Alex Murdaugh trial: Jury views son’s cellphone video

(NewsNation) — On Wednesday, the jury in the double homicide trial of South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh viewed video taken from his 22-year-old son Paul’s phone.

Considered one of the state’s most important pieces of evidence, the prosecution says the video from the phone was taken minutes before Paul was killed.

The video shows Paul in the kennels on the family’s Moselle hunting lodge trying to get a video of a dog’s tail.

But what could be extremely important in the trial is what’s heard in the background.

According to State Law Enforcement Division Lt. Britt Dove, a cellphone data analyst, three different voices are heard in the video.

Prosecutors argue one of those voices is Alex Murdaugh’s, which places him at the murder scene with both his son and wife Maggie moments before their murders.

In the courtroom, Murdaugh cried while listening to the voices.

Murdaugh previously told investigators he’d fallen asleep inside the main house yards away and hadn’t seen his wife and son until finding their bodies.

The jury also heard a detailed second-by-second analysis of data from Alex, Paul and Maggie’s cellphones.

The jury looked confused by some of the times and numbers in the expert’s testimony.

The evidence included a change in Maggie’s phone’s orientation from portrait to landscape after the state says she died.

But on cross-examination, the defense got an admission out of the data expert that undercuts the prosecution’s argument that after the murders Murdaugh had handled his wife’s phone.

Murdaugh’s defense used that same data to suggest that Murdaugh’s phone and his wife’s phone were not together when her iPhone recorded a final change in orientation, indicating it may have been tossed on the side of the road about a half-mile from the family’s property.