Alex Murdaugh Trial: How The Disgraced Lawyer’s Suicide-For-Hire Plot Unraveled

Ashe SchowFebruary 17, 2023

Thursday’s jury hearings revealed how dishonest the defendant was South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh’s attempt to hire a man to kill him so his son could collect insurance money fell apart.

Murdaugh claimed that he was fixing a flat tire along a rural road and when a man approached him to help, he shot him in the head.

“A real nice guy — acted like it,” Buzzfeed News reports that Murdaugh said to paramedics following the shooting, while they were treating him with a gunshot wound. reported. “I turned my head and, I mean, boom.”

At first, people in the community believed Murdaugh’s story that he had been targeted, since the shooting happened three months after his wife, Maggie, and youngest son, Paul, had been shot at the family’s estate. But just days after Murdaugh’s roadside shooting, the truth came out.

Murdaugh said that he hired Curtis as his man. “Eddie” Smith, to kill him so that Murdaugh’s surviving son, Buster, could collect an insurance payout.

“I was in a very bad place,” Murdaugh stated that he played for jurors in a telephone interview with investigators. “I thought it would be better for me not to be here anymore. I thought it would make it easier on my family for me to be dead.”

Murdaugh is currently on trial for killing his wife and son, and on Wednesday, Judge Clifton Newman ruled that jurors could hear about Murdaugh’s suicide-for-hire plot, The Daily Wire reported.

Prosecutors claimed that Murdaugh resort to violence after his world collapsed around him. They also suggested that Murdaugh killed his wife, and son in order to gain sympathy as the legal system crumbled. He also tried to kill himself because his crimes would soon be exposed.

Murdaugh’s own brother, Randy, helped investigators determine Murdaugh had lied about the allegedly random shooting. Randy called detectives two days after his brother’s shooting to say Murdaugh had been making phone calls from his hospital bed to unknown numbers. Authorities traced the numbers and were able to link one to Smith, a distant family member and former law firm client of Murdaugh’s. Murdaugh quickly admitted that he had hired Smith to murder him.

Investigators also noticed that Murdaugh’s tire, which he said he was changing when he was shot, was actually sliced by a knife. That knife was found in the grass near the car and contained Murdaugh and Smith’s DNA.

Murdaugh said it all in the interview taped for the jury.

“I knew that I was about to lose everything,” Alex said: “and I figured [Buster] was better off that way than dealing with me.”