It took less than an hour for the jury in the Alex Murdaugh murder trial to reach a unanimous guilty decision, juror Craig Moyer told ABC News.
Moyer said he voted the South Carolina attorney guilty from the start of deliberations on Thursday and that the jury reached a consensus after about 45 minutes. Nine jurors voted guilty, two not guilty and one undecided in the initial poll.
On Friday, Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murders of his 52-year-old wife, Maggie, and 22-year-old son, Paul, on June 7, 2021.
“The evidence was clear,” the juror told ABC.
Alex Murdaugh Trial Coverage:
A key piece of evidence that Moyer said led to the disbarred lawyer’s conviction was a cellphone video captured by Murdaugh’s son, Paul. In the video shot near the family’s dog kennels, where the bodies were found shortly after the recording, Murdaugh’s voice could be heard in the background.
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“I was certain it was [Murdaugh’s] voice,” Moyer said, adding that the other jurors heard him too.
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson oversaw the prosecution of the case. In an interview with "TODAY" on Friday, he agreed that the video was a major piece of the state’s case.
“It was basically Paul speaking from beyond the grave that yes, Alex Murdaugh was there, just moments before Maggie and Paul were brutally murdered,” Wilson said.
For 20 months, Murdaugh insisted that he had not been at the kennels that night. But after more than a year, state agents hacked his son’s iPhone and found a video with Alex Murdaugh’s voice less than five minutes before the victims stopped using their cellphones and prosecutors think they were shot.
During the trial, several witnesses testified the three voices heard in the video belong to Alex Murdaugh, Paul Murdaugh and Maggie Murdaugh.
Murdaugh eventually took the stand in his own defense and admitted he lied to authorities about his whereabouts, blaming it on a paranoid distrust of law enforcement due to an opioid addiction that clouded his thinking.
Wilson told TODAY Murdaugh took the stand in his own defense because “he believed that he could talk his way out of this” but that it ended up being the biggest piece of evidence.
“I think that was fatal for him ultimately,” he said. “Obviously, he had created a web of lies for over a decade that led to this culminating point in this trial. Obviously, he had lied,” Wilson said. “He had been lying his way out of things for so long he had forgotten what it was like to tell the truth.”
Despite the Alex Murdaugh trial being one of the most high-profile and sensational cases, Wilson wants to remind people about the lives negatively impacted.
“Two people were brutally murdered, and there’s a wake of victims from Alex Murdaugh leading up to this,” he said. “I want to remind people that there are real lives and a real family that was destroyed because of his actions.”
