WALTERBORO, S.C. — Jurors in Alex Murdaugh’s murder trial heard testimony for the first time Tuesday about allegations the former Hampton-based lawyer had for years stolen millions of dollars from his former law firm, and learned how those thefts might play into the motive for the June 2021 murders of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul.
On Monday, Judge Clifton Newman ruled the jury could hear for the first time witness testimony about Murdaugh’s 10 years of hidden thefts from his law firm, his clients and others of more than $4.8 million.
That opened the way on Tuesday for two witnesses — Murdaugh’s former law partner Ronnie Crosby and the law firm’s chief financial officer Jeanne Seckinger — to provide a window into the lucrative and close knit world of attorneys at the law firm founded and run by generations of Murdaughs.
Seckinger, the CFO at Parker Law Group — what was formerly named Peters Murdaugh Parker Eltzroth & Detrick, or PMPED — testified first Tuesday, this time with the jury present, that Murdaugh stole money from his law firm for years.
In one example, Seckinger recounted a 2017 incident when Murdaugh accidentally received a check for $121,358 that was meant for his brother, Randy, also an attorney at the firm. Seckinger said Murdaugh told the firm he lost the check and had another made out to him in the same ammount. Murdaugh cashed that check and a year later cashed the original check, twice taking money that was not meant for him, she said.
“If a lawyer converts a check to themself and not the law firm, what would that be?” lead prosecutor Creighton Waters asked Seckinger on Tuesday.
“Stealing,” she said, repeating the word several more times when asked to describe Murdaugh’s actions.
“Did you really know Alex Murdaugh?” Waters asked.
“I don’t think anybody really knew him,” Seckinger replied.
After the 2017 incident, Seckinger said another attorney, Danny Henderson, spoke to Murdaugh, who apologized and returned the money to the law firm, which then made out the correct $121,358 check to Randy.
Seckinger testified that they then chose to “sweep it under the rug” — just one instance when Murdaugh abused the “brotherhood” at PMPED, she said.
“We were very close knit group of lawyers,” said Ronnie Crosby, a partner at Parker Law, who also testified Tuesday. “We have a very family-like environment.”
Crosby said he and a small group of law partners and family visited the Murdaugh’s estate, known as Moselle, immediately after Paul and Maggie were found murdered. Crosby said he remembered that night watching Murdaugh hand over his clothes to investigators, who then sealed them in a brown paper bag.
Weeks later, Crosby recounted that Murdaugh had trouble sleeping and was losing weight. Sometimes he would fall asleep at his office chair, he said.
On July 4, 2021, Crosby said Murdaugh brought a gun to a party in a cloth bag, unusual for Murdaugh as defense attorneys have tried to show Murdaugh was scared after the shooting deaths.
Crosby, whose testimony was at times punctuated by long pauses in which the lawyer blinked back tears and composed himself, explained to jurors that he was especially close to Paul, who regarded him as a second father and called him “uncle Ronnie.”
The two would often go hunting on Crosby’s property, and Paul would always ask permission to hunt even though Crosby said he didn’t need his permission.
Crosby, who delivered Paul’s eulogy at his funeral, recalled how good Paul was with children, and choked up remembering the “overwhelming” scene of “biological material” inside the feed room where he was murdered.
“He was a kid I really loved, you know,” Crosby said.
After Waters played Paul’s cellphone video taken before the killings, heard before by the jury, Crosby said he could clearly identify the three voices heard on the footage, taken around 8:44 p.m. near the dog kennels on June 7, 2021.
“Paul Murdaugh, Maggie Murdaugh and Alex Murdaugh,” Crosby said.
Asked how sure he was, Crosby replied, “100%.”
A family firm unravels
Murdaugh’s success at the law firm, where he regularly made seven-figure bonuses on top of a $125,000-a-year salary, was built “not on his work ethic, but from his ability to establish relationships, to manipulate people into settlements and his clients into liking him,” Seckinger testified Tuesday.
“Through the art of bulls---, basically,” Seckinger added.
