- By Holly Honderich
- in Walterboro, South Carolina
1 hour ago
Image Credit: Joshua Boucher/The State/Pool
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Alex Murdaugh testifies in his own defense. If found guilty, he faces a life sentence.
For generations, the Murdaugh family ruled their rural South Carolina — then Alex Murdaugh was framed for the brutal murder of his wife and son. What followed was the startling unraveling of a life of power and privilege that uncovered embezzlement, drug abuse and a failed assassination attempt.
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In the fifth week of his murder trial, Alex Murdaugh took the stand.
Over nearly 10 hours of testifying in his own defense, the crowded Walterboro, South Carolina courtroom saw two versions of Mr Murdaugh. One seemed tired, his voice trilled and thin. His clothes were hanging loose; Months in prison had diminished his once heavy build. He rocked back and forth, shook his head and cried.
The other appeared to be a lot more like the man described by other witnesses — savvy and charming, once a formidable player in the state’s clubby legal circle. This Mr. Murdaugh addressed the jury directly, relaxed and in control.
“What a tangled web we weave,” he told them.
Directly in front of him, against the back wall of the courtroom, was a rectangular sunspot where there used to be a painting — a portrait of his namesake, his great-grandfather Rudolph “Buster” Murdaugh, that had been taken down at the trial.
For nearly a century, the Murdaugh family ruled this southern corner of South Carolina—a flat expanse of marshland, palm trees, and porched houses—running the local attorney general’s office and the private law firm that made them wealthy.
But since the brutal murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul in June 2021, a series of bizarre and tragic events have contributed to Mr Murdaugh’s spectacular fall from grace. The 54-year-old has denied the killings, which prosecutors say are a desperate diversion from decades of financial misconduct. But on the witness stand, he admitted to a number of other crimes, including embezzlement, fraud and a staged assassination attempt.
The trial has become one of the most closely watched in the country. It exposed the Murdaugh family’s apparently unchecked power in their small community and brought about the downfall of a local dynasty.
“That’s what happens when average people don’t have controls,” said Bill Nettles, former US Attorney for South Carolina.
“And there were no controls and counterbalances on him.”
Image Credit: Grace Beamm Alford/Post and Courier/Pool
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A photograph of the Murdaugh family being shown in court. Maggie and Paul (center) were fatally shot on June 7, 2021
Anyone familiar with the Lowcountry of South Carolina must know the Murdaugh surname. Between 1920 and 2006, three generations of Murdaugh men presided as chief prosecutors of the state’s Fourteenth Judicial Circuit, the longest family control of its kind in United States history.
“They were the law,” Mr. Nettles said.
Longer still, the Murdaughs worked at the family-founded litigation firm of Peters, Murdaugh, Parker, Eltzroth & Detrick (PMPED) — amassing a small fortune and expanding their dominance in every corner of the Lowcountry. In a region where personal injury firms thrived, hers was the best.
“They could reach a verdict that would dramatically exceed the norm,” said South Carolina Attorney Joe McCulloch.
“And when I say break the norm — they could turn a $100,000 case into a million-dollar settlement.”
Their judicial district became known as the Mecca for plaintiffs. Companies that managed to avoid it reportedly skipped the area entirely.
Locals told the jury the Murdaughs were familiar faces, a reliable advantage at the trial.
“When people graduated from high school, they sent gifts; they paid for funerals, sent flowers to people who were in the hospital,” said Eric Bland, a South Carolina-based malpractice attorney. “They have salted the city with benevolence.”
From their two offices in Hampton, the Murdaughs established themselves as the de facto authority on the Lowcountry. Her influence wasn’t great – it didn’t even span the width of the state – but it was deep. In the small, isolated community where they lived, residents said the Murdaugh family ruled.
“We knew them all,” said one waitress in town, who also declined to give her name, saying she didn’t want to “get in trouble” for speaking out of turn. She didn’t want to be included either. “You just have to remember that,” she said. “They had power. And they went too far.”
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Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were killed at the family’s remote hunting property in June 2021.
During the third week of the hearing, former PMPED chief financial officer Jeanne Seckinger described Alex Murdaugh’s actions as a lawyer. “Basically the art of bullshit,” she said.
Mr. Murdaugh’s success was “not due to his work ethic,” Ms. Seckinger said, “but to his ability to build relationships and get people to make deals and get customers to like him.”
This work made him rich, millions of dollars that supported his family’s affluent lifestyle — a speedboat, a beach house, their sprawling 1,700-acre hunting property called the Moselle, and a staff to support them. But success, seemingly a Murdaugh birthright, belied his secret: a raging addiction to painkillers and years of theft, fraud and embezzlement.
On the stand in Walterboro, Mr Murdaugh tearfully admitted taking millions from settlements meant for his clients and stealing $3.7million (£3million) in 2019 alone. It was wrong, he said, but he was desperate: his addiction had emptied his bank accounts.
Prosecutors painted a picture of fraud and theft on an almost implausible scale, and of a perpetrator confident of impunity. Mr Murdaugh, they allege, robbed at random from colleagues and customers, young and old, disabled and sick. He faces nearly 100 separate financial burdens.
Ms. Seckinger testified that for years she had noticed yellow flags, small irregularities in Mr. Murdaugh’s files. But the company is a “brotherhood,” she said. “You trusted him.”
