Closing arguments begin in Alex Murdaugh’s murder trial after jury visits family property where his wife and son were killed

By Elizabeth Wolfe, Alta Spells and Eric Levenson, CNN

State prosecutors began closing arguments Wednesday in the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh, the disbarred South Carolina attorney accused of killing his wife and son at the family’s countryside estate in 2021.

“After an exhaustive investigation, there is only one person who had the motive, who had the means, who had the opportunity to commit these crimes, and also whose guilty conduct after these crimes betrays him,” prosecutor Creighton Waters said.

“This defendant is the one person who was living a lie, the defendant is the person on which a storm was descending, and the defendant was a person where his own storm would actually mean consequences for Maggie and Paul and consequences for those who trusted him.”

The defense’s closing arguments will follow afterward.

Jurors heard from more than 70 witnesses over six weeks of testimony before visiting Murdaugh’s sprawling property, known as Moselle, in Islandton, South Carolina, on Wednesday morning.

Murdaugh, 54, is accused of fatally shooting his wife, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, and son Paul Murdaugh by the family’s dog kennels at Moselle on the night of June 7, 2021. He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and two weapons charges.

Prosecutors have faced a considerable hurdle — the lack of any direct evidence, such as a murder weapon, bloody clothing or eyewitnesses, that connects Murdaugh to the killings. Instead, they have hinged their case on circumstantial evidence, including video placing Murdaugh at the crime scene shortly before the murders despite his claims he wasn’t there.

The prosecution also has focused on Murdaugh’s motives for the killings and history of lies. He was motivated, prosecutors argue, by a desire to gain sympathy and distract from a slew of financial misconduct allegations against him that were on the verge of becoming public. The now-disbarred attorney is separately facing 99 charges related to alleged financial crimes that will be adjudicated at a later trial.

The defense case was highlighted by Murdaugh himself, who offered dramatic testimony over two days last week in which he flatly denied killing his wife and son. At the same time, he admitted that he had lied to investigators about his whereabouts the night of the killings, and he admitted to stealing millions of dollars from his former clients and law firm and lying to cover his tracks.

Murdaugh said he’d lied to police about his whereabouts because of “paranoid thinking” stemming from his addiction to opiate painkillers.

“I wasn’t thinking clearly,” he added. “I don’t think I was capable of reason, and I lied about being down there, and I’m so sorry that I did.”

The closing arguments come more than a month into the stranger-than-fiction trial of Alex Murdaugh, the former personal injury attorney and member of a dynastic family in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather served as the local prosecutor consecutively from 1920 to 2006.

The family has in recent years been trailed by a series of deaths, including those of Murdaugh’s wife and son; the 2018 death of their housekeeper Gloria Satterfield; the 2019 death of 19-year-old Mallory Beach after a boat allegedly driven by Paul Murdaugh crashed; and the unsolved 2015 death of 19-year-old Stephen Smith, whose case was reopened based on information gathered while investigating the deaths of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh.

Timeline of events becomes key focus

Details of how the night of the killings unfolded have been a pivotal focus of the trial, as prosecutors have suggested that Murdaugh fatally shot his wife and son and then attempted to fabricate an alibi by calling and texting his wife’s phone and driving to his parent’s home in Almeda.

“I never manufactured any alibi in any way, shape or form, because I did not, and would not, hurt my wife and my child,” Murdaugh said last week when pressed by the prosecution about the calls, which he said were “very normal.”

A cornerstone of the state’s case is the video at or near the kennels — filmed on Paul’s phone starting at 8:44 p.m. — in which Murdaugh’s voice can be heard in the background. After about a dozen friends and family members identified his voice on the video, Murdaugh took the stand and admitted he was there.

He testified that he went to the kennels at Maggie’s request, but insisted he returned to the house before the killings and then left the property to visit his ailing mother in nearby Almeda. When he returned home later that night, Murdaugh testified, he found Maggie and Paul dead and called 911.

The defense has depicted Murdaugh as a troubled but loving family man who has been wrongly accused as the result of a shoddy investigation. Among the defense witnesses was Murdaugh’s only surviving son, Buster Murdaugh, who testified his father was “devastated” by the killings.

The defense has also sought to show that Paul and Maggie could have been shot in a much wider window of time, including after Murdaugh said he had left the kennels.

Colleton County Coroner Richard Harvey testified last week that he estimated Maggie’s and Paul’s time of death to be around 9 p.m. based in part on his checks of their armpits to feel how warm the bodies were.

However, when asked by the defense if the pair could have died anytime between 8 or 10 p.m., Harvey said yes.

Police say Murdaugh called 911 at 10:07 p.m. to report finding the bodies.

A forensic pathologist called by the defense, Jonathan Eisenstat, testified Monday that armpit temperature checks are “not a valid method” to determine time of death and called the technique “just a guess.” Instead, he said, internal body temperatures should be taken.

Harvey also testified that rigor mortis — the stiffening of joints and muscles following death — had not yet set in when he arrived at the scene around 11 p.m., and that it typically starts developing one to three hours following death.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Travis Caldwell, Christina Maxouris, Dakin Andone, Kevin Conlon, Dianne Gallagher and Randi Kaye contributed to this report.