It was a video meant to evoke to jurors a loving moment in the Murdaugh family: During Memorial Day weekend in 2021, youngest son Paul presenting a white sheet cake to his father, Alex, while his mother, Margaret, looks on and party guests serenade him with “Happy Birthday.”
“Thank y’all so much,” Alex Murdaugh said in the short clip, shown by his defense team Wednesday during his double murder trial in Colleton County, South Carolina.
Murdaugh, 54, is accused of fatally shooting wife Margaret, 52, and Paul, 22, just days after that celebration, in an act that state prosecutors contend was done to cover up his slew of alleged financial misdeeds and garner sympathy ahead of being publicly exposed.
“When the hounds are at the door, when Hannibal’s at the gates for Alex Murdaugh, violence happens,” chief prosecutor Creighton Waters said in court.
But the defense’s effort to cast Murdaugh, a once-powerful lawyer and part-time prosecutor in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, as a beloved patriarch incapable of slaying his wife and son also allowed for his character to be called into question. During the defense’s cross-examination of a friend of Paul’s, named Will Loving, he was shown the birthday video and asked if there was any reason he could think of that Murdaugh would kill his wife and son.
“That, in effect, turned the cross-examination of that witness from dealing with the specific issues in the case to having that witness testify as a character witness for Mr. Murdaugh,” Circuit Court Judge Clifton Newman later told the prosecution and defense, adding that it “opened the door” for the state to bring up Murdaugh’s financial troubles because “evidence of other crimes or bad acts is necessary if it is an essential part of the crimes on trial.”
Murdaugh’s defense team has tried to argue that his finances are only being used to vilify him and aren’t definitive proof he committed the murders.
“They’ve got a whole lot more evidence about financial misconduct than they do about…
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