Another day, another intriguing murder trial in the US. Friday morning AEDT, the accused, Alex Murdaugh stepped into the witness box, took the oath Bible in hand and began to answer questions from his own counsel in his trial for the murder of his wife, Margaret and his son, Paul.
A bounty of documentaries, at least three by my count, are presently streaming on Australian television screens. All have documented the multi-generational power wielded by the Murdaughs in South Carolina’s 14th District. Decisions on who would be prosecuted and who might evade the law lay in their hands for 86 years. There were cosy relationships with county sheriffs, and district police departments.
Now one of their own is in the dock.
There are podcasts, so many podcasts. Once the dust settles, this one is set to go all the way to Hollywood.
The maelstrom of violence and crime occurred in South Carolina’s Low Country, a rough triangular shape at the south of the state, consisting of five counties, nudging the border to Georgia. The port of Charleston, the true cradle of the American Civil War, is little more than an hour’s drive away.
More than 40 per cent of all enslaved Africans passed through Charleston’s harbour between the 17th and 19th centuries. Many were forced into labour on the sub-tropical Low Country’s rice fields.
Black Americans made up the majority of the population in South Carolina until the Great Migration in the early to mid-20th Century saw their numbers decline in the South as they moved to the north-east, mid-west and the south-west of the US, to escape Jim Crow laws that continued to treat them as non-citizens.
It is a state where white privilege continues to flourish and in the Low Country, the Murdaugh family were more privileged than most. Three generations of the Murdaughs, one after the other, were the district’s solicitors, a term peculiar to South Carolina. They were the district’s prosecutors between 1920 and 2006.
In those nine decades, the Murdaughs ran unopposed in all but five elections in the state for the position of Solicitor of the 14th Circuit.
In the early years of the 21st Century, South Carolina became a litigator’s paradise. Legislative changes allowed claimants who are state residents to file a suit in any county in which an out-of-state company owns property and conducts business, regardless of where injury or loss took place.
It was boom time for Alex Murdaugh who had joined the family firm, Parker Law Group, in 1995.
Sooner or later, Alex developed a business model that saw him rip off his own clients. The scam was a simple one, given his status and the litigation factory that Hampton County where his firm was based, had become. Insurers and corporations preferred to settle. Alex would negotiate the settlements personally, pay the claimants a small amount of money and trouser the rest.
In all, Alex Murdaugh has now been charged with 88 financial felonies, including 27 counts of embezzlement. Other charges include money laundering and forgery. The indictments reveal a dozen or more victims and accrued losses of more than $14m.
One civil claim against him indicates the real number of his victims numbered somewhere between 30 and 50 and a total fraud of $30m.
His assets and bank accounts have been frozen but much of the money remains missing.
Murdaugh’s victims were, for the most part, poor claimants who’d suffered serious injuries. One, a deaf Black American man, was injured in a car accident in 2009 and required life support. Murdaugh arranged a settlement with only a small amount going to his family to pay for the man’s ongoing medical expenses. The man died two years later after his life support was suspiciously turned off. Murdaugh was there again filing a wrongful death suit against the man’s carers and another larger settlement was obtained of which an estimated $1.1m remains missing.
The scams began to unravel in 2018 when a housekeeper at Murdaugh’s home in Mosell, SC, suffered a serious head injury and died shortly afterwards. The cause of death was described as ‘natural’. No autopsy or coronial inquest took place. Murdaugh received a $5.8m payment on the housekeeper’s insurance policy and on this occasion, simply took the lot and split it with his accomplices.
The housekeeper’s family who received nothing, filed suit against Murdaugh and were ultimately able to scrape some money back. The legal action exposed Murdaugh’s scam and brought him to the attention of the state’s legal board, his own law firm and the police.
In July 2022, Alex was disbarred as a lawyer in South Carolina by order of the state’s Supreme Court. He did not appear in court to defend the action.
The housekeeper’s death is now regarded as suspicious and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division sought and obtained an order to exhume her body in 2022. The investigation continues.
It is by no means the only suspicious death that occurred in Murdaugh’s orbit. There is the bludgeoning death of a teenage boy, a friend of Murdaugh’s surviving son, Buster in 2015. SLED has reopened an investigation into that murder, too.
There is the negligent death of Mallory Beach, a 19-year-old woman who died of injuries sustained when a boat driven by Alex Murdaugh’s youngest son, Paul, crashed into a bridge. Paul Murdaugh who was then 19 and under state law prohibited from purchasing or consuming alcohol, had a blood-alcohol content of 0.286.
He was not arrested at the scene, and it would take three months before he was charged with one count of boating under the influence causing death and two counts of causing significant bodily injury. Paul pleaded not guilty to the charges and was released on a $75,000 bond.
And finally, the murders of Murdaugh’s 52-year-old wife, Margaret and his son Paul who was aged 22 on the night of June 7, 2021. Paul was hit with a shotgun blast to the arm and chest which left him wounded. He stumbled out towards the kennels at the family home and was shot again in the head, dying instantly. His mother was shot with multiple rounds of an AR-15 style rifle some ten metres away. Neither weapon has been found.
On September 8 of that year, Alex Murdaugh called 911 reporting that he been shot in the head while changing a tyre on the roadside. Initial police reports were blurry and claimed he suffered no injury while the single shot to his head caused a fractured skull and brain bleeding. A week later, he confessed to contriving the attempt on his life, having paid a man named Curtis Smith to shoot and kill him so his surviving son could claim the insurance money. Both he and Smith have been charged over the failed suicide for hire.
Just to ramp up the felony counts, both Murdaugh and Smith were also charged with drug related offences, including conspiracy to supply methamphetamine.
The running total as of this day is that Murdaugh is facing 106 criminal charges including fraud, drug offences and murder.
Today, Alex Murdaugh took the unusual step of giving evidence under oath in the trial for the murder of his wife and son. It is rare because no matter a suspect’s guilt or innocence, giving evidence necessarily means cross examination and that can end badly for the accused.
Under questioning from his own counsel, Murdaugh admitted he acknowledged he had lied to police about his whereabouts on the night of the murder. Murdaugh’s voice could be heard on a video taken on his son’s phone minutes before he was shot dead.
“I lied,” Murdaugh said under oath, claiming his judgment was clouded by an addiction to Oxycodone. “Once I lied. I continued to lie.”
But he denied that he had killed his wife and son, bursting into tears on occasion and referring to them by their family nicknames of “Maggs” and “Paw-Paw.”
His cross examination has only just begun and featured laborious answers and some further concessions on the fraud he is known to have committed.
Creighton Waters for the state of South Carolina, asked Murdaugh about lying to his clients. “Every single one of these, you had to sit down and look somebody in the eye and convince them that you were on their side when you were not, correct?”
Murdaugh replied that he lied and stole from his clients.
“I misled them. I did wrong.”
One way or another, justice will be served. Beyond the murder trial, Murdaugh faces so many felony counts, it is almost impossible to keep count. While his descent into consequence has already begun, this trial is his biggest challenge. Just how far can the privileged lawyer fall?
The trial continues.
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