Dramatic moment Alex Murdaugh is first asked by police: ‘Did you kill your wife and son?’
‘So does that mean that I am a suspect?’ Mr Murdaugh asked in the 11 August 2021 interview
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Newly-released footage has revealed the dramatic moment that Alex Murdaugh was first confronted by law enforcement for the first time about allegedly killing his wife and son.
Footage of a police interview with the disgraced legal dynasty heir was shown for the first time in Colleton County Courthouse on Wednesday as the prosecution nears the end of its case in his double murder trial.
The interview was Mr Murdaugh’s third since the 7 June 2021 murders – and came two months on from the slayings on 11 August 2021.
During the interview, SLED Special Agent David Owen asked the accused killer about his movements on the day and night of the murders – an alibi that has since been refuted in testimony and evidence revealed at his trial.
Near the end of the interview, the agent is seen telling Mr Murdaugh that he has “a few more questions”.
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Then, in a bombshell moment, the officer asked outright if he had murdered his wife Maggie and son Paul that fateful night.
“Did you kill Maggie?” he asked.
Mr Murdaugh replied: “No... Did I kill my wife? No, David.”
When the agent asked if he knows who did, Mr Murdaugh said: “No, I do not know who did.”
“Did you kill Paul?” Agent Owen continued.
“No, I did not kill Paul,” Mr Murdaugh said.
He again said that he did not know who had killed his son, before asking the officer if he believed he was responsible for his loved ones’ murders.
“Do you think I killed Maggie?” he asked.
“I have to go where the evidence and the facts take me,” Agent Owen said.
Mr Murdaugh replied: “I understand that. And you think I killed Paul?”
Agent Owen reiterated that he has to go where the evidence and the facts take him as he told him: “I don’t have anything that points to anybody else at this time”.
At that moment, Mr Murdaugh realised for the first time that he was the prime suspect in the case.
“So does that mean that I am a suspect?” Mr Murdaugh asked.
Agent Owen testified in court that, by the date of the interview, Mr Murdaugh was the one and only suspect in the brutal slayings.
As the husband and father of the victims, and the only individual on the crime scene that night, Agent Owen testified that Mr Murdaugh was in the investigative circle from the very start.
The dramatic footage wove together the prosecution’s case against Mr Murdaugh – highlighting the wild inconsistencies in the alibi he gave to police and the trove of evidence and witness testimony revealed so far at his trial.
Among the inconsistencies were: how long Mr Murdaugh spent at his mother’s home that night; whether or not he went to the dog kennels; the different clothes he was wearing; the timeline of when he was at his law firm; and the reason Maggie had gone to the family estate that day.
“It wasn’t one inconsistency. It was several inconsistencies within a period of time that were repeated,” SLED Special Agent David Owen testified.
In the video, Mr Murdaugh is heard claiming he had spent 45 minutes to an hour at his sick mother’s house that night – a timeline that has been refuted by both car data and testimony from his mother’s carer.
Mr Murdaugh told the officers that he had dinner with Maggie and Paul and then “dozed off” on the couch.
When he woke, he said he went to check on his mother, because she has Alzheimer’s and his father was in hospital. He said he would visit his mother “all times of the day”.
Last week, Muschelle “Shelly” Smith, who worked as a caregiver to Mr Murdaugh’s mother Libby, testified that a “fidgety” Mr Murdaugh showed up at his sick mother’s house sometime between 8.30pm and 9.30pm on the night of the murders. She said it was unusual for him to visit at that time.
She said he stayed only around 20 minutes – but then later told her to tell police he had been there double that time.
“I was here 30 to 40 minutes,” she said he told her days later in a conversation that left her feeling “nervous”.
Mr Murdaugh later offered “to help her out” with paying for her upcoming wedding and putting in a good word for her with her other job, she said.
Data taken from Mr Murdaugh’s SUV also indicates that Mr Murdaugh did leave his family home and drove to visit his sick mother at around 9.06pm, arriving at 9.22pm.
