Formerly well-known lawyer Alex Murdaugh was found guilty on all charges in the deaths of his wife and son by a jury in South Carolina.
He was found guilty of two charges of murder and two counts of using a weapon during the commission of a violent crime after the jury deliberated for about three hours. During the reading of the findings, Murdaugh exhibited little emotion.
On Friday, sentencing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. ET.
The 54-year-old stood up to speak for himself. He was judged guilty of murdering his wife Maggie Murdaugh, 52, with a rifle and his son Paul, 22, with a shotgun. They passed away on June 7, 2021, at the family’s sizable Moselle hunting plantation in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
Investigators, according to Alex Murdaugh’s defense, fabricated proof.
Law enforcement was biased against Alex Murdaugh from the beginning, according to defense attorney Jim Griffin, who claimed they subsequently made up evidence against him. Griffin said that state detectives “failed miserably in investigating this case,” picking apart the threads of the prosecution’s case.
Griffin claimed that if the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or SLED, had “competently” gathered the evidence, Murdaugh would have long since been taken off the list of possible suspects.
Griffin interpreted the investigators’ thinking, saying that unless we discover someone else, Alex would be the suspect. Griffin continued, claiming that his client was “an obvious target for SLED” due to his opioid addiction. They began creating false proof against Alex.
Griffin claimed that although SLED collected DNA samples from Alex Murdaugh’s clothing, they never did the same for Maggie and Paul. He added that after discovering the theory that tests revealed high-velocity blood spatter on Alex Murdaugh’s T-shirt, detectives held onto it and chased it “with vengeance.”
Griffin claimed that the “Mr. Clean theory,” which claimed that Murdaugh committed the heinous murders, quickly washed himself off with a hose and got into a golf cart “butt-naked, I guess” to drive back to the house before leaving to visit his mother, gained popularity when the state was confronted with conflicting results and concerns over tests of Murdaugh’s shirt.
Griffin listed the agency’s failings and claimed that the state never clarified whether tests were conducted on hair that he claimed was discovered in Maggie’s fingers. He also criticized the security measures put in place to protect Maggie’s phone after it was discovered on June 8 and accused detectives of failing to stop the device from continuously pinging GPS coordinates, which he claimed ultimately overwrote data from the night of the murders.
Griffin claimed that Murdaugh lied about them because “that’s what addicts do” in reference to the lies he confessed to telling. He continued by saying that he didn’t want Murdaugh’s “closet full of corpses” to be made public.
The prosecution says to focus on what is real
The rebuttal closing argument was given by prosecutor John Meadors, a veteran of murder cases who came out of retirement to take on the state’s case earlier this year. Meadors urged the 12 jurors to ignore the lies the prosecution had revealed, such as Murdaugh’s shifting alibi, in a speech dripping with dramatic flair.
Meadors claimed that Murdaugh’s testimony had only served to confirm his deception.
Meadors urged the jury to concentrate on the facts of the case rather than what he perceived as the defense’s attempts to undermine them, repeating, “That’s what’s true. He referred to “credibility and common sense” repeatedly.
