'It's one thing to have pictures and graphs but quite another to be there in person. Lori Murray, a South Carolina criminal defense attorney, told : 'The defense wants the jury to be able to use all their senses to take this crime scene in. On the one hand it could garner sympathy for the alleger killer by showing jurors where his family lived - but they may also see that it was possible him to have committed the murders. Legal experts warned the move was 'a big risk'.
WALK THROUGH OF RIDDLE SCHOOL TRANSFER TRIAL
The visit lasted an hour and 15 minutes and jurors then returned to the court to hear the prosecution's closing argument.Ĭrime scene visits by juries are relatively rare but have occurred in a number of other high-profile prosecutions, including the 1995 murder trial of OJ Simpson. The outing came after Murdaugh's defense attorneys told the judge the visit would would allow jurors to see 'how small the feed room is (where Paul was killed)' and understand its location in relation to Maggie's body. Chapman testified on the first day of the trial as one of the first cops on the scene the night of Maggie and Paul's murders. Judge Clifton Newman rode in a pickup truck driven by Colleton County Sheriff's Office Captain Jason Chapman. First responders said the scene was wet and that the bodies of the victims were saturated with water as well as blood, despite the fact it had not rained yet that night The hose at the kennels which jurors have heard much about in evidence.
WALK THROUGH OF RIDDLE SCHOOL TRANSFER WINDOWS
The 12 jurors and two alternates were loaded into three transport vans with blacked-out windows and were guarded by a convoy of cop cars as they made the half-hour trip from the Colleton County courthouse to Moselle. The judge then allowed three journalists, a reporter, photographer and videographer, to attend the scene only after the jurors had left. He said Paul had been attacked and threatened after the wreck in which Mallory Beach was killed in February 2019.Īfter sitting through more than a month of testimony, jurors were escorted by cops to see the exact spot where Murdaugh's wife Maggie and son Paul were shot dead. The final shot was fired into the back of her head as she lay face down on the ground when she was already dead.ĭuring his testimony, Murdaugh floated his own theory of who committed the murders, saying he believed that vigilantes killed his wife and son in revenge for Paul's drunken boat accident which killed a 19-year-old girl. Maggie was shot at least four times, with bullet wounds to her thigh, wrist, torso and head. Jurors have heard gruesome evidence of how Paul's brain was blown out the back of his head by a close range blast of steel buckshot from a 12-gauge shotgun. The State says Murdaugh first blasted Paul twice with a shotgun in the feed room of the kennels before shooting Maggie with a. Maggie's body was found a few yards to the right of the doghouse while Paul's was in the doorway of the feed room at the kennels (far right)
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