Alex Murdaugh juror reveals reason behind quick verdict

“You start deliberating, going through the evidence and everybody was pretty much talking,” he said of the initial deliberations, at which point two jurors held out not guilty and a third was undecided.

“About 45 minutes later, after all our deliberating, we figured it out. The evidence was clear [that he was guilty].”

Moyer was unmoved by Murdaugh’s own emotional testimony, during which he broke down several times when discussing the murders.

“I didn’t think much of him,” Moyer scoffed.

“All he did was blow snot, [there were] no tears. I saw his eyes.

“I didn’t see any true remorse or compassion or anything.”

Murdaugh was notably emotionless when the damning verdict was read. His surviving son, Buster, was also quiet, and but his head in his hands.

Moyer said that Murdaugh’s voice in the background of a Snapchat video Paul took just moments before he was killed was the key exhibit that convinced him of the once-prominent lawyer’s guilt.

“You can hear his voice clearly,” Moyer said, though he added that he was “very surprised” when Murdaugh reversed over a year of lies and admitted on the stand to being at the kennels just before the shots rang out.

Moyer also told Pilgrim that the jury did not buy the defense’s argument that Murdaugh did not have enough time to kill Maggie and Paul, clean up or stage the scene, visit his ailing mother, and return within a little over an hour, when he finally called the police.

“I think there’s just enough time [for him to do that],” he insisted.

In one of the bodycam videos from the scene that was shown in court, Murdaugh can be heard trying to blame the shootings to threats Paul received following a fatal 2019 boat crash – just moments after he supposedly stumbled upon the mangled bodies of his loved ones.

Moyer indicated that the jury was unnerved by Murdaugh’s quick thinking. 

“His responses, how quick he was with the defense, and his lies, just steady lies,” he said, trailing off in disbelief.

Speaking on the TODAY show Friday morning, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson echoed Moyer’s sentiments, stating that Murdaugh’s decision to take the stand was “fatal” for his defense.

“Alex had made a very successful career of giving closing arguments to juries and winning major cases and making a lot of money. [Taking the stand] was his closing argument to the jury. I believe in my mind that he believed that he could talk his way out of this,” Wilson said, referring to the Southern scion’s testimony as the “best piece of evidence” for his own guilt.

“And at the end of the day, I think that’s what sealed it for him.”

Wilson acknowledged that some members of the public were still struggled with the sheer viciousness of the crime: Maggie was shot five times with a rifle, while Paul’s brain was detached from his skull by an up-close shotgun blast.

“One of the things that I would get from people in the street … people can understand a spouse killing another spouse, but the way that Paul and Maggie were murdered, his son, the brutality of it, people just had a hard time making that leap,” he explained.

Wilson theorized that Murdaugh’s storied family legacy and “lifestyle of privilege” probably warped his personality and detached him slightly from his actions.

“I believe he probably loved [his wife and son] in his own way, but he loved himself more. And killing them was the price he was willing to pay to preserve his way of life,” he mused.

The Snapchat video, he continued, was Paul “speaking from beyond the grave.”

“That was a major piece of the state’s case,” Wilson said.

During their two weeks of testimony, Murdaugh’s defense team portrayed their client as a thieving, chronically dishonest drug addict who nonetheless loved his family and would not hurt them.

The defense motioned for a mistrial after the verdicts were read Thursday night, but the request was denied by Circuit Judge Clifton Newman.

Murdaugh is set to be sentenced on Friday morning. He faces 30 years to life for the murders of Maggie and Paul, and is awaiting trial for several financial crimes that could rack up over 700 years behind bars.

“You can’t write this story in Hollywood,” Wilson said of the Murdaugh saga, which has captured national attention in the year-and-a-half since the murders.

He cautioned viewers, however, against romanticizing the lurid tale.

“I do want to remind people, as interesting as this case was, a lot of lives were destroyed. Two people were brutally murdered and there’s a wake of victims from Alex Murdaugh leading up to this,” he said.