Alex Murdaugh looks on as jury convicts him of murdering his wife and son.
It didn’t take long Thursday for a South Carolina jury to convict Alex Murdaugh of murdering his wife and son, but it turns out the deliberation process was even shorter than initially thought.
A member of the 12-person jury in Colleton County broke his silence on the verdict in an ABC News interview, revealing that two holdout jurors initially came away from trial testimony and closing arguments believing that Alex Murdaugh was not guilty of murdering his youngest son Paul Murdaugh, 22, and wife Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52.
But according to carpenter Craig Moyer, whether it was the two jurors who believed in Murdaugh’s innocence or the lone juror who was unsure how to vote, the panel actually sealed the disgraced lawyer’s fate in just 45 minutes. Yesterday, it had appeared that the jury needed two hours and 50 minutes of deliberations.
Moyer listed a couple of items from the trial that stood out to him personally and the jury as a whole.
For one, Moyer said, Murdaugh’s various admissions to crucial lies did not work in the defendant’s favor, as jurors could see he was at the scene of the murders before they happened. The juror also mentioned the video recorded at the dog kennels, in which Alex Murdaugh’s voice was heard on that fateful June 7th in 2021 at Moselle.
All the jurors were in agreement that they could hear Murdaugh’s voice in the video, Moyer said.
As for himself, Moyer said he took into account that Murdaugh was a lawyer by trade, but saw the defendant’s testimony at trial as rehearsed and the defendant overall as a “big liar.” The prosecution emphasized in closings that Murdaugh lied and lied again, and when he was caught in those lies the defendant admitted he did so because he alternately felt “paranoid” or thought he had no other choice (“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” the defendant explained at one point). Just so, prosecutors told jurors, Murdaugh should not be believed when he asserted that he was a liar but not a killer. For the state, that was just another lie, and jurors—especially Moyer—were persuaded by that point.
While the juror said the defendant’s admission about the dog kennel video was the most damning one, Moyer indicated that he viewed Murdaugh’s emotion on the witness stand as inauthentic, too.
Moyer reportedly told ABC that it looked more like Murdaugh was “blowing snot” out of his than crying because he was an innocent man framed by the state for annihilating his own family members.
The Law&Crime Network will cover Murdaugh’s sentencing live on Friday.
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