The defence representing Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced and much-maligned South Carolina lawyer, stood outside the Colleton County Courthouse early afternoon on Friday to announce their client’s appeal.
Murdaugh, 54, was found guilty of the 2021 brutal murders of his wife and son on Thursday after a gruesome and emotional trial that lasted five weeks.
Jurors rendered their decision in about three hours.
Wearing a beige jail jumpsuit inside the courtroom on Friday morning, Murdaugh continued to maintain his innocence.
“I’m innocent. I would never hurt my wife Maggie and I would never hurt my son Paw Paw,” Murdaugh told Circuit Court Judge Clifton Newman before sentencing.
Mr Newman, to whom Murdaugh admitted to being addicted to opioids, sentenced him to life in prison.
“It might not have been you,” said Mr Newman. “It might have been the monster that you become when you take 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 opioid pills. Maybe you become another person.”
It was revealed during the trial that Murdaugh was consuming up to 2,000 milligrams of oxycodone per day in the months leading up to the deaths of his wife and son.
This was the drug use that Murdaugh used to rationalise bilking his personal injury clients at the family’s decades-old law firm of untold millions.
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Alex Murdaugh is led to the court in Waterboro, South Carolina, for sentencing. AP -
Murdaugh's son Buster arrives for his father's sentencing. AP -
Judge Clifton Newman sentenced Murdaugh to consecutive life terms for the June 7, 2021 murders of his son Paul and his wife Maggie. AP -
On Thursday night, Murdaugh was handcuffed and taken into custody after a jury found him guilty. AP -
Murdaugh was also accused of scheming to have himself killed so that his older son, Buster, above, could collect a $10 million insurance payout. AP -
Legal experts are flummoxed as to why Alex Murdaugh took the stand in his own defence. Reuters -
The shed and dog kennels where the bodies of Murdaugh's wife and son were found at the family's Moselle estate. AP -
The site where prosecutors say the disgraced lawyer shot and killed his wife and son. AP -
A tour of the crime scene was carried out before jurors headed back to court to hear closing arguments in the closely watched murder trial. AP -
The main house at the Murdaugh Moselle property. AP -
The entrance to the house. AP -
A bullet hole is seen from inside the feed room at the Murdaugh property. AP -
The shed area where Maggie's body was found. AP -
Dog kennels at the property, which played a large role throughout the trial. AP -
The caretaker's house. AP -
Behind the dog kennels. AP -
The feed room where Paul Murdaugh's body was found. AP -
The Moselle property has since been sold. AP -
Behind the house. AP -
The Alex Murdaugh trial has garnered international attention. AP
Good ol' boys
In what is known as the “lowcountry” of South Carolina are a series of rural communities and counties where evidence of the haves and have-nots sits in plain sight.
The Murdaughs owned a vast amount of real restate — a gated hunting lodge with kennels, a landing strip and hangar for their small plane, several outhouses and buildings, and a beach house in Edisto.
Everyone knew the name Murdaugh and many feared it — serving as county solicitors, a Murdaugh had been responsible for sending many a criminal to jail for more than a century. To most, they were law and order.
Sons Buster and Paul went to public school and sometimes socialised with children who lived in camper vans and ramshackle houses.
Generation Alpha
Two years before the murders, Paul Murdaugh, then 19, and five friends loaded up the Murdaugh family boat and headed out for an oyster bake. Using his older brother Buster’s driver's licence, Paul was able to purchase alcohol for his friends.
The group chose to take the boat via Archer Creek to the party in an effort to elude sobriety checkpoints. Social media posts show the teenagers drinking and taking selfies as they sped down the river past midnight.
Paul insisted on stopping at a bar on the river called Luther’s, where security footage shows he proceeded to consume more alcohol. His friends said they tried stopping him, but that he only became belligerent, going as far as to strike his girlfriend, Morgan Doughty.
Back on the boat, an intoxicated Paul drove the boat recklessly and refused to let anyone else drive. The teenagers screamed as they saw the boat rushing towards Archer Bridge, with which they collided at top speed.
