After 19 months of speculation, prosecutors finally laid out their evidence Wednesday that Alex Murdaugh killed his wife and son as they opened the double murder trial for the disgraced South Carolina attorney.
After 19 months of speculation, prosecutors finally laid out their evidence Wednesday that Alex Murdaugh killed his wife and son as they opened the double murder trial for the disgraced South Carolina attorney.
After 19 months of speculation, prosecutors finally laid out their evidence Wednesday that Alex Murdaugh killed his wife and son as they opened the double murder trial for the disgraced South Carolina attorney.
There was gunshot residue on a seat belt, bullets pulled from bodies that matched ammunition boxes from around the home and cellphones never used again just a few minutes after Murdaugh, his wife and son were all heard in a cellphone video, prosecutor Creighton Waters said in his opening statement.
“It’s complicated. It’s a journey. There’s a lot of aspects to this case,” Waters said. “But like a lot of things that are complicated, we start to put them all together, piecing together like a puzzle — all the sudden, a picture emerges.“
A defense lawyer said prosecutors incorrectly locked in on Murdaugh’s guilt from the start and have spent all that time trying to jam bits of evidence that can be explained away or leave an incomplete picture into a story that frames the wrong man.
“There’s no direct evidence. There’s no eyewitnesses. There’s nothing on camera. There’s no fingerprints. There’s no forensics tying him to the crime. None,” defense lawyer Dick Harpootlian said.
Waters opened the trial with three minutes of graphic description of the scene where the bodies of Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and her son, Paul, 22, were found shot with at least one bullet to the head by two different guns, pointing to Paul Murdaugh’s head and calling it “catastrophic damage.”
Harpootlian added even more gruesome details — how the shotgun blast that killed Paul Murdaugh was so close to his head that his brain exploded from his skull and was found at his feet.
