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Both sides portend ‘gruesome’ details of the killings of Alex Murdaugh’s wife and son in trial’s opening statements

Attorney Jim Griffin speaks with Alex Murdaugh as he cries after the jury is excused and the both sides discuss excluding sensitive images from evidence in his murder trial at the Colleton County Courthouse on Wednesday, January 25, 2023. Joshua Boucher/The State/Pool

Prominent South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh coldly killed his wife and youngest son at close range with a shotgun and an AR-style rifle, prosecutors alleged Wednesday in their opening statements at his murder trial.

Creighton Waters, the state’s lead prosecutor in the case, highlighted that neither Murdaugh’s wife, Margaret, 52, nor the couple’s youngest son, Paul, 22, had any defensive wounds — “as if they didn’t see a threat coming from their attacker.”

Paul Murdaugh was shot with buckshot from a 12-gauge shotgun in the chest, shoulder and finally the head, which did “devastating damage,” Waters said. Margaret Murdaugh was shot with the rifle in the abdomen and leg before being shot in the head.

The details of the injuries are horrific, Waters said, and their description will be tough to hear.

“It’s going to be gruesome,” he told the jury.

It did grow gruesome as Murdaugh’s lawyer, Dick Harpootlian, in his opening arguments detailed the grisly state of Paul and Margaret’s bodies after they were shot. Alex Murdaugh sobbed as Harpootlian described how the family scion, who he said enjoyed a loving relationship with his wife and son, discovered Paul “laying in his own blood with his brain lying at his feet.”

From left, attorney Jim Griffin speaks with Alex Murdaugh in his murder trial at the Colleton County Courthouse, in Walterboro, S.C., on Wednesday.Joshua Boucher / Pool via The State

“I want you to hear that 911 tape, a man hysterical and in grief,” said Harpootlian, who insisted there were numerous holes in the prosecution’s case, built on the attorney general’s “theories, his conjectures.”

Harpootlian said that police and prosecutors concluded at the scene that Murdaugh was guilty “without forensics, without cellphones — without any of that,” adding that they had tried to fit “a square peg in a round hole” to build their case.

“He didn’t do it, and you need to put any thought that he did from your mind,” he told the jurors, noting that Murdaugh did not have any blood on his shirt or pants despite tests by the prosecution.

Waters, who spent about 30 minutes laying out a detailed timeline of the crimes, maintained that prosecutors had built a case on a large amount of forensic evidence. That evidence includes cellphone data that Waters claimed would show Murdaugh was at the scene of the crime just minutes before his family members’ cellphones would “go silent forever.”

The state’s case would also include a video that Paul Murdaugh sent to a…

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