Jury Finds Murdaugh Guilty of Killing Wife and Son

WALTERBORO, S.C. — Alex Murdaugh, a fourth-generation lawyer whose family long exerted influence in small-town courtrooms across parts of South Carolina, was convicted Thursday of murdering his wife and son, sealing the dramatic downfall of a man who had substantial wealth and powerful connections but who lived a secret life in which he stole millions of dollars from clients and colleagues and lied to many of those closest to him.

The guilty verdict followed a nearly six-week-long trial, more than 20 months after the June 2021 fatal shootings of Murdaugh’s wife, Maggie, 52, and their younger son, Paul, 22, on the family’s rural estate. The grisly crime had reverberated across the state, in part because of the storied history of the Murdaugh family, which controlled a regional prosecutor’s office in South Carolina’s Lowcountry region for more than 80 years and ran an influential law firm for even longer.

“Today’s verdict proves that no one, no one — no matter who you are in society — is above the law,” the state attorney general, Alan Wilson, said at a news conference after the verdict.

In finding Murdaugh guilty, jurors rejected his claim that he had left the dog kennels where the crimes occurred several minutes before the shootings, an assertion Murdaugh made from the witness stand only as a fallback after prosecutors played a video contradicting his long-standing claim that he had not been there at all. The crucial, minute-long video recorded at the kennels happened to capture Murdaugh’s voice in the background. It was taken by Paul Murdaugh in one of his last living moments in an act that inadvertently helped to secure the conviction of his father.

Prosecutors contended that Murdaugh had killed his son with a shotgun, then gunned down his wife with a rifle when she ran over to see what had happened. Prosecutors said Murdaugh quickly set about creating an alibi, texting and calling his slain wife and visiting his ailing mother a short drive away.

Murdaugh stood silently in the courtroom as the verdicts were read. His older son, Buster Murdaugh, who had testified about how distraught his father had been after the killings, sat in the courtroom with a hand over his mouth.

The jury also found Murdaugh guilty of two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.

Judge Clifton Newman said he would sentence Murdaugh on Friday morning. The minimum sentence for murder is 30 years in prison, and prosecutors have said they will seek a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Dick Harpootlian, one of Murdaugh’s lawyers, said he planned to appeal the verdict.

The trial was a reckoning for Murdaugh, who long avoided legal consequences for his stealing and lying — things he admitted to from the witness stand — as he led a life of privilege and wealth.

In addition to the stolen money, he raked in millions of dollars in genuine income in some years as a lawyer for his family’s firm.

Murdaugh once dreamed of following in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather and becoming the region’s top prosecutor, but instead he served only as a volunteer prosecutor, working on a handful of cases over two decades. Nonetheless, he kept a prosecutor’s badge on the dashboard of his car and had blue flashing lights installed — a sign, prosecutors said, that he viewed himself as above the law.

Murdaugh was disbarred last summer after being charged with multiple financial crimes including the theft, in total, of about $8.8 million. Murdaugh claimed he had taken the money to pay for an opioid addiction that was sometimes costing him tens of thousands of dollars a week.

A prosecutor, John Meadors, gave a brief closing argument in rebuttal Thursday, urging jurors not to believe the claims of innocence that Murdaugh had made from the witness stand. The jury of seven men and five women began deliberating just before 4 p.m.

Motive had been a question from the beginning of the case. Prosecutors argued that Murdaugh committed the killings in a failed effort to gain sympathy and to keep his longtime embezzlement from being exposed.

But another of Murdaugh’s lawyers, Jim Griffin, told jurors Thursday that the notion that Murdaugh would try to evade scrutiny of his finances by placing himself in the middle of a murder investigation strained credulity.

“Why, why, why would Alex Murdaugh, on June 7, execute his son Paul and his wife, Maggie, who he adored and loved?” Griffin asked, noting the number of people who knew the Murdaugh family and testified about their loving relationship.

