After six weeks of avidly watched hearings across the United States, US attorney Alex Murdaugh, 54, was sentenced Friday, March 3, to two life sentences which will apply one after the another for the murder in 2021 of his wife and son, following a trial which revealed the extent of the decline of this heir to a large South Carolina family.
Before pronouncing the sentence, Judge Clifton Newman spoke at length to Alex Murdaugh in a calm tone that was all the more bitter, saying his incomprehension at the "duplicity" and the lies of the lawyer. The latter, handcuffed and dressed in a beige prison uniform, again claimed his innocence. His son Buster was in the room. “I respect this court, but I am innocent. I would never hurt my wife Maggie and (…) my son,” he said.
On Thursday, jurors in court in Walterboro, South Carolina, needed just under three hours to reach their verdict. "The evidence of guilt is overwhelming," the judge commented upon reading the verdict.
Win time
Alex Murdaugh shot and killed his wife Maggie, 52, and their youngest son Paul, 22, with two separate guns on June 7, 2021, in Colleton County, South Carolina, near the kennel of their sprawling property, according to the prosecution. , called Moselle, where men liked to hunt wild pigs. The jurors went there on Wednesday to better understand the layout of the premises.
According to the prosecution, in June 2021, however, several people had started asking questions. First, because his son Paul had, while driving a boat drunk in 2019, killed one of his friends. As the trial approached, the courts sought to know the state of the father's finances to find out if he could pay any damages. Then, because the financial manager of his law firm had spotted anomalies in his files. The morning of the murder, she had asked him for an explanation. He was accused of stealing money from his friends and even the son of his cleaning lady.
"The whole illusion of his life was going to crumble, he couldn't stand it," prosecutor Creighton Waters assured. For him, Alex Murdaugh killed his loved ones to buy time, before trying to end his life in a new scam. In early September, he asked an accomplice to shoot him so that his surviving son would receive $10 million in life insurance. The bullet had just grazed him.
If he admitted these thefts, intended according to him to feed a costly addiction to opiates and to compensate for bad investments, he never admitted the double murder.
Articles, podcasts, documentaries
The case fascinated the United States, where all the media dissected the life of this opulent family. Coming from a long line of very influential judges and prosecutors locally, Alex Murdaugh knows the world of courtrooms well. For his trial, he also had to get the painting from his grandfather, who sat for a long time in the court of Walterboro.
Several podcasts have already covered the case and a documentary, Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, is one of the most-watched programs on Netflix, with 40 million hours watched in the United States last week.
Throughout the trial, news channels live-streamed the parade of defrauded colleagues and friends, who recounted how Alex Murdaugh stole millions of dollars from them for years without their realizing it. .
