"I did not shoot my wife or my son." Lawyer Alex Murdaugh testifies tearfully at his double murder trial

By Jeffrey Collins -

Attorney Alex Murdaugh, who is on trial for murder in South Carolina, took the stand to testify in his defense Thursday and denied killing his wife and son, but did admit that he lied to authorities about when he saw them by last time.

"I did not shoot my wife or my son on any occasion, ever," Murdaugh said, "I would never intentionally do anything to hurt either of them," he reiterated with tears in his eyes.

Murdaugh, 54, is accused of fatally shooting his wife Maggie, 52, and 22-year-old son Paul, who died near a kennel they owned on June 7, 2021. He is facing a 30 years to life in prison if convicted.

Alex Murdaugh listens to testimony during his double murder trial at the Colleton County Courthouse on Tuesday, February 21, 2023, in Walterboro, South Carolina.

Grace Beahm Alford/AP

Murdaugh admitted to lying to police about his presence at the pound with his wife and son shortly before the murders.

But he blamed his addiction to opioids for clouding his thinking and causing him to distrust officers.

"As my addiction evolved, I would find myself in these situations, in these circumstances where I would have paranoid thoughts," he explained.

[Under the "fall from grace" of lawyer Alex Murdaugh: a drug addiction fueled by the opioid epidemic]

Murdaugh, who was a prominent South Carolina lawyer, told police that he was visiting his ailing mother in another city and was not near their Colleton County home in the hours before the crimes.

But several witnesses testified that they believed they had identified his voice, along with his son's and his wife's, in cellphone video recorded at the kennel about five minutes before the shooting.

The attorney explained on the stand that once he started lying about his presence at the kennel, he felt he had to stick with that story: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

By telling a lie – I told my family – I had to keep lying,” he said.

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Murdaugh testified that his wife asked him to go to the pound the night of the murders, so he rode down in a golf cart and took a chicken from a dog before heading home.

It was then, he said, that he decided to go visit his sick mother.

After returning from that alleged trip, he verified that his wife and son were not at home, as he declared.

Minutes later he drove his SUV to the kennel and described the grisly scene he found, crying: "They were so bad," he lamented.

Murdaugh said she tried to turn her son's body, which was lying face down, over, but found there was nothing she could do to help him.

“I could see his brain on the floor.

I didn't know what to do,” she stated.

He said he also checked on his wife before calling 911 911, and then went back to the house for a gun to protect himself from the alleged killer.

[A South Carolina lawyer is shot three months after his wife and son were shot to death]

Witnesses who saw Murdaugh in the minutes and hours after the shooting said they did not see him smeared with blood.

Several witnesses, including Maggie Murdaugh's sister, have testified that the lawyer did not appear to fear for his safety or that of his other son in the weeks that followed, despite the brutality of the crimes and the lack of any apparent leads to the murder. authorship.

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Murdaugh's decision to testify at his own trial is a long shot.

Prosecutors can question him not only about the deaths of his wife and his child, but also about the 100 other charges he faces, from shoplifting to organizing his own shooting on the shoulder of a highway. .

Murdaugh is in prison without bail for financial crimes, among others, so he will not be released even if he is found not guilty.

If he is convicted of most or all of those financial crimes, he would likely spend decades in prison.