Alex Murdaugh allegedly wanted his wife and son to come to their hunting estate the night they were brutally murdered—a request that a “disappointed” Maggie reluctantly complied with, the family housekeeper testified on Friday.
“Maggie told me she had to go to a doctor’s appointment, and she said...in the text she said ‘Alex wants me to come home,’” Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson, who worked for the Murdaugh family for years, testified in Colleton County court. “She kind of sounded like she didn’t want to come home because she really liked being in Edisto because they had a lot of work going on.”
Turrubiate-Simpson said the family had been doing work on their Edisto beach home and that Maggie preferred to stay there during the summer ahead of their Fourth of July celebration. But on June 7, 2021, she texted her housekeeper asking her to cook dinner for the family—revealing that Murdaugh had also asked their 22-year-old son, Paul, to come home to do some work on the property.
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That night, Turrubiate-Simpson said she cooked cubed steak with white rice, green beans, and gravy before texting Maggie, 52, to let her know dinner was left on the stove. Hours later, in the early morning of June 8, she said Murdaugh called her with a “shaky” voice to let her know that Maggie and Paul had been fatally shot outside the dog kennels of their estate.
“B, they’re gone. They’re gone,” Turrubiate-Simpson testified Murdaugh told her during the phone call. She said that when she arrived at the house, Murdaugh asked her to straighten things up “the way Maggie likes it” in anticipation of people descending on the estate.
In reality, prosecutors allege, Murdaugh brutally murdered his family in a twisted scheme to garner public sympathy and conceal the discovery that he had been stealing money from his law firm and clients for years. Murdaugh, 54, is facing two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime in connection with the case. He has pleaded not guilty and his defense team has argued that he had no motive to murder his family.
Turrubiate-Simpson said that prior to the murders, Maggie had revealed that she’d been worried about the ongoing civil lawsuit in connection to a 2019 boat crash involving Paul Murdaugh that resulted in the death of a 19-year-old.
“We don’t have that kind of money,” Turrubiate-Simpson recalled Maggie telling her before she admitted she would give everything to make the lawsuit disappear. Maggie added that she said she would be willing to “start over” and was worried that Murdaugh was not being transparent about “what was really going on” with litigation that prosecutors allege had threatened to expose Murdaugh’s financial crimes.
“He doesn’t tell me everything,” Maggie allegedly said in the conversation.
The housekeeper’s testimony bolsters the prosecution’s argument that Murdaugh took steps to murder his family with two different guns—and then cover up the crime afterward.
“It was hard because I knew [Maggie] wasn’t going to be coming back, and I didn’t want to move her stuff,” Turrubiate-Simpson said through tears about her orders to clean up the house the morning after the murders.
She added that once she entered the “cold” house, she immediately noticed a few odd details—including that the pots she had used to cook dinner were inside the fridge with the lids still on despite the family usually leaving the cooking equipment on the stove for her to clean.
“That was not normal,” Turrubiate-Simpson added.
In the main bathroom, she said she found Maggie’s clothing next to the bathtub and a “slight puddle of water, a towel, and a pair of khaki pants” on the floor next to the shower. Turrubiate-Simpson noted that on the day of the murders, Murdaugh left for work in a pair of khakis, a “sea-foam green” polo, and a navy sport coat.
The housekeeper said she washed the khakis and a “damp” towel but never saw the polo Murdaugh was wearing that day ever again.
