WALTERBORO, S.C. — The South Carolina pathologist who performed autopsies on Paul and Maggie Murdaugh after their murders disputed defense witnesses on Tuesday who said her conclusions about how the son and mother died were incorrect.
As the double-murder trial of Alex Murdaugh winds down at the Colleton County Courthouse, both sides clashed Tuesday over just how much rebuttal the state will offer to the defense’s case, and the first in-court action by the state’s attorney general as he questioned the state’s last witness.
Murdaugh’s defense attorneys formally rested their case Monday after presenting 14 witnesses over six days to try to undermine prosecutors’ case that Murdaugh is the one responsible for the June 7, 2021, deaths of his wife, Maggie, and youngest son, Paul.
S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson for the first time Tuesday questioned Ken Kinsey with the Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Office, a ballistics expert who previously testified in the case.
An elected official, Wilson won a fourth term last November as the state’s top prosecutor. He has been seated with the prosecution team most days at the Colleton County Courthouse during the trial, but it is rare for an attorney general to question a courtroom witness.
Kinsey was called back as a rebuttal witness to challenge a defense analysis that determined Murdaugh was too tall to be the gunman that killed Maggie and Paul. Instead, they found the shooter must have been between 5-foot-2 and 5-foot-4.
Kinsey testified that the pair of bullet holes at the scene examined by defense expert Mike Sutton could have been fired by a gunman of any height depending on the angle. A gunman standing further back or kneeling could produce the same angles, Kinsey said.
Kinsey said Sutton’s analysis appears to have been based partly on lining the shots up with the cartridges found at the scene. But Kinsey said there is no way to reliably place a shooter based on the position of a cartridge.
“If you knew exactly where they would land, you could put down a bucket and it would go in the bucket, but they are throughout the scene,” he said, and some are located to the left of where an image created by Sutton places the shooter. Kinsey believes both the gunman and Maggie were moving throughout the period when she was being shot, creating many variables in analyzing the scene.
He also said investigators may have inadvertently damaged the bullet holes in the soft cardboard where they were found, making it more difficult for Sutton to later work backward to determine the angle from which they were fired.
Earlier on Tuesday, the S.C. Attorney General’s Office indicated they would call at least seven witnesses to respond to the defense, which defense attorney Dick Harpootlian suggested was excessive and could even push the trial into next week. He said the defense may even need to call its own rebuttal witnesses.
Prosecutors were close to calling all of their witness early Tuesday afternoon.
“The state’s position seems to be let no dead horse go unbeaten,” Harpootlian said. “This is a process that has got to stop at some point.”
Judge Clifton Newman said he would not limit what witnesses the state could call ahead of time, but would need to go “issue by issue, objection by objection.”
Dr. Ellen Riemer, the pathologist who performed the autopsies on Paul and Maggie, returned to court Tuesday to dispute testimony from the defense pathologists that Paul died from a close-range shotgun blast to the back of the head, rather than a lower shot that passed out the back of his head.
“You can look at pictures, but doing an autopsy makes certain information available to a pathologist that is not available to people who are not performing the autopsy,” she said.
Those defense witnesses said the force of the blast at close range would be enough to explain how Paul’s brain exited his skull and flew into the door frame of the feed room where he was shot. Riemer disputed that determination.
“I know what you’ve seen is horrible, but it could have been much worse” with the kind of shot the defense suggested, Riemer told the jury. “His eyes would have been displaced from the orbital bones. ... He would not have had a face left.”
The state on Tuesday also called Murdaugh’s former law partner, Ronnie Crosby, to the stand, who said he had only heard Murdaugh admit he had been at the dog kennels the night of the murders was when Murdaugh said so during his testimony last week.
Murdaugh had consistently claimed he was not there that night until the state played a cellphone video shot by Paul that places him at the scene moments before the murders occurred.
Harpootlian asked Crosby if he was motivated by anger against Murdaugh in his testimony.
“I have extreme anger for what he did to my law firm, my partners, his clients, our clients, what he did to his family,” Crosby said. “But you can’t walk around with anger.”
Former Hampton County Sheriff T.C. Smalls, the third reply witness, testified Tuesday that he never gave Murdaugh approval to install blue lights in his personal vehicle when Murdaugh was an assistant solicitor. Murdaugh testified last week he had approval to do so for law enforcement reasons. Under cross-examination, Smalls said he was unaware Murdaugh ever had installed the blue lights or whether anyone else in his office might have given approval.
Paul McManigal, a phone examiner with the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office and the fourth reply witness, testified that a phone display screen would not necessarily have come on, and generated data, if it were thrown out of a car onto the side of the road. Prosecutors believe Murdaugh may have thrown his wife Maggie’s phone out his car window when he left the Moselle property the night of the murders.
Defense attorney Phil Barber argued McManigal did not have expertise in cellphone displays, noting he said he based his conclusions on throwing a similar phone around his office over the weekend and did not make records or record video of him doing it.
“In terms of tossing it around and seeing what it does, you don’t have any more knowledge than anyone else?” Barber asked, which McManigal agreed with. “You haven’t said something you couldn’t have found out on Google.”
Barber asked that McManigal’s testimony be thrown out based on that admission, but Newman declined.
Former law partner Mark Ball testified again Tuesday for the state that he had never heard Murdaugh express a distrust of the S.C. Law Enforcement Division, which Murdaugh blamed for lying to investigators about visiting the kennels. He also reiterated that Murdaugh gave inconsistent statements to him about checking Paul and Maggie’s bodies before calling 911, and that he also had never heard Murdaugh say he went to the kennels before Murdaugh’s testimony.
Defense attorney Jim Griffin asked Ball if he was aware Murdaugh was under investigation by SLED for allegedly obstructing the investigation into a fatal 2019 boat crash Paul was charged in. Ball said he was unaware of the investigation at the time.
Prosecutors finished calling their rebuttal witnesses Tuesday, and the defense declined to call any rebuttal witnesses of their own setting up the final stage of the six-week-long double-murder trial that has focused national and international attention on the South Carolina Lowcountry.
Before closing arguments, jurors will visit the site of the murders itself, walking the grounds near the dog kennels on the family property Moselle, where Paul and Maggie were shot. The jurors will travel about 20 miles from the courthouse Wednesday morning, accompanied by Newman, the attorney and court officials. Newman told the jurors they can’t discuss the case during the trip, and that they can only ask questions of him while there.
Both sides will make their closing arguments to jurors later Wednesday. Then, it will be up to 12 ordinary Colleton County men and women to decide the once-prominent attorney’s fate.
The defense closed out their arguments Monday by calling Murdaugh’s brother, John Marvin, who gave emotional testimony about the devastating impact the murders had on the family. At one point, he tearfully recalled attempting to clean up the feed room where Paul was killed, still covered with Paul’s blood, brains and skull fragments.
“I felt like it was something I needed to do for Paul to clean it up,” John Marvin said. “No father, mother, aunt or uncle should have to see or do what I did that day. I was just overwhelmed. I would stop, crying for a moment, just in disbelief.”
He also testified he believed law enforcement was trying to mislead him and other family members about their investigation into Murdaugh’s role in the murders of his wife and son. That included, he said, an allegedly bloody shirt Murdaugh was wearing that was never conclusively shown to have blood on it, and where exactly investigators found a blue raincoat at Murdaugh’s mother’s house that tested positive for gunshot residue.
———