Tony Satterfield was another person who trusted Mr Murdaugh. When Mr Satterfield’s mother, Gloria – the Murdaughs’ housekeeper for 20 years – died after a fall at work, Mr Murdaugh told Tony and his brother that they should file a wrongful death suit against him and that his home insurance would provide compensation would pay. He even suggested a lawyer who could help sue him.
Two of Mr. Murdaugh’s insurance policies paid out a total of $4.3 million, but the Satterfields didn’t get a penny. They didn’t even know the case was settled. Alex Murdaugh had stolen it, as he himself admitted in court.
“I have a feeling if anyone had paid more attention they would have found that out,” said Eric Bland, the malpractice attorney who represented the Satterfields against Mr Murdaugh. “But these children adored the Murdaughs, they trusted him.”
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The trial has swept America, with people traveling long distances to stand trial
A year after the death of Gloria Satterfield, another fatal accident occurred in orbit involving the Murdaugh family. But this time, prosecutors claim, the tragedy would pose a problem that Alex Murdaugh was unable to contain.
Late in the evening of February 24, 2019, Paul Murdaugh was aboard the family boat when it crashed headfirst into a bridge, throwing three of the six passengers – all young adults – into the deep end in the deep water below. One of them, 19-year-old Mallory Beach, was killed and her body was recovered days later in a swamp several miles away.
At the time of impact, according to all other passengers, Paul was driving. A blood test showed 19-year-old Murdaugh’s blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit.
Taken together, testimonies from the night paint a picture of Mr Murdaugh bent on isolating his son. He roamed from room to room, they said, trying to talk to the teenagers. A nurse said he looked like he was trying to “orchestrate something”. One passenger, Connor Cook, said in a statement he had been told by Mr Murdaugh to “shut up”. He was afraid, he said, “they are the way they are”.
In last week’s stand, Mr Murdaugh called any allegations that he “detained witnesses” or influenced any part of the investigation into the boatwreck “completely false”.
Image Credit: Facebook/Maggie Murdaugh
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Alex Murdaugh is accused of murdering his wife Maggie and youngest son Paul
For those in the Lowcountry, however, the boat crash was seen “as a test of the system,” said Mandy Mattney, a South Carolina reporter who has led coverage of the Murdaughs since 2019. “Everyone in Hampton really believed that Paul wouldn’t be charged.”
Months later, however, Paul was charged with three felonies, including drunk boating that resulted in death. He pleaded not guilty to the charges but died before being brought to justice.
Looking back now, it might have been the moment Alex Murdaugh’s life began to unravel.
The Mallory Beach family hired a lawyer named Mark Tinsley to represent them in a wrongful death lawsuit against Mr Murdaugh that could have resulted in millions of dollars in damages.
Mr Murdaugh claimed he was broke. “I didn’t believe it,” Mr Tinsley said at this month’s trial.
So Mr Tinsley filed a motion to force Mr Murdaugh to disclose his finances. A hearing on the matter was scheduled for June 10, 2021. Disclosure would reveal his years of corporate fraud.
“The fuse blew,” said Mr. Tinsley.
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Mr Murdaugh has pleaded not guilty to the murders of his wife and son.
On June 7, 2021, three days before the scheduled hearing on his finances, Alex Murdaugh called 911. His wife Maggie and son Paul were shot dead, he said.
When the first deputy sheriff arrived in Moselle, Mr. Murdaugh told him his theory: Paul and Maggie had been killed in retaliation for the boating accident.
“He gets threats,” Mr. Murdaugh said of his son. “I know it is.”
Many in the Lowcountry believed him, and with Paul dead, the wrongful death lawsuit stalled.
But three months later, Mr Murdaugh called 911 again, this time to report he had been shot in the head on the side of a country road. He later admitted to arranging a slap on himself so his surviving son, Buster, could collect his life insurance. When the ploy fell apart, his company announced that they had forced him out the day before the incident for alleged embezzlement.
For months, the mystery of Maggie and Paul’s murders deepened as authorities said little about the case and offered no leads as to suspects or motives. Then, in July 2022, Mr Murdaugh was arrested in connection with the murders.
Image Credit: Grace Beamm Alford/The Post and Courier/Pool
For more than a month, Alex Murdaugh’s early morning fall has drawn crowds into the Walterboro courthouse, a line too long to fit. Upstairs, in the cool air of the courtroom, row after row of spectators in suits and sundresses have filled the dark wooden benches that line the room. At times the mood has felt odd, like a church reception, Mr Murdaugh’s brother and son walk around offering handshakes and tepid smiles.
The prosecution and defense will present closing arguments in the coming days before the jury retires to consider its verdict.
A lot of people here in the Lowcountry said they thought Alex Murdaugh was at the end of the line.
But for decades, the Murdaugh family has made the jury an ally, walking out of the courtroom with the verdicts that have built their fortunes and cemented their influence.
Alex Murdaugh’s fate will be decided in much the same way, perhaps a final test of his influence in a case where all the evidence is circumstantial – no murder weapon was found, no blood on Mr Murdaugh’s shirt that night, no eyewitnesses to the murders .
And his decision to testify — both an unusual move and a legal risk — was perhaps a testament to an enduring self-reliance, a belief in his ability to influence people, as he has done for years.
“I can promise you that before I hurt any of them, I would hurt myself,” he said last week. “Without doubt.”