State prosecutors rested their rebuttal case on Tuesday as Alex Murdaugh’s double murder trial came to a conclusion after calling six witnesses to dispute different assertions made by the defense.
Kenneth Kinsey, a crime scene forensics specialist, was the last witness to testify in opposition to the defense expert’s assertion that the shooter had to be between 5-foot-2 and 5-foot-4 tall. 6′ 4″” is Alex Murdaugh’s height. According to Kinsey, the study was “unscientific,” and there were just too many unknowns to determine the shooter’s height with any degree of certainty.
Also, Kinsey referred to the reasoning behind another defense expert’s assertion that there were two shooters as “preposterous.” That was the first time South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has questioned a witness in a case.
The other rebuttal witnesses were two attorneys with ties to Murdaugh, a local sheriff, and the medical professional who conducted the autopsies.
On June 7, 2021, the bodies of Murdaugh’s wife Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh and son Paul Murdaugh were found there. The jury will visit Murdaugh’s sizable Islandton property known as Moselle on Wednesday morning.
There will next be some final comments.
More than a month into Murdaugh’s murder trial, the rebuttal is presented. Murdaugh, a 54-year-old disbarred personal injury attorney, comes from a long family of South Carolina’s Lowcountry prosecutors. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all served in that capacity from 1920 to 2006.
The defense rested its case on Monday after hearing from 14 witnesses, while the prosecution rested its case two weeks earlier after calling 61 witnesses.
The most significant witness was Murdaugh himself. Under oath, he admitted to lying to authorities about his whereabouts the night of the homicides and that, in fact, he had been at the dog kennels nearby where his wife and son were found dead soon before the atrocities. He claimed that his fabrications were the result of “paranoid thinking” spurred on by his opiate addiction.
Murdaugh added, “I don’t think I was able to reason, and I’m truly sorry for lying about being there.”
Prosecutors claim that he killed his wife and child in order to gain sympathy and deflect attention from allegations of financial mismanagement that, according to the state, were just about to come to light before the sad killings. Murdaugh acknowledged defrauding his clients and business partners for 10 years, but he refuted accusations that he killed his family.
“I can guarantee you that if I were in the conditions that they’re talking about here, I would damage myself before I would hurt one of them, without a doubt,” said Murdaugh on the witness stand on Friday.
In relation to two murder accusations as well as two weapons counts, he has entered a not guilty plea. In addition, he is facing a second batch of 99 allegations for alleged financial offenses.
Pathologist rejects defensive theory
Six witnesses provided rebuttal evidence on Tuesday to dispute numerous defense witnesses.
Three weeks ago, the prosecution’s witness, Ronnie Crosby, who represented Murdaugh, spoke about how the defendant behaved in court.
The accused “had a theatrical-type demeanor in the courtroom, and he could grow highly agitated during closing arguments in front of a jury,” Crosby said on Tuesday.
Dr. Ellen Riemer, a pathologist who conducted the autopsies of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh, returned to the witness stand to dispute a defense expert’s assertion that Paul died from a shotgun contact wound to his head.
She reiterated that a blast to Paul’s left shoulder entered his neck and exited his skull, causing his death.
The defense’s two-shooter hypothesis has an impact on how people die. According to a crime scene examiner for the defense, a shotgun contact wound to the head causes the skull to spectacularly rupture, temporarily stunning or maybe wounding the shooter. The expert said that it was unlikely for the same shooter to have found Maggie and killed her in such a short amount of time.
Thomas C. Smalls, the former sheriff of Hampton County, said on Tuesday that he never spoke with Murdaugh about installing blue police lights on Murdaugh’s personal vehicle.
Murdaugh’s assertion from the prior week that Smalls had granted him permission to install blue lights in his automobile was refuted by the evidence. The blue lights were used by the defense to show that Murdaugh had misused his power with the police.
Smalls said under cross-examination that he was unaware that Murdaugh had blue lights in his vehicle and was confused as to whether anybody else in his department had given the lights the go-ahead.
In the boat case, in which a 19-year-old woman died when a boat he was driving crashed, Smalls said that Paul Murdaugh had not reported any threats. Murdaugh has said in court that he believes there was some kind of connection between the threats his family had received in that case and the deaths of his wife and son.
Investigating Murdaugh’s whereabouts and the sequence of the killings
The prosecution made an effort to discredit Murdaugh’s account of what happened on the night of the killings by insinuating that he sought to make up an alibi using mobile phone data, video, and other evidence.
As there is no direct evidence connecting Murdaugh to the killings—no murder weapon, bloodied clothing, or eyewitnesses—key issues in his trial have centered on the chronology of events and Murdaugh’s position on the evening of June 7, 2021.
In this case, the prosecution used video shot at the dog kennels immediately before authorities said the fatalities took place to show Murdaugh was there before the fatal shooting. According to many witnesses, the video was filmed on Paul’s phone starting at 8:44 p.m. and had Murdaugh’s voice in the background. In his testimony, Murdaugh admitted that he had been there and had lied about it.
In his evidence from the previous week, Murdaugh said that he went to the kennels at Maggie’s request but then returned home and passed out on a couch. He said that after waking up, he visited his ailing mother in the nearby Almeda neighborhood before returning to his home that evening. He called 911 at 10:07 p.m., according to authorities, to report finding the body.
The defense argues that Murdaugh was wrongfully accused of being involved in the killings as a result of a shoddy crime scene investigation and inquiry, presenting him as a loving husband and father.
A forensics expert whose research suggests that two shooters perpetrated the killings and his former law partner, who testified that the site was not sufficiently secured, were among the witnesses called by Murdaugh’s defense.
However, the defense has attempted to demonstrate that Maggie and Paul’s deaths could have taken place over a far longer time span than the prosecution has claimed.
Colleton County Coroner Richard Harvey testified last week that he thought the two died about 9 p.m., just a few minutes after Murdaugh’s speech was audible on the audio. This belief was based in part on armpit checks he conducted to determine how warm the bodies were.
When the defense asked Harvey whether the two may have been shot at any point between 8 and 10 p.m., Harvey answered yes.
Armpit temperature testing is “just not a realistic approach to seek to establish a judgment of time of death,” according to forensic pathologist Jonathan Eisenstat, who testified on Monday.