Always more of a general practitioner, Murdaugh excelled at “strategizing against insurance companies and opposing lawyers,” Crosby testified.
“Lawyers in the firm were often amazed at the results he got,” he said.
Allendale-based attorney Mark Tinsley, who is suing Murdaugh in the 2019 boat crash that killed Mallory Beach, testified Monday out of the jury’s presence that Murdaugh excelled at the art of surprise.
“It’s Monday morning, there’s nothing on the roster and he’ll say, ‘I’m ready for trial.’” testified Tinsley, who is expected to testify before the jury this week.
One of the central pillars of the financial motive advanced by the prosecution is Seckinger’s testimony that she confronted Murdaugh about missing money that was owed to the firm on the same day — June 7, 2021 — Paul and Maggie were later shot at the family’s rural estate.
A month earlier, Seckinger testified she had become concerned about Murdaugh.
Seckinger told the jury Tuesday that she first became concerned about Murdaugh in May 2021, when she found that he was writing checks directly to what appeared to be Forge consulting account. Forge was the same name as a legitimate structured settlement company that the firm employed.
At the time, Murdaugh told her that he was trying to put some money in Maggie’s name due to Tinsley’s boat crash lawsuit, which was seeking a substantial amount of any and all assets Murdaugh had.
Later that same month, Seckinger said she became concerned again, when Murdaugh’s paralegal, Annette Griswold, brought it to her attention that the firm had not received a $729,000 fee check from Chris Wilson, an attorney and Murdaugh’s close friend. They two had just settled a case together.
When Seckinger sent a request to Wilson’s firm for proof that they had made the payment to PMPED, Murdaugh told her that the money was in Wilson’s trust account and he was planning to structure it.
“Oh f--- no, we do not,” Crosby said Tuesday, recalling his memory at the time when he learned that Murdaugh was supposedly trying to structure money in order to hide assets.
Trying to shelter assets, Crosby testified, was “illegal and unethical, and under no circumstances were we going to participate in anything that was illegal and unethical and that exposed us to liability from the South Carolina Bar.”
The next month on June 7, 2021, Seckinger confronted Murdaugh over the missing $729,000 fee check. All fees earned by the firm’s partners are supposed to be promptly turned over to the firm’s client trust account, according to court testimony.
In that confrontation, Seckinger told Murdaugh she wanted to see proof of where the missing money was actually located. But the meeting was cut short, she said, when Murdaugh got a call that his ailing father was dying at a local hospital.
But the budding investigation into whether Murdaugh was hiding assets was shelved after Maggie and Paul’s murders, and after the death of Murdaugh’s father and former partner at the law firm, Randolph, a few days later, Seckinger said.
“We knew he was taking pills, we were concerned about his sanity,” Seckinger testified. “We decided we were not going to press Alex.”
In defense attorney Jim Griffin’s cross-examinaton, Griffin tried to establish from Seckinger that the death of Murdaugh’s father alone was enough to halt any investigation into missing money, implying that Murdaugh would have had no incentive to kill Paul or Maggie.
On Sept. 2, 2021, Seckinger said she decided to start combing through Murdaugh’s payments.
That’s when she said she found Murdaugh had been writing checks to a Bank of America account that he controlled. The account was named Forge, but it was not a real Forge account, Seckinger testified. Murdaugh, she added, had used the account to send himself money owed to clients and the law firm.
The same day, Sept. 2, 2021, Seckinger said Griswold found the missing $792,000 attorney’s fees check intended for the law firm made out to Murdaugh from Wilson, realizing then the money was never in a trust account as Murdaugh had told her, Seckinger testified.
“I’m about to throw up,” Seckinger testified Tuesday about how she felt at the time.
Murdaugh was fired following a partners meeting the next day, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021.
When Murdaugh’s brother, Randy, was shown evidence of the theft, “he immediately hung his head and said, ‘He stole it. We have to do something about this,’” Seckinger testified.
When Randy told Murdaugh that the firm had evidence he had been stealing, Murdaugh said, “he knew he was going to get caught at some point of time and admitted what he did,” Crosby testified.
