WALTERBORO, S.C. (CN) — South Carolina prosecutors called their final witnesses this week in the double murder trial for Alex Murdaugh, the disbarred attorney accused of murdering his wife and son nearly two years ago at the family's hunting estate.
Jurors heard testimony about Murdaugh's longtime opioid addiction and the attorney's botched suicide – part of an alleged insurance fraud scheme he concocted with his longtime drug dealer several months after the murders.
Among the last witnesses was David Owen, the State Law Enforcement Division agent who led the investigation into the homicides. He testified about Murdaugh’s final interview with investigators about the murders before being grilled in cross-examination over missteps in the investigation.
Jurors also heard from Marian Proctor, the sister of Murdaugh's slain wife Maggie Murdaugh, who said it was odd that the 54-year-old defendant was not more concerned for his own safety after his wife and son were gunned down on the family's property.
“I think everyone was afraid,” she testified, pausing. “Alex didn’t seem to be afraid.”
Murdaugh called authorities shortly after 10 p.m. on June 7, 2021, to report finding the bodies of Maggie and his son Paul Murdaugh near the kennel on the family’s 1,772-acre hunting estate in Colleton County.
The 52-year-old wife was shot four or five times with an assault rifle chambered to fire .300 blackout rounds, ammunition commonly used to hunt wild hogs, according to testimony. Paul, 22, was blasted twice with a shotgun, including a devastating blow to his upper body that obliterated his skull. The young man’s brain, absent its stem, was delivered to forensic pathologist Ellen Riemer in a bucket, she testified.
Neither victim had defensive wounds to suggest a struggle took place, Riemer said. Kenneth Kinsey, a crime scene examiner, testified Thursday the shooter finished Maggie off execution-style with a close-range blast to the head. An impression on the woman’s leg was likely a tire track, he testified, which could have been left by an all-terrain vehicle on the property.
Prosecutor Creighton Waters warned jurors in his opening statement the state’s case was largely built on circumstantial evidence. While witnesses called at the trial described sometimes unusual behavior by the defendant in the days and weeks after the killings, Murdaugh has maintained his innocence. The murder weapons were not recovered and the crime was not captured on any surveillance cameras.
The ginger-haired man has often wept and rocked in his seat at the defense’s table as friends and colleagues took the stand to recount their memories of Maggie and Paul. He sometimes flashed a warm smile at the witnesses – a reminder that the charismatic personal injury attorney was no stranger to the courtroom.
Prosecutors claim Murdaugh, the scion of a century-old legal dynasty built in the state's swampy Lowcountry, committed the brutal slayings in a desperate bid to distract investigators threatening to unearth more insidious crimes lurking in his past.
Before he was a killer, the attorney was a prolific thief, prosecutors say, stealing millions of dollars from his law clients in a dizzyingly complex scheme that relied on phony bank accounts and roped in several respected colleagues.
On the day of the killings, the chief financial officer for the Murdaugh family’s Hampton law firm quizzed him about a missing $792,000 legal fee, she testified. Meanwhile, an attorney was threatening to expose his financial records in a lawsuit tied to a 2019 fatal boat crash. A hearing on the attorney’s motion to reveal his perilous finances was scheduled for later that week.
Murdaugh’s father was dying and his mother was debilitated by dementia.
All those pressures drove the attorney to kill his wife and son, prosecutors say, and while the murders did successfully distract from his other crimes for a time, it drew the nation’s attention to the macabre saga unfolding in the Palmetto State.
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