A video that could undermine Alex Murdaugh’s claim that he was not at the scene of killings will be shown in court today, according to a source

Paul Murdaugh and the Murdagh family: A joint investigation into the shooting of Paul and Maggie Harpootlian at a South Carolina boarding house

One of those voices on the video belongs to Alex Murdaugh, according to prosecutors. In interviews with law enforcement, Murdaugh has maintained that he was not there.

A law enforcement expert testified that Paul’s video could have been filmed in the area where the bodies of Paul andMaggie would be found. Murdaugh has said he was not at the boardinghouse when he found the bodies. Police said he called 911 at 10:07 p.m.

Dove said three different voices could be heard in the footage. And while Dove did not personally know the voices, he said, “You can tell that they’re different voices.”

Crosby said he identified three people when the prosecution played the video from Paul’s phone. Crosby replied that he was sure that the voices on the audio were theirs.

Paul Murdaugh called Gibson the night of the shooting, at 8:40 p.m., to ask if something was wrong with Gibson’s dog, Cash, which was in a kennel at the Murdaugh property. The reception was not good enough to allow them to hold a video call, as they had tried to do. Gibson said that Paul Murdaugh told him he would take a video of the dog and send it to him if the call wouldn’t work.

Prosecutor Waters of the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office – which is prosecuting the case due to the Murdaugh family’s decades-old ties with the local solicitor’s office – teased the video in his opening statement last week, saying that while Alex claimed to investigators he was napping at the house, video evidence would show he was present at the family’s kennels, where the bodies of his son and wife were found.

The video obtained by the prosecutors will show Murdaugh and his wife having a normal discussion with no animosity, according to the defense attorney. Paul is “very happy,” Harpootlian claimed. “Nobody’s down there threatening him. Daddy isn’t using a shotgun to kill him.

There’s evidence that Murdaugh had a chance to commit the murders. Audio from a Snapchat video recovered from his son’s phone places Murdaugh at the murder scene, prosecutors contend, contrary to his alibi to investigators that he was not there that night.

Murdaugh called 911 the night of the killings to report he’d found his wife and son shot dead at the family’s home in Islandton, South Carolina – a property known as Moselle.

Dove said that Maggie was in a chat with her family at 8:51 pm when she read two text messages.

Waters said that Murdaugh called his wife several times that evening before texting her that he planned to visit his mother in Almeda, South Carolina.

Murdaugh and a forensic scientist interviewed by a gunshot primer primer on the clothing of a former South Carolina attorney who died in his death

The display of the phone went off at 8:52 p.m. Dove said that at 8:54 pm, the orientation changed and the camera activated, indicating that the phone was moved and the camera tried to locate her face.

Dove testified Wednesday that call logs show a gap in calls between June 4 and June 7.

Dove said the only way to remove the calls from the log would be to manually do it.

Dove testified that Murdaugh typically had a habit of texting within 5 minutes, or sometimes 30 to 40 minutes.

A forensic scientist testified in Alex Murdaugh’s murder trial Tuesday she found gunshot primer residue particles on clothes the now-disbarred South Carolina attorney was wearing the night his wife and son were killed – and on a blue jacket that has drawn increasing attention in the proceedings.

The primer is one of the elements that make up an.308 caliber round.

Without the jury present, the defense on Monday asked the judge to rule that the jacket shouldn’t be considered evidence. They argued that the saw carried only a tarp, not a jacket, and that the caregivers’ testimony was that no one connected Murdaugh to the jacket. The judge on Tuesday denied the defense’s request.

Moore told the court that investigators found a blue tarp and blue jacket on the second floor of the mother’s home.

Murdaugh and Seckinger confronted after the murders of his wife, Maggie, and son, Ronnie Crosby, in September 2021

On Tuesday, the friend and former law partner, Ronnie Crosby, testified that after the killings, Murdaugh shared he had dinner with Maggie and Paul, and then fell asleep on the couch while the two went to the kennels on the Murdaugh property.

More impropriety was found when Seckinger dug into Murdaughs records in the weeks ahead. She told the court that in September 2021, the partners of the firm confronted Murdaugh about the money and made him resign.

She looked for Alex that morning and found him standing outside his office, she testified. He “looked at me with a pretty dirty look – one I’ve not seen before – and said, ‘What do you need now?’ Clearly disgusted with me. she testified.

At the time Maggie and Paul were killed, Murdaugh was facing a lawsuit from Beach’s family. The June 10, 2021 hearing was scheduled to revealMurdaugh’s financial problems, according to prosecutors.

The conversation occurred in September 2021, three months after the deaths of Murdaugh’s wife and son and after Murdaugh’s law firm said it had discovered extensive financial wrongdoing.

Seckinger said that no one at the firm was concerned about finding the missing money because they were concerned about Alex.

Seckinger told the court that the partners put up money to make up for the money that was misappropriated. When asked why, she said that Murdaugh “stole it.”

“He said, ‘I’m sorry I’ve had a drug problem, I’m addicted to opioids … for something like 20 years,’ ” the friend, Chris Wilson, testified. “He said he had a drug addiction and he admitted that he had been stealing money from his law firm and from clients.”

Per court filing, prosecutors argue that Murdaugh killed the people to pay attention to a number of alleged illegal schemes to distract from his legal and financial troubles.

There’s a lot more evidence about financial wrongdoing than there is about guilt in a murder case. Last week, the defense lawyer said that this was about that.

He and Murdaugh had worked on a personal injury case together and won a verdict of $5.5 million, with each attorney earning about $792,000. Murdaugh asked Wilson to write the check to him personally rather than his law firm, and Wilson did as requested.

According to testimony from his coworkers, the checks played a crucial role in the discovery that Murdaugh had been misappropriating funds.

