The prosecution has tried to overcome a lack of direct evidence in the trial of Alex Murdaugh

Murdaugh v. Harvey: A man who murdered his wife, daughter and son in South Carolina, confessed to murdering his wife and son

Editor’s Note: The HBO docuseries “Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty” chronicles the family’s influence in South Carolina. CNN airs the program on Sunday, February 19 at 8pm.

In September of 2021, after the killings, he decided to have a man shoot him instead of giving him pills.

On May 26 she searched for a green gel pill and found the description of a nonprescription nighttime cold and flu medication.

In his opening statement, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian said the audio showed Murdaugh and his wife having a “normal discussion” with “no animosity.” Harpootlian claimed that Paul is very happy. Nobody is threatening him. Daddy is not going to kill him with a shotgun.

His addiction caused him to lie about it, according to Murdaugh. During Wednesday’s panel discussion, attorney Glenda Hatchett said that his admission might have come too late.

Prosecutors have tried to paint Murdaugh as a dishonest and disgraced attorney who killed his wife and son to draw attention from investigations into financial misconduct allegations against him. In his testimony, Murdaugh repeatedly denied carrying out the killings but admitted to stealing millions of dollars from his former clients and law firm.

The defense has portrayed the defendants as a loving husband and father who called authorities after finding his wife and son, while the real killers remain at large, and who is being prosecuted after a poorly handled investigation.

According to the defense this week, the killings of Maggie and Paul could have been related to a money dispute betweenMurdaugh and a man who owed him a lot of money.

The first two witnesses the defense called to the stand were the Coroner Richard Harvey of Colleton County and a guy who did a armpit check on them. Harvey said yes when asked if there was any time in between where they could have been shot.

The defense has said that the crime scene was not secure and that it was mishandled. One witness, Mark Ball, who worked at the law firm of Murdaugh, testified that no barricades or police tape were set up to prevent visitors from entering the premises the night of the killings.

Both Maggie and Paul’s phones were last used at 8:49 p.m., and Maggie’s phone forensics showed she took a lot of steps minutes later, according to the prosecutor. Waters argued that this showed Murdaugh fatally shot his son, and Maggie heard the shot, ran to the scene and was then shot dead by her husband.

During his testimony on Friday, Peter Rudofski, an investigator with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, said he was able to plot the movements of Murdaugh on the night of the killings.

When Margaret and Paul Murdaugh met at their home in Islandton, South Carolina, in the wake of their first encounter with a local solicitor

He went back to Islandton after visiting his mother because he thought Margaret and Paul were still there.

Rudofski testified he saw Murdaugh drive by the spot on the side of the road where the cell phone was recovered.

Murdaugh did not give any details about the process of going to his mother’s house despite continuous prodding by Waters.

According to previous testimony, he told investigators on the night of the killings that when he arrived at the crime scene and discovered the bodies, he tried to turn Paul over, then attempted to check Paul’s cell phone, and then attempted to tried both of their pulses, before calling 911.

Margaret Murdaugh and her son, Paul Murdaugh, were found dead at the family’s estate in Islandton, South Carolina.

The case was transferred that same day from the local solicitor to the Attorney General’s Office, which has been prosecuting the case due to the Murdaugh family’s long ties with the local solicitor: Three generations of Murdaughs served as the 14th Circuit Solicitor over about 87 years.

The footage played in court Wednesday showed SLED agents confronting Murdaugh about evidence that appeared to contradict his earlier statements to law enforcement.

Around 8:45 p.m., Paul’s phone recorded a video of a friend’s dog as his father’s voice could be heard in the background. The elder Murdaugh changed his story about where he was after seeing the video.

“And Rogan’s been around your family for pretty much all his life,” Owen said, something Murdaugh agreed with. “And he recognizes your voice, and you have a distinct voice. Can you think of anyone who has a similar voice to yours that he might have misinterpreted?

Alex Murdaugh and the Street Crimes: A Call to the Attorney General for the Children of the Aborigines, whose parents shot and killed two?

The agents confronted Murdaugh about a video he saw on the family’s property that Paul had filmed the night of the killings. In it, Murdaugh is seen wearing pants and a blue shirt. But later, he was wearing shorts and a white T-shirt.

“There’s a video on Paul’s phone of you and him on the farm that night. You’re wearing khaki pants and a dress shirt … When I met you that night, you were in shorts and a T-shirt,” Owen said. “At what point in the evening did you change clothes?”

