Alex Murdaugh

The backstory

The killings

Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52, and Paul Murdaugh, 22, Alex Murdaugh’s wife and younger son, were shot and killed on the night of June 7, 2021, at Moselle, the family’s hunting property in Colleton County, South Carolina.¹²⁹ Paul was killed with two shotgun blasts and Maggie with four or five rifle shots, and their bodies were found near the dog kennels on the property, the Associated Press reported from the trial.²³ In closing, prosecutor Creighton Waters argued that Paul was shot first and Maggie, with a .300 Blackout rifle, after she came toward him, and that neither had defensive wounds; a State crime-scene expert testified that the first shotgun blast struck Paul in the chest in a feed room.²⁶ Murdaugh called 911 shortly after 10 p.m., and the coroner estimated that the deaths occurred between 9 and 9:30 p.m., according to NPR.¹⁶ The weapons were never produced, and there were no eyewitnesses.²⁴

The evidence at trial

The State’s case was circumstantial, WCIV reported.²⁵ Murdaugh told police on the night of the killings and again three days later that he was never at the kennels that night, and that he had napped at the house and then left to visit his ailing mother.²⁹ A video recorded on Paul’s phone at the kennels, last activated at 8:44 p.m., captured voices that two of Paul’s friends testified were Alex, Paul and Maggie Murdaugh’s, according to the AP.²⁹ Prosecutors said the video was made about five minutes before the killings.²⁹ An analyst testified that Paul last read a text at 8:48 p.m. and that Maggie’s phone showed a last-read text shortly afterward; Maggie’s phone was found by a roadside the next day.²⁹

Prosecutors argued that the motive lay in his finances.²⁵ The chief financial officer of his law firm testified that on the morning of June 7 she confronted him about $792,000 that should have been collected by the firm and was missing, and he faced a June 10 hearing in a lawsuit over a 2019 boat crash that prosecutors argued could have led to disclosure of his accounts, CNN reported.²⁸ The trial judge, Clifton Newman, admitted evidence of his financial crimes, which the State presented over about ten days of the trial.¹¹⁶ More than 75 witnesses testified and nearly 800 exhibits were admitted, the AP reported.²³

His testimony

Murdaugh testified in his own defense on Feb. 23 and 24, 2023.¹⁶ He admitted that he had been at the kennels and had lied about it for about 20 months, and said that his opioid addiction made him distrust police: “Once I told a lie — I told my family — I had to keep lying,” he testified, according to the AP.²⁷ He testified that he rode down to the kennels in a golf cart, returned to the house and went to see his mother, and that when he came back he drove to the kennels and found his wife and son.²⁷ He denied killing them.²⁷²⁴ His lawyers argued that two shooters may have been involved and that state investigators did not properly process the scene.²⁵

The verdict and sentence

On March 2, 2023, after a six-week trial in Walterboro, the jury deliberated about three hours and found him guilty of both murders and of two counts of possession of a weapon during a violent crime.²⁵³ Waters said the jury “properly found he murdered his wife and son in cold blood,” according to the attorney general’s office.³ Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty.²³ On March 3, Judge Newman sentenced him to two consecutive life terms.²³²⁴ At sentencing Murdaugh told the court, “I respect this court, but I’m innocent,” NPR reported.²⁴

The clerk of court and the new-trial motion

After the verdict his lawyers sought a new trial, alleging that Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca “Becky” Hill had tried to influence the jury.¹¹⁶ Former Chief Justice Jean Toal heard the motion.¹²⁰ Twelve jurors testified in January 2024; one testified that Hill told her before Murdaugh took the stand to “watch him closely” and “made it seem like he was already guilty,” and the others said Hill did not influence their verdicts, according to FOX Carolina.²⁰ On Jan. 29, 2024, Judge Toal found that Hill had been drawn by “the siren call of celebrity” and did not find her denials fully credible, but ruled that the defense had not shown her comments influenced the verdict, and denied the motion.²⁰¹

