Alex Murdaugh, the outstanding South Carolina lawyer whose spouse and son had been shot and killed in June, requested a former consumer to kill him this month so his different son may gather a $10 million insurance coverage cost however survived being shot within the head, the police mentioned on Tuesday evening.
It was the newest startling twist in a collection of mysteries which have introduced intense scrutiny to the Murdaugh household and the agricultural slice of South Carolina the place their household has held sway for greater than a century, although the central query of who killed Mr. Murdaugh’s spouse and son stays unsolved.
The previous consumer, Curtis Edward Smith, 61, of Walterboro, S.C., was arrested and charged with assisted suicide, aggravated assault and battery, and insurance coverage fraud in reference to the taking pictures on Sept. 4, the South Carolina Legislation Enforcement Division mentioned.
The state police company mentioned that Mr. Murdaugh, 53, had admitted to the scheme on Monday and that Mr. Smith had admitted to being on the scene and eliminating the gun. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer didn’t reply to inquiries in regards to the arrest, and it was not clear if Mr. Smith, who was booked within the Colleton County jail, had a lawyer.
Mr. Murdaugh has not been charged, however he’s known as a “co-defendant” within the charging paperwork for Mr. Smith; a police spokesman, Tommy Crosby, mentioned with out elaborating that the police anticipated to deliver extra fees within the case.
Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer and spokeswoman had insisted that the taking pictures on a rural highway in Hampton County, S.C., was not self-inflicted. They mentioned that Mr. Murdaugh had stopped to examine a flat tire when somebody in a truck pulled up and shot him, inflicting a cranium fracture. He was launched from a hospital inside a number of days.
A day earlier than the taking pictures, Mr. Murdaugh had been pushed out of his household regulation agency, P.M.P.E.D., which mentioned it found that he had misused thousands and thousands of {dollars}. Mr. Murdaugh issued a press release apologizing to his household and his colleagues, and his lawyer mentioned he was getting into a drug rehab program.
It was a surprising unraveling for Mr. Murdaugh, who’s a part of a authorized dynasty that has amassed highly effective ties within the South Carolina Lowcountry over the previous century. His great-grandfather, grandfather and father sequentially served as the highest prosecutor throughout a five-county area from 1910 till 2006.
Mr. Murdaugh represented Mr. Smith as just lately as 2015 in a lawsuit that Mr. Smith had filed in opposition to a forest administration firm based mostly in Charlotte, N.C. He had additionally represented Mr. Smith in 2013 when Mr. Smith was given a ticket for driving as much as 10 m.p.h. over the pace restrict.
The taking pictures of Mr. Murdaugh got here practically three months after he returned to his household’s giant, rural property in Islandton, S.C., and found that his spouse, Maggie, and son Paul, a 22-year-old school scholar, had been shot to dying.
On the time of his dying, Paul Murdaugh was going through fees that he had drunkenly crashed a ship in 2019, killing Mallory Seaside, a passenger, and wounding others.
The killings additionally led the South Carolina Legislation Enforcement Division to open an investigation into the 2015 dying of Stephen Smith, a 19-year-old man whose physique was present in a highway 10 miles from the Murdaugh residence and whose dying was dominated a taking pictures after which a possible hit-and-run. Nobody has been charged in his dying.