Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife and son in 2021 on Thursday evening at Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro. The jury of seven men and five women spent less than three hours deliberating before announcing Murdaugh guilty of murder on two counts, as the disgraced South Carolina lawyer stood still and did not speak or react.
The disgraced legal scion, 54, showed no expression on his face but was visibly shaken when the verdict was announced at the Colleton County courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina, following six weeks of grueling testimony. The foreman declared that they had reached a unanimity of opinion and handed the case to Judge Clifton Newman.
Proven Guilty at Last
Murdaugh, 54, did not speak or react when the two murder convictions were announced. He was also then pronounced guilty on two counts of having a weapon while committing a crime. Buster, his surviving son, who was sitting a few rows behind, had a hard expression and put his head in his hands.
Murdaugh turned to face the 26-year-old and his sister Lynn as he was handcuffed and taken away. Neither his older brother Randy nor his younger brother John Marvin, who gave testimony earlier this week, were present in the courtroom.
"The minimum sentence [on the homicide charges] is 30 years and the maximum is life imprisonment," Judge Newman said in his address to the court after the judgment was read.
He then scheduled sentencing for Friday at 9:30 am. Buster did not get up in support of his father as Murdaugh was led away the court.
The jury reached a startling verdict after a six-week trial that presented two radically different portraits of Murdaugh, one as a cold-blooded killer and the other as a bumbling, guilty drug user who loved his family and would not harm them.
Murdaugh fatally shot dead his wife Maggie, 52, and younger son Paul, 22, at the family's 1,800-acre hunting estate in Moselle on the evening of June 7, 2021.
The disbarred lawyer lied to police about his location that evening before making the astonishing choice to testify last week in order to amend his narrative to fit the damaging evidence. Murdaugh's family has had extensive judicial power in the area for three generations.
End of the Road
During their four weeks of testimony, prosecutors contended that Murdaugh, the descendant of a renowned legal family, had killed his wife and son to hide his enormous financial wrongdoings, which were about to be revealed by his business partners after his drug addiction had gotten out of hand.
Unsettling bodycam footage of Murdaugh standing only a few feet away from his relatives' bullet-riddled bodies was among the damning evidence that the state presented.
As soon as the police arrived at the estate, Murdaugh can be heard trying to blame the shooting on the threats Paul had been receiving following a 2019 drunken boat crash that claimed the life of his buddy Mallory Beach. He would subsequently repeat this story while testifying.
Lead prosecutor Creighton Watters also informed the jury that Murdaugh sobbed, "I did him so bad!" when shown photographs of his son's disfigured body, according to an audio recording of an interview conducted three days after the killings.
According to the evidence, Paul was shot twice with a shotgun, once from point-blank range to totally separate Paul's brain from his head.
When the jury visited the location after the defense rested, a witness for the defense, Murdaugh's former law partner, later claimed that he had discovered a chunk of the problematic son's skull "the size of a baseball" there.
Murdaugh claimed on the witness stand that he misled investigators about his locations the night of the killings, despite the fact that his defense team disputed the state's assertions of the weeping quasi-confession.
Murdaugh testified that he was the voice recorded by Paul in a Snapchat video at 8:45 p.m., just five minutes before authorities believe the young man and his mother were shot to death. Although he initially claimed that he was visiting his mother, who had advanced Alzheimer's disease, at the time of the killings, Murdaugh later admitted that he was in fact there.
However, Murdaugh maintained that after seeing his mother, he went back to the kennels and didn't find his family's bodies until more than an hour later.
Buster, who supported his father throughout the trial, testified last month on behalf of the defense, claiming that Murdaugh was "destroyed" and "heartbroken" by the deaths of Maggie and Paul.
Murdaugh is currently being tried for a number of suspected financial crimes in addition to the murder convictions, which could result in a sentence of nearly 700 years in prison, according to Law&Crime.