Hill was arrested in May 2025.¹⁴ On Dec. 8, 2025, she pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and perjury for showing a news photographer sealed trial exhibits and lying about it, and to two counts of misconduct in office for taking bonus money and using her office to promote a book about the trial; she was sentenced to three years of probation, the AP reported.¹⁷ The judge said the sentence would have been far harsher had investigators found that she tampered with the jury.¹⁷ The prosecutor in her case said a jury-tampering charge could not be proven because three jurors or alternates said she made remarks that might have been attempts to influence them while eleven said she did nothing wrong.¹⁷

The appeal

The South Carolina Supreme Court heard the appeal on Feb. 11, 2026, and on May 13, 2026, unanimously reversed the denial of a new trial and remanded the case for a new trial, in a per curiam opinion joined by Chief Justice Kittredge and Justices Few, James, Hill and Verdin.¹ The court found that Hill told jurors that the day Murdaugh testified was important, urged them to watch his body language and not to be “fooled” by the defense, and told them deliberations “shouldn’t take us long.”¹¹⁴ It held that these were more than innocuous contacts, that prejudice was therefore presumed and that the State had not rebutted the presumption; it concluded that Hill “placed her fingers on the scales of justice, thereby denying Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury.”¹¹⁵ It also held that jurors may not testify about how such comments affected their deliberations.¹

The court held that some evidence of his financial crimes was properly admitted to show motive, but that the trial court “allowed the State to go far too long and far too deep” into it, creating unfair prejudice; if such evidence is offered at the retrial, the court said, the State “must complete its introduction of that evidence efficiently.”¹¹⁴ The court did not reach his other challenges, including to firearms evidence, a blue raincoat and gunshot-residue testimony.¹

Attorney General Alan Wilson said his office respectfully disagreed and would retry the case.² On May 18, 2026, Murdaugh sued Hill, alleging that she denied him a fair trial; his lawyer said the suit seeks at least $600,000, the amount he spent on his defense, ABC News reported.¹¹

The retrial

Judge Debra McCaslin is presiding over the retrial.¹⁰ At a June 29, 2026, status conference she set April 5, 2027, as her preferred trial date and said, “When I set a trial date, I don’t do continuances.”¹⁰ In August the defense asked to move the trial to Charleston County and the State proposed other counties; on Sept. 8 she moved it to Sumter County, finding that Colleton County’s size, the family’s long association with it, the publicity and the clerk’s conduct prevented a fair trial there.⁹⁸ At an Oct. 16 hearing she granted the defense independent DNA testing of remaining samples, including from under Maggie Murdaugh’s fingernails, and the State corrected the record to say that Murdaugh had failed a polygraph about hidden assets but had never taken one about the killings, Fox News reported.⁷

In August 2026 his lawyers moved to dismiss the murder indictments, arguing that the chief state investigator, SLED agent David Owen, misled the 2022 grand jury by telling it that blood was found on a shirt Murdaugh wore after another agent had found none; the judge did not hear arguments on the motion then.⁶ In an Oct. 30 memorandum, the defense alleged that SLED testing in August 2021 found no human blood in the shirt cuttings, that the results were withheld from the State’s blood-spatter consultant until December 2022, and that Owen repeated to grand juries a claim about ammunition that he acknowledged at the first trial he had used as a deception in an interview with Murdaugh, FITSNews reported.⁵ The defense asks that the indictments be dismissed without prejudice so the State could seek new ones “from a grand jury that has not been deceived.”⁵ Prosecutors have cited grand jury secrecy in related disputes; no response by the State to the memorandum was reported in the sources reviewed.⁵ He is presumed innocent of the murder charges unless convicted at the retrial.

