Alex Murdaugh Trial: Housekeeper Reveals Maggie’s Anxiety

After first being informed by him that Maggie and Paul had been killed, she’d driven to see Alex at his mother’s home to comfort him and his surviving son, Buster. That’s where he asked her to go to the hunting lodge to “straighten up” in case they had concerned visitors drop by to offer condolences or plates of food. He even told her to enter the house via a different entrance than the one near the kennels, which were now buzzing with law enforcement officials.

“I just want the house to look the way that Maggie would like it to look,” Turrubiate-Simpson said Alex told her. 

Turrubiate-Simpson’s testimony on Friday to a packed courtroom at the Colleton County courthouse offered a detailed look at the goings-on of the Murdaugh family on the day leading up to their killings, as well as what was happening inside the house the following day. 

Prosecutors used Turrubiate-Simpson’s time on the witness stand to zero in on a series of unusual things that she had observed: the odd placement of the kitchenware and pajamas, the damp towel and puddle suggesting someone had showered, as well as some of Maggie’s last words to her friend and housekeeper. 

In a phone call on June 7, Maggie had said that she and Paul were heading to the hunting lodge that day because Alex had specifically asked them to be there, Turrubiate-Simpson testified. 

“She kind of sounded like she didn’t want to come home,” Turrubiate-Simpson said, describing how Maggie preferred to be at the family beach house, which was being renovated ahead of a planned 4th of July celebration. This mattered to Maggie even more than Alex’s father being in the hospital, Turrubiate-Simpson suggested. “She sounded like she was a little disappointed,” Turrubiate-Simpson said. 

But Turrubiate-Simpson’s testimony was also seized upon by the defense team as evidence of what they contend was a shockingly sloppy treatment of a crime scene. She testified that one or two agents had entered the house while she was there, but no one had ever asked her to leave or told her to preserve potential evidence. 

“I didn’t ask any questions. They didn’t ask me,” she said.

Alex had been wearing khaki pants and a seafoam green polo shirt earlier on the evening of June 7, as evidenced by a Snapchat video Paul had filmed of himself and his father earlier that night on the property. Turrubiate-Simpson had also seen him wearing the same outfit when he left for work that morning. She even recalled stopping him on his way out the door to fix his collar. 

Yet when Alex was first interviewed by police in the hours after the killings, he was wearing a different outfit: a clean white shirt and a pair of shorts. And while she washed a pair of khakis the next day, Turrubiate-Simpson said she never saw the seafoam shirt or his shoes from that night again.

Then in August 2021, Alex approached Turrubiate-Simpson for what she described as an unusual conversation about his shirt. Pacing back and forth, Alex asked her to sit down. “I got a bad feeling. Something’s not right,” she said he told her, alluding to a video that had emerged. 

He then asked if she remembered that he was wearing a shirt from “Vinny Vines,” or Vineyard Vines, on June 7. Turrubiate-Simpson said she stayed silent as Alex told her that was what he was wearing, because she specifically recalled fixing his collar that day and remembered the seafoam green polo shirt.

“It didn’t feel like he was inquiring,” Turrubiate-Simpson said. “It felt more like he was trying to convince me of the shirt that he was wearing.”

Turrubiate-Simpson’s testimony about Alex’s purported efforts to convince her about something he’d done that day mirrored that of Shelley Smith earlier in the week. Testifying Monday, Smith — the caregiver for Alex’s mother, whom Alex had visited briefly on the evening of June 7 before he says he returned to find his wife and son dead — described how Alex had approached her in the days after the murders to tell her he’d been with them at mother’s home for 30 to 40 minutes. But Smith said she knew it was more like 20 minutes. The conversation made her so uneasy at the time that she called her brother. “I was nervous,” Smith said.