The Lingering Thriller of the Alex Murdaugh Homicide Trial

The trial of the South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh for the homicide of his spouse, Maggie, and his son Paul was anticipated to final three weeks, however as an alternative went on for six. It was a fittingly epic finale to the protracted downfall of Murdaugh, the scion of a outstanding authorized dynasty, whose saga concerned embezzlement, drug trafficking, cash laundering, a faked homicide try, a failed assisted suicide, and the deaths of three different people. It was additionally a fittingly theatrical spectacle, echoing the remainder of the Murdaugh story with its notes of excessive tragedy, low farce, and macabre horror.

In the middle of the trial, somebody known as in a bomb menace. A protection lawyer pointed a rifle on the prosecution whereas proffering theories of how the shootings had occurred. Two jurors had been knocked out by COVID-19 and two extra owing to different medical issues. A fifth was eliminated on the final day for discussing the case exterior court docket; as she was despatched on her method, she informed the choose she’d left a dozen eggs within the jury room, offering a uncommon second of comedian aid. There have been exchanges concerning the trajectory of evacuated brains which may have come out of “Breaking Unhealthy,” and others extra harking back to “Gone with the Wind,” with household retainers speaking of “Miss Maggie” and “Mr. Alex,” and extravagantly decorous ma’am-ing and sir-ing all spherical. We heard a terrific deal concerning the Murdaugh household’s looking property, Moselle, with its dove fields and quail pens, its swamps filled with hogs and forests filled with deer, its shotguns, pistols, and semi-automatic rifles so quite a few that their house owners had lengthy misplaced rely. Over strenuous objections from the protection, we additionally heard how Murdaugh had stolen huge sums of cash from colleagues, household, and the victims he’d represented as a personal-injury lawyer. The choose had dominated these crimes admissible on the bottom that they had been related to his alleged motive for the murders: confronted with spoil from the upcoming publicity of his frauds and thefts, the prosecution’s principle went, Murdaugh had determined that the one approach to save himself was to develop into a sufferer—sympathy for a bereaved husband and father would supplant the gathering storm of suspicion, and the murders themselves may very well be attributed to threats that Paul had acquired after allegedly inflicting the dying of a younger girl, Mallory Seashore, in a ship crash in 2019.

What we didn’t hear a lot about in the course of the trial was Murdaugh’s cousin Eddie, the alleged shooter in Murdaugh’s botched assisted suicide, and his potential confederate in narcotics schemes that each males have been charged with. Apart from some darkish hints within the protection’s opening statements, we didn’t hear a lot concerning the violent drug traffickers with whom Murdaugh supposedly fell into debt after Eddie cheated them. (Eddie’s legal professionals deny claims that Eddie cheated anybody or skimmed any of this cash.) We didn’t hear what position Eddie or the traffickers performed, if any, within the protection’s principle that there have been two shooters, and we heard nothing in any respect concerning the failed polygraph take a look at that Murdaugh’s attorneys had made public earlier than the trial, wherein Eddie was requested if he had been current on the murders or knew something about them. Nor did we hear as a lot as some would have preferred concerning the brown hair present in Maggie Murdaugh’s hand or the unidentified DNA recovered from underneath her fingernail.

Not like the spectators crammed into the Walterboro courtroom, these of us following the trial on-line couldn’t see the jury. However we did have the benefit of reside commentary from the likes of Nancy Grace and O. J. Simpson (“I do suppose this man greater than seemingly did it,” Simpson mentioned in a video posted on Twitter), together with the same old spate of inventively tasteless memes, eye-roll gifs (“Me watching Alex Murdaugh cry”), and florid misinformation. (John Grisham was not, in actual fact, current within the courtroom.) We heard from consultants—some accredited, most self-appointed—on physique language, jail prepping, and the prison thoughts. Each lawyer was appraised for authorized effectiveness and for leisure worth. Followers of the goateed lead prosecutor, Creighton Waters, posted movies of him rocking out in his former life because the lead guitarist of the quilt band Sole Function. In the course of the protection’s closing arguments, the incredulous facial expressions of the prosecutor Savanna Goude went viral.

For all of the circus surrounding the trial, the actual fact is that two folks had been brutally murdered and a 3rd was dealing with the opportunity of life behind bars. The case towards Murdaugh was based mostly solely on circumstantial proof, a lot of it gleaned from the treacherous surveillance know-how of automobiles and telephones. For anybody who might comply with it, the telemetry-related testimony was a sobering lesson within the extent to which our gadgets are watching us, and in addition the diploma to which fashionable forensics can penetrate into the best crevices of previous occasions. Out of the mass of knowledge that prosecutors harvested, they had been capable of create an in depth time line of the fateful evening at Moselle. Virtually each step that the three members of the family took, each inch travelled and motion carried out of their autos, each repositioning of their telephones, was accounted for.

Whether or not the accounting was as correct as prosecutors recommended, or as unambiguous in its implications, was one other matter. The protection tried to advance its two-shooter principle early within the trial by utilizing knowledge from Maggie’s and Murdaugh’s telephones to make a believable case that somebody apart from Murdaugh will need to have thrown Maggie’s cellphone into the woods the place it was later discovered. Different makes an attempt to undermine the credibility of the investigation by the South Carolina Legislation Enforcement Division (SLED) had been aided by some clear blunders on the division’s half. Essentially the most notable had been an inner fiasco involving a declare that they’d discovered high-velocity spatter on Murdaugh’s shirt, which was later walked again (although not earlier than the state grand jury had indicted Murdaugh for the murders), and an inexplicable failure to make a well timed search of Murdaugh’s mother and father’ property, to which he drove after the shootings and the place he might have stowed the 2 homicide weapons earlier than hiding them irretrievably. (Police lastly searched the place three months later.) Legislation enforcement additionally made far an excessive amount of of a muffled phrase spoken by Murdaugh in one in all his police interviews, which some folks claimed to listen to as “I did him so dangerous” (referring to his son), however which others heard as “They did him so dangerous.” Whichever it was, it hardly bolstered their portrayal of Murdaugh as a cold-blooded “household annihilator” to insist that he’d blurted out a confession like some conscience-stricken Lowcountry Raskolnikov.

However the prosecution had one piece of incontrovertible and deeply damning proof, particularly a video clip discovered on Paul’s cellphone that captured Murdaugh’s voice close to the kennels the place his spouse and son had been shot, putting him on the scene of the crime within the slim window of the victims’ seemingly occasions of dying. The video, of a pal’s canine, featured nothing extra sinister than a raucous little household drama within the background involving the rescue of a hen from the jaws of the household’s personal canine Bubba, but it surely proved Murdaugh to be a liar—he’d informed police in three separate interviews that he hadn’t gone right down to the kennels with Maggie and Paul that evening—and fatally compromised his alibi.