Alex Murdaugh was confronted in court about his sudden and dramatic change in story about the night of his wife and son’s murders – coming only after jurors were shown a bombshell video placing him at the scene of the murders and more than half a dozen witnesses identified his voice in the footage.
On Friday morning, the disgraced attorney returned to the witness stand in Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina, for a further grilling from prosecutor Creighton Waters in his trial for the double murder of his wife Maggie and son Paul.
During a testy exchange, Mr Murdaugh was confronted about his sudden move to confess that he had lied for the past 20 months about his alibi on the night of the 7 June 2021 slayings.
The prosecutor pointed out that this confession only came after several friends and acquaintances testified that they are “100 percent sure” that his voice is in a video taken by Paul at the dog kennels minutes before he and Maggie were shot dead.
Mr Waters accused Mr Murdaugh of only turning to this “new story” because he had been backed into a corner and had no way of disputing the evidence placing him at the murder scene.
“You, like you have done so many times in your life, had to back up and make a new story to fit with the facts of your life,” Mr Waters said.
“The second you’re confronted with facts you can’t deny, you immediately come up with a new lie. Isn’t that correct?”
He continued: “You’ve done that over and over again. The second you’re confronted with facts you can’t deny you confront them with a new lie?
Mr Murdaugh denied this and instead gave a bizarre explanation for not coming forward with the truth earlier.
The disbarred attorney sought to blame the prosecution for his lies rumbling on until his trial testimony, claiming that he tried to tell the truth – but that the state would not speak to him.
“I didn’t have the opportunity to [tell law enforcement the truth] as you did not respond to my invitations to explain what I did wrong,” he said.
He claimed that his attorneys had contacted the prosecutor’s office “multiple” times but never got a response .
In a dramatic moment – laced with objections from the defence – Mr Waters pointed out that Mr Murdaugh’s own attorneys were not apparently aware of his change in story either.
Jurors heard how – at a time when Mr Murdaugh claims he wanted to come clean – his attorneys did a national TV interview in November last year “repeating your own lies” about his alibi.
Jurors have seen how in the 911 call that night, multiple police interviews, conversations with friends, family members and colleagues, Mr Murdaugh consistently denied ever being at the dog kennels that night.
Mr Murdaugh admitted that Thursday marked the first time since the 7 June 2021 murders that law enforcement, prosecutors, friends, colleagues – and his own brother Randy – had heard him change his story.
“Law enforcement, my partners and my friends heard me say that for the first time. Yes i agree with that,” he said.
Mr Waters grilled Mr Murdaugh about why – given his extensive experience of the justice system as an attorney from a long line of attorneys – “the last time you saw your wife and child you didn’t think was important” to share with law enforcement investigating their murders.
“I think it’s important,” he insisted.
Later in the cross, Mr Murdaugh was asked to pinpoint the exact moment in his first interview with law enforcement on the night of the murders that he “consciously decided” to lie about his movements.
Mr Murdaugh insisted that it wasn’t a conscious decision to lie, saying: “When I got thinking in paranoid way… it didn’t go away in a matter of seconds and I decided to lie.”
The testy exchange came after Mr Murdaugh shocked the court during direct testimony when he confessed for the first time that he had lied about his alibi on the night of the murders.
At the start of testimony, the disgraced attorney admitted that he had lied about not going to the dog kennels with Maggie and Paul on the night of 7 June 2021.
He blamed his opioids addiction for giving him “paranoid thinking” and his distrust of SLED which together led him to lie to law enforcement agents, family members and friends on multiple occasions and for the past 20 months.
“On June 7, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I don’t think I was capable of reason. And I lied about being down there. And I’m so sorry that I did,” he said, his eyes brimming up with tears.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave. Once I told the lie, and I told my family, I had to keep lying,” he testified.
This marked the first time that Mr Murdaugh has ever confessed publicly or to law enforcement that he had lied.
This confession comes after jurors have seen Paul’s damning cellphone video which places him at the scene of the murders with his wife and son at 8.44pm. Multiple witnesses had identified his voice in the footage.
Prosecutors say that Maggie and Paul were killed minutes later at 8.50pm. Data suggests they last used their cellphones at 8.49pm.
Mr Murdaugh’s intense cross-examination began on Thursday afternoon, after he made the last-ditch decision to take the stand in his high-stakes murder trial.
In bombshell testimony, he instantly confessed to lying about his alibi on the night of the murders – but continued to insist he was innocent of killing Maggie and Paul.
While the lengthy cross grew increasingly combative, the prosecutor did not bring the 7 June 2021 killings up during the afternoon’s exchange – paving the way for what is expected to be a major confrontation over the murders on Friday.
Instead, Mr Waters grilled Mr Murdaugh about his alleged attempts to influence the boat crash investigation through the power of his legal badge and his schemes stealing millions of dollars of settlement money from “real people” including a quadriplegic and two young girls.
In the cross, Mr Waters reeled off a list of “real people” who had suffered extensive injuries or losses – and were then swindled by the now-disbarred attorney.
In one case, Mr Murdaugh stole $6m from Hakeem Pinckney, a man who became a quadruplegic after a car crash.
