will decide whether former Lowcountry attorney Alex Murdaugh is guilty of the crime.
Waters on Wednesday attempted to summarize the case against Murdaugh in the closing argument of the six-week-long murder trial.
Twelve jurors have heard a complicated case involving reams of evidence admitted by both sides, but Waters bore down on the central question of who killed Murdaugh’s wife and son nearly two years ago.
“Only one person had the motive, the means and the opportunity to commit these crimes, and whose guilty conduct after these crimes betrays him,” Waters said, indicating Murdaugh, 54.
Murdaugh faces life in prison without parole if convicted of shooting Maggie, 52, and Paul, 22.
A “slow burn” of increasing thefts by Murdaugh from his clients and law partners peaked with a 2019 fatal boat crash that led to charges against Paul, which Waters said increased the financial pressure on Murdaugh and raised the threat of exposure of his activities.
Mounting financial troubles and a pending lawsuit over the boat crash increased the pressure on Murdaugh, who was confronted about missing money in his law office the day of the murders.
After the deaths of his wife and son, those pressures “immediately go away,” Waters said.
His law partners stop asking about the missing money, and the attorney bringing the lawsuit, Mark Tinsley, testified earlier in the trial he no longer believed the case could succeed.
The double-murder trial against the former attorney got a late start Wednesday before attorneys for both sides got to put their finishing touches on the arguments for Murdaugh’s guilt or innocence in the murders of his wife and son.
Early Wednesday, the jury of 12 men and women and two alternates visited the Moselle dog kennels — the location where Murdaugh is accused of shooting Maggie and Paul to death on the family’s Colleton County estate.
Defense attorney Jim Griffin was expected to give the closing argument for Murdaugh's team.
The defense had not given their closing at press time.
Judge Clifton Newman is expected to charge the jury either late Wednesday or Thursday morning. Then the jury will begin deliberations on whether the state has proven Murdaugh’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. No one knows how long it will take for the 12 men and women to reach a decision.
The six-week trial has attracted national and international attention on South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where three generations of Murdaugh’s family served as the region’s lead prosecutor. Murdaugh admitted on the stand last week he once harbored aspirations of being the fourth Murdaugh to be elected to the role, but his trial has revealed details of the seedier side of the once-prominent attorney’s life — included an admitted drug addiction, financial troubles and legal deception.
Murdaugh faces separate charges he stole millions of dollars from the law firm founded by his great-grandfather, and from clients who trusted him to handle their money from legal settlements, many of them children injured in car wrecks.
Former Palmetto State Bank CEO Russell Laffitte was convicted in November 2021 by a federal jury on bank fraud charges related to financial moves he took to help out Murdaugh using money held for many of those underage victims in his family’s bank.
The since-disbarred attorney admitted to those thefts when he took the stand in his own defense. But he emphatically denies prosecutors’ claims that the threat of the looming exposure of those crimes drove him to kill Maggie and Paul with two different firearms by the family dog kennels, and then use a visit to his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother as an alibi.
The state has presented a largely circumstantial case, with no direct physical evidence tying Murdaugh to the crimes. The murder weapons have never been found, although prosecutors say they were family weapons based on comparisons between shell casings at the scene and others found around the property.
Prosecutors have built a timeline of the killings based on activity on Paul and Maggie’s cellphones at 8:49 p.m. Maggie’s cellphone records movement from 8:53 p.m. to 9:08 p.m., during which time it traveled from the kennels to the side of the road outside Moselle. Data from Murdaugh’s phone and his car also recorded his movements leaving the property around the same time.
Most damning might be a short cellphone video shot by Paul moments before his death that includes Murdaugh’s voice. Murdaugh had told investigators he wasn’t with his wife and son at the kennels that night. He later admitted on the stand he lied about his whereabouts that night.
But the defense has hammered on flaws in the investigation they say show that the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division zeroed in on Murdaugh early to the exclusion of other possible suspects, and that others had more reason to want Paul dead over his involvement in a 2019 boat crash that killed teenager Mallory Beach, an event Paul faced criminal charges for at the time of his death.
In his closing Wednesday, Waters said the law does not treat circumstantial evidence as less valid than direct evidence. He also said the legal standard of reasonable doubt doesn’t mean the jurors have no doubt at all.
To illustrate, Waters held up a picture of the Mona Lisa and ripped the corner off.
“That’s reasonable doubt,” he said. “You still know what this is.”
On Wednesday morning, the jury toured the Moselle dog kennels property and visited the outside of the main house, with Newman in tow, along with other Colleton County personnel and members of law enforcement, some of whom testified for the state earlier in the trial.
In addition to the judge and other court officials, Murdaugh’s defense attorneys Dick Harpootlian and Margaret Fox were also on scene, as was South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson.
A three-person media pool was allowed to go on the property as well: Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein, Post and Courier photographer Andrew Whitaker and Steven Gresham, a photojournalist for Court TV.
The reporters followed behind the jury, who were only visible for several minutes.
“We had a few seconds to view them as they walked the narrow path between the kennels and the shed. One juror was standing in the feed room door, glancing up at the doorway that has been the subject of so much wrenching testimony,” Bauerlein wrote.
“The grass on the property is tall and the shrubs outside the caretaker’s cabin are bushy and overgrown. The black mailbox at the entrance to the kennels is covered in pollen and spiderwebs. There is a ‘no trespassing’ sign tied to a post at the top of the mailbox,” Bauerlein added.
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