5 takeaways from Week 3 of the Alex Murdaugh double-murder trial you may have missed
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Alex Murdaugh Coverage
The Murdaugh family saga has dominated the news after another shooting, a resignation and criminal accusations — with Alex Murdaugh at the center of it all. Here are the latest updates on Alex Murdaugh.
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The third week of Alex Murdaugh’s double-murder trial saw no shortage of drama — inside the courtroom and out.
Murdaugh, a disgraced Lowcountry lawyer, is accused of killing his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, in what prosecutors have theorized was a desperate move to draw attention away from his unraveling financial crimes and misdeeds.
The state’s push to include evidence of Murdaugh’s alleged financial crimes crescendoed in key testimony, more data from the family’s cellphones was revealed, and the case’s high-profile nature made it the target of a phony bomb scare.
Here are five key takeaways from the week of testimony:
Limited information from gunshot residue
Alex Murdaugh’s hands, shirt and shoes from the night of the murders had gunshot primer residue particles on them, a witness testified.
Three particles were found on the T-shirt investigators seized from Murdaugh on June 7, 2021, the night of the murders. Two were found on his shorts, and none were on his shoes.
SLED forensics expert Megan Fletcher clarified gunshot primer residue can cover a surface if that surface is directly behind a gun while it’s fired, in the general vicinity of a gunshot, or if something already coated with primer particles contacts the clean surface.
Another limiting factor of particle evidence, Fletcher said, is there’s no way to know when the residue settled on a surface or how it got there in the first place.
But the “significant” amount of particles found on a blue rain jacket recovered from Murdaugh’s mother’s house, prosecutors suggested, shouldn’t be overlooked.
The interior of the raincoat had the most particles, Fletcher said, with 38 found after lab sampling. The coat’s outside had 14 particles.
The only way the coat could’ve had more residue on the inside is if a gun was concealed within, prosecutors argued.
“If a recently fired firearm were wrapped up inside that jacket, would that be consistent with your findings?” prosecutor John Meadors asked.
“There is a possibility of that, yes,” Fletcher said.
The defense has established the Murdaughs as a family of frequent firearm users, however, countering that gunfire was common at their 1,700-acre Moselle property. Primer residue could likely be found across the land, the defense suggested, and the jacket might have been tossed onto a dirty gun or any surface that wasn’t cleaned after a residue-laden firearm rested on it.
Maggie expressed financial concerns
The prosecution notched a potential win in presenting its theory that Alex Murdaugh may have murdered his wife and son due to a dire financial situation and the looming revelation of financial crimes stretching back over a decade.
Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson worked as the Murdaugh family’s housekeeper intermittently since 2007, she said. She stopped around 2017 but came back to work for the Murdaughs again in 2019.
During that time, Turrubiate-Simpson said she became close with Maggie Murdaugh.
Defense attorney Dick Harpootlian loudly objected on hearsay grounds, asking for a mistrial, after prosecutor John Meadors asked the witness whether Maggie had been concerned about money issues. The witness, Harpootlian said, could not speak to Maggie’s concerns.
“I don’t think even if you give this jury instruction (not to consider the testimony), you can’t unring the bell.”
Judge Clifton Newman denied the request for a mistrial.
Turrubiate-Simpson said Maggie Murdaugh once confided concerns about the family’s finances due to a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Mallory Beach’s family. Beach was 19 when she died in a 2019 boat crash. Paul Murdaugh was reportedly driving the boat drunk during the accident.
“She was worried because the lawsuit was presented, saying they wanted $30 million,” Turrubiate-Simpson said when recalling the conversation. “Maggie was crying, saying, ‘We don’t have that kind of money, B. ... If I could give them everything we’ve got and make this go away I would do it in a heartbeat. I’ll start over. We’ll start over. I just want it gone.’”
Maggie Murdaugh was further concerned Alex Murdaugh was keeping details of the lawsuit from her, Turrubiate-Simpson testified.
“She felt that Alex was not being truthful [with] her in regard to what was going on with that lawsuit,” Turrubiate-Simpson testified. “She said, ‘He doesn’t tell me everything.’”
On cross-examination, Turrubiate-Simpson told defense attorney Harpootlian that Alex Murdaugh “adored” his wife and often said Maggie Murdaugh was “his all,” part of the defense’s ongoing effort to seed doubt that Alex Murdaugh would be capable of murdering his family.
More cellphone and vehicle data
On Friday, prosecutors presented the dizzying technical details behind how the FBI extracted phone location data from the Murdaugh family’s cellphones.
