WALTERBORO, S.C. — Prosecutors attempting to convict Alex Murdaugh of homicide within the killing of his spouse and son revealed on Friday that the 2 victims had found luggage of drugs in Mr. Murdaugh’s laptop bag a month earlier than the killings, disclosing the stunning new proof of a attainable motive earlier than resting their case in opposition to the outstanding lawyer.
“When you get here we have to talk,” Mr. Murdaugh’s son, Paul Murdaugh, mentioned in a May 2021 textual content to his father. “Mom found several bags of pills in your computer bag.”
The message bolsters the prosecution’s argument that on the time of the murders, a “perfect storm” was approaching Mr. Murdaugh, 54, that threatened to reveal his embezzlement of tens of millions of {dollars} from his regulation agency and purchasers, in addition to his lavish spending on his dependancy to painkillers.
Prosecutors rested their case on Friday after questioning greater than 60 witnesses in a trial that has charted the yearslong downfall of Mr. Murdaugh, whose household of prosecutors and personal apply attorneys held highly effective sway within the rural Lowcountry area of South Carolina for greater than a century.
Over the previous three weeks, prosecutors with the South Carolina legal professional common’s workplace have outlined their principle of the grisly crime, during which Mr. Murdaugh’s spouse, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and their youthful son, Paul Murdaugh, 22, had been shot to demise close to the canine kennels on the household’s huge looking property.
They have elicited testimony that Mr. Murdaugh’s monetary thefts had been on the verge of being uncovered across the time of the killings in June 2021. On Friday, additionally they confirmed a textual content that Mr. Murdaugh despatched to an in depth buddy 4 days earlier than the murders, during which he mentioned he wanted to take out a further $600,000 line of credit score.
Understand the ‘Murdaugh Murders’
On May 6, the day that Mr. Murdaugh’s son advised him in regards to the discovery of the drugs, Mr. Murdaugh’s spouse additionally searched the web for capsule markings in an obvious try to determine them, prosecutors mentioned, trying up an outline for drugs that matched some oxycodone drugs. The subsequent morning, Mr. Murdaugh texted his spouse, saying: “I am very sorry that I do this to all of you. I love you.”
On May 26, Ms. Murdaugh searched one other capsule description.
The prosecution has additionally highlighted a sequence of inconsistencies in Mr. Murdaugh’s statements to the police and pointed to cellphone and automotive location information that it says contradicts his account of his actions on the evening of the murders. Perhaps most crucially, prosecutors performed a video taken by his slain son that captured Mr. Murdaugh’s voice on the crime scene within the minutes earlier than the murders, regardless of his repeated claims that he had not been there.
What the prosecution has not proven is any direct proof conclusively tying Mr. Murdaugh to the crime: There is not any homicide weapon, no blood on Mr. Murdaugh’s shirt from that evening and no witness.
In cross-examining the prosecution witnesses, Mr. Murdaugh’s attorneys have additionally gained a string of vital concessions, portray the police as sloppy investigators who had been in a rush to pin the murders on Mr. Murdaugh. The attorneys have gotten witnesses to confess {that a} bloody footprint on the scene of the crime was an officer’s; that the police waited months to go looking a house that Mr. Murdaugh visited on the evening of the crimes; that Mr. Murdaugh had loving relationships together with his spouse and son; and that Mr. Murdaugh was indicted based mostly partially on false testimony from the particular agent who led the investigation.
This week, the protection attorneys tried to shift consideration to different attainable suspects, noting that an unknown man’s DNA was discovered beneath Ms. Murdaugh’s fingernails. They additionally instructed that the police ought to have regarded into the drug sellers that Mr. Murdaugh was shopping for drugs from, which he mentioned he did by writing giant checks — typically for as a lot as $60,000 in per week — to a distant cousin who was buying the medicine for him.
Still hanging over the trial is the query of whether or not Mr. Murdaugh himself will testify. After prosecutors rested, Mr. Murdaugh’s attorneys started questioning their first witness, the Colleton County coroner. They will proceed to name witnesses subsequent week.
