Roughly three hours after he claimed to have first come across the bodies of his slain wife and son at their rural South Carolina hunting lodge on June 7, 2021, Alex Murdaugh gave his first interview with investigators.
Sitting inside a vehicle parked on the property just before 1 a.m. and joined by his lawyer, Murdaugh spoke with Colleton County Sheriff’s Detective Laura Rutland and a state agent. He told them how he’d found his family shot dead near dog kennels on the property after returning from a visit to his mother.
“I knew something was bad. I ran out and then it was really bad,” he told the authorities in the interview, a video recording of which was played Friday in court at his closely watched murder trial.
Both Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were laying in pools of blood and brain matter, having been shot in the head. Distraught, Alex described seeing his son’s brain exposed from the gunshot wound.
“I think I tried to turn Paul over first. I tried to turn him over,” Alex said, describing how his son’s cellphone had fallen out of his pockets when he did so.
“I touched them both. I tried to do it as limited as possible, but I tried to take their pulse, both of them,” Alex said.
Testifying in court on Friday, Rutland said that while she was sitting in the car with Alex she made a mental note: “That he was clean,” she told the jury.
Reenacting the physical effort Alex would have needed to exert to move his son’s body in order to check his pulse, prosecutor John Meadors asked Rutland if she observed any blood at all on Alex’s hands, arms, shirt, shorts, or shoes. Rutland said she did not. “They were clean,” Rutland testified.
“Is the individual you describe as clean from head to toe in this courtroom?” Meadors asked.
“Yes, he is,” she responded, pointing to Alex.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/alex-murdaugh-trial-blood