Creighton Waters, the lead prosecutor, noted that Murdaugh admitted on the witness stand that he had told many lies over the years to cover up his financial misdealings and addiction to painkillers. Waters urged the jurors to avoid becoming the next ones to believe his lies. “Don’t let him fool you, too,” he said. Waters told jurors that a “perfect storm” had been approaching Murdaugh — and, by extension, his wife and son — on the day of the murders. Earlier that day, Murdaugh had been confronted by his law firm’s financial chief, who accused him of pocketing a six-figure check that he was supposed to pass along to the law firm.

That confrontation, Waters said, was one of two inquiries into Murdaugh’s finances that led him to fear the walls were closing in. The other was an effort by another lawyer, Mark B. Tinsley, who had sued Murdaugh over his son’s involvement in a drunken boat crash in 2019 that resulted in the death of a 19-year-old woman. The authorities said the boat was driven by Paul Murdaugh, and Tinsley had been asking a lawyer to force Murdaugh to disclose detailed financial records so that he could go after Murdaugh’s personal assets.

Initially, prosecutors said, Murdaugh’s scheme worked: For several months after the murders, the inquiries into his finances were halted. But then, in September 2021, an employee at his law firm found a missing check in Murdaugh’s office, leading to the firm’s discovery that he had siphoned off millions of dollars. They forced him to resign.

The next day, in a bizarre series of events, Murdaugh reported that he had been shot in the head on the side of a rural road. It turned out, as Murdaugh admitted from a detox facility days later, that he had actually asked a distant cousin, Curtis Eddie Smith, to kill him. Murdaugh said he had wanted to frame his death as a murder so that his surviving son, Buster, could collect on his insurance policy.

Much of the trial focused on Murdaugh’s lies, including the one that he repeated to police in three interviews after the murders, in which he claimed to have not been at the family’s dog kennels.

Murdaugh made the risky decision to take the witness stand in his own defense last week and said, in tearful testimony, that he lied to the police because he feared he would become a suspect if he acknowledged being at the kennels that night. He said he had been there for a few minutes, but then had left and driven to check on his ailing mother who lived about 15 minutes away. He said he returned about an hour later to find his family dead.

Griffin addressed Murdaugh’s initial statements to the police directly Thursday, saying that the video from the kennels turned out to be the backbone of a case that lacked any other evidence. But as a longtime drug addict, Murdaugh had become accustomed to telling lies, he said.

“Frankly, he probably wouldn’t be sitting over there if he had not lied,” Griffin said, pointing to his client, who sat at the defense table in a brown blazer and white shirt, intently watching the proceedings. Griffin added: “He lied because that’s what addicts do. Addicts lie. He lied because he had a closet full of skeletons.” Throughout the trial, Murdaugh’s lawyers argued that the police were sloppy in their investigation and had focused almost exclusively on Murdaugh instead of looking for other suspects. Griffin characterized the police investigation as being driven by the concept that “unless we find somebody else, it’s going to be Alex.”

In his testimony, Murdaugh said he believed the killings were probably carried out by someone seeking revenge over the boat crash.

Griffin had ticked through problems in the investigation in his closing arguments, including that the lead agent, David Owen of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, gave false testimony about guns found on the property to the grand jurors who indicted Murdaugh. He also noted that the police had for months wrongly believed that blood spatter had been found on Murdaugh’s shirt, when, in fact, more rigorous tests taken later showed no blood.

He also criticized the prosecution for its contention that Murdaugh’s inconsistent comments about the timeline of his movements suggested that he was the killer.

“Can you imagine what he saw?” Griffin said, choking back tears as he described Murdaugh returning home to find his wife and son killed. “And it’s evidence of guilt that he doesn’t remember what the sequencing was in that moment? Is that evidence of guilt, or is that evidence of trauma?”

But Waters hammered Murdaugh on his previous deceptions, asking Murdaugh repeatedly when he was on the stand if he had looked his clients in the eyes when he stole their money and suggesting that he was also lying to the jury.

“He’s fooled them all,” Waters said of the victims of Murdaugh’s deceit. “He fooled Maggie and Paul, too, and they paid for it with their lives.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.