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Mar 2, 2023 · A jury convicted Alex Murdaugh of murdering his wife and son in June 2021. The former South Carolina lawyer maintained his innocence throughout the double-murder trial. WSJ’s Valerie...
- 5 min
- 66K
- The Wall Street Journal
The prosecution has rested its case against former South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh, accused of killing his wife and son in 2021. WSJ's Valerie Bauerlein ...
- 5 min
- 44.5K
- The Wall Street Journal
Alex Murdaugh was convicted for killing his wife and son at their South Carolina estate in 2021.
- 694 min
- 536.9K
- News 19 WLTX
Mar 3, 2023 · On 7 June 2021, Maggie and Paul were killed at the dog kennels on the family's sprawling hunting estate, called Moselle. And for 20 months after their murders, Alex Murdaugh told law enforcement...
- 1 min
- Holly Honderich
- Overview
- The passcode problem
- The crucial clip
A key piece of evidence in the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh was a cellphone video that captured his voice at the dog kennels on his family’s sprawling Lowcountry estate — the place where his wife, Margaret, and son Paul were found fatally shot on June 7, 2021.
The disgraced South Carolina lawyer had told authorities that he wasn't there the night of the killings. But the video — taken by Paul and stored on his phone — showed that he was.
It took investigators months to recover the video — even though the six-digit passcode to the locked device was as basic as it gets: 041499, Paul’s birthday.
In his first interview about the case, the South Carolina investigator charged with cracking the phone told NBC News' “Dateline” why the process took so frustratingly long, how law enforcement finally gained access to it, and how astonished authorities were when they discovered the video.
"I was in disbelief,” Lt. Britt Dove, a computer crimes investigator for the state Law Enforcement Division. “I hollered out that I found it to nobody in particular ’cause I was in the office working by myself.”
Murdaugh, who has proclaimed his innocence in the killings of Margaret, 52, and Paul, 22, has acknowledged lying to authorities about his alibi on the night of the murders.
After the killings, authorities obtained Paul’s iPhone almost immediately, Owen said. But it was locked and authorities didn’t know his passcode.
Apple allows users to enter the wrong passcode only a handful of times before the phone is permanently disabled. To access the device after that, it needs to be reset — a process that would wipe out everything on it, including videos.
When Dove got the phone, he said it was temporarily disabled, with a message telling him to enter a passcode again in a few minutes. He said he wasn’t sure who had entered the wrong code or how many times they’d done so.
Investigators had supplied Dove with roughly 20 numbers that he described as significant dates associated with Paul, he said. Some were birthdays, Dove said, but none were Paul’s.
Although a date of birth might appear to be an obvious choice for a passcode, Dove said that in his experience — he’s been a computer crimes investigator for 15 years — the codes that people use vary.
Some select random numbers, Dove said. Others use street numbers or a spouse’s birthday.
The brief clip, which had a time stamp off 8:44 p.m., contained three distinct voices, Dove said — Paul, who’s shooting the video and grabbing at the dog, Cash; his mother, who can be heard shouting that another dog, Bubba, has a “bird” in its mouth; and a third voice — Alex’s — that was also shouting at Bubba.
Dove said he watched the video once, then turned up the volume and watched it again.
“Then I put headphones on to make sure I was really hearing what I thought I heard,” he said, adding: “This, we knew for a fact then, just destroyed whatever alibi that was put out.”
After watching the video a few times, he called Owen, who recalled thinking that he now had “tangible evidence” that Alex was lying.
"It put Alex at the kennels when he said he wasn’t there,” Owen said, adding: “I was excited. I was really excited.”
Alex’s lawyers came to have a name for what the video showed — “the lie.”
Mar 3, 2023 · A video clip — a vital piece of the state's evidence taken from the cellphone of Paul before his death — proved that Murdaugh was at the crime scene after he had repeatedly insisted to ...
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Feb 23, 2023 · Murdaugh is accused of killing his wife, Margaret, 52, and the couple’s younger son, Paul, 22, in June 2021. Updated Feb. 23, 2023, 10:50 PM UTC. By Uwa Ede-Osifo and Phil McCausland. What to...
