Alex Murdaugh’s attorney bizarrely links murder case to FBI raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago
Alex Murdaugh is accused of shooting dead his wife Maggie and son Paul at the family’s hunting lodge in Islandton, South Carolina, back on 7 June 2021
The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
An attorney for disgraced legal scion Alex Murdaugh has made a bizarre comparison between his double murder case and the FBI raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Mr Murdaugh, 54, is accused of shooting dead his wife Maggie Murdaugh and son Paul Murdaugh at the family’s hunting lodge in Islandton, South Carolina, 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.
On Wednesday, his attorney Dick Harpootlian hit out at South Carolina prosecutors over their handling of the murder case, accusing them of withholding evidence and launching a “trial by ambush” against Mr Murdaugh.
Mr Harpootlian called a press conference where he said that the state attorney general’s office was taking too long to share evidence with the defence.
The delay is making it difficult for Mr Murdaugh to defend himself in his upcoming trial, he said.
As part of his criticism, the attorney made a far-fetched attempt to compare the delay in turning over evidence to the Department of Justice’s refusal to hand over the affidavit for the raid on Mr Trump’s south Florida home.
“There was no reason, as I point out, that they couldn’t turn almost all of this over to us 32 days ago,” he said.
“A number of search warrants have sealed affidavits – now sealed affidavits I shouldn’t have to explain to any of you because you turn on the news right now, they’re talking about sealed affidavits on a certain search warrant in Florida.
“The question is – after the indictment is brought, should they still be sealed? The answer is no.”
Last Monday, federal agents executed a search warrant on the Palm Beach home of the former president.
In the raid, officials seized 27 boxes including 11 containing classified information. Some of the information was of the highest possible top secret classification, meaning it should never have left the custody of the government.
In the aftermath, the DOJ released the search warrant to the public, revealing probable cause to believe Mr Trump had violated the Espionage Act.
While the search warrant was released, the Justice Department has rebuffed calls for the release of the affidavit, saying that it could harm the ongoing investigation and damage cooperation from witnesses.
On Thursday, a Florida court will hear arguments for and against its release.
While Mr Trump is yet to be charged with any crime, Mr Murdaugh was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime last month.
The charges came a staggering 13 months after his wife and son were found murdered by the dog kennels at the family’s estate.
After he was charged, Mr Murdaugh’s legal team immediately asked for the prosecution’s evidence and said they were seeking a speedy trial.
Under court rules, prosecutors have up to 30 days to hand over evidence – giving them until Monday.
Mr Harpootlian said that the defence still hasn’t received a “shred of paper” in the case.
“I don’t have a shred of paper. I don’t have an email. I don’t have an exhibit. I don’t have any evidence,” he said.
“We want to try this case in January.”
He said that – given the investigation went on for 13 months before Mr Murdaugh was charged – the state should have had a lot of evidence ready to share.
“There’s the cellphone data. There’s the data from the black box in his truck. There’s forensics. We’re never seen an autopsy or an analysis of the time of death,” he said.
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”.
“This manufactured drama is just a well-known part of defence counsel’s playbook,” the office said.
Prosecutors said that the delay in sharing evidence was actually caused by Mr Murdaugh’s team after they wouldn’t agree to a protection request.
The AG’s office had filed a protection request on Friday to prevent autopsy details, crime scene photos and other evidence from being made public before the trial.
Prosecutors have so far remained tight-lipped about what evidence finally led them to charge Mr Murdaugh with the double murders – coming more than 13 months on from the grisly crime.
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.
Mr Murdaugh was also 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.