WALTERBORO, SC (WSPA) – Alex Murdaugh was ‘destroyed’ and ‘heartbroken’ the night his wife Maggie and son Paul were brutally murdered, according to his surviving son.
Buster Murdaugh took the stand in his father’s double murder trial Tuesday. In June 2021, his brother and mother were killed in Colleton County.
Prosecutors say Alex Murdaugh shot and killed them. Murdaugh and his attorneys deny this.
Buster testified at length about the Murdaugh family dynamic. He said family members spoke with one another regularly.
He said he received two calls from his father the night of the murders. One call at 9:10 p.m.
Buster testified his father sounded ‘completely normal’. This call came about 20 minutes after the murders, according to prosecutors.
Buster said the second call he received was later that evening. He told jurors, “He asked me if I was sitting down and then he told me my mother and brother had been shot.”
According to Buster, he was with his father at all times in the days following the murders.
Murdaugh’s defense attorneys played the video from Murdaugh’s second interview with law enforcement after the murders. He was asked whether he hears his father say ‘I’ or ‘They’.
Buster said he heard his father say ‘They did him so bad’ in that clip and multiple times the night of June 7th.
During cross-examination, Buster told prosecutors and the jury the 2019 boat crash, Paul’s criminal charges, and the civil lawsuits had made things ‘unsettling’ for the family.
He also testified he was unaware of the family’s financial troubles until the September 2021 roadside shooting. Buster said he and his father did not spend another night at the property where the murders happened but his father said he could use it for hunting.
Tuesday afternoon, the defense called a forensic engineer they hired to reconstruct the crime scene to the stand. Mike Sutton testified he used SLED crime scene photos, evidence collected from the scene, and measurements he took at the property.
