Alex Murdaugh admits he lied about being at kennels and his alibi on night of murders in bombshell testimony

In a hotly-anticipated moment, the 54-year-old took the witness stand to testify that he is innocent of the brutal slayings of his wife Maggie and son Paul Murdaugh

Embattled legal dynasty heir and accused killer Alex Murdaugh has confessed to lying about his alibi on the night of the murders in bombshell courtroom testimony.

In a hotly-anticipated moment – in Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina, on Thursday morning, the 54-year-old took the witness stand in his trial for the brutal murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul.

The disgraced attorney insisted that he is innocent of the horrific slayings but dramatically confessed that he had lied about not going to the dog kennels with Maggie and Paul on the night of 7 June 2021.

“I did lie to them,” he said.

He blamed his opioid addiction for giving him “paranoid thinking” and his distrust of SLED which together led him to lie to law enforcement agents, family members and friends on multiple occasions and for the past 20 months.

“On June 7, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I don’t think I was capable of reason. And I lied about being down there. And I’m so sorry that I did,” he said, his eyes brimming up with tears.

“And I’m so sorry that I did.”

Mr Murdaugh said that once he started lying, he couldn’t get out of it.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave. Once I told the lie, and I told my family, I had to keep lying,” he testified.

Mr Murdaugh broke down in tears as he apologised to his family – including Maggie and Paul – for lying.

“I would never do anything intentionally to hurt them, ever,” he said.

This is the first time that Mr Murdaugh has ever confessed publicly or to law enforcement that he had lied.

The confession comes after jurors have seen a damning cellphone video which places him at the scene of the murders.

Alex Murdaugh stands next to the witness booth during a break in his trial for murder at the Colleton County Courthouse on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023 in Walterboro, South Carolina (AP)

The video, captured by Paul at 8.44pm on 7 June 2021, reveals three voices at the dog kennels on the family estate.

Multiple witnesses – including family friends and law firm partners – have testified that they are “100 per cent sure” that the three voices belong to Maggie, Paul – and Mr Murdaugh.

Minutes later, at around 8.50pm, prosecutors say Maggie and Paul were shot dead.

Mr Murdaugh has long claimed he never went to the kennels that night. He claimed he was asleep at the house at the time of the murders and woke up and went to visit his mother. When he returned, he found his wife and son weren’t home and drove to the kennels.

There, he claimed he discovered their bodies, calling 911 at 10.06pm.

No doubt, if Mr Murdaugh hadn’t confessed during direct questioning from his defence team, he would have faced a grilling by prosecutors about why he lied about being at the kennels that night.

Mr Murdaugh was confronted by his defence attorney Jim Griffin about the murders and his fake alibi as soon as he took the stand.

Alex Murdaugh gives testimony during his murder trial at the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina (AP)

Instantly, the defence launched into questioning as to whether he shot and killed his wife and son.

“No I did not,” he said.

“Did you take this gun or any gun like it and blow your son’s brains out?” Mr Griffin asked.

“No I did not,” he insisted.

“I did not shoot my wife or my son any time, ever,” he added.

Mr Murdaugh broke down in tears as he said he was very close to Paul – who he repeatedly referred to as “Paw Paw” – and said that “you could not be around him and not be having a good time”.

“You couldn’t be any closer than Paul and I,” he said.

He said he and Paul drove around and did work on the grounds together that evening.

In a Snapchat video – taken by Paul at around 7.38pm – which was previously shown to jurors, he said he and his son were “fooling with a fruit tree.”.

The work – and his consumption of drugs – made him sweaty so he took a shower and changed into the white t shirt and shorts that he is seen wearing in the bodycam footage, he testified.

Mr Murdaugh said that he and Maggie ate dinner together, whereas Paul was “always on the go” and had pretty much finished eating.

Alex Murdaugh cries on the witness stand (Colleton County Court)

Maggie then wanted to go down to the kennels but Mr Murdaugh did not want to go with her at first because he didn’t want to get sweaty again, he said.

She left without him going down to the kennels with Paul, he said.

But, after lying on the couch for some unspecified length of time, he decided he would do as she asked and go down to the kennels, he testified.

He drove the golf cart down there, he said.

Mr Murdaugh testified that he did not know at the time how Maggie and Paul got down to the kennels but now believes Paul drove them.

When he got there, he said there was some “chaos” as Maggie had let her favourite dog Bubba and Buster’s dog Grady out of the kennels.

“It was a little bit of chaos. It was clear to me that Mags had just let the dogs out. The two dogs that were out were her pet dogs,” he said.

He said one of the dogs Bubba caught a chicken.

After getting the chicken out of Bubba’s mouth, he said he “got out of there”.

“I got out of there, I left. I went back to the house,” he said, saying that he drove back in the golf cart.

“I went straight back to the house to the air conditioner.”

