Jury hears Alex Murdaugh’s final interview with murder investigators

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.”

In that interview, Murdaugh was accompanied by friend and attorney Corey Fleming, who began by questioning whether SLED was considering Murdaugh as a suspect in the case.

“I’m uncomfortable with you asking him questions as a suspect because I came here with the thought you were going to be telling him where you are in the investigation,” Fleming an be heard saying in the video.

In the video, Owen says the purpose of the interview is to further their investigation, and that he had previously explained to Murdaugh, “Any homicide investigation starts with the closest person, or the person who found the deceased.”

Murdaugh said he spent the day at his office working on issues related to the lawsuit over the boat crash, and that he and Paul both arrived at the house around 5:30 p.m. At times he cried recalling the evening he spent with Paul.

Murdaugh did not mention a confrontation with his law firm’s chief financial officer that day, accusing him of taking money from a legal settlement that belonged to the firm. He also said Maggie had come to the house because she was worried about Murdaugh’s ailing father, although Maggie’s sister testified earlier that Murdaugh had wanted her to come there that day.

Owen asked Murdaugh when he changed clothes from the outfit he was seen wearing in a Snapchat video Paul shot earlier in the day.“I’m not sure, what time of day was that?” Murdaugh responds. When told the video might have been shot about 7 or 8 p.m., Murdaugh said he must have changed when he got back to the house.

Agents also asked Murdaugh about why Maggie did not go with him to visit his mother that night. Maggie’s sister Marian Proctor testified that was the main reason Maggie had gone back to the house that night.

“I don’t remember if she planned to ride with me,” Murdaugh said. “Maybe she told me that. I don’t recall that specifically. She didn’t normally go over there.”

Murdaugh told investigators he was at his mother’s house for 45 minutes to an hour. On the stand, Owen confirmed by this point, he had already spoken to Murdaugh’s mother’s caregiver Shelly Smith, who earlier testified Murdaugh had only been in the house for 15 to 20 minutes.

On the tape, Owen also confronted Murdaugh for the first time about the fact Gibson heard what he believed was Murdaugh’s voice on a call with Paul at the kennels that night. Murdaugh appeared to be aware of this, though.

“Rogan Gibson had asked me if I was up there, that he thought it was me,” Murdaugh said. Asked directly if he had been at the kennels that night, Murdaugh respods, “At 9 o’clock? No sir, not if my times are right.”

Then who did Murdaugh think Gibson heard on the phone? “I have no idea,” he said.

Investigators later uncovered a video shot on Paul’s phone around 8:45 p.m., in which voices believed to be Alex and Maggie Murdaugh can be heard speaking in the background. Multiple witnesses at the trial have identified the voice on the tape as Murdaugh.

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.”

On Tuesday, Maggie Murdaugh’s sister, Marian Proctor, testified that she initially believed the murders were related to a fatal 2019 boat crash that Paul was involved in, but she said her assessment changed that September, after the suicide attempt. It was the first time the jury had heard about the incident.

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.