WALTERBORO, S.C. — In the more than 20 months since his wife and son were killed, Alex Murdaugh, the scion of a South Carolina legal dynasty, has rarely spoken publicly, even when prosecutors charged him with the killings. As reports of his questionable financial dealings, a botched suicide plot and an expensive drug habit swirled in the national spotlight, he remained quiet.
But on Thursday, Mr. Murdaugh talked for hours. Taking the witness stand in his own murder trial, Mr. Murdaugh acknowledged that he had stolen from his law clients. He conceded that he had pocketed a check he was supposed to hand over to his law firm. And he admitted that he had lied to the police about his whereabouts on the night of the killings.
Still, Mr. Murdaugh, who at 54 has spent decades representing clients in courtrooms like the one where he has been on trial for the past four weeks, was adamant that he had never harmed his family.
In the courtroom, his lawyer, Jim Griffin, held up a shotgun. “Did you take this gun, or any gun like it, and blow your son’s brains out?” he asked.
“I didn’t shoot my wife or my son any time — ever,” Mr. Murdaugh replied, insisting that paranoia fueled by his painkiller addiction had led him to lie about his movements on the night of the June 2021 murders. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” he said. “Once I told a lie — then I told my family — I had to keep lying.”
Though Mr. Murdaugh was disbarred last year, he nonetheless managed to take the trial into his own hands on Thursday — and to become its star witness, for better or for worse. In choosing to testify, Mr. Murdaugh took a gamble that could determine whether he is acquitted or sent to prison for life.
His most formidable challenge was to explain why he had claimed to be at the family house when a video taken by his son actually showed that he was with his wife, Maggie, 52, and younger son, Paul, 22, at the family dog kennels nearby, minutes before the murder took place.
He lied, he said, because he feared that putting himself at the scene in the period before the murders would make the police consider him a suspect.
“I lied about being down there, and I’m so sorry that I did,” he said.
The trial in a small-town courtroom in Walterboro has been live streamed across the country, opening a window into a world of both simple country life and moneyed privilege: Mr. Murdaugh and his sons hunting deer and doves on the family’s 1,700-acre estate, frolicking on four-wheelers, gathering with TV trays around the television set for family dinners.
It has also revealed what amounted to Mr. Murdaugh’s double life. To many, he was a successful, fourth-generation lawyer who earned millions of dollars for his family’s firm and lived a life of comfort.
But Mr. Murdaugh admitted that many things were not as they seemed: Since having knee surgery years ago, he said, he had been addicted to oxycodone; he said he had stolen money to pay for it, often from his law firm and clients, some of whom had won settlements after severe injuries.
In his cross-examination of Mr. Murdaugh, which will continue on Friday morning, the lead prosecutor sought to drive home how frequently and easily Mr. Murdaugh had lied not just to the police, but also to others in his orbit. The prosecutor, Creighton Waters, held up a stack of papers relating to clients whom Mr. Murdaugh stole from.
“Every single one of these, you had to sit down and look somebody in the eye and convince them that you were on their side, when you were not, correct?” he asked while looking directly at the jury.
“What I admit is I misled them, I did wrong and that I stole their money,” Mr. Murdaugh responded.
Prosecutors have said that Mr. Murdaugh feared, at the time of the killings, that his financial malfeasance was about to be exposed, and that he murdered his wife and son to gain sympathy and halt investigations into his finances.
Mr. Waters spent much of Thursday’s cross-examination trying to establish that Mr. Murdaugh had benefited from the reputation of his storied family, and suggested that Mr. Murdaugh had felt as if he operated above the law. He held a volunteer position at the local prosecutor’s office that allowed him to carry a badge, and he had blue lights installed on his car.
Most of the prosecution’s questions dealt with Mr. Murdaugh’s financial and social dealings, and prosecutors ended the day without having asked Mr. Murdaugh about his movements on the night of the crimes, which was the focus of the defense questioning.
Mr. Murdaugh said he had eaten dinner with his wife, who then drove with their son to the dog kennels a short distance away on the property. Mr. Murdaugh had initially not wanted to go, but eventually followed after them in a golf cart, he said. He testified that after pulling a chicken from a dog’s mouth, he drove the golf cart back to the house to cool down in the air-conditioning.
Then, he said, he drove over to check on his mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Car and phone records indicate Mr. Murdaugh left his property at about 9:07 p.m. for the roughly 15-minute drive.
In prosecutors’ version of events, this was after Mr. Murdaugh carried out the murders and was an attempt to create an alibi. Mr. Murdaugh said he left without checking in again at the dog kennels and had no reason to worry about his wife and son.
It was not until 10 p.m., when he returned home to find the house empty, that he drove down to the kennels and, he says, discovered the gruesome crime scene.
“I saw what y’all have seen pictures of,” he told the jurors on Thursday as he broke down in tears. “So bad.”
Mr. Murdaugh said that over the following weeks and months, he cooperated with the police and, realizing that he was a suspect, was intent on vindicating himself through phone and car data.
“That was extremely important to me,” Mr. Murdaugh said.
His defense team has sought to portray the police investigation as sloppy, noting that some location data on Maggie Murdaugh’s phone from the day of the murders — which his lawyers suggest might vindicate Mr. Murdaugh — was overwritten.
Mr. Murdaugh’s testimony was also the first time he spoke extensively about his relationships with his wife and son. His wife, he said, was “such a lady.” While she “didn’t grow up in the swamp and in the country,” he said, she came to enjoy the area and raising their two boys.
His son, Paul Murdaugh, was “100 percent country boy,” cared deeply about people and was “fiercely loyal,” Mr. Murdaugh said.
Asked of their relationship, he said: “You couldn’t be any closer.”
Ben Shpigel contributed reporting.
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