Judge won’t allow evidence of Murdaugh’s botched suicide attempt at murder trial

Prosecutors are moving toward the close of their double-murder case against Alex Murdaugh, even as Judge Clifton Newman closed the door on more discussion of an apparent botched suicide attempt three months after Murdaugh’s wife and son were killed at the family’s rural Colleton County estate.

On Wednesday morning, S.C. Law Enforcement Division agent David Owen, the lead investigator on the case, gave jurors at the Colleton County Courthouse some new details as he laid out an overview of the state’s investigation.

Owen said he arrived at the family’s home the night of June 7, 2021, shortly after Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and Paul Murdaugh, 22, were found dead near the dog kennels behind the home. He conducted an interview with Murdaugh inside a law enforcement vehicle at the scene, which was videotaped and played for the jury earlier in the trial. Owen also conducted an interview with Murdaugh three days after the killings, a recording of which had also been previously played for the jury.

Owen said he also interviewed Paul’s friend Nathan Tuten at the scene that night, along with groundskeeper C.B. Rowe. The next day he interviewed Rogan Gibson, another one of Paul’s friends.

“Y’all were investigating then?” asked prosecutor John Meadors, countering a defense claim that investigators zeroed in on Murdaugh early on without considering other suspects. “Y’all were interviewing people?”

“Yes,” Owen responded.

Owen said he stood outside Murdaugh’s open bedroom door as the defendant disrobed and gave him the clothes he was wearing the night of the murders, so that the state could test them for evidence.

Owen’s testimony was leading up to prosecutors playing tape of a third interview Murdaugh gave to investigators on Aug. 11, 2021.

“We wanted to know what they experienced,” Owen said. “What was going on in his life, and in Paul and Maggie’s lives, and what may have led to this.”

Botched suicide evidence considered

Even as state prosecutors have signaled they plan to wrap up presenting their case against Murdaugh this week, lead prosecutor Creighton Waters spent Wednesday morning arguing for more evidence to come before the jury.

Prosecutors wanted to present evidence related to a bizarre incident over Labor Day weekend 2021, after Murdaugh was fired from his law firm. The defendant initially told investigators he was shot by a stranger on the side of the road while he was changing his tire, but ultimately acknowledged he had asked someone to kill him in order to provide a life insurance payout for his surviving son, Buster.

However, the judge in the case has ruled they won’t be allowed to present that evidence to the jury.

Waters contends the initial story of the Labor Day weekend shooting was part of a plan to tie Murdaugh’s shooting to the murders of his wife and son, Maggie and Paul, three months earlier — and convince the world both were the work of unknown assailants targeting the family.

“This case is intricate and complex on a scale the rest of us have never seen,” Waters told Judge Clifton Newman. “It doesn’t really matter what happened on the side of the road. What’s relevant is what the defendant said about it and the fact that it was not true.”

Defense attorney Dick Harpootlian contends the incident was simply a suicide attempt in response to Murdaugh’s firing and that he quickly admitted what really happened when he believed it might detract from the search for Paul and Maggie’s real killers.

“He was confronted on Friday, he was fired on Friday,” the day before the shooting, Harpootlian argued. “His thinking was to get his son Buster Murdaugh a $12 million insurance payout that he thought would be excluded by a suicide exception.”

Under the state’s theory of the murders, Murdaugh killed his wife and son in response to pressure that various financial schemes Murdaugh was involved with would be uncovered. If that were the case, Harpootlian argued, then after Murdaugh was fired from his law firm “he would have killed Buster.”

Newman has allowed other testimony about Murdaugh’s alleged financial crimes, in which the disbarred attorney has been accused of stealing millions from his law partners and clients. But on Wednesday, the judge ultimately decided not to allow more evidence about the “roadside incident,” as attorneys have referred to it in court.

“It doesn’t survive the relevancy test,” Newman said. “I believe to allow this evidence is a bridge too far.”

The trial was set to resume with the state presenting other testimony to the jury later Wednesday morning.

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