The financial crimes

Murdaugh resigned from his family’s law firm on Sept. 3, 2021, and the firm later concluded that he had taken millions from it and its clients, NPR reported.¹⁶ The next day he reported being shot on a roadside; investigators say he staged it as part of an insurance-fraud and assisted-suicide scheme, and nine days later he admitted the scheme, which he said was meant to get his surviving son a $10 million insurance payout.¹⁶ He was arrested on Oct. 14, 2021, at a Florida rehabilitation facility, and by May 2022 faced 79 state charges, which the attorney general said involved about $8.5 million.¹⁶ The South Carolina Supreme Court disbarred him on July 12, 2022.¹⁶

He pleaded guilty in September 2023 to 22 federal counts, including conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud and money laundering.⁴¹⁶ In November 2023 he pleaded guilty to state financial crimes, and on Nov. 28 Judge Newman sentenced him to 27 years under a plea agreement requiring him to serve at least 85 percent of it.²¹²² Waters said he stole “more than $12 million over a decade.”²¹ On April 1, 2024, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel sentenced him to 40 years, to run concurrently with the state term.¹⁹ Gergel said he stole from “the most needy, vulnerable people,” including an injured state trooper and a trust for children whose parents died in a wreck, the AP reported.¹⁸ The Fourth Circuit dismissed his appeal of that sentence in October 2024, citing the appeal waiver in his plea agreement.¹⁸

Other deaths in the record

Gloria Satterfield. The family’s longtime housekeeper died on Feb. 26, 2018, after a fall at Moselle, NPR reported.¹⁶ Prosecutors said Murdaugh promised her sons he would recover money for them and then kept the money; prosecutors put the settlement funds he took at $3.8 million.¹⁶²¹ Her family is among the victims of his financial crimes, and in 2022 a court ordered him to pay more than $4.3 million to them.²²¹⁶

Mallory Beach. On Feb. 24, 2019, a boat crash near Beaufort killed Mallory Beach, 19; Paul Murdaugh pleaded not guilty to charges of boating under the influence causing her death.¹⁶ The South Carolina attorney general dropped the three felony charges after Paul was killed.³² Prosecutors argued that a lawsuit over the crash threatened to expose Alex Murdaugh’s finances.²⁸²⁴

Stephen Smith. In 2021 the State Law Enforcement Division opened an investigation into the 2015 death of Stephen Smith, which had been attributed to being struck by a vehicle, based on information gathered in the Murdaugh double-homicide investigation; in 2023 the agency said it was investigating his death as a homicide.³⁰ It has not said what that information was.³⁰ As of July 2025 the agency described the investigation as active and ongoing, and no one has been charged, according to WCIV.³¹

Personal backstory

Family and early life

Murdaugh was born in May 1968 to Randolph Murdaugh III and Elizabeth “Libby” Alexander Murdaugh and grew up in Hampton County, South Carolina, according to USA Today.³³ His father, grandfather and great-grandfather served as the elected prosecutor in the local judicial circuit for more than 80 years, and the family founded a law firm about a century ago, the AP reported.²³ He graduated from Wade Hampton High School in 1986, earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of South Carolina in 1990 and a law degree from its law school in 1994, according to USA Today.³³ He played college football, the AP reported.²³

Career and marriage

He became a partner in the family firm, handling personal-injury cases, and served as a volunteer part-time prosecutor in the 14th Judicial Circuit, USA Today reported.³³ He married Maggie in 1993, while he was in law school; their older son was born in 1996 and Paul three years later.³³

Addiction

Murdaugh has attributed both his thefts and his lies to investigators to an addiction to opioids.¹⁹²⁷ He testified that the addiction grew out of a college football injury that worsened nearly two decades earlier and that he spent large sums on pills.²⁷ His defense described him at trial as a caring father and husband who fell into a severe opioid addiction.²⁴ No expert testimony or court finding about his mental health appears in the sources reviewed.

In custody

He has been in custody since his arrest in October 2021.²⁵¹⁶ At his state sentencing his lawyer said he “feels awful about his conduct and he’s going to spend the next 22 years in prison, apologizing.”²² The Supreme Court’s ruling does not affect his financial-crimes sentences, and he remains in prison.²¹⁴ No statement from the families of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh about the retrial appears in the sources reviewed.