The day of the murders, Blanca Simpson was told by a family member that Alex had asked both Paul andMaggie to come to Moselle.

“And the reason you didn’t, (was because) you weren’t concerned about those clothes. You have been focused on the T-shirt he was wearing, the shorts he was wearing and the shoes he was wearing when he called for help.

Owen told the grand jury that an expert had found blood spatter on the front of the T-shirts, and that it was sent to a lab for testing. The test, however, found no blood on the shirt.

When you did the HemaTrace test to confirm whether there was blood, it came up negative. Was that not taken notice? asked the man.

“Whoever killed Maggie and Paul would likely have biological material on them from the blasts that killed the two victims, right?,” Griffin asked Owen.

Griffin established that Murdaugh’s mother’s property in Almeda was not searched until months after the killings, in September 2021. No weapons were found on that property, Owen testified.

At one point Wednesday, Judge Clifton Newman ruled against allowing testimony about a roadside shooting that injured Murdaugh in September 2021. Authorities have alleged that Murdaugh arranged for another man, Curtis Edward Smith, to shoot him so his surviving son could obtain millions of dollars in life insurance.

Griffin said Smith owed a lot of money to a drug gang, and Owen testified that he was told the gang was not worried about the money because it knew it was going to get paid.

Did Alex Murdaugh ever mention to you anyone that might have been involved in the murder of his son or wife prior to that day?

Owen said drug gang members use burner phones and he didn’t have their phone numbers, when asked if a cell phone analysis was performed to see if anyone was in the area on the night of the killings. But state investigators performed an analysis around Moselle and had identified only first responders as coming to the scene, Owen said.

Owen was asked by the defense attorney if a small amount of male DNA had been analysed to see if it was related to Murdaugh. Owen said no.

A day after defense attorneys rested their case in Alex Murdaugh’s weekslong double murder trial, prosecutors on Tuesday intend to call a handful of rebuttal witnesses before the jury visits Murdaugh’s sprawling South Carolina estate where his wife and son were shot to death in 2021.

The defense has painted Murdaugh as a loving father and husband being wrongfully accused after what it says has been a poorly handled investigation. He gave his first day of testimony.

“They have more evidence of financial misdeeds than they have about a murder, and there is a lot of evidence that supports that,” defense lawyer JimGriffin stated in court.

Legal experts who have followed the trial told CNN that it is difficult to convict because of the lack of direct evidence.

“It does make the case more difficult,” said trial attorney Misty Marris. “But at some point, if the prosecutors have enough evidence that they can put together that story, and show motive and opportunity, it can certainly rise to the level needed to get a conviction.

“Jurors want science, jurors want DNA, jurors want something that’s persuasive,” Azari said. Because they lack it, theprosecutors are focusing on the tenuous cause and the lies after the fact, but not the evidence that they need.

One minute before he was shot to death: Alex Murdaugh, the former South Carolina attorney, and a lawsuit filed against Beach, the young woman killed in February 2019

It took just one minute to record a snapchat video on Paul’s phone before he was shot to death. David Britton Dove, a supervisor in the computer crimes center at the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.

The video focuses on one of their dogs and appears to have been recorded at the kennels at their family home in Islandton. In the footage, three different voices can be heard, and family friends have identified those voices as of Paul,Maggie and Alex Murdaugh.

The evidence focused on the calls and text messages that Murdaugh sent to his wife after the killings. A tech expert testified that those calls were missing from Murdaugh’s call log, indicating they had been manually deleted.

The prosecution has used that video and other testimony to try and prove his claim that he was asleep, and they have also cut into his claims about how long he had been with his mother.

Prosecutors say that nearly three months after Mr. Murdaugh’s wife and son were killed, an employee at his law firm — which was founded by his great-grandfather more than a century ago — discovered a check that was supposed to be addressed to the firm but was instead made out to Mr. Murdaugh. That finding led the firm to investigate further and, when they discovered evidence of financial wrongdoing, to ask for his resignation, which he gave.

“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.

Second, Murdaugh was facing a lawsuit from the family of Beach, the young woman who was killed in February 2019 when a boat, owned by Murdaugh and allegedly driven by Paul, crashed. A hearing in that civil case was scheduled for June 10, 2021, and had the potential to reveal his financial problems, prosecutors argued.

