WALTERBORO, S.C. — Over and over again last week, lead state prosecutor Creighton Waters asked Alex Murdaugh about a long list of people disgraced South Carolina lawyer and accused double-murderer fooled, tricked and swindled for years.
“I lied to a lot of people, Mr. Waters,” a subdued Murdaugh, 54, said on the witness stand, agreeing repeatedly as Waters called out a list of those people while a jury of 12 men and women and two alternates looked on. Murdaugh also readily admitted to embezzling millions of dollars over the years from his former law partners, clients, his best friend — lawyer Chris Wilson — and even his older brother, Randy.
Murdaugh’s astonishing and unexpected admission, when he decided to put himself on the witness stand first Thursday, that he is a world-class liar underscores a major irony in South Carolina’s “trial of the century.”
Both sides are relying in a major way on Murdaugh’s admissions — his first ever public statements on his alleged crimes, given under oath — that for years he led a secret criminal life.
Prosecutors hope the confessions convinces the jury that Murdaugh is what they have said all along — a villain who killed his wife and son and then with ease launched a cover-up.
And defense lawyers claim that Murdaugh’s revelations demonstrate he has now come clean about all his misdeeds, so his public denials this week about killing his wife and son should be believed.
Murdaugh, a fourth-generation member of a Lowcountry political and legal dynasty, is charged with killing his wife, Maggie, 52, and youngest son, Paul, 22, on June 7, 2021, at the dog kennels on the family’s 1,770-acre estate, called Moselle, in rural Colleton County. For years, operating out of Hampton, Murdaugh was one of the state’s most successful attorneys, often raking in more than $1 million a year as a plaintiff’s lawyer. Simultaneously, he was stealing millions from those closest to him.
There were no witnesses to the killings. No murder weapons — a shotgun killed Paul, and an assault rifle killed Maggie — have ever been found.
“Alex, did you murder Maggie?” defense lawyer Jim Griffin asked Murdaugh Friday.
“I would never hurt Maggie,” Murdaugh replied.
“Did you murder Paul?” Griffin asked.
“I would never hurt Paul,” Murdaugh testified.
Murdaugh’s shaky alibi
Up until early February, in the trial’s second week, Murdaugh always had an alibi.
He had repeatedly told South Carolina Law Enforcement Division investigators, friends and family that he was nowhere near the dog kennels in the minutes before his wife and son were killed. He was several hundred yards away, napping in the estate’s house. He then drove off for an hour to visit his ailing mother before returning around 10 p.m. and discovering the bodies, he has said.
But on Feb. 2, Waters’ prosecution team introduced a cellphone video taken by Paul in the minutes before he and Maggie are believed to have been shot to death.
The video contained the voices of Paul, Maggie and Murdaugh talking excitedly about a dog around 8:45 p.m. on June 7, 2021. About four minutes later, Paul and Maggie’s cellphones went silent forever, which prosecutors say means they had been killed.
Since then, prosecutors have played the video numerous times during the trial, and more than half a dozen people have identified the three voices on the video as belonging to Paul, Maggie and Murdaugh.
That new evidence forced a decision on the defense team. Either Murdaugh could not testify and hope his lawyers’ attacks on alleged flaws in the state’s investigation were enough to create reasonable doubt among jurors. Or, Murdaugh could take the witness stand and try to explain why he lied to so many people for so long about not being at the dog kennels just before the killings.
A major risk of Murdaugh testifying is that he faces more than than 90 charges of financial fraud committed over the last 12 years. Indictments say he stole more than $8 million. He also says he has a long-standing addiction to illegally bought oxycodone, on which he claimed he spent as much as $50,000 a week.
If he testified, prosecutors on cross-examination could ask him about his hidden life of treachery and thievery, as well as his drug addiction. And that, defense lawyers said they feared, could inflame the jury against him.
In the end, Murdaugh himself made the decision to testify, relying on the theory that if he freely admitted his lies about drug addiction and betraying friends, jurors would find him credible when he told them that he didn’t kill his wife and son — even though he lied about his initial alibi.
He spent more than eight hours over two days on the witness stand, including nearly five hours undergoing Waters’ questions.
