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Alex Murdaugh Was Seen Wearing Different Clothes After The Murders Of His Wife And Son
A Snapchat video captured Alex Murdaugh wearing a blue shirt and long khaki pants at 7:56 p.m the night of the murders, but just hours later, Murdaugh was seen talking to investigators wearing a white shirt and shorts.
Alex Murdaugh was captured on video wearing different sets of clothing the night his wife and son were gunned down on the family’s property.
Jurors were shown a Snapchat video in court Wednesday that was taken by Alex’s son Paul at 7:56 p.m. on the evening of June 7, 2021, according to Fox News.
Alex was seen in the video wearing a blue shirt and long khaki pants as he stood by a newly planted tree that flopped to the side as Paul can be heard laughing in the background.
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"Better than it was, ain't it?" Alex asks his son in the video, according to ABC Savannah affiliate WJCL.
Paul’s friend Will Loving testified that Paul sent him the video that night, about an hour before prosecutors believe the 22-year-old was killed.
Alex Murdaugh called 911 at 10:07 p.m. to report that he had discovered the bodies of his wife Maggie, 52, and Paul near the dog kennels on the property after coming home from visiting his ailing mother.
“It’s bad,” a frantic Alex said in a recording of the call previously obtained by Oxygen.com.
When investigators arrived to interview Alex that night, he was wearing a white T-shirt and shorts and appeared “clean from head to toe,” according to previous testimony from Colleton County Sheriff’s Office detective Laura Rutland.
Alex told officers that on the night of the murders, he had dinner with his family before taking a nap inside the main house, while Maggie and Paul went down to the dog kennels on the property. When he woke up, Alex said he decided to go visit his mother and returned home around 10 p.m. to make the grisly discovery.
He insisted that he was never at the dog kennels that night, however, an unsent video recovered from Paul’s cell phone has seemingly called that claim into question.
Paul recorded the video at 8:44:49 p.m. the night of his death, Fox News reports. He appeared to be trying to capture images of a dog’s tail for his friend Rogan Gibson, who owned the black lab, as two other voices can be heard in the background discussing another dog with a chicken in his mouth.
Gibson testified that he had spoken to Paul on the phone about a possible concern with the dog’s tail at 8:40 p.m.
Paul planned to take a video to send to his friend as soon as they hung up — but the video was never sent and authorities said Paul’s phone locked forever just minutes later. Gibson testified that he texted Paul to see whether he was able to get a video at 8:49 p.m. but never got any reply, NBC News reports.
Using the data from Paul and Maggie’s cell phones to recreate their final activities, investigators believe the mother and son were killed by Alex, who has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon, around 8:50 p.m. that night.
On the stand, Gibson testified that he believed one of the voices heard in the background of the video was Alex, allegedly placing him at the murder scene just before the fatal shots were fired.
Loving also testified that he was “100 percent” sure that it was Alex’s voice on the video, according to CNN.
On Thursday, the judge in the case heard testimony about the potential motive in the case, outside of the ears of the jury.
Prosecutors are hoping to introduce evidence about Alex’s alleged financial crimes, which they believe motivated him to kill his wife and son.
Jeanne Seckinger, the chief financial firm for Alex’s former law firm now known as the Parker Law Group, testified that on the morning of the murders, she had confronted Alex about $792,000 in missing funds and told him she believed he may have kept the funds himself, CNN reports.
Seckinger said she told Alex it was up to him to prove that he had not taken the money meant for the law firm.
“He assured me that the money was there, and that he could get it,” she said.
But the probe into the missing money was set aside after the double murders.
“Alex was distraught and upset and not in the office much,” Seckinger testified. “And nobody wanted to harass him about nothing that we thought was really missing, when we had several months till the end of the year to clear it up. So we were not going to harass him at that point in time.”
Alex is facing around 100 other charges stemming from 19 grand jury indictments accusing him of stealing close to $9 million from his law firm, former clients and others.
The alleged misdeeds were uncovered in the months following the double homicide as investigators took a deeper look into Alex’s activities around the time of the deaths.
State prosecutor Creighton Waters wants to introduce “just a few areas” related to the alleged financial misdeeds in an attempt to show the jury that Alex was feeling pressured and believed his alleged crimes were about to come to light the night of the murders.
“It is certainly relevant for the jury to consider when they consider the perfect storm that was arriving for this man on June the 7th,” he argued.
Alex’s attorneys, however, are hoping to keep the allegations related to the financial crimes out of the courtroom.
Judge Clifton Newman will be tasked with determining whether to allow the testimony if the two sides cannot agree, WJCL reports.
