Defense attorney Dick Harpootlian, right, jokingly points a rifle at prosecutors in Colleton County, S.C., on Feb. 21, 2023.
A witness for the defense on Tuesday claimed that Alex Murdaugh was too tall to have fired the weapons that killed his wife and youngest son at the family’s hunting lodge in June 2021.
Mike Sutton, a forensic engineer from North Carolina, went through a PowerPoint slideshow purporting to show the trajectory and positioning of the shooter who killed Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52, and Paul Murdaugh, 22.
“In my opinion, it’s very unlikely that [Murdaugh] fired that shot,” he said near the end of his direct examination by the defense. “It puts him in an unrealistic shooting position. It’s not an aiming position. It’s not a shooting position.”
Sutton said Alex Murdaugh is 76 inches tall. The expert said, however, that his calculations of the crime scene suggested the shooter was likely between 62 and 64 inches tall.
Sutton said that a taller shooter would have had to hold the AR-style weapon that killed Maggie Murdaugh quite low, such as at his hip.
As for the defendant himself, the forensic expert said it was even more unrealistic because he would have had to have fired the weapon below his kneecap.
“Again, it would be very difficult,” Sutton said. “You would have to be bending over and have your shooting hand down at or below your kneecap. And what’s important about that to me is that it just makes it very unlikely that a tall person made that shot.”
During cross-examination, prosecutor David Fernandez sought to cast doubt over Sutton’s calculations of the shooter’s height.
The expert witness said those calculations were based on bullet holes found in a dog kennel and quail pen at Moselle and on shell casings recovered near Maggie Murdaugh’s body.
The prosecutor asked if it was possible the casings could have been moved or if the bullets that killed Murdaugh’s wife ricocheted.
Sutton acknowledged the possibility but pushed back when Fernandez suggested the shooter could have been kneeling when he fired some fatal shots.
“The first thing you look at is that [Alex Murdaugh] is 76 inches tall,” Sutton said. “I measured to his knee as 25 inches, so that means that if he went down on one knee, his shoulder’s still 51 inches off the ground. If he shouldered his rifle in a kneeling position, he still can’t make that quail shot.”
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