Following the swift conviction of disgraced former South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh for the double murder of his wife and son, reporter Dianne Gallagher told CNN's Erin Burnett the significance of the trial's result.
In particular, she argued, one piece of evidence was critical to securing the guilty verdicts: video evidence that showed Murdaugh was lying about not being present on the scene at the time of the shootings.
"They're going to reconvene tomorrow, but he kept emphasizing — Judge Newman, the overwhelming nature of the evidence," said Burnett.
"That was something emphasized in the closing arguments of the prosecution," said Gallagher. "Acknowledging from the very start this is a case based on circumstantial evidence but based on a lot of circumstantial evidence. They created an exceptionally detailed timeline using GPS data, cell phone data, the last time a phone was open, when text messages were received and videos were recorded. And it was that video found on Paul Murdaugh's phone. Marianne Proctor, the sister of Mary Murdaugh, testified that they call Paul Murdaugh a 'little detective.' That was because he was finding pills that his father had been taking and confronted him about it."
"But it looks like the little detective's final case that he may have cracked here was in fact the video on his phone that put his father at the crime scene minutes before the state says Paul and Maggie were murdered," said Gallagher. "And the jury said Alex Murdaugh is the one who did it. If not for the video, the state may never have been able to charge him. No one knew about the video until March of 2022, around nine months after Paul and Maggie were killed."
"The judge talked about the amount of evidence that the amount of witnesses, you said this more than 70 witnesses, six weeks, this was supposed to be a three-week trial, and we had roughly three hours of deliberation after they sat through that for nearly six weeks listening to graphic testimony," said Gallagher. "Sometimes extremely difficult to understand testimony about cell phones in the way the cars were driving, to see this come tomorrow morning. The state says they're not seeking the death penalty between 30 years to life in prison for the murder charges, again, for killing Maggie and Paul Murdaugh."
Dianne Gallagher says video footage was critical in convicting Alex Murdaugh www.youtube.com
