Opening arguments began late Wednesday afternoon in the double murder trial of disgraced South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh.
After the defense exhausted six strikes, and the state used three of their own, a 12-person jury of eight women and four men – as well as six alternates – were impaneled in Colleton County. Ten of the jurors are white; two are Black; all in their thirties through their sixties. Among the six alternates: four are men; two are women; split equally between Black and white; and in their twenties through their forties.
Colleton is one of the five counties making up the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, the same office that the Murdaugh family controlled, as elected lead solicitor, uninterrupted from 1920 through 2006.
The 54-year-old disbarred lawyer stands accused of shooting and killing his wife, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52, and their youngest son Paul Murdaugh, 22, near dog kennels on the family’s 1,770-acre hunting lodge, sometime between 8:30 p.m. and 10:06 p.m. on June 7, 2021. Later, Alex Murdaugh himself dialed 911 and described the heartrending scene. After being told not to touch the bodies, he told a dispatcher he had already done so to check for signs of life.
Blood that made it onto Alex Murdaugh’s white T-shirt that night has become an issue of marked dispute among the prosecution and the defense. Lead prosecutor Creighton Waters and Palmetto State investigators have amassed expert witnesses to testify that at least some of that blood was the result of blood spatter from the shotgun believed to have killed Paul Murdaugh. Defense attorneys Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin have filed numerous pre-trial motions to prevent blood spatter testimony from ever reaching jurors’ ears.
A pre-trial hearing on Tuesday, however, elided the blood spatter issue in favor of arguments about the state’s motive evidence – vast troves of documents that show Alex Murdaugh’s years of alleged financial crimes and improprieties. Prosecutors say that evidence proves the ginger-haired attorney’s life was falling down all around him.
The defense took great umbrage at Waters’ “ruin” theory of the case.
“His theory is that he knew the jig was up, so he went home and butchered, blew the head off his son, and butchered his wife,” Harpootlian reportedly said. “There’s not one shred of evidence there was any problems between any of them. There is no dispute anywhere that they were the perfect family in terms of their relationship — no divorce, no separated, no left him, no nothing.”
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