Alex Murdaugh gives testimony during his murder trial in South Carolina. Photo / AP
Alex Murdaugh, once a prominent lawyer, is on trial for murder, charged with killing his wife and son as his finances and legal career fell into ruin.
The killing of a mother and son. Millions of dollars in stolen funds. Fresh investigations into a fatal boat crash and a housekeeper’s deadly fall.
The tragic circumstances swirling around a lawyer and his family in South Carolina became only more perplexing over time, leading to several arrests, stunning twists — and now, one of the most closely watched trials in the country.
At its centre is Alex Murdaugh, 54, whose family dominated the legal landscape in the southern part of the state for 100 years, and who now faces trial on two counts of murder. Prosecutors have accused him of killing his wife and son in a failed attempt to conceal his own financial crimes.
It all began on the night of June 7, 2021, when Alex Murdaugh, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather all served as the top prosecutors across a wide area of the state, called 911 to report that his wife and one of their two sons had been shot to death.
A sense of mystery enveloped the killings as more than a year passed without a suspect or motive identified. Then, on July 14, 2022, Murdaugh was indicted on two counts of murder, with authorities saying he fatally shot his wife with a rifle and his son with a shotgun.
Murdaugh has been in jail since October 2021, when he was first charged with stealing from a former client, and prosecutors have since brought a wave of financial charges against him, saying he defrauded victims — many of whom were clients — out of about US$8.8 million ($14.1 million).
Murdaugh has maintained his innocence in the killing of his wife and son, and his lawyers said before trial that he “looks forward to this opportunity to clear his name.”
The trial began January 23, and was expected to wrap up by next week.
The scrutiny on Murdaugh has spawned several more investigations into three previous deaths in proximity to the family, and Murdaugh has also been charged with concocting a bizarre scheme to stage his own suicide to look like a murder after being pushed out of his law firm. That case will go to trial later.
If Murdaugh is convicted of murder, state law mandates that he be sentenced to at least 30 years in prison, and prosecutors have said they will seek a life sentence; they have chosen not to seek the death penalty. Jurors will also hear testimony on two charges that Murdaugh possessed a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.
Here’s what to know.
The fatal shooting of Murdaugh’s wife, Maggie, 52, and their son Paul, a 22-year-old junior at the University of South Carolina, rocked the state’s Lowcountry region, where the family had established a legal dynasty. The killings began to be known as the Murdaugh murders.
Few details were released about the attack, and no arrests were made for more than a year.
Alex Murdaugh had told authorities that he discovered their bodies near some dog kennels at the family’s isolated home in Islandton, a rural hamlet about 105km west of Charleston.
Alex Murdaugh had been at home with his wife and son earlier on the day that they died, but phone records indicate that he left to visit his mother around 9pm. He has said that he then returned home and found the bodies. Prosecutors have said that he killed Maggie and Paul before leaving, and then tried to create an alibi.
In audio of his call to 911, which he placed just after 10pm, a seemingly distraught Alex Murdaugh said he had arrived home and found their bodies on the ground “out at my kennel.”
“I’ve been up to it now, it’s bad,” Alex Murdaugh told the dispatcher. He said that neither his wife nor his son was breathing, and he implored the emergency responders to hurry. “Are they close, ma’am?”
After law enforcement officers arrived, Alex Murdaugh told them that his son Paul had been getting threats because of a fatal boat wreck he had been involved in a couple of years earlier. (At the time of his death, Paul had been charged with felonies related to the crash.)
Officers with the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office wrote in reports that they had discovered several shell casings and had called a tow truck company to the scene. They also said they had looked for surveillance cameras from neighbouring homes and businesses, though the heavily redacted police reports did not indicate whether they found any.
Prosecutors say that nearly three months after Alex Murdaugh’s wife and son were killed, an employee at his law firm — which was founded by his great-grandfather more than a century ago — discovered a cheque that was supposed to be addressed to the firm but was instead made out to Murdaugh. That finding led the firm to investigate further and, when they discovered evidence of financial wrongdoing, to ask for his resignation, which he gave.
The next day, September 4, 2021, in another bizarre twist, Alex Murdaugh claimed that he had been shot in the head on the side of a rural road by someone who drove by while he was changing a flat tyre. He was taken to a hospital, but his story soon began to fall apart. It turned out that he had not been alone on the side of the road, as he had claimed, but was with a friend and distant cousin, Curtis Edward Smith.
Alex Murdaugh soon admitted that he had asked Smith to shoot him in the head. Alex Murdaugh’s lawyers said he had come up with a plan to make his suicide look like a murder because he believed it would help his older son, Buster Murdaugh, collect on his life insurance policy.
Medical records showed that Alex Murdaugh had been shot in the back of the head, but he had been able to call for help afterward. Two days later, Alex Murdaugh issued a statement apologising to his “family, friends and colleagues” and said he was entering rehab for an addiction to painkillers.
The incident ended in the arrest of both Murdaugh and his cousin. Smith was charged with aggravated assault, assisting in a suicide attempt and insurance fraud. He told The New York Times that he did not shoot Murdaugh and that the gun had gone off as he grabbed Murdaugh’s arm to stop him from shooting himself.
