Alex Murdaugh Labeled 'Family Annihilator' In Intense Closing Arguments From Prosecutors
March 1 2023, Published 5:45 p.m. ET
Closing arguments concluded in the case of South Carolina vs. Alex Murdaugh, the once-prominent attorney accused of killing his wife Maggie and son Paul. Lead prosecutor Creighton Waters leaned on weeks' worth of testimony, evidence, and financial crimes to paint Alex as a "family annihilator," RadarOnline.com has learned.
Waters addressed the jury after they returned from a trip to the crime scene at the Murdaugh's private hunting ranch, Moselle, where Maggie and Paul were fatally shot on June 7, 2021.
The prosecution accused Alex of killing his family as a final desperate grab at self-preservation — claiming the disbarred lawyer used his wife and son's death as a means to gain sympathy from jurors in separate civil lawsuits and criminal financial cases.
Waters pointed to Alex's well-established legal career, which provided him with knowledge of the system and could have helped him to effectively carry out a plan clouded with reasonable doubt.
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Creighton Waters
"There is only one person who had the motive, who had the means, who had the opportunity to commit these crimes, and also whose guilty conduct after these crimes betrays him," Waters told the jurors on Wednesday. "The forensic timeline puts him there. The use of his family weapons corroborates that."
Waters added that Alex's testimony the previous week — when he admitted that he lied to investigators about being at the scene of the crime, claiming his opioid addiction made him paranoid of law enforcement and "guilty actions afterward" — confirmed their theory.
Throughout the trial, numerous family members, close friends, and former colleagues testified under oath to being unaware of Alex's double life as the fourth-generation attorney seemingly flew under their radar for years while he abused prescription pills and allegedly stole money from clients.
Waters described a "gathering storm" of incidents surrounding the Murdaugh family that allegedly pushed Alex over the edge.
Paul and Maggie were keenly aware of Alex's opioid addiction — and he was confronted by his son over a "bag of pills" that Maggie found before her death amid her own investigation into the family's dwindling bank accounts.
"Those pressures mount," Waters continued. "And that person becomes a family annihilator."
"The pressures on this man were unbearable, and they were all reaching a crescendo on the day his wife and son were murdered by him," Waters added as he pointed to investigations that he disrupted by the killings.
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Before the closing arguments, a state witness testified that he feared the civil case regarding the 2019 boat crash, which killed 19-year-old Mallory Beach, would be dropped if Paul and Maggie's deaths were found to be connected to the case.
The testimony aligned with Alex's claim that his son was a target of hate from the community following the backlash from Beach's death.
In addition to the possibility of the civil case going away with Paul and Maggie's murders, Waters highlighted an investigation by Alex's former law firm into the alleged $792,000 missing under Alex's tenure that was halted due to the killings.
As the state continued to lay out evidence and testimony to prove Alex was "manufacturing an alibi" to allegedly cast himself as a victim, Alex sat emotionless at the defense table.
