Loving father, or murderous ‘storm’? Dueling arguments face off in Murdaugh trial opener

“He was the storm,” prosecutor Creighton Waters thundered, pointing at Alex Murdaugh, who is on trial accused of murdering his wife and son. “The storm came for them.”

Outside the courthouse, the sky above Walterboro, S.C., gave way and great sheets of water fell on the small town that has become host to South Carolina’s trial of the century.

In opening statements delivered Wednesday afternoon, an uncompromising Waters laid out a damning portrait of the largely circumstantial evidence that his team intends to introduce to the jury. But in a deft statement, which wound its way from genteel and self-deprecating to impassioned outrage, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian offered a full-throated defense of Murdaugh, a man that many in South Carolina have already judged as guilty.

“I will do something that irritates you. I will do something that irritates you or angers you. ... Don’t hold that against Alex; hold that against me,” said Harpootlian, a former 5th Circuit solicitor. “He didn’t do it. He is innocent. He would require a verdict of not guilty from you. That’s the law. That’s your oath.”

In opening statements Wednesday afternoon, both sides laid out the arguments they intend to prove to the jury.

Prosecutors previewed he trail of evidence they say ties Alex Murdaugh to the 2021 murder of his wife and son. The defense, meanwhile, portrayed Murdaugh as a loving husband and father, railroaded by law enforcement who decided he was guilty from the night of the murders.

“They’ve been pounding that square peg in the round hole since June 2021,” Harpootlian said.

The prosecution’s case

During his opening statement, Waters revealed for the first time the sequence of the killings: that Paul was shot first with a shotgun, the first shot – heavy buckshot – hitting Paul in the chest and the second hitting his head, Waters said.

Maggie was shot next, with two bullets striking her leg and taking her down.

“Pow! Pow!” Waters slammed the table, mimicking the two shots from an AR-15 style rifle that he say killed Maggie Murdaugh. After that, “two shots in the head did catastrophic damage,” he said.

In his thundering opening statement, Waters, the lead prosecutor in the state’s case against Murdaugh, told jurors the evidence they will hear will prove Murdaugh, the disbarred Lowcountry attorney, was undeniably guilty of gunning down his wife and son in June 2021.

“It’s going to be gruesome,” Waters told the jury. “There’s no other way around that. ... This storm had been gathering for a long time.”

Among that evidence is a newly revealed raincoat that Murdaugh allegedly took to his mother’s house about a week after the killings. When investigators found that raincoat, they discovered gunshot residue on the inside of the coat, Waters said.

Gunshot residue also was found on the seat belt of Murdaugh’s car, Waters said. Spent bullet cartridges found near Maggie’s body match those recovered from a gun range and a flower bed on the property. The state will prove, Waters said, that the .300 Blackout cartridges were fired by an AR-15 style rifle that Murdaugh bought for Paul in 2018 to replace one that was stolen — a gun prosecutors say has since gone missing.

“It was a family weapon that killed Maggie Murdaugh,” Waters said.

The lead prosecutor indicated that his team was prepared to present a mountain of forensic evidence, but he drew special attention to cellphone records.

At times, Waters held a cellphone above his head and told the jury that data from cellphones used by Paul, Alex and Maggie would provide crucial information, including about the location of the people who were using them.

The phone records will show Maggie, Paul and Alex Murdaugh were all near the dog kennels on the family’s Moselle property minutes before Paul and Maggie were killed, Waters said.

At 8:44 p.m. the night of the murders, Paul recorded a video of a friend’s dog at the kennels. His mother and father can be heard in the background, Waters said. Three minutes later, all activity on the phone stops. His mother’s stops approximately 40 seconds after that.

The state also will present evidence that cellphone records place Murdaugh at the scene shortly before the murders, Waters said.

“Neither Paul nor Maggie had any defensive wounds,” Waters told the jurors. “They didn’t see a threat coming from their attacker, and they were shot from extremely close range.”

Waters drew the jury’s attention to the so-called “stippling” found on the bodies of Paul, 22, and Maggie, 52. The rippled patterns of soot on skin indicate a gunshot at close range, Waters said.

Evidence jurors will hear be circumstantial, from experts and scientific data, Waters said, because no one saw the killings. But circumstantial evidence can be just as powerful as direct evidence, he said.