Mr Murdaugh’s former friend and law firm partner Mark Ball previously testified that he noticed a golf cart next to the family home in the aftermath of the murders.

Mr Murdaugh testified that he then lay down on the couch, where the TV was on, and said he “wasn’t positive if he did or didn’t doze off for a minute”. He then decided he would go to visit his mother, he said.

Data from Mr Murdaugh’s SUV has previously revealed that he left the Moselle home at 9.06pm – just 22 minutes after he is captured in Paul’s cellphone video.

He told the court that Maggie didn’t like to go to see his mother as she had sever Alzheimer’s so she never planned to go with him that night. He tried to call her to tell her he was going but got no answer.

He testified that he went to his mother’s house and spent some time with her.

He was asked about car data which revealed he had stopped in his mother’s driveway for a minute.

When asked if he was disposing of murder weapons or bloody clothes at that time, he said firmly “no” and said that he was getting his phone which had dropped down to the ground.

After returning home, he said he drove to the kennels to find Maggie and Paul.

In dramatic testimony, the accused killer sobbed as he described the moment he claims he found their bodies, saying: “It was so bad.”

“My boy was lying face down... I could see his brain laying on the sidewalk. I didn’t know what to do,” he said.

Sobbing, he testified how he had touched both of the victims, how Paul’s cellphone “popped out” of his pocket, described seeing his son’s brain shot out of his head – and said that to some extent he is “not sure exactly what I did”.

“I jumped out of my car... I’m not sure exactly what I did,” he said on arrival at the kennels.

He said he went back to the car and called 911, and was on the phone to the dispatcher while touching both his wife and son’s bodies.

“I was trying to tend to Paul. I was trying to tend to Maggie,” he said. “I was going between them.”

When asked about Paul’s bodies, he kept repeating “so bad” and wept.

“I know I tried to check him for a pulse. I know I tried to turn him over,” he said.

When asked why he tried to turn Paul over, Mr Murdaugh said: “I don’t know. I don’t know why I tried to turn him over.

“I tried to turn him over, grabbed him by the belt loop and tried to turn him over,” he said.

Mr Murdaugh volunteered the information that, as he tried to move Paul, his son’s phone “popped out” of his pocket.

“And when I did, his phone popped out,” he said.

“And when it did I picked it up and put it back down.”

Jurors have previously heard testimony from multiple law enforcement officers on the scene that – despite his claims that he touched the victims’ bodies – Mr Murdaugh did not appear to have any blood on his hands or clothing.

Bodycam footage from the first officer on the scene also shows him dressed in a clean white t shirt and the shirt did not test positive for any blood.

As jurors have previously heard, the crime scene was especially violent and bloody, with Paul’s brain shot out of his skull and both he and Maggie lying in pools of their own blood, fuelling the prosecution’s theory that Mr Murdaugh killed his wife and son and then changed his clothing – disposing of the bloody clothes.

Mr Murdaugh testified that he did get blood on his hands “probably” from both Maggie and Paul after touching their bodies.

“I know I got blood on my fingertips,” he said, adding “there was so much blood”.

He said he assumed that a drop of blood on the steering wheel of his car and blood on the shotgun he had at the scene must be from him after touching the bodies.

Murdaugh during a police interview where he learned he was a suspect for the first time (AP)

The 911 call, Mr Murdaugh made at 10.06pm that night, was also played in court revealing him saying “he should have known”. Mr Murdaugh claimed he was talking about the threats to Paul over the 2019 boat crash.

After finding the bodies and calling 911, he said he drove back to the house and got a gun, fearing that the killer or killers was still out there.

In an effort to suggest that he was not thinking rationally because of the trauma, he said he just grabbed ammo and loaded it – not realising he was loading a 16-gauge shell into a 12-gauge shotgun, something he claimed that as a longtime hunter he wouldn’t have done.

He also pushed back on the data which indicates he opened text messages, Googled a restaurant and searched for a wedding photographer while waiting for police to arrive.

“I’m not trying to call people. I’m not doign a Google search of a restaurant and I’m certainly not reading any texts,” he said, suggesting he fumbled onto the pages when he was calling his brothers to tell them about the murders.

Mr Murdaugh broke down in tears multiple times on the witness stand – something he has also done at the witness table throughout the weeks-long trial.

During his testimony, Mr Murdaugh’s family members appeared to be emotional, with his surviving son Buster and younger brother John Marvin seen wiping their eyes at one point.

As he testified, he faced the jury to speak to them face on and had addressed them with a cordial “good morning” as he got to the stand.

He also kept referring to the timeline provided by the prosecution.

He offered no explanation for the glaring discrepancies in the times he gave to investigators for months after the murders – including when he went to work that day and when he arrived home – but did not dispute it saying that having seen that data he now knows the timeline he gave was not accurate

However, he did dispute – in some cases without offering concrete alternatives – the testimony from several prosecution witnesses.

