Alex Murdaugh denied bond, ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation
Embattled South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh will remain behind bars, a judge ruled Tuesday.
He was denied bond by Judge Clifton Newman, who rejected prosecutors’ request of a $200,000 surety bond and a GPS monitor. Murdaugh’s lawyers requested that he be released without bond and allowed to return to drug rehab in Florida.
“Murdaugh is a danger… A man who is a danger to himself is a danger to others,” Assistant Attorney General Creighton Waters said at the bond hearing in Richland County Court. “This is the tip of the iceberg. There is far more we will reveal soon.”
Murdaugh has been charged in a scheme to steal millions of dollars from the children of his family’s longtime housekeeper, who died in 2018 after allegedly falling on their Hampton County property. According to prosecutors, the legal scion coordinated with the sons of Gloria Satterfield to sue himself, then instead kept most of the $4.3 million settlement.
Satterfield’s sons, who have also sued Murdaugh, claim they never saw a cent of the insurance payout.
“At the funeral of Ms. Satterfield, Mr. Murdaugh tells the family, ‘Hey, she fell at the house, it was because of the dogs, it was my fault and I’m going to take you to a lawyer so y’all can file a claim and get some compensation for the death of your mom,’” Waters said Tuesday.
The Murdaugh family mysteries: a timeline of murders, cryptic deaths, scandals and power
That lawyer, Cory Fleming, was Murdaugh’s college roommate and the godfather to his youngest son, a fact he failed to disclose to Satterfield’s sons, Tony Satterfield and Brian Harris.
Fleming has since had his law license suspended.
The South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division opened an investigation into Satterfield’s supposed trip-and-fall death last month after Hampton County Coroner Angela Topper reported inconsistencies with the cause of death — and that no autopsy had been performed.
“Today is the day that Alex Murdaugh needs to get comfortable being uncomfortable,” Eric Bland, the lawyer representing Satterfield’s family, told the court. “Our position is, he does not deserve bond. He stole. He’s a liar and a cheat.”
The same name written on the insurance checks that Murdaugh allegedly received was also listed on a bank account to which millions of dollars were funneled from Murdaugh’s law firm, according to a lawsuit filed against him.
In separate charges, Murdaugh has also been accused of insurance fraud for arranging with a former client to shoot him so his elder son, Buster, could get his $10 million life insurance payout.
According to Murdaugh’s lawyers, the lawyer was distraught after the deaths of his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in June and had fallen into a drug addiction and saw no way out but dying.
He accidentally survived.
His lawyer, Jim Griffin, revealed last week that Murdaugh is a person of interest in the deaths of Maggie and Paul, who he found fatally shot on their property.
“He had no motive to kill them,” Griffin told Fox Carolina.
“You would think that if Alex was the one who did it, that SLED would have been able to establish that pretty easily that night. You would think they would have searched his house and found blood somewhere. You would think they would have found the murder weapons on the property. You would think they would come up with something to link Alex to the murders, forensically or independent evidence. To my knowledge, they have not done that.”
State police are also looking into Murdaugh’s ties to the 2015 hit-and-run death of 19-year-old Stephen Smith the 2019 boating death of 19-year-old Mallory Beach.
Newman ordered Murdaugh Tuesday to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before he reconsidered bail.
