For the second day during his trial for the murder of his wife and son, disgraced former South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh took the stand in his own defense — and was hammered by prosecutors over a significant confession he made the previous day.
Throughout the trial, Murdaugh's attorneys, as well as his surviving son Buster, stated that Murdaugh was not at the dog kennels on his family's estate the night his Maggie and Paul were shot there — despite the fact that a voice on a tape recorded at the scene was identified as him by witnesses for the prosecution.
But in a moment that "stunned" observers of the case, Murdaugh changed his story on Thursday night, placing himself at the scene, and revealing that either he had lied to his defense counsel and family, or they had lied for him.
"You had to back up and make a new story that fit with the facts," said the prosecution counsel. "You've done that over and over again all these years. The second you're confronted with facts that you can't deny, you immediately come up with a new lie."
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He went on to say, "your own lawyer was repeating your own story that you were home napping" for months.
Murdaugh resisted the implication he was lying at times, saying, "I disagree with that proposition that you're putting out" and "All I was trying to do was just sit down ... and go through all of these financial things, all these things that I had done wrong, and bring it to a close."
However, he also acknowledged under questioning that the story he gave was different than the one his witnesses and attorneys had testified to, and "this is the first time they heard [this version]."
Prosecutors have argued that Murdaugh, who comes from a powerful well-connected lawyer family from the South Carolina Lowcountry, killed Maggie and Paul to cover up a series of financial crimes and embezzlement from his law firm to pay for a $50,000 a week pain pills addiction. Murdaugh has confessed to the embezzlement, the drug addiction, and to faking his own death to arrange an insurance payout to Buster, but maintains his innocence in the murders of his family.
Watch a livestream of the trial below or at this link.