Murdaugh’s murder investigation concluded he had been lying to investigators about a stash of pills three months after his death, and it led to a settlement
Prosecutors presented evidence Friday that showed Paul confronted his father about a stash of pills a month before he and his mother were killed.
The conversation happened just three months after the deaths of Murdaugh’s wife and son as the law firm announced it had discovered financial wrongdoing.
The trial on the deaths of the Murdaughs is about to enter its third week. Alex Murdaugh has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and two weapons charges.
Murdaugh had the ability to commit the murders, as prosecutors have shown. Audio from a Snapchat video recovered from his son’s phone places Murdaugh at the murder scene, prosecutors contend, contrary to his alibi to investigators that he was not there that night.
“They’ve got a whole lot more evidence about financial misconduct than they do about evidence of guilt in a murder case. And that’s what this is all about,” defense lawyer Jim Griffin said last week.
Murdaugh later asked Wilson to rewrite the check and make it out to the law firm, he testified. Wilson had to spend $192,000 of his own money to cover the difference, after Murdaugh wired him $600,000 but he didn’t have the full funds.
The checks ultimately played a key role in Murdaugh’s law firm’s discovery that he had been misappropriating funds, according to testimony from his coworkers.
Michael Satterfield, the son of Gloria Satterfield, testified Thursday about being defrauded by Murdaugh.
Satterfield’s family heard about the settlement through media reports. He said when he asked Murdaugh about it in June 2021, Murdaugh told him “it was still making progress” and to be ready to settle by the end of the year.
Martin Murdaugh, whose husband was a murderer, had been accused of misusing money to obtain a job in the Bay Area
The CEO of the local bank testified that Murdaugh’s account had been overdrawn by about $350,000. The total debt to the bank was $4.2 million according to the CEO of Palmetto State Bank.
“Murdaugh Murders” features interviews with several key figures, including Paul’s girlfriend, Morgan Doughty; Mallory Beach’s friends Miley Altman and Connor Cook; and Mallory’s boyfriend, Anthony Cook. Yet the most illuminating information comes from an attorney for Beach’s family, Mark Tinsley, who lays out evidence of incidents when the Murdaughs allegedly received special treatment from the authorities, which goes beyond Paul avoiding consequences for the fatal boating accident.
Tinsley was asked about the lawsuit on Thursday. He testified he was trying to get $10 million from Murdaugh, but that the person he was talking to said they would only be able to come up with $1 million. Tinsley is expected to continue his testimony Friday morning.
The CFO testified that they were not going to go in and harass him about money because they were worried about his mental state.
Indeed, that “day of reckoning” didn’t come for another three months, when his law firm again confronted him about misappropriated funds, leading to his resignation, a bizarre murder-for-hire and insurance scam plot, a stint in rehab, dozens of financial crimes, his disbarment and, ultimately, the murder charges.
The defense has said the June 10 civil hearing was not a “day of reckoning” but just one in a series of hearings. There are 99 charges against Murdaugh for financial crimes, but those charges aren’t related to the murders.
Maggie Murdaugh was worried about money possibly being demanded of her family in a lawsuit and suspicious her husband wasn’t being entirely honest with her in the days before her killing, housekeeper Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson testified Friday in the double-murder trial of Alex Murdaugh.
“She was concerned about the amount of money that they were requesting in that lawsuit – $30 million is what she told me,” Turrubiate-Simpson said. She was aware of the amount of money they were asking for.
Turrubiate-Simpson said that he believed people were going to stop by and bring some food. “He said I just want the house to look the way Maggie would like for it to look. So, I said OK and I went to the house.”
Some Murdaugh relatives were told to sit further back in the South Carolina courtroom this week due to improper conduct by some of their family members.
In court Wednesday, Alex Murdaugh’s sister Lynn Murdaugh Goettee passed him a book through a member of his defense team. A source with knowledge of the situation tells CNN that Goettee was reprimanded just five minutes before the victim’s advocate was notified.
The book was considered contraband because it was not clear what was in it, the source said, adding Murdaugh was already back in his jail cell with it before anybody could check it. John Grisham’s book “The Judge’s List” was seized.
The younger Murdaugh was admonished for the incident, Hill said. Lynn Murdaugh Goettee and Buster Murdaugh have been warned that any more violations will result in them being barred from the courtroom.
Amid the book incident, Wednesday’s testimony was interrupted when a bomb threat was called into the clerk’s office and the courthouse in Walterboro was evacuated, Hill said. Court resumed hours later.
Legal teams on Thursday offered a glimpse into the remaining trial schedule: Closing arguments could start around February 23, based on attorneys’ estimates – weeks after Friday’s originally scheduled end date.
The state hoped to rest its case by the middle of next week, prosecutor Creighton Waters said, while the defense will need at least a week, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian said, noting it could be on the shorter side because of how long testimony already has lasted.
Harpotlian said that the length of the state’s case is making it difficult and expensive to schedule out-of-state expert witnesses. The state so far has called 44 witnesses and introduced more than 400 exhibits of evidence.
He said in his opening statements that he wanted the judge to allow jurors to visit the hunting property where the Murdaughs were killed.
Murdaugh was accused of killing his wife and younger son but his lawyers called his surviving son to testify for them.
The jury heard testimony about the shooting that injured Murdaugh months after the killings. Authorities have alleged that Murdaugh arranged for another man to shoot him so that Buster could obtain millions of dollars in life insurance.
Last week the defense argued that the killings could have been related to a drug debt that Murdaugh was having with a gang.
Correlated Events in the Murdaugh Family Boating Adventures: A New Detection of a Missing Person and a Dog by an Officer at the Collider Detector
He told investigators that when he returned home he found the bodies of his wife and son in their dog house and called the police.
According to Richard Harvey, the time of death for Paul and Maggie was around 9 pm on June 7, 2021, when body temperature checks indicated that they were dead.
An almost minute-long video filmed on Paul’s phone beginning at 8:44 p.m. shows one of the family dogs and appears to have been taken at the kennels, Lt. David Britton Dove, a supervisor in the computer crimes center at the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, testified.
Dick Harpootlian stated in his opening statement that the audio showed a normal discussion between Murdaugh and his wife. Harpootlian claimed that Paul is very happy. “Nobody’s down there threatening him. Daddy isn’t killing him with a shotgun.
The title of the show refers to the killing of Paul Murdaugh and his mother, but that is not part of the way the episodes are constructed. The focus of the first two parts, rather, centers on the boat crash.
Indeed, if ever a true-crime docuseries would have benefited from using a narrator, it’s this one; instead, the producers let the group of friends who were swept up in the tragic boat accident that claimed the life of 19-year-old Mallory Beach drone on, augmenting their accounts with blurry reenactments that look like something out of a cheap horror movie.
Paul, the driver of the boat, was said to have drinking too much, and the Murdaugh family used their wealth and influence to protect him.
The Murdaughs have been accused of ignoring suspicious events, including the death of a nanny and the serious injury of a dog, which they claimed was to blame.