Waters also urged the jurors to watch body camera videos of Murdaugh taken by law enforcement officers at the scene the night of the killings.

“Watch his expressions. Listen to what he’s saying. Listen to what he’s not saying,” Waters told jurors, underscoring that Murdaugh’s credibility will be on the line throughout the state’s case.

The defense

Harpootlian, who spoke to the jury for some 27 minutes after Waters, told jurors they had just heard “theories” and “conjectures” about Murdaugh and that the prosecution’s case was all about “smoke that concealed the truth.”

The jury will learn that law enforcement began to focus on Murdaugh from the beginning and ignored other suspects, he said. The reality is that more than likely, there were two shooters, Harpootlian told the jury. There is nothing that ties Murdaugh to the crime, he said.

Asking his client to stand, Harpootlian gestured to Alex Murdaugh and told the jury they would not hear anyone contradict that Murdaugh was a loving father and husband.

Harpootlian dwelt at some length on the horror of the wounds to Paul and Maggie, especially Paul, whose brain had been blown out of his head by a shotgun blast.

Harpootlian stressed the horror of the killings because, he has said before trial, he is going to ask the jury how they can believe that a loving husband and father could ever do something like that.

“He (Murdaugh) didn’t do it. He didn’t butcher his own son,” Harpootlian said. Only an hour before the killings, Harpootlian told jurors, Paul sent a Snapchat video showing himself laughing and joking around with his father at some crooked trees they had planted.

The killing shots were delivered by someone who was close up, Harpootlian said, and whoever did the killings would have been drenched in blood. Yet investigators never found Alex or his clothes soaked in blood, Harpootlian said.

Harpootlian also dismissed the argument that there were no defensive wounds. Pointing to the angle of the gunshot to Paul’s chest, Harpootlian held his arms up in the air imitating surrender and argued that Paul may have been held at gunpoint.

“Maggie is shot running. That’s why there’s no defensive wounds,” Harpootlian said.

He urged the jury to consider the questionable statements on the night of the killings that made law enforcement suspect Murdaugh in light of the state of shock the man was in discovering the bodies of his wife and son.

“It’s numbing. You go into shock,” Harpootlian said, explaining that Alex’s statements to law enforcement that night were understandable.

Murdaugh told investigators he was visiting his ailing mother at the time of the killings and discovered the bodies when he returned home. But prosecutors allege Murdaugh killed Maggie and Paul as part of a plan to divert attention from a string of shady financial transactions that were on the cusp of unraveling, and made several phone calls to his dead wife and son to “manufacture” an alibi on the night of the killings.

Murdaugh has yet to be tried or convicted of any financial crimes, and it’s likely the defense will object to any evidence presented claiming the murders were motivated by financial misdeeds.

In the face of the of the mountain of unproven allegations against Murdaugh, Harpootlian invoked the jury’s sacred obligation to see him as innocent until proven guilty.

“Here is the law. He didn’t do it. He is presumed innocent! As you sit there right now, you have to believe that he is innocent,” Harpootlian said.

The audience watching the statements included, sitting on the defense’s side of the courtroom and directly behind Alex Murdaugh, members of Murdaugh’s family: his son, Buster; his older sister, Lynn Murdaugh; his older brother, Randy Murdaugh; and his younger brother, John Marvin Murdaugh and his wife, Liz Murdaugh.

The jury is comprised of 12 jurors and six alternates. Of the main jury, eight of the 12 jurors are women and four are men. The majority of the jurors are white, and two are Black.

Six alternate jurors also were chosen and sworn in. Of the six, two are women and four are men. The alternates are evenly split, with three Black and three white alternates. Combined, the total of 18 jurors all appeared to range in age from the 20s to the late 50s.

Among the jurors are a warehouse manager, a hotel receptionist and a payroll processor.

Before opening statements, Judge Clifton Newman went over some of the ground rules of being a juror: that they were to be the ones who decided what the facts were in the case from the evidence, and his duty was to instruct them on the law.

“He cannot be found fully guilty until you, the jury, decide the facts of the case,” Newman said. “Out of all the people in South Carolina, only you can decide the facts of this case.”