Timeline puts Murdaugh at crime scene, SC prosecutor says in closing argument

Only one person could have murdered Maggie and Paul Murdaugh the night of June 7, 2021, South Carolina prosecutor Creighton Waters told jurors who will decide whether former Lowcountry attorney Alex Murdaugh is guilty of the crimes

“Only one person had the motive, the means and the opportunity to commit these crimes, and whose guilty conduct after these crimes betrays him,” Waters said, at times extending his right arm to point at a grim-faced Murdaugh, 54, sitting at the defense table across the room.

Waters spoke for nearly three hours in three different segments Wednesday morning and afternoon, attempting in a long-anticipated closing argument to summarize hundreds of exhibits and testimony from 61 prosecution witnesses about the execution-style slayings. Maggie and Paul were killed at the dog kennels on the Murdaugh family’s 1,770-acre estate, called Moselle.

Evidence included gory autopsy photos so graphic that only the jury was allowed to see them. Witnesses also testified about Murdaugh’s numerous financial crimes involving more than $10 million in stolen money and years of betrayals of colleagues, friends, clients and family members.

A key theme of Waters’ argument was the lies Murdaugh told to everyone — the prosecutor repeated the words “lie,” “liar,” “lying” and “lied” at least a hundred times during his argument — as the former attorney lived a hidden life of theft, mounting debt and drug addiction.

On June 7, 2021, Murdaugh knew his lies about embezzlement were on the verge of being exposed by his firm and a 2019 lawsuit over a boat crash. As an “outwardly successful middle-aged man” who was respected by the community, family and fellow lawyers and who owned a vast country estate, Murdaugh plotted to kill Maggie and Paul, Waters told the jury.

The threats to his life of lies were a “gathering storm” that had reached “a crescendo” on the day of the murders, Waters told the jury. That morning, he had been confronted by Jeanne Seckinger, who manages the firm’s finances, about a missing $792,000 fee he was supposed to have deposited in the firm’s client trust account.

In committing a rare kind of murder known as ‘’family annihilation,” Murdaugh quickly became an object of sympathy in the community and shut down not only his law firm’s investigation into his thefts, but he also delayed and perhaps scuttled a lawsuit against him in which the plaintiff’s lawyer, Mark Tinsley, was seeking millions of dollars, Waters said.

After the deaths of his wife and son, those pressures “immediately go away,” Waters said.

After the killings, his law partners stopped asking about the missing money, and Tinsley no longer believed the case could succeed, Waters told the jury.

Murdaugh carefully planned the crime, Waters said, using two weapons — a shotgun and a .300 Blackout assault-type rifle — to make people think there were two shooters. Then he got rid of the weapons, putting them in a place that baffled law officers have never been able to locate, Waters said.

In one of the most dramatic parts of his arguments, Waters re-created the killings, describing how Paul was shot first with two shotgun blasts, and when Maggie “runs to her baby... Alex moves around her firing” with his .300 Blackout. The kill shot to Maggie was at her head, he said.

“We couldn’t bring any eyewitnesses because they had been murdered,” Waters said.

After the killings, Murdaugh quickly stripped and washed himself off with a hose at the kennels, then “jetted” back to the main house, where he hid his blood-soaked clothes, dressed and jumped in his Chevrolet Suburban to visit his ailing mother, roughly about a 15-minute drive away, he said.

Waters’ also derided an anticipated argument by defense lawyers that will come on Thursday, that Paul and Maggie were killed by roving “vigilantes” who were full of hate.

Some of Murdaugh’s biggest lies were that he was not at the murder scene minutes before Maggie and Paul were believed to have been killed. For months, Murdaugh told people he was napping in the estate’s main house around the time of the killings and was nowhere near the dog kennels.

That lie held up until April 2022, Waters told the jury, when investigators finally cracked the pass code to Paul’s cellphone. The biggest clue found was a video Paul had taken at 8:44 pm on June 7, 2021 — just minutes before he and Maggie are believed to have been shot. A voice on the video was identified by numerous witnesses as Murdaugh’s.

The video, whose existence was kept confidential until the trial, forced Murdaugh to go on the witness stand last week. In hours of cross examination by Waters, he admitted his life of lies but insisted he did not kill Maggie and Paul, weeping at times as he professed his love for them.

Murdaugh faces life in prison without parole if convicted of shooting Maggie, 52, and Paul, 22.

The trial got a late start Wednesday, giving attorneys for both sides more time to polish their closing arguments.

The attorneys got some extra time because Judge Clifton Newman agreed to send the jury of 12 men and women, plus two alternates, to visit the Moselle estate and look at the dog kennels. The jurors traveled as a group, accompanied by lawyers for each side, Newman and a guard of deputies.

Attorney Jim Griffin is expected to give the closing argument for the defense, when court resumes Thursday morning.

Newman is expected to charge the jury about the laws in the case sometime Thursday after Griffin finishes and another prosecutor, likely John Meadors, gives a second prosecution argument.

After that, the jury will begin deliberations on whether the state has proven Murdaugh’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. No one knows how long it will take for the 12 men and women to reach a decision.

Few observers predict an acquittal; most predictions are for a hung jury or a guilty verdict.

