Buster Murdaugh, the surviving son of Alex Murdaugh — a South Carolina lawyer who was found guilty of killing his own wife and youngest son — is insisting that his father is innocent.
Buster said he believes the real person behind the killings of his mother Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and brother Paul Murdaugh, 22, is still on the loose and he “absolutely” worries for his safety.
“I think I set myself up to be safe but yes, when I go to bed at night I have a fear that there is somebody that is still out there,” Buster told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum in his first TV interview since his father was handed two life sentences for murder.
Clips of the interview were released to The Huffington Post and People on Tuesday. Buster’s interview is part of Fox Nation’s three-part docuseries The Fall of the House of Murdaugh, which will premiere on Thursday.
Buster attended each day of his father’s murder trial and told Fox he believes the jury was biased against his father from the start. At Alex’s trial, the jury deliberated for three hours before finding him guilty of shooting Maggie and Paul.
“I was there for six weeks studying it, and I think it was a tilted table from the beginning. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of the jurors felt that way prior to when they had to deliberate. It was predetermined in their minds prior to when they ever heard any shred of evidence that was given in that room,” Buster said.
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After the trial, one juror told ABC News the defining piece of evidence that convinced him of Alex’s guilt was a video found on Paul’s cellphone shot minutes before the killings, near the dog kennels on the family’s hunting lodge where the bodies would be found.
The voices of Maggie, Paul and Alex can be heard on the video, despite Alex previously insisting for months he hadn’t been anywhere near the kennels that night. When Alex took the stand in his trial, he admitted he lied to investigators about being at the kennels, saying he was paranoid about law enforcement because he was addicted to drugs and had opioids in his pocket the night of the killings.
Still, Buster believes that his father was not behind the killings of his mother and brother.
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“I don’t think that he could be affiliated with endangering my mother and brother. I mean, we’ve been here for a while now and that’s been my stance,” he told MacCallum.
Prosecutors argued at Alex’s trial that the prominent South Carolina lawyer was motivated to kill his family in order to gain sympathy and distract from his financial crimes that were on the verge of being exposed in an impending lawsuit from the family of Mallory Beach, a 19-year-old who was killed on board Alex’s boat while it was being operated by a drunk and underage Paul.
Buster called this a “crappy motive,” but did concede that his father had lied and stolen. Before his murder trial, Alex was in jail on about 100 other charges ranging from insurance fraud to tax evasion. He also admitted to stealing millions from the Murdaugh family law firm and clients.
When asked if Buster worried he might be like his father, he responded: “No, I do not worry, because I am not a thief. I am not a liar. I’m not a manipulator.”
Though he added that he’s “proud” to share some of his father’s “more admirable traits.”
A series of other mysterious deaths in the Murdaugh family orbit continue to be investigated.
The body of Stephen Smith, 19, was exhumed in April for an independent autopsy seven years after his badly injured body was found 24 kilometres outside the Murdaugh family home.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) said it reopened the case of Smith’s death in 2021 due to information it gleaned during the Murdaugh investigations, though authorities have so far made no official connection between Smith’s death and the infamous family.
Buster and Smith were high school classmates who reportedly graduated together in 2014. When the 19-year-old’s body was found near the Murdaugh home in 2015, investigators with South Carolina’s highway patrol said they received tips that Buster may have been connected.
Buster has denied involvement and called the allegations “vicious rumours.”
SLED also reopened the case of the death of the Murdaughs’ housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, who died after allegedly tripping and falling at the family’s hunting lodge, where Maggie and Paul were later killed.
Alex admitted to lying about the circumstances of Satterfield’s death in a May court filing. He previously claimed that Satterfield fell down the stairs after tripping over one of their dogs. He is now claiming that no dogs were involved in her fall.
Alex is currently being sued for lying about Satterfield’s death in order to fraudulently obtain an insurance payout, which he then stole from Satterfield’s sons.
— With files from The Associated Press
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