His law firm once again confronted him about funds being misappropriated, which led to his resignation, bizarre murder-for-hire and insurance scam plot, a stint in rehab for a drug addiction and dozens of financial troubles.

Disgraced former South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh, who is on trial for murder in the deaths of his wife and son, was back on the stand Friday for more cross-examination from the prosecution.

Buster Murdaugh was called as the defense’s first witness of the day. The accident reconstructionist is expected to focus on the findings of the investigation at the murder scene, as well as the treatment of the body, according to a source familiar with the case.

Upon returning home to the family’s sprawling estate, he told investigators, he found the bodies of his wife and son on the ground by their dog kennels and called 911.

An almost minute-long video filmed on Paul’s phone beginning at 8:44 p.m. shows one of the family dogs and appears to have been taken at the kennels, Lt. The supervisor at the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is David Dove.

Officers with the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office wrote in reports that they had discovered several shell casings and had called a tow truck company to the scene. They also said they had looked for surveillance cameras from neighboring homes and businesses, though the heavily redacted police reports did not indicate whether they found any.

A Seven-Year-Ina Row from the Killings of his Ex-Attorney, Paul Murdaugh,

On September 4, 2021, nearly three months after the killings, Murdaugh reported he was shot alongside a road and was treated for a “superficial gunshot wound to the head,” authorities said.

Mr Murdaugh was arrested and charged with insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and filing a false police report.

The ex-attorney pleaded not guilty to the murder of his wife and son on June 7, 2021, at their Islandton home.

Murdaugh told the court that on his way back from his mother’s house, he tried to call his wife twice, but she did not answer. He said he left a message for her. However, he said he did not find her non-response unusual, because she was with Paul and because of sometimes-spotty cell service.

In all of these cases, Mr. Waters, I admit that I shouldn’t have taken the money and that I should have known it wasn’t my money.

He said he doesn’t know why he tried to turn him over. “I mean, my boy’s laying face down. He’s done what he’s done. His head was the way he wanted it. I could see his brain laying on the sidewalk. I didn’t know what to do.

Murdaugh, Waters and the Gribov-Saunders case: Inconsistencies in waters’ tapes after the shootings

Waters sought to poke holes in Murdaugh’s account of where he was on the night of the killings.

When asked if that drug transaction actually happened, Murdaugh said he didn’t know because after withdrawal symptoms started, Murdaugh said he changed his plan.

After about six hours of testimony Friday – which included a prosecutor grilling the former disgraced South Carolina attorney over lies, drug use and details in the grisly case – the court adjourned for the weekend and is set to resume Monday morning.

You don’t disagree with me that you’ve got a photographic memory about the details that have to fit now that you know and you also don’t believe in the other stuff that complicates it? You disagree with that?”

The heated cross examination continued after a lunch break. Waters pointed out inconsistencies in Murdaugh’s videotaped statements to police after the killings. Parts of the tapes were shown to the jury.

Murdaugh said he was unsure before saying he knew what he wasn’t doing. I was not cleaning off guns or putting guns into a raincoat as you’ve claimed, just doing things as I believe you have implied.

Waters and Griffin Question Murdaugh during a Radio Interview after the Wreck-Induced Pulsar Shootout: “I Know What I’ve Learned and Done”

He said that he had never manufactured an alibi because he did not hurt his wife or child. “So I know for a fact that I never, ever, ever created an alibi.”

He said that the person or people who did what he saw hated Paul Murdaugh. “And they had anger in their heart.”

Murdaugh didn’t believe anyone who was involved in the wreck had anything to do with the murders. But he said he suspected the killer was someone who had heard about what happened.

Waters repeatedly called Murdaugh to identify when he lied to investigators and he played excerpts of his previous police interviews.

Shortly before 4 p.m., Waters concluded his cross examination and Murdaugh’s defense attorney, Jim Griffin, began questioning him again after a brief break. Griffin ended questioning shortly after and the court adjourned for the day.

Murdaugh’s “paranoid thinking” led to his eventual arrest and alleged financial crimes and killings, and his decision to lie to the police

“They are real people. They are good people. They’re all people that I care about … And a lot of them people that I love and I did wrong by them,” Murdaugh said.

I have no idea if that came from looking them in the eye or not. But I will agree with you that every single client I looked them in the eye and I believe that the people that I stole money from for all those years trusted me.”