With so many witnesses and a lot technical information, jurors could have a considerable amount of proof to sift by as soon as deliberations start. The jurors should not have notepads within the courtroom, so that they must depend on their recollections and the various displays that had been entered into proof, together with a wealth of reviews, maps and different objects.
“How this case turns out may well be determined by the quality of the closing arguments,” mentioned Jessica Roth, a professor of legal regulation and proof at Cardozo School of Law in New York and a former federal prosecutor. “How streamlined they are, how clear they are and how well they summarize the evidence and don’t get bogged down in the details.”
Prosecutors say the proof means that Mr. Murdaugh hit his son with two shotgun blasts, the second of which instantly killed him, and then fatally shot his spouse a number of occasions with a rifle. They say he left each victims useless on the bottom, roughly two hours after a household meal across the dinner desk.
Then, prosecutors have instructed to the jury, Mr. Murdaugh set about creating an alibi, calling his useless spouse’s cellphone and texting her, saying that he was going to go to his mom, who lived a brief drive away. On the best way there and again, he made a sequence of cellphone calls to buddies and kinfolk, returning to the household’s looking property about an hour later, simply after 10 p.m. At that time, he put in a distraught name to 911, reporting that he had found the our bodies.
All of this got here hours after two key occasions earlier that day: Mr. Murdaugh had been confronted by his regulation agency’s monetary chief over lots of of hundreds of {dollars} in lacking authorized charges that had been in Mr. Murdaugh’s custody. He had additionally discovered — when he acquired a cellphone name throughout that very same confrontation — that his ailing father had taken a flip for the more serious and was close to demise. The murders, prosecutors argue, had been an try to achieve sympathy and preserve the purported embezzlement from coming to gentle.
Since the murders, Mr. Murdaugh has been criminally charged with stealing about $8.8 million from a variety of victims and has been disbarred.
Several prosecution witnesses testified about Mr. Murdaugh’s conduct after the murders. His mom’s caregiver, Shelley Smith, testified that he visited his mom for about 20 minutes on the evening of the killings however that Mr. Murdaugh had advised her a number of days later that he had been there for 30 or 40 minutes. And Maggie Murdaugh’s sister, Marian Proctor, mentioned that as Mr. Murdaugh grieved, he by no means spoke along with her about looking for the killer and didn’t appear afraid — as different kinfolk had been — that somebody could possibly be out to kill your complete household.
A key to the case is Mr. Murdaugh’s declare — which he repeated with confidence in interviews with the police after the murders — that he had by no means been on the kennels together with his spouse and son that night. He advised the police that he had hung out driving across the property together with his son that afternoon, and that after dinner, Maggie and Paul had walked out to the kennels, which had been about 500 yards from the home.
“I stayed on the couch and I dozed off,” he advised the state police in an interview two months after the murders that was performed publicly for the primary time at trial this week. He mentioned he then obtained up and drove on to his mom’s home shortly after 9 p.m.
The police later obtained a video from Paul Murdaugh’s cellphone during which Alex Murdaugh’s voice could possibly be heard within the background at 8:45 p.m., calling for a canine. Prosecutors have instructed that this was simply minutes earlier than the shootings, noting that Paul and Maggie Murdaugh’s telephones had been final unlocked at 8:49 p.m. The protection has but to considerably deal with the contradiction, one thing authorized analysts mentioned that Mr. Murdaugh’s attorneys must confront as they lay out their case.
“The main point of the prosecution’s case has been to establish, resoundingly, a timeline, and to underline, highlight and pound away on every inconsistency with the prosecution timeline,” mentioned Joe McCulloch, a lawyer and former prosecutor in Columbia, S.C., who can be buddies with Dick Harpootlian, one among Mr. Murdaugh’s attorneys.
“We already get the sense from everything that he’s capable of lying,” Mr. McCulloch mentioned of Mr. Murdaugh. “The question is, is he forgetting? Is he lying? Why is he lying?”