An influential lawyer in the southern United States, Alex Murdaugh, was found guilty Thursday of the murder of his wife and son after a river trial, a true chronicle of the drift of a powerful, which captivated the whole country.
After six weeks of hearings, the fate of this 54-year-old man was decided in less than three hours. “The evidence of guilt is overwhelming,” Judge Clifton Newman commented on reading the verdict.
Standing, Alex Murdaugh showed no emotion, only blinking repeatedly. He faces life imprisonment and will be fixed on his sentence Friday morning.
This red-haired man with an imposing physique was accused of having stolen crazy sums from his law firm, from his friends and even from the son of his cleaning lady, and of having shot his relatives to avoid being unmasked.
If he admitted these thefts, intended according to him to feed a costly addiction to opiates and to compensate for bad investments, he never admitted the double murder.
“Alex Murdaugh tried one last shot to avoid being held accountable, as he had done all his life, but the jury was not fooled,” said prosecutor Creighton Waters who told him. had called a “master liar” in his indictment.
“It proves that no matter their power or social position, no one is above the law,” added State Attorney General Alan Wilson: “Alex Murdaugh’s house of cards, built on lies, manipulation and theft, has collapsed”.
Netflix
Alex Murdaugh shot dead his wife Maggie, 52, and their youngest son Paul, 22, with two separate guns on June 7, 2021, near the kennel of their sprawling property, dubbed Moselle, where the men liked to hunt, according to the prosecution. the wild pig.
The jurors went there on Wednesday to better understand the layout of the premises. It was the first time in a month and a half that the television cameras were kept away from the proceedings.
Because the case fascinated in the United States, where all the media, including the most serious, dissected the life of this opulent family, proud of its three generations of local prosecutors and judges, as well as the forfeiture of the father.
Several podcasts have already covered the case and a documentary, “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal”, is one of the most-watched programs on Netflix, with 40 million hours viewed in the country last week.
Throughout the trial, news channels live-streamed the parade of defrauded colleagues and friends, who recounted how Alex Murdaugh stole millions of dollars from them for years without their realizing it. .
But his image had ended up cracking, especially after the death of a young girl in a boat accident piloted by her son Paul, when the investigators had begun to take an interest in his finances.
“Absurd”
“The whole illusion of his life was going to crumble, he couldn’t stand it,” assured prosecutor Waters.
For him, Alex Murdaugh killed his relatives in order to buy time, before trying to end his life in a new scam: in early September, he had asked an accomplice to shoot him so that his surviving son could touch $10 million life insurance. The bullet had just grazed him.
At the helm, his lawyer Jim Griffin denounced an “absurd theory”, assured that he “adored” his wife and son, and underlined the absence of DNA or traces of blood to incriminate him.
But he had to recognize a disturbing element: a video filmed by Paul a few minutes before dying, in which we hear the voice of the father, while Alex Murdaugh had always denied having gone near the kennel that evening.
Last week, in a harrowing testimony, the disgraced lawyer had admitted to this lie, attributing it to paranoia caused by his addiction to drugs, while maintaining that he had not committed the double murder.
When he is confronted with the truth, “he backtracks, pivots and invents a new story,” retorted the prosecutor.