A caretaker for Alex Murdaugh’s family dogs took the stand as a prosecution witness on Tuesday but may have helped the defense after he described the former South Carolina lawyer charged with killing his wife and son as a loving husband and father.
“I never saw that man even raise his voice at his wife and kids,” Dale Roger Davis, who took care of the family’s three Labradors for four years, testified during Murdaugh’s double-murder trial in Colleton County Court. “Anything she wanted, or the boys wanted, he would try to get it for them.”
Davis later added that Murdaugh once shied away from fatally shooting one of the family’s injured hounds, noting that the 54-year-old asked him to do the “mercy” kill instead because he could not bring himself to do it. The caretaker’s portrayal of Murdaugh as a sensitive family man was unexpected, given that prosecutors allege he shot his 52-year-old wife, Maggie Murdaugh, and his 22-year-old son, Paul, in a diabolical scheme to shield the discovery of his financial crimes.
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Murdaugh has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his defense team has argued that their client has to be innocent because he had no motive to murder his family and no concrete evidence ties him to the crime. If convicted, Murdaugh faces up to 30 years in jail.
And while Davis was the prosecution’s 58th witness, his testimony could have bolstered the defense’s argument. During cross-examination, Davis admitted that he would describe Murdaugh’s relationship with Maggie as “lovey-dovey” and stressed that his former boss seemed focused on providing for his family.
“It means they loved each other,” Davis added.
The caretaker added Murdaugh often spent time hunting and drinking beer with Paul on the hunting estate—but he did not see the former lawyer hang out often with his older son, Buster. Davis also explained that his job was to take care of the family’s dogs—Grady, Bubba, and Maggie—because Buster, who has been in the courtroom for the majority of the trial, had eczema.
On the day of the murder, Davis explained, he fed the dogs and washed the kennels twice—rolling up the water hose as he always did before he left the hunting estate around 4:30 p.m. Looking at several crime scene photos on the stand, he said that some of the dogs were in different pens from where he left them and that the way the hose was left indicates someone used it after he went home.
“Somebody used that hose after I did because it's twisted,” he noted. “There is too much water right there around the second and third pen.”
Defense attorney Jim Griffin, however, noted that in a video Paul took at 8:44 p.m. in the kennels, the hose could be seen on the ground. In the video, which was taken about five minutes before prosecutors say Paul and Maggie were murdered, prosecutors and witnesses allege Murdaugh can be heard in the background talking about one family dog.
Dr. Ellen Riemer, the Medical University of South Carolina forensic pathologist who conducted Maggie and Paul’s autopsies, revealed to jurors this week the wounds the two sustained around 8:50 p.m. that night.
Riemer testified Tuesday and Wednesday that Paul was shot first with a shotgun—and that he could have survived his initial chest wound if he had received medical attention. The second wound to the head, however, was fatal. She added that Maggie had five gunshot wounds from a .300 Blackout semi-automatic rifle.
Both Maggie and Paul’s wounds indicate they were shot at close range and neither had defensive injuries that would indicate a struggle, Riemer added.
