Alan Wilson says it took 10 months to access key Alex Murdaugh murder trial video

Mar. 28—South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said Tuesday afternoon it took prosecutors and investigators 10 months to access a video that one juror said ultimately led to Alex Murdaugh's conviction for the murders of his wife and son.

Before Judge Clifton Newman sentenced Murdaugh to two life sentences without the possibility of parole March 3, juror Craig Moyer told reporters a video showing Murdaugh at the dog kennels less than five minutes before his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, were shot to death ultimately led jurors to find Murdaugh guilty after less than three hours of deliberations.

Wilson told the Aiken Republican Club that the video taken was locked away on Paul's iPhone for 10 months after the murders because no one knew the password to the device.

"Apple wouldn't help us so we couldn't get into the iPhone," Wilson said. "We had the Secret Service working on it. Finally someone in the bowels of the Secret Service came up with a great idea to try his birthday in the code in the phone and it opened the phone up 10 months later."

Investigators soon found a video, less than one minute in length, taken by Paul at 8:44 p.m. at the dog kennels of the family hunting estate known as Moselle.

Paul had taken the video after a four-minute conversation with family friend Rogan Gibson about an injury to the tail of a dog, a chocolate lab puppy named Cash, that Gibson owned but was staying at the Murdaugh property.

Gibson told jurors Feb. 1 during the phone conversation Paul said he would take a video of the dog's tail and send it to Gibson.

After the phone call ended, Paul took a video, less than a minute long, of the dog.

In the video, three voices can be heard.

Gibson and Will Loving, another family friend, identified those voices as Paul, Maggie and Alex during the trial.

The video ended at 8:45:45 p.m.

"That's the moment where you hear him [Alex] yelling to Bubba the dog to get the bird out his mouth," Wilson said.

But Paul never sent the video to Gibson and less than three minutes later he and Maggie were killed.

Wilson said prior to disclosure of the video Murdaugh told investigators he hadn't been at the kennels prior to finding the bodies at around 10 p.m.

Prosecutors used what Murdaugh told investigators and the video to paint him as a liar and someone looking to escape responsibility for committing a horrible crime.

When Murdaugh testified in his own defense, Murdaugh explained the contradiction between the video and what he told investigators by saying he was paranoid of law enforcement because he was addicted to opioids and had pills in his pocket the night of the killings.

Moyer said the jury believed the prosecution's version of the events. He added Murdaugh was "a good liar. But not good enough."