Alex Murdaugh’s Son Buster Testifies At Murder Trial

Defense attorneys introduced Buster’s testimony to explain evidence given by the Murdaugh family housekeeper two weeks ago. Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson testified how she’d been asked by Alex that morning to clean the home in case visitors came to offer condolences, but she noticed several odd things. This included at least two towels discarded on the floor in Alex’s bathroom and wardrobe, a puddle of water next to the shower, and a white T-shirt on the floor that appeared to have fallen from a pile placed up high.

Both Paul and Buster were avid shooters who routinely hunted animals at the family’s rural property. Many weapons were left around the property, Buster said, especially by Paul, who had a habit of not storing them properly. But Buster said that he would never alternate buckshot and birdshot rounds in a single shotgun, and he’d never seen anyone on the property do that either. A shotgun loaded in this manner was used to kill Paul.

In a bid to further discredit the state’s case, defense attorneys also called Mike Sutton, an engineer who produces digital reproductions of crime scenes in order to track ballistic trajectories. Sutton testified Tuesday that he believed, based on his analysis of the angles at the scene, whoever shot Maggie was most likely at least a foot shorter than Alex. “In my opinion, it’s very unlikely that he fired that shot,” Sutton testified.

Prosecutors have hinted that they believe Alex hid the two missing murder weapons when he drove to his mother’s house and discarded them sometime later. However, state investigators have said they did not search his mother’s home until months after the killings — something they’ve admitted was a mistake.

But in the 10 days after his mother and brother were killed, Buster said, he was regularly with his father.

“Do you remember your dad disappearing for any periods of time?” defense attorney Jim Griffin asked.

“No, sir,” Buster responded.

“Were you physically close to him almost all the time?” Griffin asked.

“Yes, sir,” Buster responded.

Prosecutors also played for Buster a snippet of an interview that his father gave to investigators three days after the killings in which detectives said they could hear Alex say of Paul, “I did him so bad.”

But defense attorneys have insisted that Alex was actually saying, “They did him so bad,” and was referring to whoever killed his wife and son. After playing the tape for Buster, Griffin asked what he could hear his father saying in the audio. Buster said he could hear his father using the pronoun “they.”

“Was that the first time you’d heard him say, ‘They did him so bad’?” Griffin asked.

“The first time I heard him say that was the night I went down to Moselle,” Buster said. “The night of June the seventh.”


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