Disbarred South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh took the stand Thursday to testify his own defense in his double murder trial. He denied killing his wife and son but admitted lying to investigators about when he last saw them alive.
Murdaugh, 54, is charged with murder in connection with the shootings of his wife, Maggie, 52, and their 22-year-old son, Paul, who were gunned down near the dog kennels of the family’s hunting estate on June 7, 2021.
At the outset of his testimony, Murdaugh denied shooting Maggie and Paul.
“I didn’t shoot my wife or my son anytime, ever,” Murdaugh said in response to questions from his lawyer Jim Griffin. “I was nowhere near Paul and Maggie when they got shot.”
A murder weapon was never found.
Prosecutors say that Murdaugh feared he was about to be exposed for stealing millions of dollars from his law firm and clients over many years, and that he carried out the killings to gain sympathy to buy time to cover up his financial crimes that were about to be discovered.
Lying About Alibi
The once-prominent attorney admitted lying to police that he had not been at the kennels the night of the murders.“I did lie to them,” he said. “I don’t think I was capable of reason and I lied about being down there and I’m so sorry that I did.”
Several witnesses testified that they believed they heard Murdaugh’s voice along with his son and wife on cellphone video taken at the kennels about five minutes before the shootings.
Murdaugh blamed his addiction to opioids for clouding his thinking and creating a distrust of state law enforcement agents.
“As my addiction evolved over time, I would get in these situations, these circumstances where I would get paranoid thinking,” Murdaugh said.
Once he started lying about being at the kennels, he said he felt he had to continue: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Once I told a lie—I told my family—I had to keep lying.”
Day of the Murders
Murdaugh testified that his wife asked him to go to the kennels the evening of the killings, so he rode down in a golf cart and wrestled a chicken away from a dog before returning to the house and deciding to go visit his ailing mother.He said that, after returning home from visiting his mother, neither his wife nor son were in the house. After several minutes, Murdaugh said, he drove his SUV to the kennels where he said he last saw them.
Murdaugh described arriving to find the grisly scene of the killings, pausing for several seconds as he cried. “It was so bad,” he said.
Murdaugh said he briefly tried to roll over his son, who was lying face down, to check on him but decided he couldn’t do anything to help.
“I could see his brain laying on the sidewalk. I didn’t know what to do,” Murdaugh said.
He testified that he also checked on his wife before calling 911 and then went back to the house to get a gun for safety.
Witnesses who saw Murdaugh in the minutes and hours after the shooting said they didn’t see any blood on him, despite the gruesome crime scene.
Murdaugh testified that he did get blood on him after touching the bodies, but said “there’s no way I had high-velocity blood splatter on me.”
Several witnesses, including Maggie Murdaugh’s sister, have testified that Alex Murdaugh didn’t appear scared for the safety of himself or his surviving son in the weeks after the killings despite the brutality of the shootings and no apparent leads from police.
He faces 30 years to life if convicted of the murders. Prosecutors have said they would seek a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Murdaugh, who has been charged with embezzling about $8.8 million, faces about 100 other crimes, ranging from stealing from clients and the family law firm to insurance fraud to tax evasion. He is being held without bail on those charges, so even if he is found not guilty, he will not walk out of court a free man.