An internal firm investigation turned up a string of thefts dating back to 2011, Seckinger said.
The firm has since paid back around $5 million to clients, Seckinger told Griffin during cross-examination.
After he was fired, Murdaugh sought treatment for what his attorneys have said was a yearslong opioid addiction. Seckinger’s testimony Tuesday was the first indication law partners said they were aware of Murdaugh’s drug use.
Asked why they so often took Murdaugh’s assurances at face value for years, Seckinger said of the firm’s attorneys, “they are members of the Bar who have taken a sworn oath that we are supposed to trust and they are telling us that the money is there.”
Jury begins hearing financial motive
Crosby and Seckinger’s testimony comes after prosecutors had a significant breakthrough Monday when Newman admitted evidence of Murdaugh’s alleged financial crimes for the jury. The state contends that the strain of possible exposure of his shady financial dealings motivated Murdaugh to kill his wife and son as a distraction that would postpone questions about his financial situation.
The defense has repeatedly objected to the allegations, arguing Murdaugh has not been convicted of any crimes, and those allegations have nothing to do with the deaths of his wife and son.
Newman told the jury they would be hearing evidence of “other crimes” Murdaugh has been accused of, but that their job was not to weigh his guilt or innocence of those charges. Despite Murdaugh not having been convicted of any crimes, Newman said there is an “exception exists show motive, identity, existence of a common scheme or plan.”
”It is necessary to the presentation of the full case, especially as the state is relying heavily on circumstantial evidence,” Newman said. But Newman advised the 12-member jury Monday that the evidence was to be only considered for motive, not Murdaugh’s “propensity” to commit crime.
Murdaugh was named as a defendant in a lawsuit over a 2019 fatal boat crash involving his son, Paul, and a scheduled meeting days after the murders could have paved the way to the plaintiff getting access to Murdaugh’s financial information. Mark Tinsley, the attorney for the family of boat crash victim Mallory Beach, testified Monday he was confident he would get access to the information, and that after Paul and Maggie’s murders he considered he might have to drop the lawsuit.
Jury will decide ‘tarp or raincoat’ question
Earlier Monday, Newman ruled that jurors could consider the testimony of the caregiver for Murdaugh’s mother, who told the court she saw Murdaugh carrying a “blue tarp something” into his mother’s house.
“This evidence was obtained through a search warrant, it is in evidence and it is there for a jury’s consideration,” Newman said, over the defense’s objections.
Prosecutors say the item was a rain coat, which was later recovered from the house and tested positive for gunshot residue. But Murdaugh defense attorney Jim Griffin made much of the fact caregiver Mushelle “Shelly” Smith consistently identified the item as a “tarp” and not a rain coat, and that a blue tarp was also found by investigators in Murdaugh’s mother’s house. They argued the rain coat should be excluded because there was no evidence connecting it to Murdaugh.
Waters argued the item Smith saw Murdaugh carrying was the rain coat, based on the fact Smith identified a photo of the rain coat folded in a closet as the item she saw Murdaugh carrying into the house.
Gunshot residue expert Megan Fletcher, who was the final witness to testify Tuesday, examined the rain coat and the clothes Murdaugh wore the night of the shooting.
Fletcher said she took samples from the blue raincoat taken from Murdaugh’s mother’s house, which tested positive for gunshot residue. There were 38 gun shot primer residue particles found on the inside of the jacket, including three on the inside of the hood, Fletcher said. It was such a “significant number,” that she said she ultimately made the decision to stop counting them.
“This jacket could have been in the vicinity of the discharge of a firearm, or something with gunshot residue could have been transferred to it,” Fletcher said.
She also testified Tuesday that she found trace amounts of gunshot residue on the shirt and shorts Murdaugh was wearing the night of the murders, as well as from samples collected from his hands. Murdaugh told investigators he handled a shotgun the evening Maggie and Paul were murdered, which he said he picked up to protect himself after finding his wife and son murdered.
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(Island Packet reporter Blake Douglas contributed to this report.)
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