Defense attorney Dick Harpootlian, left, checks his phone during cross-examination of his client Alex Murdaugh, right, by lead prosecutor Creighton Waters, inset, in the Colleton County courthouse on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023.
The drama was high in Walterboro, South Carolina, as the prosecution began the cross-examination of Alex Murdaugh on Thursday afternoon.
Earlier in the day, the defendant readily admitted he was a liar under direct examination from his attorney, Jim Griffin. As lead prosecutor Creighton Waters spent hours asking questions to attack his credibility, Alex Murdaugh repeatedly admitted he was also a thief.
For over an hour, the state grilled the defendant about the specific names and underlying cases of clients he stole from.
This series of substantially similar questions puzzled many court watchers. It appeared to grate somewhat on Alex Murdaugh himself eventually. Waters repeatedly asked the defendant if he recalled a single instance during which he sat across the table, looked a client in the eyes, and used his lawyering skills to facilitate the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Mr. Waters, you have charged me with the murders of my wife and son,” the defendant said at one point. “I can’t tell you all the details of these financial situations. I can tell you I did steal money that wasn’t mine. And I did wrong. It was terrible what I did.”
Alex Murdaugh even offered to speed things up vis-à-vis the testimony about his serially-admitted thefts and financial wrongdoing.
Audible reaction from gallery when #AlexMurdaugh says, “Mr. Waters, just to try and get through this quicker….” Waters: I know you want to get through this quicker, but we’re not. pic.twitter.com/n1rJ18MB66
— Cathy Russon (@cathyrusson) February 23, 2023
“I know you want to get through it quicker, but we’re not,” Waters replied.
This sort of back-and-forth continued with the defendant insisting he could not remember the specifics of his swindles.
“It wouldn’t be unusual for me to look them in the eye,” the defendant offered at another point.
“You were doing some fast-talking to a teenager, is that correct?” Waters asked at another point.
Murdaugh replied that he didn’t know how fast he was talking but admitted he lied, deceived his clients, and did not dispute that he stole from many of them.
“I didn’t do right by Natasha Thomas,” the defendant said. “I took money from Natasha Thomas that didn’t belong to me.”
Waters really wants #AlexMurdaugh to say he looked innocent people in the eyes and lied to them. AM doesn’t really want to answer it that directly. The point will be he continued that behavior when lying about the murders.
— Cathy Russon (@cathyrusson) February 23, 2023
At one point, Waters asked the defendant: “How many times did you practice that answer before your testimony today?”
Alex Murdaugh replied that he had not practiced any answers.
The prosecutor said it sounded like he did because he gave the same answer to almost every question. The defendant replied that he was being asked nearly the same thing repeatedly.
“I misled people I shouldn’t have misled,” Alex Murdaugh said. “And I did wrong.”
Judge Clifton Newman broke up the cross-examination around 5:30 p.m. EST.
The defense suggested they should be allowed to call more witnesses earlier in the morning because the financial testimony appeared endless. He said the financial costs of keeping their experts in town over the weekend were high.
“I could have sworn this was a murder case,” defense attorney Dick Harpootlian said. “For two hours now, we haven’t heard the word ‘murder’ once.”
SEE ALSO: ‘That was a lie’: Alex Murdaugh notches significant victory with testimony about state’s failed ‘blood spatter’ claims
The judge declined to break up the cross-examination further but said the witnesses might be able to testify Friday afternoon.
Waters did not mention the murder allegations against Alex Murdaugh but began his cross-examination to find areas the prosecution and the defense could both agree on.
To do this, he suggested the defendant’s earlier admitted lies, to his family and police, about being at the dog kennels on the night of the murders were the most important reason he chose to testify. Alex Murdaugh replied that he thought all of his testimony was important but conceded the lies about the dog kennels were significant.
Early on, the prosecutor traced the legal lineage of the Murdaugh clan, beginning with the defendant’s great-grandfather becoming district solicitor in 1920 and noting his family’s nearly 100-year-long “unbroken chain of being the chief prosecutor here.”
Waters suggested that such a storied history illustrated his family’s relationship with local law enforcement.
Alex Murdaugh hesitated at times to agree to the prosecutor’s arguments about how close he and his family were with members of law enforcement before later conceding several such relationships.
The prosecutor and the defendant also had a couple of dust-ups over whether he and his family were considered prominent in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and the degree to which Alex Murdaugh considered himself a successful attorney.
“I’m not sure about your adjective,” the defendant said while admitting he made millions of dollars winning and settling clients’ cases. On that metric, he might be considered successful.
The questions about the Murdaugh family’s legal prominence, the defendant’s success, and the congenial relationship with various sheriffs in the area appeared to be in service of addressing prior testimony. Earlier in the day, the defendant testified that he strongly distrusted the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.
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