Ashleigh Banfield is the host of “Banfield,” which airs weekdays at 10:00 p.m. ET on NewsNation
It was the cell phone of Paul, Alex Murdaugh’s murdered son, that exposed the smoldering deception his father had been peddling for a year and a half.
Alex, a 54-year-old disgraced attorney, had claimed he wasn’t around his doomed wife Maggie, 52, and son Paul, 22, when they arrived at their sprawling estate in the South Lowlands in June Carolina were brutally gunned down in 2021.
And ever since that fateful night, Alex has claimed to anyone who will listen that he was napping in the main house and had no idea of the horrors unfolding 350 meters away outside the family kennel.
But it was the stupidest, most damaging lie he could ever have told.
Because a random video Paul filmed of one of the dogs in the kennel showed the shrill but haunting voice of Alex Murdaugh in the background.
If the Alex Murdaugh murder trial has taught us anything, it’s that key witnesses are lurking in almost everyone’s pocket.
In the video, Alex could be heard kibbitzing with Maggie over a chicken on the property. And it proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Alex was there in the kennel just minutes before his family was annihilated.
The electronic evidence presented to the court was so clear and compelling that even Alex had to turn back on the witness stand and admit after 20 months that it was in fact his voice on the tape.
If the Alex Murdaugh murder trial has taught us anything, it’s that key witnesses are lurking in almost everyone’s pocket.
The mountain of electronic data being carried through this South Carolina courtroom certainly helped seal Alex’s fate.
A considered juror told Good Morning America that that was the moment — right now — that he decided Alex was guilty.
But that wasn’t the only electronic data that proved crucial to putting Alex Murdaugh behind bars for the rest of his life.
The mountain of electronic data being carried through this South Carolina courtroom certainly helped seal Alex’s fate. And it is this type of data that almost all of us carry around with us on a daily basis.
It was mind-blowing to learn that a simple cellphone would record almost every instance of its own movement for posterity whenever the device’s backlight was activated.
It also records any change from portrait to landscape mode when a phone is lifted to the face.
We all know it happens. What we didn’t know was that all these movements are hidden in a tiny vault of memory deep inside the device.
When experts testified that Maggie’s phone was moved after her death, it gave us a remarkable insight into what might have been going on.
The expert testimony indicated that Alex was holding her phone in one hand and his phone in the other while calling her to leave a fake alibi message.
As a former attorney, he may have tried to deceive future investigators into calling her from the main house to let her know he was going to visit his aging mother.
But when dead Maggie’s phone was picked up, the screen switched from landscape to portrait. You could almost imagine Alex fumbling with the phones in his hands.
The problem for Alex was that Maggie’s phone recorded the movement two seconds before Alex’s call came through. It certainly seemed that he was watching her phone to confirm that his call was being received.
Also irritating was the realization that the phone logs your every step, even when you’re not connected to and tracking a fitness app.
Alex’s lie that he slept while his family was being slaughtered was invalidated by the frantic paces recorded by the electronic spy in his pocket.
Alex, a 54-year-old disgraced lawyer, had claimed he was not around his doomed wife Maggie, 52 (centre) and son Paul, 22 (second from right) when they were brutally gunned down became. Low Country South Carolina Estate in June 2021.
The electronic evidence presented to the court was so clear and compelling that even Alex had to turn back on the witness stand and admit after 20 months that it was in fact his voice on the tape.
And dead Maggie’s phone seemed to be recording his steps, too. This data was consistent with the prosecution’s claim that Alex hastily hosed down and washed away all traces of blood after shooting his loved ones.w
When the smartphone connects to a vehicle’s Bluetooth, another tiny digital witness is born, which becomes another window into criminal behavior.
Alex’s suburb recorded his 80 mph sprint through dark and winding country roads, something he assumed he was doing in secret.
As his GMC slowed just as Maggie’s phone was thrown into the woods, it was hard to believe he hadn’t.
Finally, an innocent Snapchat video taken by Paul less than an hour before the killings, showing his father fiddling with a wayward sapling that had just been planted, provided another clue.
The clothes Alex wore in the video were not the clothes he was wearing when he claimed to “discover” his dead family just hours later. And no one could find the button-down pants and chinos he wore in the video.
Surprisingly, the only electronic spies not featured in this trial are now almost standard evidence in most other courtrooms — doorbell cameras.
None were busy in the main house, and certainly none were down by the kennels.
Usually, these cameras are everywhere else, tracking every drive, walk, or other innocent (or sinister) movement.
A veritable network of neighborhood cameras provided the origin of the investigation into Bryan Kohberger and his White Elantra. The pictures of Kohberger’s car eventually led to his arrest.
Prior to joining NewsNation, writer and anchor Ashleigh Banfield was a legal analyst and anchor for Court TV, anchor for CNN’s “Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield” and a correspondent for ABC News.
His vehicle was captured while speeding through a neighborhood in Moscow, Idaho, around 4:00 a.m. This is around the time four innocent University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in their own home.
This proliferation of electronic witnesses and their increasing importance in American jurisdiction should not be underestimated.
The human eyes of decent, law-abiding citizens cannot peer into all the dark corners where criminal behavior simmers, but these electronic eyes are a powerful and ubiquitous substitute.
Electronic and video data have become the primary criminal investigative tools since fingerprints, black and white photography and DNA have become ubiquitous in court.
So the next time someone blows that “it’s just circumstantial,” it’s good to note that this kind of evidence is circumstantial evidence, and it’s downright compelling because it has the power to dispel all reasonable doubt.
Increasingly, it can be seen as even more powerful than direct evidence as we learn more about the fallibility of eyewitness accounts.
There is no doubt that phones and gadgets have become an integral part of modern life.
As it now turns out, they have become indispensable tools for avenging death.
Ashleigh Banfield is the host of “Banfield,” which airs weekdays at 10:00 p.m. ET on NewsNation. Click here to find NewsNation near you.