The records suggest he only stayed at his parents’ home for 21 minutes, leaving again at 9.43pm and arriving at Moselle at around 10pm. He called 911 at 10.06pm.
In the police interview, Agent Owen also asked Mr Murdaugh about several comments he had made in the 911 call reporting the murders – compared to what he was telling him two months on.
The footage shows Mr Murdaugh telling the officers that he went to the dog kennels after returning from his mother’s house.
When asked where the dogs were, he said he “didn’t move the dogs” and didn’t “recall a dog being out”.
However, in the 911 call, he is heard appearing to call to someone or something, saying: “Here, here.”
Agent Owen pointed out the call saying it sounded like he was talking to somebody else or calling for one of the dogs.
Mr Murdaugh confirmed that he didn’t see any people at the kennels and was “certain” none of the dogs were loose at the time.
The footage also showed Mr Murdaugh’s apparent lack of surprise when he was told for the first time that his wife and son had been murdered by the family’s own guns.
Asked to describe Mr Murdaugh’s reaction to that revelation, Agent Owen told the court: “Nothing.”
Prosecutors claim that Mr Murdaugh shot dead Maggie and Paul at the dog kennels on the family’s sprawling 1,700-acre estate at around 8.50pm on the night of 7 June 2021.
Mr Murdaugh claims he was asleep at the house at that time and woke up and went to visit his mother. When he returned, he said he found his wife and son’s bodies, calling 911 at 10.06pm.
Prosecutors allege that Mr Murdaugh killed his wife and son to distract from his string of alleged financial crimes – at a time when his multi-million-dollar fraud scheme was on the brink of being exposed.
Meanwhile, the defence is seeking to paint him as a family man who could not have carried out the brutal murders because he loved his wife and son.
The brutal double murders brought to light a series of scandals surrounding Mr Murdaugh including unexplained deaths, the multi-million-dollar fraud scheme and the botched hitman plot.
At the time of the murders, Paul was awaiting trial over the death of Mallory Beach – a 19-year-old woman who died in a 2019 crash in the Murdaugh family boat.
Paul was allegedly drunk driving the boat at the time and crashed it, throwing Beach overboard. Her body washed ashore a week later. Paul was charged with multiple felonies over the boat wreck and was facing 25 years in prison at the time of his murder.
The Beach family sued Mr Murdaugh and a lawsuit hearing was scheduled for the week of the murders. It was postponed following Maggie and Paul’s murders.
Days on from the shootings, an investigtion was then reopened into the 2015 death of Stephen Smith, who was found dead in the middle of the road in Hampton County.
The openly gay teenager, 19, had suffered blunt force trauma to the head and his death was officially ruled a hit-and-run. But the victim’s family have long doubted this version of events, with the Murdaugh name cropping up in several police tips and community rumours.
An investigation was also reopened into another mystery death connected to the Murdaugh family – that of the Murdaugh’s longtime housekeeper Gloria Satterfield.
She died in 2018 in a mystery trip and fall accident at the family home. Mr Murdaugh then allegedly stole around $4m in a wrongful death settlement from her sons.
Then, three months on from the murders on 4 September 2021, Mr Murdaugh was suddenly shot in the head along the side of a road in Hampton County.
He survived and called 911, claiming he was ambushed in a drive-by shooting while he was changing a tire on his vehicle.
But, Mr Murdaugh’s story about the incident quickly unravelled.
One week later on 13 September, he confessed to law enforcement that he had orchestrated the whole saga, 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.
He told investigators that he had paid Curtis “Eddie” Smith – a former law firm client, distant cousin and allegedly his drug dealer – to carry out the shooting. Both he and Mr Smith were arrested and charged over the incident.
The plot, described as the “side of the road” incident, marked one of the most bizarre twists in the sprawling scandal which has enveloped the disgraced heir to a prominent South Carolina legal dynasty over the past 20 months.
Mr Murdaugh, 54, is facing life in prison for the murders of his wife and son. He has pleaded not guilty.