“This defendant … has fooled everyone, everyone, everyone who thought they were close to him,” Waters told the jury. “Everyone who thought they knew who he was, he’s fooled them all. He fooled Maggie and Paul too, and they paid for it with their lives. You should also not let him fool you.

A cascading turn of events would then ensue, including Murdaugh’s resignation from his law firm, his disbarment, revelations his shooting was a scheme to provide life insurance money to his surviving son, and his eventual arrest in connection with the alleged financial crimes and killings.

He said various factors contributed to his “paranoid thinking” which led to his decision to lie to police, including his “distrust of SLED,” (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division), questions about his relationship with his wife and son, and “the fact that I have a pocket full of pills in my pocket,” he said. The police interview was played by the prosecution.

Pill addiction: Murdaugh said he took a lot of the drug in the months leading up to his wife’s and son’s deaths.

The first interrogation of Murdaugh by the Moore County Sheriff’s Office: “What have you done?” Waters told the jury after the killings of Kurt Sturm-Liouville

He is being tried at the Moore County Courthouse in Walterboro on charges of murder and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime. If convicted, he could face life in prison.

The officer who was at the scene when Murdaugh called for assistance was recorded on his body camera.

The person can be heard saying that it was earlier tonight. I don’t know the exact time, but I left. I was probably gone an hour and a half for my mom’s, and I saw them about 45 minutes before that.”

His other explanations were beggars belief because he chose to lie so soon after the deaths. The prosecutor said all of the reasons you presented to the jury regarding the most important piece of your testimony was a lie.

“If I was under the pressure that they’re talking about here, I can promise you I would hurt myself before I would hurt one of them, without a doubt,” Murdaugh said on the stand Friday.

You told the jury how cooperative you’ve been and how much data you wanted to give, but didn’t you highlight the most important parts? Waters asked what he was doing.

Water and Murdaugh exchanged words many times. As the two went back and forth about Murdaugh’s last minutes with his wife and son, Waters faulted Murdaugh for being “fuzzy” on details.

The first interrogation by Waters began when David Owen, the lead investigator from the Law Enforcement Division, was in a car hours after the killings.

Murdaugh’s last day at the kennels, to protect himself and his wife, Maggie, and his son, Paul, during the execution of his son Paul, a father-of-two,

In his closing argument, Waters stressed to jurors that he thinks one thing was missing from the two days Murdaugh spent testifying. If the new alibi is true, Waters asked, why hadn’t Murdaugh voiced any regret that he didn’t remain at the kennel, to potentially protect his wife and child?

Murdaugh said that he spent most of the night sitting in the golf cart. He left the golf cart to take a chicken out of his dog’s mouth.

Cell phone location data shows that Murdaugh did not bring his phone down to the kennels, Waters said. Murdaugh claimed that he did not have a phone and that he left his phone in the house.

Around 8:49 p.m., Paul and Maggie’s phones, which location data showed to be at the kennels, were locked for the last time. Data shows that Maggie’s phone moved 59 steps. The phone’s appearance changed and it went from portrait to landscape several times.

Alex Murdaugh’s phone was not working at the main house. But starting at 9:02 p.m., data from Murdaugh’s phone showed that it moved 283 steps in four minutes.

Noting that he had just left Maggie at the nearby kennels and had then failed to get her on the phone, Waters asked why Murdaugh didn’t just swing by the kennels to speak with her. “She’s so close, and there’s a driveway right there,” Waters said.

Murdaugh repeatedly said he couldn’t remember details or conversations, but wouldn’t dispute the prosecutor’s account of the misdeeds.

Waters also questioned Murdaugh about a solicitor’s badge he carried for years — a credential he received from his father when he volunteered at the circuit solicitor’s office that elder generations of the Murdaugh family led for some 86 years.

Waters displayed a picture of Murdaugh wearing the Badge while talking to people on the night of his son Paul’s boating accident which left one woman dead. Murdaugh believes that the family events are linked to the execution-style killings.

The Case of Alex Murdaugh: A Hard Case for an Addiction-Adicted Witness to a High-Penalty South Carolina Massacre

After hearing from dozens of witnesses in the high-profile murder trial of Alex Murdaugh, a South Carolina jury last week heard from the man himself after he took the stand – a move legal experts say was risky but could have helped his case.

Mark Eiglarsh, a criminal defense attorney and a former prosecutor, said that a lawyer who has been in the courtroom for 20 years is what you want on the witness stand. “And all it takes is one juror to connect with him emotionally.”

