Clashes, crowds set to mark opening of Murdaugh double murder ‘trial of the century’

For the next few weeks, journalists, crime experts, witnesses and legions of the simply curious will pour into the usually unhurried town of Waterboro in South Carolina’s Lowcountry to cover what’s been called the “trial of the century:” The double murder trial of disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh.

It begins Monday morning with jury selection — a process that could take several days.

More than 100 journalists alone and their support staffs, including a team of 30 from Fox News and a reporter from France, are expected to flood motels and guest houses around Walterboro, population around 5,400, turning the rural county seat whose relaxed logo includes a red rocking chair into a ground zero of true crime.

“I’d say 100 is low-balling it,” said Mike Atwood, a county deputy and Colleton County courthouse security official.

The trial, a “whodunit,” is unlike many high-profile murder trials in South Carolina.

There is no confession, no video of the killings and no reported eyewitnesses.

In its chilling mystery, the June 7, 2021, execution-style killings of Murdaugh’s wife Maggie, 52, and youngest son Paul, 22, at the family’s rural Colleton County 1,700-acre estate stands apart from many of South Carolina’s most lurid murders.

In 1983, when Pee Wee Gaskins blew up an inmate on South Carolina’s death row, prosecutors played a tape recording of Gaskins admitting the killing. In 1994, Susan Smith gave a confession about drowning her two young sons. In 2014, killer Tim Jones was found with the bodies of his five young children in his Cadillac Escalade In 2015, Dylann Roof quickly admitted to the FBI that he killed nine Black churchgoers at a Charleston church and gave agents a video confession.

Even what is arguably South Carolina’s most despicable murder — the 1903 assassination of State newspaper editor N.G. Gonzales — was carried out in broad daylight on Columbia’s Main Street in front of witnesses.

But in the Murdaugh murder case, challenges to prosecutors abound.

Maggie was shot with an assault rifle. Paul was killed with a shotgun. Neither weapon has been found.

No one has been reported to have heard gunshots in the heavily forested part of Colleton County where they died. Maggie’s cellphone also was later found by a road, not far from the crime scene. No one has said how or why it got there.

Defense, prosecution theories

Murdaugh, 54, a once-wealthy disgraced lawyer and descendant of a prominent legal and political family, contends he is innocent.

He has acknowledged being at the family estate, called Moselle, just before the killings, but says he left to visit an ailing mother. He says he returned to find the lifeless bodies of his wife and son.

Prosecutors — a team of attorneys with the S.C. Attorney General’s Office, which typically doesn’t try murder cases but has all the resources of the state behind them — will be relying on circumstantial evidence, including GPS location data to try to prove Murdaugh was the killer.

Prosecutors Creighton Waters and Don Zelenka so far haven’t disclosed in public filings who they believe Murdaugh shot first or how the shootings took place. Waters, who works with state grand juries with multi-county jurisdiction, usually handles a variety of complex cases, including white-collar fraud, corruption and drug rings. Zelenka most often handles appeals of criminal cases.

Defense attorneys Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, veteran lawyers who both — especially Harpootlian — have decades of murder trial experience will be stressing an alternate theory: that there were two death weapons and that means there were two killers, and that state investigators never really looked for other suspects.

Harpootlian and Griffin also will appear to try and show that agents with the State Law Enforcement Division, the lead investigative agency, bungled the investigation of crucial elements of the case, as shown in numerous court documents related to an expert witness on organic spatter and a purported blood-soaked T-shirt.

They will ask the jury could a father actually execute his son with a shotgun? Could he have shot his wife at the same time?

Harpootlian and Griffin have filed numerous briefs contesting much of the circumstantial evidence that Waters and Zelenka want to get before the jury.

“With a circumstantial case, you have to be on your A game,” said Columbia defense attorney Johnny Gasser, a former state and federal prosecutor who has tried some 400 murder cases. “You have to cross all your T’s and dot all your I’s.”

The prosecution’s theory of the case, according to pretrial filings, is that Murdaugh killed his wife and son to gain time to thwart a growing investigation into 15 years of alleged embezzlement from his law firm and its clients.

