Taped Interview Reveals Roadside Shooting Motive

Sitting shirtless in the back of an ambulance on an isolated rural road in South Carolina, Alex Murdaugh told a shocking story to the paramedics treating him for a gunshot wound to the head: He’d stopped to change a tire that had suddenly gone flat when a man in a truck passed him, before doubling back and offering to help — only to then shoot him. 

“A real nice guy — acted like it,” Alex said. “I turned my head and, I mean, boom.”

The date was Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021. It had been almost three months since Alex’s wife, Maggie, and son Paul were fatally shot by an unknown assailant at their hunting lodge. Now, here was Alex being readied to be airlifted to a hospital in Savannah, Georgia, to get treated for gunshot injuries himself. Although the wounds he sustained were minor, it appeared to most observers that someone was indeed out to get the Murdaugh family. 

And yet, Alex would admit within a matter of days that the entire story of the roadside shooting was a work of fiction. 

What authorities did not yet know was that the roadside shooting happened a day after the partners at the family law firm where Alex had long worked forced him to resign after discovering he’d allegedly been stealing from them and their clients for years. They’d been planning to wait until Monday to announce the news, when they too learned that Alex had been shot. 

That very Saturday morning, just hours before the roadside incident, his longtime friend Chris Wilson had also confronted him after learning about the missing funds and resignation. Alex, who owed Wilson almost $200,000 after lying to him about a legal settlement, explained how he’d stolen from his friend and others to purchase oxycodone and other opioids, Wilson said.

After years of allegedly hiding extensive financial misdeeds and a drug addiction — secrets so dark and ruinous, prosecutors say, that they drove him to kill Maggie and Paul in order to avoid them being discovered — Alex had finally been unmasked. 

“I was in a very bad place,” Alex said in a Sept. 13, 2021, phone interview with investigators that was played in court on Thursday at his murder trial. “I thought it would be better for me not to be here anymore. I thought it would make it easier on my family for me to be dead.”