Also in court Thursday, Michael “Tony” Satterfield, the son of Murdaugh’s former housekeeper Gloria Satterfield, testified about being defrauded by Murdaugh.

Satterfield testified that he learned of the settlement from his family, who heard about it through media reports. He said when he asked Murdaugh about it in June 2021, Murdaugh told him “it was still making progress” and to be ready to settle by the end of the year.

Murdaugh’s debts to a local bank and murder for hire: Tinsley, Seckinger, and Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson

Further, the CEO of a local bank testified for the jury that Murdaugh’s account was overdrafted by about $350,000. As of August 2021, Murdaugh had a total debt to the bank of $4.2 million, according to Palmetto State Bank CEO Jan Malinowski.

Tinsley’s testimony continued Friday after ending Thursday with him on the stand. He was involved in representing the family of the 19-year-old Beach who was killed in a boat crash.

“We weren’t going to go in there and harass him about money when we were worried about his mental state and the fact that his family had been killed,” the CFO, Jeanne Seckinger, testified.

When his law firm confronted him again about misappropriated funds, he resigned, and was accused of having a murder-for-hire and insurance scam plot.

Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson testified in the double-murder trial of Alex Murdaugh on Friday, saying that she was suspicious of Alex Murdaugh in the days before his wife was killed and concerned about money possibly being demanded of her family.

“She was concerned about the amount of money that they were requesting in that lawsuit – $30 million is what she told me,” Turrubiate-Simpson said. She said she knew the amount of money they were asking for.

“He said there was going to be people probably stopping by and bringing food and stuff,” Turrubiate-Simpson said. I asked him if he wanted the house to look like the wayMaggie would want it to. I went to the house after saying yes.

The Murdaugh family of the 2021 murder victim was killed in Colleton, South Carolina, by a lawyer named J.G. Turrubiate-Simpson

Alex Murdaugh is on trial for the killings on June 7, 2021. The trial is expected to last two more weeks after he pleaded not guilty to the murder charges.

Ahead of Turrubiate-Simpson’s testimony, some Murdaugh relatives were ordered this week to sit farther back in the South Carolina courtroom due to inappropriate contact and conduct, the Colleton County clerk of court said.

In court Wednesday, Alex Murdaugh’s sister Lynn Murdaugh Goettee passed him a book through a member of his defense team. A source with knowledge of the incident said that Goettee was admonished before the victim’s advocate was made aware of it.

A source said that the book was considered to be a violation of the law because it wasn’t clear what was in it. The book – John Grisham’s “The Judge’s List” – was later confiscated.

The younger Murdaugh was reprimanded for his actions. The two men have been warned that they’ll be barred from the courtroom if they persist in their transgressions.

Amid the book incident, Wednesday’s testimony was interrupted when a bomb threat was called into the clerk’s office and the courthouse in Walterboro was evacuated, Hill said. Court resumed hours later.

The legal teams said that closing arguments could start around February 23 based on attorney estimates, weeks after the original end date.

The defense will need at least a week to rest their case if the state is able to do it by the middle of next week.

The defense has out-of-state expert witnesses who will require travel and lodging, Harpootlian said, pointing out the length of the state’s case is making that difficult and expensive to schedule. The state has called 44 witnesses and brought in more than 400 exhibits of evidence.

Harpootlian planned to ask the judge to let jurors visit Moselle, the hunting property where Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were killed, he said in opening statements.

The video had been shown to the jury in January, but Monday was the first time the public could watch Murdaugh’s actions as deputies arrived at his home on the family’s estate after he placed a 911 call.

30 seconds later, the deputy asks him if the gun he brought to the scene was from the home. Murdaugh says yes, and then offers his own reasoning as to why someone would kill his family.

The deputy asks where the gun is, and Murdaugh tells him it is leaning against Murdaugh’s vehicle. The deputy checks Murdaugh’s shirt before talking further.

“This is a long story. My son was in a boat wreck … months back. He has been receiving threats, says Murdaugh. “Most of it’s been benign stuff. We didn’t take serious, you know, he’s been getting like punched. That is what it is, I know that.

When Greene asked Murdaugh when he was last with the pair, Murdaugh answered, “earlier tonight,” before explaining that at one point that evening he’d left the home to visit his mother, who lived about a 15-minute drive away.

The injuries suffered by Maggie, Paul and Alex Murdaugh during a visit to a university of South Carolina psychiatric hospital

Also Monday, under questioning from the prosecution, Ellen Riemer, a pathologist at the Medical University of South Carolina, gave graphic testimony Monday about the injuries suffered by Maggie and Paul and their autopsy results.

The force of the shot caused his brain to be ejected, Riemer said, and it arrived to the autopsy separately. Alex Murdaugh wiped his eyes and nose after he was teary eyed during testimony.

According to Riemer, at least four times, Murdaugh was shot with an assault rifle. The first two shots were fired from the front while Maggie was standing, Riemer said; one went through her abdomen and the other went through the inside of her left thigh.

Riemer testified that he saw nothing on his hands that would indicate he had his hands up to his face. “That first shot, his arm was down, and I don’t see any evidence of injury to his hands from the second.”

The next shot went upward, starting at Maggie’s chest and going through the left side of her face. Riemer said the first two shots caused the girl to double over and her head was bent over. This wound would have been immediately fatal, she said. The last gunshot, Riemer testified, was to the back of the head.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/us/alex-murdaugh-trial-monday/index.html

Prosecutor’s Brief Report: “A Pedestrian’s Perspective on the First Preliminary Test of the Second Amendment”

The jurors will be tested again on Wednesday. While defense and prosecution attorneys discussed the postponement of the proceedings, Judge Newman said jurors would wear masks and have a positive attitude.