National attention

The six-week trial has attracted national and international attention on South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where three generations of Murdaugh’s family served as the five-county region’s lead prosecutor. Murdaugh admitted on the stand last week he once harbored aspirations of being the fourth Murdaugh to be elected to the role. But his trial has raised questions about how well law firms protect their clients’ money and revealed details of the seedier side of Murdaugh’s life, including an admitted drug addiction, financial troubles and legal deception.

Murdaugh faces more than 90 separate charges that he stole millions of dollars from various victims, including the law firm founded by his great-grandfather and clients who trusted him to handle their money from legal settlements, many of them children injured in car wrecks.

Former Palmetto State Bank CEO Russell Laffitte was convicted in November 2022 by a federal jury on bank fraud charges related to financial moves he took to help out Murdaugh.

Murdaugh admitted to all those those thefts when he took the stand and testified for nearly eight hours last week. But he emphatically denied prosecutors’ claims that the threat of the looming exposure of those crimes drove him to kill Maggie and Paul.

The state has presented a completely circumstantial case, with no direct physical evidence tying Murdaugh to the crimes. Unlike many other high profile killings, there is no video and no witnesses. While the murder weapons have never been found, prosecutors say comparisons between shell casings at the scene and others found on the property prove they were family weapons.

Prosecutors have built a timeline of the killings based on activity on Paul and Maggie’s cellphones at 8:49 p.m. Maggie’s cellphone records movement from 8:53 p.m. to 9:08 p.m., during which time it traveled from the kennels to the side of the road outside Moselle. Data from Murdaugh’s phone and his car also recorded his movements leaving the property around the same time.

‘What’s he so concerned about?’

Most damning might be the 58-second cellphone video shot by Paul moments before his death, the one with Murdaugh’s clearly identifiable voice.

In his argument, Waters noted that Murdaugh consistently lied about being at the kennels, even when family friend Rogan Gibson said he heard Murdaugh’s voice in the background of a phone call with Paul that night.

“Law enforcement didn’t have this kennel video until April of 2022, when the phone was unlocked,” Waters said. “Why would a loving husband and father lie about that, and lie about it so early? ‘Rogan was mistaken.’ ‘I’m surprised.’ ‘Not if my times are right.’ That’s what he said.”

Waters also noted that Murdaugh must have been aware Paul was talking to Gibson, because he would have seen missed calls and texts from Gibson on Paul’s phone after he was shot. Murdaugh’s phone shows he tried to call Gibson multiple times the night he says he found the bodies.

“He’s calling Rogan before he calls many of his family,” Waters said. “Before he calls Buster, he calls Rogan multiple times. Those messages would have come through on Paul’s phone. What’s he so concerned about?”

Waters continued that Murdaugh “was forced to do what he’s done all the time, come up with a new lie when he’s confronted with evidence he cannot deny. That’s because all those witnesses sat there and said, ‘That’s him. He was there.’”

The prosecutor went on to play video of Murdaugh’s initial interview with investigators that night, pointing out each time he must have been lying about his movements that night.

Not a single person close to Murdaugh knew who he really was, Waters said.

“Not a single person close to him had not been lied to by this man, and this is the most blatant one yet,” he said.

The defense has hammered on flaws in the investigation they say show that the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division zeroed in on Murdaugh early to the exclusion of other possible suspects. The defense also has claimed that others had more reason to want Paul dead over his involvement in a 2019 boat crash that killed teenager Mallory Beach. Paul was facing criminal charges in the crash when he was killed.

In his closing, Waters said the law does not treat circumstantial evidence as less valid than direct evidence. He also said the legal standard of reasonable doubt doesn’t mean the jurors have no doubt at all.

To illustrate, Waters held up a picture of the Mona Lisa and ripped off a corner. The picture remained intact.

The picture is now incomplete, but: “You still know what this is.”

Waters noted that Murdaugh seemed unconcerned about finding whoever was responsible for the murders, nor was he concerned about whether he or his surviving son Buster were under threat.

“Why is there no threat to Buster? Because he (Murdaugh) was the threat,” Waters said.

Waters reminded the jury that “common sense” and their knowledge of “human nature” should serve to guide them in their quest to reach a verdict.

Waters told the jury that for years Murdaugh had fooled everybody. “Don’t let him fool you too.”

Jury visits Moselle

On Wednesday morning, the jury toured the Moselle dog kennels property and visited the outside of the main house, along with other Colleton County personnel and members of law enforcement, some of whom testified for the state earlier in the trial.

In addition to the judge and other court officials, Murdaugh’s defense attorneys Dick Harpootlian and Margaret Fox were also on scene, as was S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson.

A three-person media pool was allowed to go on the property as well: Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein, Post and Courier photographer Andrew Whitaker and Steven Gresham, a photojournalist for Court TV.

The reporters followed behind the jury, who were only visible for several minutes.

“We had a few seconds to view them as they walked the narrow path between the kennels and the shed. One juror was standing in the feed room door, glancing up at the doorway that has been the subject of so much wrenching testimony,” wrote Bauerlein, a former reporter for The State Media Co. who has taken a leave of absence from The Wall Street Journal to write a book on the Murdaugh saga.

“The grass on the property is tall and the shrubs outside the caretaker’s cabin are bushy and overgrown. The black mailbox at the entrance to the kennels is covered in pollen and spiderwebs. There is a ‘no trespassing’ sign tied to a post at the top of the mailbox,” Bauerlein added.

“The birdsong is constant and beautiful; the sky is still overcast,” wrote Bauerlein.