Alex Murdaugh, a well-known lawyer from a wealthy family in the southern United States, was sentenced this Friday to life imprisonment for murdering his wife and son. The case has kept the country on edge in recent weeks.
Judge Clifton Newman has sentenced Murdaugh, 54, a scion of a family of judges and lawyers, to two consecutive life sentences for the murders carried out on June 7, 2021. He has once again defended his innocence.
The day before, Thursday, Murdaugh was found guilty. “The evidence is overwhelming,” Judge Clifton Newman said after the jury delivered its unanimous verdict.
Standing in the courtroom, Murdaugh, scion of a family of three generations of local prosecutors and judges, remained impassive, though he blinked endlessly.
It took less than three hours of deliberation for jurors to find him guilty of shooting to death his wife Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and their son Paul Murdaugh, 22, on June 7, 2021, near the kennel. from his sprawling South Carolina estate, named Moselle.
He was accused of stealing vast amounts of money from his law office, from friends and even from his housekeeper’s son, and of having executed their relatives to avoid discovery.
The case has fascinated the United States, where the documentary The Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal is among the most watched on Netflix, with 40 million views last week.
“He fooled the whole world,” but “don’t be fooled” by this, “master con man,” prosecutor Creighton Waters told jurors Wednesday.
“Why would he have killed the two people he loves the most in the world?” his lawyer Jim Griffin responded Thursday, denouncing an “absurd theory” and asking for his acquittal citing the absence of material evidence.
The jurors visited the farm on Thursday to better understand the layout of the place. It was the first time in a month and a half that television cameras were unable to film.
“OPIOID ADDICTION”
Throughout the trial, news networks broadcast live the parade of defrauded colleagues and friends, who recounted how Alex Murdaugh, 54, stole millions of dollars from them.
Murdaugh acknowledged these frauds, which he attributes to bad investments and an addiction to opiates, and for which he will later be tried for the double homicide.
The shadows over Alex began after a young woman died in a boat accident piloted by her son under the influence of alcohol in 2019. The justice was interested in the state of the father’s finances to find out if he could pay the possible damages and damages.
“All the illusion of his life was going to collapse, he couldn’t bear it,” the prosecutor said.
In his opinion, Murdaugh murdered his relatives to buy time before attempting suicide. In early September, he asked an accomplice to kill him so his son would receive $10 million in life insurance. But the bullet barely grazed him.
“A VIDEO RECORDED BY HIS SON”
According to the prosecutor, Alex Murdaugh used his professional experience to tamper with the crime scene, change his clothes and erase the conversation history, the prosecutor said. He also “made an alibi” by visiting his senile mother and making calls right after the crime, Waters said.
“But there’s one thing he couldn’t control,” the prosecutor said. A video recorded by his son minutes before he died, in which his father’s voice is heard, despite the fact that he always denied having been near the kennel that day.
Last week the defendant admitted to having lied but said that it was due to paranoia caused by his dependence on drugs. He nevertheless denied the double murder.
Confronted with the truth, “go back, change and invent a new story,” the prosecutor reacted.