Five of the teenagers sustained injuries and were taken to Buford Hospital. Mallory Beach was tossed into the water and nowhere to be found.
Police on the scene described the driver as “grossly intoxicated” and at least one passenger gave evidence that Paul had crashed the boat at about 2.30am into a bridge’s pylon, launching Ms Beach into the water.
Alex Murdaugh raced to the hospital and immediately tried to take control of the narrative of events, according to the teenagers' parents as well as the teenagers themselves — yet he never inquired about the whereabouts or condition of Ms Beach.
Seven days later, her body washed ashore.
At the time of his death, Paul was facing manslaughter charges resulting from Ms Beach's death as well as boating under the influence charges — to which he had pleaded not guilty. Ms Beach's family also filed a wrongful death suit against the Murdaughs.
He had been facing up to 25 years in prison.
First death at Moselle
Gloria Satterfield had taken care Buster and Paul Murdaugh for 20 years at their Moselle property and that is where she suffered an injury that would end her life.
In a February 2018 call to emergency services, Maggie Murdaugh can be heard requesting an ambulance for her housekeeper, who had “fallen up the brick stairs” behind the house.
“Are you guys able to control the bleeding?” the dispatcher asked during the call.
“No, I haven’t even tried,” Ms Murdaugh responded at the time.
Paramedics found the woman bleeding from her head, splayed out on the ground.
Ms Satterfield died in hospital about three weeks later, having never regained consciousness. There was no postmortem and her death was never reported to the coroner.
Morgan Doughty told Netflix that, before her “trip and fall”, Ms Satterfield had allegedly found opiates taped under Mr Murdaugh's bed and told Paul about it.
Ms Doughty's parents, Bill and Diane, who were also interviewed for the Netflix series, thought Ms Satterfield “knew too much” — though they declined to elaborate.
Right after her funeral, Murdaugh reportedly approached her sons and said that he had liability insurance on his home and that his friend, lawyer Corey Fleming, would take care of them. They never received any compensation for their mother’s death.
It was later revealed in a lawsuit brought by insurance firm Nautilus Insurance Company that, about a month before their mother’s deadly fall, Murdaugh had taken out a multimillion-dollar balloon policy on his estate. Mr Fleming made a claim against that in the name of the Satterfield family.
About $4.3 million was paid out, but the Satterfields never saw a dime, according to criminal and civil allegations.
The funds went from Mr Fleming, who wrote out a check to Forge Consulting LLC and delivered it to Murdaugh. Forge is a legitimate settlement funding company and in a workaround, Murdaugh went to Bank of America and opened an account in his name.
About $3 million of the funds that should have gone to the Satterfields was deposited into that account, along with millions belonging to countless other clients.
The body of Ms Satterfield was exhumed last year and there is an ongoing investigation.
2015 death of Stephen Smith
A classmate of Buster Murdaugh, 19-year-old Stephen Smith, was found dead in the middle of a Hampton County motorway in 2015.
His body was reported by a passer-by, who found the teenager in the early morning hours of July 8. Mr Smith lay in a pool of his own blood, his shoes still on, his mobile phone still in his pocket.
Authorities immediately branded it a hit-and-run, and guessed that Mr Smith may have been hit on the head by the side-view mirror of an oncoming vehicle.
Mr Smith's death certificate named the cause of death as severe blunt-force trauma to the head and independent investigators hired by his mother found no broken car glass or other remnants from a crash.
His car was not dusted for prints or DNA, and interviews with townsfolk all pointed towards the Murdaughs.
Six years and four deaths later, in June 2021, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division reopened an investigation into Mr Smith's death “based upon information gathered during the course of the double murder investigation of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh”.
Buster Murdaugh has never been formally accused of involvement in Mr Smith's death.
It not yet known if Murdaugh will be charged in any of these deaths, though he has been charged in nearly 100 crimes related to the money embezzled from his clients.
