Prosecution wraps its case at Alex Murdaugh murder trial

Alex Murdaugh's theft of millions of dollars was about to be revealed so he killed his wife and son to buy time to figure a way out, a prosecutor said Wednesday during closing arguments in the disgraced South Carolina attorney's murder trial.

Alex Murdaugh's theft of millions of dollars was about to be revealed so he killed his wife and son to buy time to figure a way out, a prosecutor said Wednesday during closing arguments in the disgraced South Carolina attorney's murder trial.

Murdaugh's fear that his decade-long theft would be exposed and his desire to maintain his lofty standing in the community led him to make sure his wife and younger son were at the family's Colleton County home on June 7, 2021, so that he could kill them as part of a clever plan aided by his knowledge of how criminal cases are constructed, prosecutor Creighton Waters told jurors.

"The pressures on this man were unbearable. And they were all reaching a crescendo the day his wife and son were murdered by him," Waters said. The defense would get to sum up its case later Wednesday.

Murdaugh, 54, faces 30 years to life in prison if he is convicted of either murder count. Investigators said his 22-year-old son, Paul, was shot twice with a shotgun and his 52-year-old wife, Maggie, was shot four or five times with a rifle outside of the kennels on their property.

Jurors began the day with a visit to the crime scene, where a pool reporter said at least one of them carefully inspected the door frame of a storage closet where Paul Murdaugh was standing when he was killed.

The key piece of evidence connecting Alex Murdaugh to the killings is a video Paul Murdaugh shot from the kennels about five minutes before he last used his cellphone. It took more than a year for federal agents to hack into the young man's locked iPhone and find it.

Before the trial, Alex Murdaugh repeatedly told investigators that he hadn't been at the kennels on the night of the killings, but while testifying in his own defense, he admitted that he lied and that he had been there.