Mr Murdaugh denied accusations that he tried to get his story straight with two state witnesses – his mother’s carer and his housekeeper.

Muschelle “Shelly” Smith, who worked as a caregiver to Mr Murdaugh’s mother Libby from October 2019, previously told jurors that he turned up at his parents’ home for a brief 20 minute visit on the night of the murders – and then told her to tell authorities he stayed for double the length of time.

Mr Murdaugh claimed he had only said he would “appreciate” if she spoke to law enforcement if they came calling.

He said that he intentionally avoided speaking to people that investigators would want to speak to about the murders – saying he “wasn’t taking any chances” after the fatal boat crash case.

“After the boat wreck that you have heard so much about in this courtroom... there was so much talk on how I fixed witnesses and structured the investigation,” he said.

“Things that were totally false, baseless but it was said repeatedly, reported repeatedly, how I influenced this witness and influenced this police officer.”

He also denied Ms Smith’s testimony that he went to his parents’ home at around 6.30am one morning after the murders and left a blue tarp or blue raincoat there.

Investigators found a blue raincoat at the home covered in gunshot residue – with prosecutors claiming Mr Murdaugh used the item to transport and dispose of the guns used in the murders.

“Never seen it, never touched it, don’t know anything about it,” he said.

Mr Murdaugh also cast doubt on the significance of the clothes he was wearing on the day and night of the murders, accusing the prosecution of only focusing on clothes after he said an official lied about there being blood spatter evidence on his shirt.

In an August 2021 interview with SLED, Mr Murdaugh was asked about the clothes he was wearing in the Snapchat video with Paul – and how he had different clothes on in the aftermath of the murders.

He once again disputed the testimony of one of the state’s key witnesses – denying that he had tried to get his story straight with housekeeper Blanca Simpson about the clothes.

“I asked her specifically did she remember getting my clothes when she went back to Moselle,” he claimed.

Mr Murdaugh said that investigators have never asked him to produce the other outfit and said that, until just weeks before the trial, “as far as I thought, my clothes were never an issue in the case”.

“I was not aware my clothes were an issue in this case until my lawyers proved this blod spatter that I had on my shirt from my wife and son was a lie and there was no blood on my shirt,” he said.

“Once it was proven a lie, all of a sudden the clothes I was wearing back on that day became an issue.”

Jurors previously heard SLED Special Agent David Owens admit that he had told the Colleton County Grand Jury that the white t-shirt had blood spatter on it. He acknowledged that initial testing had indicated the presence of blood – but that further testing proved negative for human blood.

Mr Murdaugh also went on to confess to stealing money from his law firm and to orchestrating the bizarre botched hitman plot – two other cases which he is facing around 100 charges for.

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.

At the time of the murders, Mr Murdaugh was being sued by the family 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.

Their attorney had also filed a motion to compel, which prosecutors say would have exposed Mr Murdaugh’s ruinous finances.

The 10 June hearing was then postponed following Maggie and Paul’s murders.

Prosecutors claim that Mr Murdaugh’s multi-million-dollar fraud scheme was also on the brink of exposure, with his law firm PMPED closing in on his alleged theft.

That very morning, the CFO had confronted him about $792,000 worth of missing payments.

Mr Murdaugh had allegedly stolen the money and could not pay it back.

Jurors have heard testimony from several law firm partners and clients about how Mr Murdaugh stole millions over a decade-long fraud scheme.

Mr Murdaugh admitted in court on Thurday that he had stolen funds from clients at his law firm PMPED.

Mr Murdaugh blamed his alleged financial crimes on a 20-year opioid addiction which he said he had spent years battling.

“I’m not quite sure how it got the way it got but I was battling addiction for so many years. I was spending so much money on pills,” he said.

“My addiction is to opiate painkillers in particular to oxycodone,” he said.

He claimed that he developed his addiction after injuring his knee in college, and his addiction just escalated after that.

“It just escalated and escalated and escalated,” he said.

In a move that sought to undermine the prosecution’s theory of a motive, Mr Murdaugh insisted that he was not concerned that his financial crimes were on the brink of exposure on 7 June 2021 – the day of the murders.

When asked by his attorney Mr Griffin if, on the day of the murders, he thought his “financial house of cards was crumbling”, he insisted he did not.

Alex Murdaugh tells judge he will testify at his murder trial (Colleton County Court)

He sought to dismiss the significance of a voicemail message he sent to former Palmetto State Bank CEO Russell Laffitte four days before the murders – and suggested that the deaths of Maggie and Paul could not have benefited him financially,

On 3 June 2021, Mr Murdaugh sent a voicemail to Mr Laffitte asking him for money to extend credit on the family Moselle home.

“I need to extend farm credit line another 600k. My dad will sign also if needed. How much turnaround will that take?” he asked.