Defense attorneys, with their theories of a bungled investigation and alleged failure by law enforcement to pursue other suspects, will want to convince jurors there is “reasonable doubt” that Murdaugh killed his wife and son. If jurors have such doubts, they must vote to acquit, defense attorneys will argue.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys have argued for weeks over whether various pieces of evidence should be presented to the jury.

Evidence, witnesses

Judge Clifton Newman is expected to hear oral arguments on opposing legal issues later in the week, likely after a jury has been seated, and issue rulings about what can be introduced at trial.

“The judge is the gatekeeper of what the jury is permitted to hear, and the instructor on the law, and what he decides can dictate the outcome of a trial,” said Joe McCulloch, a Columbia attorney who represents a client injured in a 2019 boat crash where an intoxicated Paul was alleged to have been driving the boat.

The judge won’t want to allow information that would unduly prejudice the jurors against Murdaugh, McCulloch said, but he has to weigh that against other information that would legitimately allow the prosecution to present its case.

Disputed issues in the murder trial may include:

▪ Evidence about Eddie Smith and whether he is or was a possible suspect in the murders. Smith flunked a lie detector test about the murders, according to a defense filing. Prosecutors want to keep evidence about other possible shooters to a minimum.

Evidence about GPS time-stamped location data from various cellphones and Murdaugh’s SUV that may put him at the scene of the murders around the time of the killings.

▪ Purported blood spatter said to be on Murdaugh’s shirt. Prosecutors contend there are microscopic bits of organic matter on his shirt, which could indicate he was just a few feet from Paul when he was shot. In a court filing last week, defense lawyers asserted that spatter evidence is false and based on mishandled junk science.

▪ Evidence about whether the crime scene — where the bodies were found, lying on the ground near the estate’s dog kennels — was contaminated by law officers and others on the night the killings occurred.

▪ Murdaugh’s alleged motive. Murdaugh is charged with embezzling some $8 million from his former law firm, his clients, his friends and family over the last 15 years. Charges include money laundering, tax evasion and trafficking in drugs. Prosecutors contend Murdaugh killed his family to gain sympathy and time when his firm and others were beginning to scrutinize his financial situation. Defense lawyers say evidence of fraud shouldn’t be shown to the jury because Murdaugh has not been convicted of those charges. Unproven financial crime allegations are out of bounds in a murder trial, defense attorneys argue.

In addition to legal issues about evidence, both sides have subpoenaed more than 70 witnesses total, sources familiar with trial details said.

Potential witnesses include various scientific experts, members of Murdaugh’s former law firm and Palmetto State Bank, where convicted banker Russell Laffitte, Murdaugh’s alleged enabler in his financial crimes, worked.

Others include Smith, allegedly involved in several insurance fraud, money laundering and drug trafficking schemes with Murdaugh, and lawyers Eric Bland and Mark Tinsley, who played roles in bringing Murdaugh’s alleged financial crimes to light before law enforcement got involved.

Another potential witness is a current assistant U.S. attorney, who has been subpoenaed by the defense based on knowledge they acquired through their job as a lawyer in private practice, according to a U.S. Attorney’s office spokesman. That attorney has been “walled off” from any investigations involving Murdaugh, the spokesman said.

Dennis Bolt, a longtime Columbia criminal defense lawyer and former prosecutor, said some major trial decisions may not happen until midway through the trial, including whether Murdaugh will take the stand in his own defense.

“The defense assesses what it needs to show the jury after the state rests,” Bolt said.

“If there is reasonable doubt in the state’s case, that is clear by the time the state rests. So there would be no need to put your client on the stand, especially if your client just wouldn’t be a good witness. You can take a good case of reasonable doubt and ruin it by putting an obnoxious client on the stand,’’ Bolt added.

Court TV, a digital true crime broadcast network, will air the case to an audience of potentially millions.

So many people are expected to visit Walterboro, that churches around downtown have opened their parking lots, said Scott Grooms, the city’s tourism director. In all, the city will provide some 1,100 free parking spots for the expected daily influx of 500 to 1,200 people, including news media satellite trucks.

Nicknamed the “Front Porch of the Lowcounty,” Walterboro has an annual rice festival, and its 202-year-old courthouse has often been the scene of local murder trials over the years.

“But there’s been nothing of this magnitude that would attract national attention,” Grooms said.