Murdaugh turned himself in to the police on September 16 and was charged with insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and filing a false police report — all felonies.
In July 2022, Murdaugh and Smith were indicted on conspiracy charges for what prosecutors said was years of money laundering related to distributing oxycodone.
In February 2018, Gloria Satterfield, who had worked as a nanny and housekeeper for Alex Murdaugh and his family for more than 20 years, fell at their home and died from her injuries several weeks later.
After her funeral, Alex Murdaugh introduced her two adult sons to a lawyer who he said would help them resolve the issues around their mother’s death, but the sons said in a recent lawsuit that they did not know that the lawyer, Cory Fleming, was a close friend of Alex Murdaugh’s. Fleming reached a US$4.3 million settlement with Alex Murdaugh and his insurers that was supposed to send about US$2.8 million to Satterfield’s sons after lawyer’s fees, but the sons said in September 2021 that they had learned about the deal only recently and never got any money.
In October, police arrested Alex Murdaugh on charges stemming from the missing settlement funds — this time apprehending him at a detox centre in Orlando, Florida. He was charged with two counts of obtaining property by false pretences, a felony with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
Alex Murdaugh admitted in June 2022 that he owed her sons the full settlement plus lawyers’ fees, US$4.3 million in all.
Police are also looking into the cause of Satterfield’s death. Her family had long presumed, based on the Murdaugh family’s accounts, that she had tripped over their dogs and fallen down the front steps of their home. But the coroner was not notified about her death and no autopsy was done. Her death is also listed as “natural” on her death certificate, which is at odds with an accidental fall.
Police said in June 2022 that they planned to exhume Satterfield’s body after receiving permission from her family.
At the time of his death, Paul Murdaugh was out on bail after being charged in 2019 with drunkenly crashing a boat in an accident that killed one of his passengers, 19-year-old Mallory Beach, and injured several others.
Documents and videos released since his death have raised questions about whether the police were sloppy in their investigation or gave him favourable treatment. One of the boat’s six passengers told a Department of Natural Resources officer shortly after the crash that Paul Murdaugh had been driving the boat, but the officer wrote in a report that the passenger had said he was not sure who was driving.
The South Carolina attorney general is still investigating the crash, in which Paul Murdaugh faced a charge of boating under the influence causing death and two charges of boating under the influence causing great bodily injury — all felonies.
A lawsuit was filed against Alex Murdaugh and several others whom the plaintiffs sought to hold liable in the crash, and at the time of the killings, a lawyer for Beach’s family was pressuring Alex Murdaugh, as Paul Murdaugh’s father, to release an account of his finances. A hearing in the matter was scheduled for three days after the killings, and prosecutors have suggested that Alex Murdaugh’s motive for the killings was to gain sympathy and keep his financial misdealings concealed.
The housekeeper’s death is not the only one to receive fresh scrutiny.
In June 2021, a few weeks after the deaths of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division announced that it was opening a new inquiry into the death of Stephen Smith, a 19-year-old man whose body was found on a road about 15km from the Murdaugh home.
His death has never been fully explained, and no arrests were made. It was initially investigated as a possible shooting, then it was considered to be a hit and run. Police files have suggested that Smith ran out of gas on the side of the road several miles away from where his body was found.
Police have not accused the Murdaugh family of wrongdoing in the case, and they have not said what — during their Murdaugh investigation — led them to open an investigation into Smith’s death.
The Murdaugh legal dynasty goes back to Randolph Murdaugh, who ran a one-man law office before he was elected, in 1920, as the first chief prosecutor for a five-county region that covers 3,200 square miles.
He served in the position for two decades before he was killed in a train crash. Then his son, Randolph Murdaugh Jr., who was known as Buster, took over his father’s role in the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office. The younger Murdaugh was in the position for 46 years and, when he retired, his son, Randolph Murdaugh III, who was Alex Murdaugh’s father, was elected, serving until 2006.
Alex Murdaugh never ran for the prosecutor job, but he did serve as a volunteer prosecutor and sometimes helped his father with cases. He was officially removed from that volunteer role in September, The Island Packet newspaper reported.
When the trial began in January, defence lawyers for Murdaugh pointed to friendly family scenes that had been recorded on Paul’s cellphone not long before the murders. The lawyers suggested that Murdaugh could not have had the impulse — nor the time — to brutally execute his wife and son.
Prosecutors argued that Alex Murdaugh’s finances were under so much scrutiny — he is accused of embezzling millions of dollars — that he hatched a bizarre plan to kill his family members in order to gain sympathy, and to delay efforts to get him to divulge his personal financial information.
Over the past several days, video recordings from law enforcement officials have been shared with the jury, showing more of what happened in the hours after Alex Murdaugh’s 911 call.
The footage showed that Alex Murdaugh, who was polite but sometimes distraught as he answered investigators’ questions, was wearing a white T-shirt that did not appear to be bloody. He could be heard saying that he had touched the bodies of his son and his wife, searching for a pulse, and that he had a “wonderful” marriage to Maggie and a good relationship with Paul.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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