Alex Murdaugh: Judge vows to stop courtroom ‘carnival’ in fiery hearing as legal heir tries to subpoena agents

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A South Carolina judge said he wants to stop the “carnival-type atmosphere” surrounding Alex Murdaugh in a fiery court hearing where the embattled legal scion’s attorneys tried to subpoena law enforcement agents to testify.

Mr Murdaugh appeared in court in Walterboro on Monday morning for a heated hearing in the double murder case of his wife and son.

The 54-year-old is accused of shooting dead his wife Maggie Murdaugh and son Paul Murdaugh at the family’s hunting lodge in Islandton on 7 June 2021.

The double slaying lies at the centre of a sprawling web of alleged criminality involving the powerful attorney, including multi-million-dollar fraud schemes – as well as a string of other mysterious deaths of people close to him.

The courtroom descended into chaos at multiple points on Monday as the 54-year-old’s legal team went head-to-head with state prosecutors over the handling of evidence in the case, hurling accusations back and forth about leaking information to the press.

Judge Clifton Newman vowed to try to limit the “carnival” as he pointed out the sudden turnaround in relations between the two sides.

“The court has an independent responsibility and an obligation to avoid the creation of a carnival-type atmosphere in a case of this nature and I will do all I can to limit that,” he said.

“But in this case we have gone from the parties seeking agreement in a gag order a few weeks ago to being at extreme odds at this point, claiming there is a violation of rules.”

The judge handed both sides something of a victory. He granted the prosecution’s request for a protective order restricting both sides from releasing evidence ahead of the trial.

The protection order is temporary but “a more formal, more permanent order” will be issued soon, the judge said.

Judge Newman said he would also order the state to hand over evidence to the defence including the unsealed search warrants in the case.

The defence had claimed the prosecution was withholding evidence from the team. Meanwhile the prosecution said that the delay in sharing evidence was actually caused by Mr Murdaugh’s team after they wouldn’t agree to a protection request to prevent autopsy details, crime scene photos and other evidence from being made public before the trial.

Monday’s hearing got off to a heated start from the get-go as the prosecution and defence sparred about why they were even appearing in court.

State prosecutors said that the hearing was to settle a protective order about evidence not being leaked ahead of the trial.

At that point, Mr Murdaugh’s attorney interjected, arguing that the hearing was actually because of a defence complaint that the prosecution had not handed over evidence.

Attorney Dick Harpootlian instantly grew irate and shouted across the court that the state had “hijacked’ the case.

“I’m sorry if I’m being upset but every time we turn around they’re trying to hide something,” he told the judge.

Mr Harpootlian asked the judge to allow him to call South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) Captain Ryan Neill to testify on the stand.

Last week, he took the dramatic step of subpoenaing four SLED agents: Ryan Kelly, Charles Ghent, David Owen and Mr Neill. The SLED is leading the murder investigation as well as multiple other criminal investigations tied to Mr Murdaugh.

The judge denied the unusual request on Monday.

The prosecutor went on to ask the judge to grant a protective order amid fears that evidence could be leaked ahead of the trial.

He described the case as “unprecedented” in the state of South Carolina with both “violent crime” and “corruption” on a scale “never seen before”.

The prosecutor said that – given the significance of the case and the public interest – there are concerns that information could be leaked to the wrong people.

“If not this case, what case?” he asked.

Following claims from Mr Murdaugh’s team that the state had been leaking information, the prosecutor denied the accusations, saying it would not help their case to do so and that the evidence in the slayings is worth a million dollars.

Mr Harpootlian told the judge that he does not trust the office of the state attorney general not to release details to the public and asked for a “master supervisor” to be assigned to make sure prosecutors release all the evidence to the defence.

Earlier this month, Mr Murdaugh’s attorneys accused prosecutors of withholding evidence and launching a “trial by ambush”.

At the centre of the complaint was video footage which reportedly captures Mr Murdaugh, Paul and Maggie moments before their brutal murders.

At a press conference on 17 August, Mr Harpootlian said that the state attorney general’s office was taking too long to share evidence, claiming that the delay is making it difficult for Mr Murdaugh to defend himself in his upcoming trial.

The South Carolina AG’s office responded to the claims from Mr Murdaugh’s legal team in legal papers, claiming they were staging a “manufactured drama”.

Mr Murdaugh was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime in July.

The charges came a staggering 13 months after his wife and son were found murdered by the dog kennels at the family’s estate.

Prosecutors have so far remained tight-lipped about what evidence finally led them to charge Mr Murdaugh with the double murders.

However, at his indictment on 20 July, prosecutors indicated that the disbarred attorney’s string of white collar fraud and drugs scandals are all tied to his motive.

However, sources close to the investigation said that blood spatter on the 53-year-old’s clothing as well as cellphone footage placed Mr Murdaugh at the scene of at least one of his loved ones’ murders.

The source told FITS News that the high velocity spatter on his clothing shows he was in close contact with at least one of the victims when they were shot.

Meanwhile, Paul’s cellphone – which was discovered near his body – contained audio and video footage of Mr Murdaugh speaking to his wife just before the time that he and his mother were killed, the source said.

While investigators have given no motive for the murders, Mr Murdaugh’s finances were secretly in tatters and his marriage to Maggie was reportedly in ruins.

At the time of her murder, Maggie was living apart from her husband at the family’s beach house on Edisto Island and had been speaking with divorce attorneys.