Mr Murdaugh insisted that there was $7m equity in Moselle home and that the home was fully in Maggie’s name.

“The entire Moselle property was 100 per cent in Maggie’s name,” he said, so her death actually made it more difficult to access his finances.

The second home – the Edisto Beach house – was owned 50-50 by the married couple so he also couldn’t access the equity after her death, he said.

Mr Murdaugh also said that there was no life insurance policies on Maggie and Paul.

He also downplayed the significant of the boat crash hearing saying he was concerned about a change in venue – but not that his finances would be exposed through the suit.

Mr Murdaugh dismissed the significance of the hearing, saying that, based on his own legal experience, the motion to compel was not so significant.

Over the coming months after the murders, Mr Murdaugh’s law firm partners uncovered an alleged multi-million-dollar fraud scheme where he had stolen millions from their clients and pocketed it himself.

Things reaching a head on 3 September when the partners confronted him about the scheme and forced him to resign.

The next day, Mr Murdaugh was shot in the head in what turned out to be a botched hitman plot.

Mr Murdaugh told the court that he initially asked his alleged accomplice Curtis EddieSmith “to bring me pills” but then “changed the plan”.

“Not to get pills anymore. I asked him to shoot me,” he said.

Mr Murdaugh said he believed it would be better for him to be dead.

“I meant for him to shoot me so I’d be gone,” he said.

“I knew all this was coming to a head. I knew how humiliating it would be for my son... I’d been through so much.

“At the time... I thought it was the better thing to do.”

After the shooting, Mr Murdaugh initially claimed he was the victim of a drive-by shooting while he changed a tire by the side of a road in Hampton County.

He spent hours with a sketch artist to help track down the fictional drive-by shooter.

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 $12m life insurance windfall.

He told investigators that he asked Mr 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 are awaiting trial over the incident.

Prosecutors say this fits the pattern of Mr Murdaugh orchestrating a crime to make himself a victim – and to get out of being held accountable for his actions.

Meanwhile Mr Murdaugh’s confession to the two other cases he is awaiting trial for – the financial crimes and the botched hitman plot – appears to be part of the defence’s strategy to suggest that the disgraced attorney would also confess to the murders if he was guilty of carrying out them too.

Before the day’s proceedings got under way, the disgraced attorney had defiantly told Judge Clifton Newman that he had finally made his decision to testify at his trial.

Buster, Maggie, Paul and Alex Murdaugh left to right (Maggie Murdaugh/Facebook)

Prosecutor Creighton Waters argued that the cross-examination is “wide open” to all the alleged crimes – including the financial crimes – if Mr Murdaugh takes the stand. Judge Newman sided with the state, refusing to issue an order ahead of the testimony.

“For the court to issue a blanket order limiting the scope of cross-examination, that’s unheard of to me,” he said.

“I am going to testify. I want to testify,” he vowed confidently.

Mr Murdaugh is accused of gunning down his loved ones in a horrific fashion on the grounds of the family’s 1,700-acre estate in Islandton, South Carolina, back on 7 June 2021. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The decision for Mr Murdaugh to testify comes as the defence plans to wrap up its case on Friday – a case that seeks to present the alleged killer and financial fraudster as a loving family man who would never have murdered his wife and son.

So far, jurors have heard from 10 defence witnesses including experts who testified about mistakes in the preservation of crime scene evidence, a ballistics expert who claimed Maggie’s shooter was 5’2” tall and not the 6’4” Mr Murdaugh, and the accused killer’s surviving son Buster.

This comes after jurors have heard four weeks of dramatic testimony from the prosecution, presenting Mr Murdaugh as a serial liar who stole millions from his own law firm and friends, and orchestrated situations to paint himself as a victim when his alleged crimes were on the brink of exposure.

In total, 61 prosecution witnesses covered a trove of circumstantial evidence, including cellphone and car data, a damning video allegedly placing Mr Murdaugh at the crime scene and apparent holes in his alibi for the time for the murders.

The decision to put Mr Murdaugh on the stand came down to the wire, with his defence attorneys paying him a jailhouse visit on Wednesday night.

Attorneys Dick Harpootlian and Mr Griffin had previously said that their client wanted to testify in his own defence but were dealt a – not entirely unexpected – blow when the judge refused to limit the scope of his cross-examination.

On Wednesday morning, Mr Griffin asked Judge Clifton Newman to bring an order preventing the prosecution from cross-examining Mr Murdaugh about his string of alleged financial crimes should he take the stand.

Mr Griffin said the legal team had not yet decided whether or not Mr Murdaugh would testify in his murder trial but that they wanted the financial crimes to be off-limits if he did.

Buster Murdaugh waits to resume testifying at his father’s trial (AP)

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.

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.

The 54-year-old is facing life in prison on the murder charges.