The lengthy testimony, presented by FBI agent Matthew Wilde further established that Alex, Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were all at Moselle the day of the murders. FBI data also confirmed the family’s former groundskeeper, C.B. Rowe, was not near Moselle when the killings occurred.
More eye-catching information was gleaned from the computers in Alex Murdaugh’s car.
Dwight Falkofske, an FBI automotive forensics expert, said the agency had limited data to work with — they couldn’t track the vehicles exact location at specific times, or even tell whether the car was moving. The computer did, however, track whether the vehicle was in park or not.
At 9:06:49 p.m. on June 7, 2021, Murdaugh’s car was turned on and taken out of park. It was next put into park at 9:22:45 p.m.
That 16 minutes, prosecutors hinted, correspond with Murdaugh’s drive from Moselle to his mother’s home at Alameda.
At 9:44:54 p.m., the car is again taken out of park, then parked once more at 10:00:30 p.m.
Another 16-minute drive back to Moselle, the state hinted. More important was the roughly 20-minute period from when the car was parked at 9:22 and taken out of park at 9:44.
Alex’s visit that night was ‘unusual’
How long Murdaugh visited his mother, Libby, on the night of the murders was a point of contention in testimony earlier in the week. Libby Murdaugh’s caretaker, Mushelle “Shelley” Smith, said she recalled Murdaugh visiting for 15 to 20 minutes.
But during a wake after his father’s death a few days after the murders, Smith said Murdaugh — unprompted — emphasized to her that he’d visited for 30 to 40 minutes the night of June 7, 2021.
Smith described as “unusual” the late-night visitor to his mother’s home on June 7, 2021. Smith said she remembers Murdaugh arriving at the house after 9 p.m. and leaving after about 20 minutes.
Murdaugh’s defense attorney Jim Griffin noted there was a reason Murdaugh would have visited that night in particular, because his father had just been placed into hospice care. The discrepancy in times, he suggested, was just a misremembering of how long Murdaugh had been in the house.
Smith also seemed to tie Murdaugh to an incriminating piece of evidence found in his mother’s house, but her testimony also frustrated prosecutors’ efforts to make that connection.
Smith testified she saw Murdaugh carry a balled-up “blue tarp something” into the house about a week after the murders. Prosecutors contend this was a raincoat that investigators later recovered with gunshot residue coated on its interior.
But both defense attorneys and Smith contended that the item was a tarp, not a raincoat, that was also found inside the house. A SLED examiner who testified later said the agency had not examined that tarp for gunshot residue.
Courtroom drama: GoFundMe controversy, bomb threat
The Murdaugh trial hit rough patches in its third week, with one major disruption delaying testimony and an online controversy intruding into the courtroom.
The state had just called its latest witness to the stand around 12:30 p.m. Wednesday when Judge Newman was informed a bomb threat had been called into the Colleton County Courthouse. Newman calmly told the jury to return to the jury room and then told the public to evacuate the building — but told them to return for court to resume at 2:30 p.m.
After law enforcement cleared the building, located in the center of downtown Walterboro, Newman resumed where testimony left off without ever mentioning the reason for the sudden dismissal. As of Friday, neither SLED nor local law enforcement had made any further comment on the bomb threat.
Inside the courtroom there were more fireworks on Thursday. The state called attorney Mark Tinsley, who earlier offered sometimes combative testimony away from the jury on the lawsuit he filed against Murdaugh over the fatal 2019 boat crash involving Murdaugh’s son, Paul. But first the defense tried to get Tinsley’s testimony thrown out over, of all things, a GoFundMe donation.
Defense attorney Phil Barber told Newman that Tinsley had made a $1,000 donation to a fundraiser for Mushelle “Shelly” Smith, “thanking” her for her “bravery” in testifying against Murdaugh earlier in the week. Smith, the caregiver for Murdaugh’s mother, testified to Murdaugh’s behavior the night of the murders and afterward.
“He’s made a financial payment to the witness, in a case where he has a direct financial interest,” Barber said to Newman, who declined to exclude Tinsley’s testimony but offered that the subject would make “good fodder for cross-examination.”
Barber ultimately made no mention of the GoFundMe page when he briefly cross-examined Tinsley after he told jurors he believed he was close to getting access to Murdaugh’s financial information, and potentially exposing criminal wrongdoing on Murdaugh’s part when the murders occurred.
Thinking Paul and Maggie Murdaugh were killed in retaliation for the boat crash, Tinsley said he feared he might have to drop the lawsuit entirely.
This story was originally published February 11, 2023 at 5:00 AM with the headline "5 takeaways from Week 3 of the Alex Murdaugh double-murder trial you may have missed."
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