Jury Convicts Alex Murdaugh in Slayings of Wife and Son

The verdict in the sensational double-murder trial of Alex Murdaugh is in. A jury in South Carolina on Thursday found the disbarred lawyer guilty of murder in the 2021 slayings of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul. The panel deliberated less than three hours after a trial that lasted more than a month and included more than 70 witnesses. The judge scheduled sentencing for Friday morning, CNN reports. "Circumstantial evidence, direct evidence, all of the evidence pointed to one conclusion," Judge Clifton Newman told the jury after the verdict was read, per USA Today, "and that's the conclusion that you all reached."

Background on the case, per the AP:

• The killings: Alex Murdaugh called 911 on the evening of June 7, 2021, and said he'd found his son and wife dead when he returned home from a one-hour visit with his mother, who has dementia. Authorities said Paul Murdaugh, 22, was shot twice with a shotgun, each round loaded with different size shot, while Maggie Murdaugh, 52, was struck with four or five bullets from a rifle. A crime scene report suggested both victims were shot in the head after initially being wounded near dog kennels on the Murdaughs’ sprawling rural property.
• No death penalty: Prosecutors took more than a year to charge the disgraced lawyer with murder but decided not to pursue the death penalty. Murdaugh, who is also charged with about 100 counts of financial and other crimes, adamantly denied any involvement in the killings. Prosecutors contended Murdaugh killed his wife and son to distract from those financial crimes.
• Key moment: The weapons used to kill the victims have not been produced. But prosecutors did get one key piece of evidence that both showed Murdaugh lied to police and put him at the kennels where his wife and son were shot just five minutes before investigators think they were killed because they stopped using their cellphones. It's a video taken by Paul Murdaugh, locked in his cellphone for a year after the killings until federal agents could hack into it. Alex Murdaugh told the first police officer to arrive and every one after that he was never at the kennels. His voice is on that video. “That changed everything," prosecutor Creighton Waters said in his closing statement Wednesday.

(More Alex Murdaugh stories.)