The cross grew increasingly heated as Mr Waters delved into the financial crimes with Mr Murdaugh repeatedly returning to what the prosecutor said was a rehearsed line.
“How many times did you practice that answer before your testimony today?” he asked.
Mr Murdaugh fired back: “I’ve never practiced that answer.”
He also sparred with the prosecutor over the prominence of the Murdaugh family in Hampton County with Mr Murdaugh admitting that people likely saw him as a successful lawyer and that he and his family were prominent in the local legal circles.
They had “a lot of friends in law enforcement,” he said, but he insisted that they did not see themselves as “big shots”.
He also admitted that he “may” have used his solicitor’s badge to curry favour with law enforcement – including on the night of the 2019 fatal boat crash.
One night in February 2019, Paul was allegedly drunk driving a boat carrying his friends and crashed it, throwing then overboard.
Most of the group survived but the body of Mallory Beach, 19, washed ashore a week later. Paul was charged with multiple felonies over the boat wreck while the Beach family sued Mr Murdaugh.
The court was shown a surveillance image of Mr Murdaugh at the hospital where the other teenagers were taken. He is wearing his soliticor’s badge hanging out of his pocket.
Mr Murdaugh denied telling the survivors not to cooperate with law enforcement and said he wasn’t sure why he had his badge on him – but “may” have done so to get a “warmer” response from police that night.
“I never told anybody not to cooperate with law enforcement,” he insisted.
“Did I pull my badge out when I went in the room with those kids? I know I did not do that.”
Mr Murdaugh was later the focus of a grand jury investigation into allegations he tried to meddle in the boat crash case and influence witnesses. He admitted he learned about it sometime before the murders.
The jury also learned how he fitted blue police lights in his vehicle – even though he was never a member of law enforcement – and carried the solicitor badge in his car – even though he was only ever a volunteer at the office.
While Mr Murdaugh confessed to lying during his direct testimony, he continued to insist his innocence of the murders.
“I did not shoot my wife or my son any time, ever,” he insisted, breaking down in tears on multiple occasions as he recounted finding the bloody scene that night.
“My boy was lying face down... I could see his brain laying on the sidewalk. I didn’t know what to do,” he said of Paul’s body.
Mr Murdaugh also confessed to stealing money from his law firm and to orchestrating a bizarre botched hitman plot – two other crimes for which he is facing around 100 charges.
Mr Murdaugh again blamed his opioid addiction for his alleged financial crimes.
In a move that sought to undermine the prosecution’s theory of a motive, Mr Murdaugh insisted that he was not concerned that his financial crimes were on the brink of exposure on the day of the murders.
His law firm was asking questions about missing payments – with his CFO confronting him about $792,000 on the day of the murders – and a hearing in the 2019 fatal boat crash lawsuit was scheduled for that week.
He also sought to dismiss the significance of a voicemail message he sent to former Palmetto State Bank CEO Russell Laffitte four days before the murders – and suggested that the deaths of Maggie and Paul could not have benefited him financially.
Mr Murdaugh insisted that there was $7m equity in Moselle home and that the home was fully in Maggie’s name.
“The entire Moselle property was 100 percent in Maggie’s name,” he said, so her death actually made it more difficult to access his finances.
On the botched hitman plot, Mr Murdaugh told the court that believed it would be better for him to be dead.
“I knew all this was coming to a head. I knew how humiliating it would be for my son... I’d been through so much,” he said.
“At the time... I thought it was the better thing to do.”
Prosecutors allege that the botched hitman plot was all part of a pattern where Mr Murdaugh made himself the victim of a crime to prevent avoid accountability for his scandals and crimes.
They claim Mr Murdaugh killed his wife and son to distract from his string of alleged financial crimes – at a time when his multi-million-dollar fraud scheme was on the brink of being exposed.
Jurors heard four weeks of dramatic testimony from the prosecution, covering a trove of circumstantial evidence, including cellphone and car data and numerous apparent holes in his alibi for the time for the murders.
The defence meanwhile is seeking to present the alleged killer and financial fraudster as a loving family man who would never have murdered his wife and son. Defence experts have testified about mistakes in the preservation of crime scene evidence and claimed Maggie’s shooter was 5’2” tall – not 6’4” like Mr Murdaugh.
Beyond the murders, the brutal double murders brought to light a series of scandals surrounding Mr Murdaugh including unexplained deaths, the multi-million-dollar fraud scheme and the botched hitman plot.
Days on from the murders of Maggie and Paul, an investigtion was then reopened into the 2015 death of Stephen Smith, who was found dead in the middle of the road in Hampton County.
The openly gay teenager, 19, had suffered blunt force trauma to the head and his death was officially ruled a hit-and-run. But the victim’s family have long doubted this version of events, with the Murdaugh name cropping up in several police tips and community rumours.
An investigation was also reopened into another mystery death connected to the Murdaugh family – that of the Murdaugh’s longtime housekeeper Gloria Satterfield.
She died in 2018 in a mystery trip and fall accident at the family home. Mr Murdaugh then allegedly stole around $4m in a wrongful death settlement from her sons.
The 54-year-old is facing life in prison on the murder charges.
