Jury selection in Alex Murdaugh’s trial began Monday. The disgraced South Carolina attorney is on trial for the 2021 murders of his wife and son.
Summary
Jury selection in Alex Murdaugh’s trial began Monday. The disgraced South Carolina attorney is on trial for the brutal 2021 slayings of his wife and son.
- Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and her son Paul Murdaugh, 22, were found shot to death on the family’s property on June 7, 2021. Maggie was shot with a rifle outside of the dog kennel, while Paul was killed by two shotgun blasts inside the estate’s dog kennel.
- Thirteen months later, prosecutors charged Alex Murdaugh, 52, with two counts of murder. Prosecutors allege Murdaugh, who is also under indictment for 99 counts of financial crimes, killed his wife and son as his life was unraveling with various illegal schemes coming to light.
- Prosecutors will try to prove that Murdaugh “murdered his family to distract from his rapidly-unraveling financial schemes that allegedly involved tax evasion, forgery, money laundering, and fraud.”
- Approximately 900 potential jurors received summons for the jury selection process that began Monday. Prosecutor Creighton Waters and Murdaugh defense attorneys Jim Griffin and Dick Harpootlian, a Democratic state Senator, will pick the jury over the next few days.
- While jury selection began Monday, rival pre-trial court filings disputing the forensic evidence allowed in the trial are already well underway. The defense is seeking to have the testimony from the state’s blood spatter expert thrown out. The dispute is centered on the blood-spattered T-shirt Murdaugh wore the night of the murders.
- The Murdaugh case has more twists and turns than a British television murder mystery. Paul Murdaugh was awaiting trial for his role in a boat crash that killed Mallory Beach, 19, in 2019 when he was murdered.
- Alex Murdaugh was shot in the head in Sept. 2021 in an alleged insurance fraud scheme to ensure his surviving son, Buster, would get a $10 million life insurance payout.
- Murdaugh goes on trial in Colleton County, South Carolina, the heart of the five-county region that the Murdaugh family dynasty dominated for generations.
- The Murdaugh family controlled the prosecutor’s office for this region, the Fourteenth Circuit, for 86 years while running a profitable legal practice.
- As CNN revealed, prosecutors believe a Snapchat video sent by Paul Murdaugh on the night of his death will be a key piece of evidence in their case against Alex Murdaugh. Paul sent the video just minutes before he was shot, according to a court filing from the local prosecutor.
- NBC News reported the trial is set to receive “gavel-to-gavel coverage” from some cable news channels for what one local publication dubbed “the trial of the century.” Hotel rooms have been bought up in Walterboro, the site of the trial, for weeks.
- The New York Times noted law enforcement’s decision to look into “all things Murdaugh” has led them to reopen investigations into the mysterious deaths of Gloria Satterfield and Stephen Smith, who were both found dead at or near the Murdaugh property.
- The New York Post covered the case’s “gruesome” forensic report, which revealed new details of the crime scene including the injuries suffered by Maggie and Paul Murdaugh before their deaths.
- Murdaugh faces a total of 99 felony counts, according to the Wall Street Journal. Most of the crimes he is charged with are related to a scheme to bilk his clients out of their money along with alleged separate drug trafficking, money laundering, and insurance fraud schemes.
- The Murdaughs were a prominent Democratic dynasty for generations in their part of South Carolina, Fox News observed. Four generations of Murdaughs served as solicitor, or chief prosecutor, for a five-county region in the southern portion of South Carolina.
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