‘Are you a family annihilator?’
Under questioning by Griffin, Murdaugh professed his love for his wife and son and wept when recalling their memories.
Portraying his family as close-knit, he repeatedly called Maggie “Mags” and Paul “Pau-Pau.”
Murdaugh’s explanation for lying about not being at the dog kennels just before the killings was this: his drug addiction had made him paranoid, and he knew he would be a prime suspect if he told people he was at the crime scene minutes before the killings, he testified. So until taking the stand last week, he lied to everyone about his true whereabouts, he testified.
Prosecutor Waters worked the same lies from the opposite angle, showing that Murdaugh — an assistant volunteer prosecutor for years — had close ties to law enforcement and should not have been paranoid. He also elicited Murdaugh’s admission that Bubba, a dog at the kennels who was especially sensitive to strangers, was out and would have barked if the would-be killers were nearby.
Murdaugh’s now-admitted years of easy lying to people and stealing likely shows that his now-disproven alibi was just a cover-up of his murders of Paul and Maggie, Waters told the jury through questions.
False alibis have long been Murdaugh’s defining characteristic, said Waters, who sarcastically referred to Murdaugh’s revelation as his “new story.”
“So you, like you’ve done so many times over the course of your life, had to back up and make a new story that kind of fits with the facts that can’t be denied. Isn’t that true, sir?” Waters asked.
“No, sir, ” replied Murdaugh.
“Are you a family annihilator?” Waters asked.
“An annihilator? Do you mean did I shoot my wife and son — no,” Murdaugh replied. “I would never hurt Paul or Maggie — under any circumstances.”
Murdaugh repeatedly admitted he stole money that did not belong to him, misleading people along the way.
“People that I cared about and still care about, a lot of them that I love and still love, and ... I was wrong,” testified Murdaugh, who was once president of the S.C. Trial Lawyers’ Association, now called the Association for Justice. “I misled them from Day 1.”
But no, he did not kill “Mags” and “Pau-Pau,” he insisted again and again.
Despite Waters’ fierce cross-examination, during which the prosecutor sometimes shouted, waved his arms and leaned his upper body almost horizontally, pointing it like a weapon at Murdaugh, the accused killer never once lost his temper.
At times, he appeared to throw Waters off his stride with lengthy digressions.
On one occasion, Friday morning, Waters asked Murdaugh if he had told investigators he and Paul had ridden around Moselle looking for hogs late on the afternoon of the night Paul was killed.
“You don’t look for hogs in the daytime,” Murdaugh patiently explained to Waters. “Hogs are deep in the swamp in the daytime. Paul and I were not riding around looking for hogs. What we were doing is we were going from food plot to food plot, and we were looking for hog signs. What hogs do is come out and root, and they tear up everything. That was one of the things we were doing. But we were not hog hunting.“
It was a reminder that for all his life, Murdaugh has had a reputation as an engaging conversationalist with a humble “aw shucks” manner, a man who could make friends with anyone and convince them of anything.
In cross-examination, Murdaugh also acknowledged that Maggie and Paul were aware of his abuse of oxycodone, which could reach more than 1,000 milligrams daily, and had confiscated his drugs in the past. In his questioning about family opposition to his drug use, Waters opened up the possibility, without saying directly, that Murdaugh’s motive for killing them may have had something to do with drugs.
When Murdaugh told Waters he had been cooperative “in every aspect” with investigators, Waters turned his next question into an accusation.
“Very cooperative, except you omitted the most important fact of all — that you were at the murder scene with the victims just minutes before they died — right?” Waters asked.
Waters also derided Murdaugh’s telling the jury that the people who killed Paul were seeking vengeance because of Paul’s involvement in a February 2019 boat crash that killed 19-year-old Mallory Beach. Waters described Murdaugh’s theory as relying on imaginary “vigilantes” for which there was absolutely no evidence.
And Waters repeatedly used a complex timeline derived from cellphone calls and step data, as well as Murdaugh’s Chevrolet Suburban “black box” geolocation data, to show Murdaugh’s explanation of what he did after leaving the dog kennels didn’t jibe with what technology showed.
