Jury finds Alex Murdaugh guilty of murder of wife and son

Alex Murdaugh, the fourth-generation lawyer whose family long exerted influence in small town South Carolina courtrooms, was convicted on Thursday of murdering his wife and son, sealing the dramatic downfall of a man who had substantial wealth and powerful connections but who lived a secret life in which he stole millions of dollars from clients and colleagues and lied to many of those closest to him.

The guilty verdict in Walterboro, South Carolina, followed a closely watched trial that lasted nearly six weeks, and it came more than 20 months after the June 2021 fatal shootings of Murdaugh’s wife, Maggie, 52, and their younger son, Paul, 22, near the dog kennels on the family’s rural estate. The grisly crime stunned the South Carolina Lowcountry in part because of the storied history of the Murdaugh family, which controlled a regional prosecutor’s office for more than 80 years and ran a law firm for even longer.

In finding Murdaugh guilty, jurors rejected his claim that he had left the crime scene minutes before the shootings, an assertion Murdaugh made from the witness stand only after prosecutors played a video contradicting his long-standing claim to have never been there at all. The crucial, minute-long video recorded at the kennels happened to capture Murdaugh’s voice in the background. It was taken by Paul Murdaugh in one of his last living moments in an act that inadvertently helped to secure the conviction of his father.

Prosecutors said Murdaugh killed his wife and son in a failed effort to keep his longtime embezzlement of millions of dollars from being exposed. Defense lawyers argued that the police had become so fixated on Murdaugh as a suspect that they had “fabricated” evidence and a dubious theory about his possible motive.

The prosecution leaned on Murdaugh’s lies in its arguments to the jury — he also admitted to a string of falsehoods to his legal clients and partners as he stole from them over a course of many years — but there was little in the way of physical evidence in the case.