Alex Murdaugh Convicted Of Murdering Wife And Son

On the very morning his wife and son were killed, the chief financial officer of Alex’s law firm had confronted him about nearly $800,000 in missing fees, telling him she had reason to suspect he’d stolen them. It was the first time in his years of alleged thefts from clients and the firm that someone appeared to be onto him. But, the CFO later testified, the murders brought a sudden end to any internal inquiry as colleagues rallied around Alex to support him. 

“Alex was distraught and upset and not in the office much,” said Jeanne Seckinger, the CFO. “Nobody wanted to harass him about nothing that we thought was really missing.”

Similarly, the killings also delayed a lawsuit against Alex from the family of 19-year-old Mallory Beach, who was killed in a 2019 boat crash over which Paul had been charged with involuntary manslaughter. The Beach family had been seeking a court order to force Alex to open up his finances for review, with the matter scheduled to be heard on June 10 — three days after the killings. Not only was that hearing delayed, but the entire lawsuit seemed as good as over after the deaths, Beach family lawyer Mark Tinsley testified, because juries would suddenly be immensely sympathetic to him.

“If Alex had been victimized by a vigilante, nobody would have brought a verdict back against Alex,” Tinsley said.

In his first words to a 911 dispatcher and responding officers at the scene, Alex pointed to the boat crash as the motive for the killings. Paul had been shunned and threatened because of the incident, Alex said, while Maggie had essentially decamped full-time to the family’s beach home elsewhere in the state to avoid the negative local attention. 

“I know that’s what this is,” Alex told the very first sheriff’s deputy who arrived on the scene. 

Indeed, others also immediately suspected that the murders must have been connected to the boat crash. There had been complaints that Alex and his father used their legal influence to try to interfere with the investigation into Paul, and now those close to the Murdaughs feared the family was being targeted in revenge.

“We were afraid. We didn’t know what was going on. My family was scared. I was scared for Alex and Buster. I thought that they needed protection. I think everybody was afraid,” said Maggie’s sister, Marian Proctor. 

Everyone, Proctor said, except one person: “Alex didn’t seem to be afraid.”

By far the most damning piece of evidence against Alex, though, was a video that investigators eventually recovered from Paul’s phone months after the murders. Filmed by Paul just a few minutes before prosecutors contended he and Maggie were shot dead — a time estimate based on their phones both locking for a final time by 8:50 p.m. — the 50 seconds of footage showed Paul trying to corral a dog at the kennels as two voices could be heard in the background. Witness after witness identified the voices as belonging to Maggie and Alex. 

Alex repeatedly told both investigators and his own surviving family that he had not seen his wife or son prior to waking up from a post-dinner nap and then driving to his mother’s home. But this video proved that his version of events was not correct. He had been with them just minutes before each of their phones were locked for the final time.

Alex’s defense team eventually conceded the state had proven that he was with his wife and son at that point in time, but insisted that his mere presence at the scene did not indicate guilt. They also denied he was present when the pair were eventually killed, arguing that the state couldn’t even definitively say when that was. 

When Alex made the surprise decision to testify in his own defense, he was forced to admit almost immediately that he had been found out as a result of the video and that he had lied about his whereabouts before the murders — something he blamed on drug-induced paranoia. He apologized for lying to his loved ones, but insisted he had nothing to do with the killings. 

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” Alex said, quoting the 1808 epic poem Marmion by Sir Walter Scott. “Once I told the lie, and I told my family, I had to keep lying.”

Another shocking piece of evidence that emerged early in the trial was a recording of an interview Alex had done with investigators three days after the murders. Asking him about a graphic photo he’d seen of the extent of Paul’s head wounds, prosecutors contended that Alex made a Freudian slip, of sorts: “It’s just so bad. I did him so bad,” they insisted he said.

Alex’s lawyers, however, claimed that he had in fact been saying, “They did him so bad,” even calling Buster to the stand to support their interpretation of the tape.