While defendants can often find themselves at a disadvantage when taking the stand, in this case, several attorneys told CNN Murdaugh practically had no choice but to testify.

Everyone wanted to know why you lied about where you were, and why you were not in the kennels. So he had to give an explanation as to that,” criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor Bernarda Villalona said. “That’s what I think is the main reason why the criminal defense attorney in this case made a calculated decision to put him on the stand.”

What will be key in the end, several attorneys said, is whether Murdaugh’s long-winded answers were able to convince at least one person on the jury panel – which could save him from conviction on the charges and potentially spending the rest of his life behind bars.

They are trying to show that he had an addiction problem, and that he sympathizes with trying to wrestle with it, and that may have made him paranoid, and so they are trying to make it look like he wasn’t there.

“But if he was that addled by the addiction, he might have been acting very irrationally at the time and the jury might believe that this very opioid-addicted person went off into this paranoid frenzy and did slaughter his own family,” Wu noted. It is a double-edged sword.

Joey Jackson, criminal defense lawyer and CNN legal analyst, said that the prosecutors were saying that he was a liar, a cheat, and you should not even take his words at face value.

The case went very well for the defendants and poorly for the prosecutors. Murdaugh was a skilled lawyer, and that made him a tough witness. The person doing the cross should control him, but he was able to control the pace and that’s what he did.

“Would he really do this?” is a key point of contention for the prosecution in the trial, according to a law professor at Cardozo School of Law. “Despite all the other crimes he’s admitted to, would he actually kill his wife and son?

The scene of the killings was not properly secured, and a forensics expert who looked at the bodies said two people were responsible.

Timothy Palmbach, a former professor of forensic science at the University of New Haven, was hired by Alex Murdaugh’s defense to review the case and analyze the crime scene.

Waters said that Paul Murdaugh was killed by shots from a shotgun. The prosecutor said that investigators determined that two fired shells that killed Paul had “class characteristics” that were similar to a 12-gauge shotgun.

Defendant’s Brother John Murdaugh and the Charges against him in the St. Paul’s Assassination

The prosecution will likely seek rebuttal witnesses on Tuesday because they featured 61 witnesses over three weeks of testimony. After the rebuttal witnesses, jurors will be allowed to visit the family’s expansive estate, according to the judge.

The 14th and final defense witness was the defendant’s brother John Marvin Murdaugh, who testified in emotional terms that law enforcement released the crime scene back to the family without cleaning up Paul Murdaugh’s remains.

It had not been cleaned up. He testified that he saw blood, brains, and pieces of skull. “For some reason I thought it was something that I needed to do for Paul to clean it up. It felt like it was the right thing to do. I felt like I owed him, and I started cleaning. I promise you won’t have to watch or listen to what I did that day.

The defense also worked to show that investigators had done a shoddy job with the case, particularly in securing the crime scene. Mark Ball, a colleague of Murdaugh, testified that there were no barricades or police tape at the entrance to the property, and that Paul’s remains were still there after investigators left.

They tried to show that he lied to investigators and created a false picture of the fraudster who killed his wife and son in order to distract the investigations into his actions.

That shooting was followed by a stint in rehab for drug addiction, dozens of allegations of financial crimes, his disbarment and, ultimately, the murder charges.

The Case of Murdaugh, 67, of Islandton, Missouri, before the Super Process. Newman, Newman and Waters

The state plans to call four or five witnesses to testify on issues raised by the defense, and hopes to finish with all of them by the end of the Tuesday, prosecutor Creighton Waters said.

The jury will be allowed to look at the property that Murdaugh owned in Islandton, where the bodies of his wife and son were found. After the rebuttal witnesses testify, a visit will happen, Newman said.

After hearing weeks of witness testimony, jurors will continue hearing closing arguments Thursday before they deliberate over whether Murdaugh is guilty of two counts of murder and two weapons charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

To demonstrate that the killings could have taken place after Murdaugh left the kennels, the defense has tried to show that the time of death was much longer than what prosecutors have presented.

Harvey, who said he arrived on scene at 11:04 p.m., also testified that rigor mortis – the stiffening of a body’s joints and muscles following death – had not yet set in, and that it typically starts developing one to three hours following death.

Jonathan Eisenstat, a forensic pathologist, testified on Monday that armpit temperature checks are not the best way to determine time of death.

