Buster Murdaugh’s not giving his father up — even if he’s basically calling him a psychopath.
In his first public statements since Alex Murdaugh’s arrest and later conviction for the June 2021 murder of his wife, Maggie and younger son, Paul, at their South Carolina estate, Buster insisted his father is innocent — and hinted the real killer is still out there.
“I do not think that he could be affiliated with endangering my mother and brother,” Buster, 26, said in the upcoming three-part documentary, “The Fall of the House of Murdaugh” with FOX host Martha MacCallum which airs Aug. 31.
“We have been here for a while now and that’s been my stance.”
He’s also afraid of the alleged killer he says is still at large.
“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 added.
But he didn’t flinch when MacCallum asked him if his dad was a psychopath.
“I’m not prepared to sit here and say that it encompasses him as a whole, but I certainly think there are characteristics where you look at the manipulation and the lies and the carrying out of that such, and I think that’s a fair assessment,” Buster said.
Murdaugh was convicted in February and is serving two life sentences in a South Carolina state prison.
Murdaugh gunned down his family members in an effort to cover up his theft, hoping that their deaths would buy him sympathy and time to figure out a plan, prosecutors argued.
Before the killings, state and federal investigators said Murdaugh spent a decade bilking millions from clients who suffered debilitating injuries and who needed money for medical care.
Buster admitted, however, that he remains stumped by his father’s shocking confession on the witness stand during his double murder trial that he lied about not being down at the dog kennels at the family estate, Moselle, shortly before the murders occurred on Jun 7, 2021.
Maggie, 52, and Paul, 22, were shot dead in cold blood with two separate weapons at the estate dog kennels.
Prosecutors played footage from Paul’s phone at the murder trial that torpedoed Murdaugh’s long-held claim that he was not present at the scene where his wife and son were murdered. A video taken by Paul minutes before he and his mother, Maggie, were killed near the family’s dog kennel reveals three voices
“I thought it was very odd,” Buster said. “I was very confused.”
Buster said that his dad had “told everyone” that he was not at the kennels that night,
Buster also said he had nothing to do with the 2015 death of his high school classmate, Stephen Smith, a 19-year-old gay man whose body was found on a rural road a few miles from the Murdaugh estate. Smith’s mother, Sandy, has said for years she believes the Murdaugh family was somehow involved in his death.
“I never had anything to do with his murder, and I never had anything to do with him on a physical level in any regard,” Buster said in a documentary clip.
“I don’t want to be rude here, but have you ever been accused of murdering somebody?” Buster asks MacCallum.
“Well, let me tell you, this is very, very, very, very, very, it’s a terrible thing to place on somebody with absolutely no fact. I mean, it has harmed my reputation. I mean, people perceive me as a murderer.”
Alex Murdaugh’s older brother said earlier this year that he thinks Alex is still lying over the brutal slayings of his wife and son.
“He knows more than what he’s saying,” Randy Murdaugh, 56, told the New York Times.
“He’s not telling the truth, in my opinion, about everything there.”
Randy’s admission is in sharp contrast to a claim by his 54-year-old brother’s defense team that the whole family was “more convinced” of the disgraced legal scion’s innocence after his six-week trial.
“The not knowing … is the worst thing there is,” Randy said.
Randy shared similar observations to Maggie’s sister, Marian Proctor, who testified how she found it “off” that Murdaugh “never talked about finding” the killer.