The night of her killing, the 52-year-old had texted a friend saying that her husband had asked her to meet him at their estate that night so they could go to visit his dying father together, FITS News reported.

Maggie told her friend she believed Mr Murdaugh was “up to something” and was acting “fishy”.

Hours later, she was dead.

Paul, meanwhile, was awaiting trial on charges over the death of 19-year-old Mallory Beach in a 2019 boat crash. Paul was allegedly drunk driving a boat when he crashed it, throwing his friend Ms Beach to her death.

He was charged with boating under the influence and faced up to 25 years in prison. Rumours instantly swirled that the incident was in some way connected to Paul’s death.

Mr Murdaugh, a self-confessed opioid addict, is accused of shooting Maggie multiple times with an assault rifle and Paul once in the head and once in the chest with a shotgun back on the night of 7 June 2021.

He then made a dramatic 911 call, claiming that he had returned home from visiting his sick father and elderly mother to find their bodies by the dog kennels on the family’s sprawling hunting estate in Islandton, South Carolina.

In the dramatic call – placed at 10.07pm local time – the high-profile attorney cried and sobbed down the phone telling the dispatcher “my wife and child have been shot badly” as he begs them to “please hurry”.

Mr Murdaugh also tells the dispatcher that he hasn’t seen anyone on the property.

An autopsy for the two victims placed their time of death between 9pm and 9.30pm.

For more than a year, no arrests were made, no suspects were named and no charges brought over their killings.

The only person ever confirmed as a person of interest was Mr Murdaugh, all the while a slew of other investigations were launched and a string of other charges stacked up against him.

In the months after their deaths, Mr Murdaugh was arrested and charged over numerous alleged schemes including embezzling millions of dollars to fund his opioid habit and a bizarre plot where he allegedly hired a hitman to kill him.

Three months after his wife and son’s deaths, Mr Murdaugh allegedly hired a hitman to fake his own murder.

On 4 September, the attorney called 911 claiming he was ambushed in a drive-by shooting while he was changing a tire on the side of a road in Hampton County.

Mr Murdaugh was shot in the head and taken to hospital with superficial injuries.

One day after the shooting, Mr Murdaugh entered rehab for a 20-year opioid addiction and announced he had resigned from his law firm Peters, Murdaugh, Parker, Eltzroth, & Detrick (PMPED).

Days later, his law firm partners accused him of stealing millions of dollars from its clients going back years.

The partners had confronted Mr Murdaugh about the allegations and ousted him from the firm just one day before the shooting.

Mr Murdaugh’s version of events around the shooting rapidly fell apart and he confessed to police to paying an alleged hitman to shoot and kill him in an assisted suicide plot so that his surviving son Buster could get a $10m life insurance windfall.

Both Mr Murdaugh and his alleged accomplice Curtis Smith – who the attorney had previously represented – were charged over the incident.

Last week, Mr Smith was returned to jail after violating his house arrest and after being accused of new charges around a drug and $2.4m money laundering ring with Mr Murdaugh.

Following the botched roadside shooting, Mr Murdaugh was released on bond on the promise that he enter rehab for his opioid addiction.

He was then arrested on his release from rehab in October on charges of stealing funds from the wrongful death settlement over the mysterious trip and fall death of the family’s longtime housekeeper Gloria Satterfield in 2018.

Mr Murdaugh is accused of siphoning off $3.4m of the $4m settlement meant for Satterfield’s sons to a fake company called Forge.

Questions have been swirling around Satterfield’s death ever since and investigators reopened a probe into her death. Last month, officials announced plans to exhume her body.

Satterfield worked for the influential Murdaugh family for more than 20 years when she was found at the bottom of some stairs at the family’s home. She died weeks later from her injuries.

At the time, her death was regarded as an accidental fall – though her death certificate cited her manner of death as “natural”.

Mr Murdaugh reached an agreement to pay her family $4m in a wrongful death settlement – money he is now accused of swindling from his insurance company to help fund his drug habit.

An investigation was also reopened into a third mystery death connected to the Murdaugh family.

Stephen Smith, 19, was found dead in a road from blunt force trauma to the head in 2015.

His death was officially ruled a hit-and-run but the victim’s family have long doubted this version of events and said that rumours swirled in the community that a “Murdaugh boy” may have been involved.

As well as the murder charges, Mr Murdaugh is already facing more than 80 criminal charges from 16 indictments around the suicide-for-hire plot and schemes to defraud the Satterfield family and other victims out of millions of dollars. He is also facing 11 civil suits.

He has also been disbarred from practicing law in South Carolina by the state’s Supreme Court.

“Based on his admitted reprehensible misconduct, we hereby disbar respondent Richard Alexander Murdaugh from the practice of law in South Carolina,” the Supreme Court said on the same day murder charges were announced.

Throughout the legal saga, his surviving son Buster has stood by him.

In prison phone calls leaked last month, Mr Murdaugh is heard laughing to Buster that he has “allegedly done illegal things”.

Mr Murdaugh has denied killing his wife and son and pleaded not guilty to the charges.

He is being held on $7m bond at Richland County’s Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center – an amount that the financially-ruined attorney has no way of meeting.

Prior to his dramatic fall from grace, Mr Murdaugh was a powerful figure in Hampton County.

For almost a century, his family members have reigned over the local justice system with his father, grandfather and great-grandfather all serving as the solicitor in the 14th Judicial Circuit solicitor’s office.