He said someone arriving on scene should first check the ambient temperature of where the body was found and then take a rectal temperature in order to get as close to a core body temperature as possible.

Harvey testified earlier that he did not take rectal temperatures that night. During cross examination, prosecutors asked if the coroner had an idea of when the killings occurred since he did not take exact temperatures.

The Stranger-than-fiction Case: Alex Murdaugh, Jr., of a Dynastic Family, Revisited

The stranger-than-fiction case has brought national attention – including Netflix and HBO Max documentaries – on Alex Murdaugh, the former personal injury attorney and member of a dynastic family in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather served as the local prosecutor consecutively from 1920 to 2006.

The evidence shows that the defendant became so addicted to money that the millions of dollars in legal fees he was getting was not enough and so he started to steal.

Waters used phone forensics to reconstruct the prosecution’s version of events before and after the murders at Moselle.

Everything was changed by that. Why did it change everything? Opportunity. Waters said that he was at the scene of the murders. More importantly, exposing the guilty party’s lies about what he might have told law enforcement. ‘When was the last time I saw my wife and child alive?’ Why in the world would an innocent, reasonable father and husband lie about that, and lie about it so early? He didn’t know that (video) was there.”

He pointed out that the testimony from the weapons expert said that the bullets found near the body ofMaggie were similar to those found on other parts of the family’s property.

A family had an issue and killed a person. It was present before the killings, but now it is gone. A family weapon the defendant cannot account for killed Maggie.”

Legal experts who have participated in high-profile cases joined CNN Wednesday night to discuss questions that have arisen over Murdaugh’s trial, including whether his admissions to lying to investigators could help or hurt the case.

“It comes down to two things that every single prosecutor has to contend with. CNN senior legal analyst, Laura Coates anchored a panel discussion on motive and opportunity. Here are key takeaways from the legal experts’ discussion of the case:

Hatchett says that he thinks the credibility of the case has been undermined by the fact that he waited until there was testimony in the court and said he was paranoid.

“Once you have that credibility gap, I think that it also can taint your other testimony, whether you’re credible or not,” Hatchett, also a former chief presiding juvenile court judge in Georgia’s Fulton County, said.

Criminal defense lawyer Mark O’Mara said the prosecution needed to exclude every reasonable hypothesis of innocence in order to get a conviction.

Loni Coombs, a former Los Angeles County prosecutor said that the kennel video is the most important piece of evidence in the case. “I’m talking about the big lie of his alibi, where he (initially) said, ‘I was not there at the crime scene.’”

“As my addiction evolved over time, I would get in these situations or circumstances where I would get paranoid thinking,” Murdaugh said on the stand. I was not thinking clearly on June the 7th. I don’t believe I was capable of reason. And I lied about being down there.”

The trial of the KamLAND murder of a 17-year-old man in possession of an illegal opioid-doping drug, J. C. Gupta

Patients typically start at 10 to 20 milligrams a few times a day, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta said Wednesday night. He said that it is possible to take that much daily.

People can build up their tolerance to these drugs gradually. Gupta said that this is not uncommon. People can escalate the dose over time. It is “tough to know” what the impact of opioid addiction would have on a specific person’s behavior, Gupta added.

Gupta said that people can become tolerant to the point where they are no longer taking the medication to get high, but rather just to feel normal and not have withdrawal.

The trial resumed shortly after 9:30 a.m. Thursday — the day the case is expected to go to the jury, more than a month after the court heard opening statements on Jan. 25.

The prosecution will respond after the defense presents its closing argument. Judge Clifton Newman is then expected to give final instructions to the jury, and charge them with coming to a verdict.

The police and forensic teams fell far short of preserving evidence from the scene and the hunting estate’s main house, according to his defense team.

Newman explains why Murdaugh had a “difficult conversation” with a woman who lied about the case to investigators

As Thursday’s court session began, Judge Clifton Newman announced that a juror is being replaced on the panel. The court received a complaint from a member of the public saying the juror, a woman identified only as juror No. 785, had “improper conversations” with people not involved with the case.

Newman thanked the woman for her attentive and positive attitude throughout the case, and the investment of her time. He said that she would be replaced so the trial wouldn’t fall apart.

A light moment then erupted shortly before the juror left, as she said she needed her purse from the other room — along with a dozen eggs that another juror had brought in for everyone on the panel.

The trial is coming to an end after Murdaugh admitted he had lied to investigators multiple times when he said he was not with his wife and son before they died.