Judge Newman’s decisions
Ordinarily, prosecutors would not have been able to question Murdaugh about his financial misdeeds.
But early in the trial, over defense objections, Waters convinced Judge Clifton Newman to allow the jury to hear nine witnesses whose testimony implicated Murdaugh in a wide range of financial schemes that defrauded victims of millions of dollars.
Waters wanted to explain to the jury why a seemingly happy family man, like Murdaugh, would commit the unnatural act of killing his wife and son. Waters has told the jury that Murdaugh hoped the shock of such brutal killings would derail various investigations that threatened to expose his misdeeds and shaky financial conditions.
Newman’s admission of financial crimes evidence was done over heated objections by Murdaugh’s defense team, Dick Harpootlian and Griffin. They said that financial crimes had nothing to do with the murder and would prejudice the jury against Murdaugh.
Allowing damning financial evidence to go before the jury was just one of many decisions by the judge that have mostly favored the prosecution.
On Friday, Newman — known for an unflappable, gentle demeanor — almost shouted at Griffin when Griffin rose to make another objection after Newman just overruled an objection about Murdaugh’s Fifth Amendment rights being violated.
“Sit down!” Newman barked. As some in the audience laughed, Griffin sank back into his seat.
A national spectacle
Murdaugh’s trial has morphed into a live-streamed Court TV battle watched by millions around the nation.
“It’s a spectacle, like the O.J. Bronco chase — everybody is tuning in and calling everybody about it,” said Columbia attorney Jack Duncan. On Friday, Duncan was attending a federal public defender seminar in New Orleans where, he said, most of the 200 attendees and their spouses were glued to their screens, watching the deadly serious legal extravaganza.
Even before Murdaugh took the stand Thursday in a moment of high drama as the defense’s 11th and star witness — defendants in murder trials rarely testify — the trial had already attracted legions of true crime devotees.
Numerous documentaries, news shows and podcasts had already stoked wide interest in South Carolina’s 21st century true crime saga, with its unique mix of brutal deaths, financial fraud and a once-untouchable family’s tarnishing, not to mention scandals that destroyed a top Lowcountry law firm and led to the conviction of a former CEO of a once-respected Hampton County bank on federal fraud charges.
Murdaugh’s surprise testimony only increased attention.
“People are going to lose their jobs because they’re all watching the trial on TV,” Columbia lawyer Eric Bland, who filed a 2021 lawsuit that was instrumental in bringing Murdaugh’s embezzlement to light, told The State newspaper. In addition to practicing law, Bland now hosts a weekly podcast, Cup of Justice, which talks about Murdaugh and Murdaugh-related subjects that has some 400,000 to 800,000 listeners, he said.
For weeks, people from across the South have lined up before dawn at the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, about 90 miles south of Columbia on Interstate 95, to snag one of the 180 or so seats designated for the public.
“We wanted to beat the crowd,” said Jane Chronister, 75, a retired medical office manager, who drove from Lincolnton, North Carolina, with her daughter, Amy Housinger, 52, to see the trial. She and Amy arrived at the courthouse at 4:30 a.m. Friday to be first in line.
“I think he (Murdaugh) is very smooth, and he thinks he can fool anybody. But I think he might have met his match in Creighton Waters,” said Chronister, adding she has no doubt Murdaugh is the killer.
There is just one way people will learn whether Murdaugh or Waters won their gamble on their use of the disgraced lawyer’s lies, Duncan said. “We’ll know when we hear the verdict.”
Among the millions watching are members of Murdaugh’s own family, including his surviving son, Buster, his two brothers, Randy and John Marvin, and his older sister, Lynn. They have been in the courthouse audience most days.
The trial, which started Jan. 23 and was expected to wrap up by early February, could end next week.
Murdaugh was the 72nd witness to take the stand, after 61 prosecution witnesses and 10 for the defense.
On Monday and Tuesday, the defense is expected to put up four witnesses, followed by several prosecution reply witnesses. Then, prosecutors and the defense will give closing arguments followed by Newman’s charge of the law.
Only then will this case go to the jury.
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