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The trial of a prominent US lawyer for the murder of his wife and son has prompted the reopening of investigations into other deaths.

Alex Murdaugh, 54, is accused of shooting dead his wife Margaret, 52, and their youngest son Paul, 22, on their estate in South Carolina.

Prosecutors say the lawyer carried out the killings after he was caught stealing from the family firm.

A jury’s verdict is expected soon.

The Murdaughs feature in a Netflix documentary series called Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal. In it, residents in their hometown of Hampton County question the family’s influence, historically, over local law enforcement.

Following the murder charges against Murdaugh, police have begun reinvestigating the death of the family’s housekeeper.

Fresh inquiries are also being made into the 2015 death of a former classmate of Murdaugh’s oldest son.

The Murdaugh story is one anchored among South Carolina’s wealthy and well-heeled.

Before he was disbarred, Murdaugh was a personal injury lawyer – distinguished and high-earning in a powerful legal dynasty founded by his forebears in the Low Country region of South Carolina.

But now the dynasty, and he, will forever be associated with the horrific events of the evening of 7 June 2021.

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Alex Murdaugh in a police mugshot
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Alex Murdaugh in a police mugshot. Pic: AP

Murdaugh shot wife five times and son twice, prosecutors say

On the family’s hunting estate, prosecutors say Murdaugh shot his wife five times with an automatic rifle.

His son was shot twice with a different weapon, a shotgun, in the head and chest.

The prosecution claims Murdaugh changed the guns used to create the appearance of an ambush.

It was Murdaugh who made a 911 call, sobbing as he told the dispatcher “my wife and child have been shot badly”.

Subsequently, he told police he had been to visit his mother and had returned to find his wife and son dead by the kennels on the estate.

Alex Murdaugh (far right) with wife Maggie and son Paul. Pic: Facebook
Image:
Alex Murdaugh with wife Maggie and son Paul. Pic: Facebook

The boating tragedy

Officers who first attended the scene found Murdaugh in distress. Upon their arrival, he quickly provided a theory behind the killings, suggesting it was a reaction to a boating tragedy that took place in February 2019.

Murdaugh’s son Paul, then 19, had crashed the family boat whilst three times the legal alcohol limit.

A number of people were thrown overboard, including Mallory Beach, 19, who was killed.

Murdaugh might have been promoting the boating incident as part of his legal defence – in the event, it featured in the prosecution case.

The family of Ms Beach are suing Murdaugh as the owner of the boat involved in their daughter’s death.

The brother of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh, Buster,  receives a hug at their funeral service on June 11, 2021. Pic: AP
Image:
Buster Murdaugh receives a hug at the funeral service for his mother and brother on 11 June, 2021. Pic: AP

Murdaugh was defrauding law firm, chief financial officer says

The murder trial has heard from his law firm’s chief financial officer, who gave evidence that Murdaugh had been defrauding the company and putting the money in his wife’s bank account to shield it from the lawsuit brought by the dead girl’s family.

She told the court that she had confronted him about a missing $792,000 (£655,000) on the day of the double shooting.

It plays into the prosecutor’s argument that Murdaugh was driven to murder by a fear that his financial crimes were about to be exposed, and that his wife and son were shot to elicit sympathy and stymie investigations.

Snapchat recording casts doubt over alibi

A Snapchat video recorded by Murdaugh’s son, Paul, has also been played in court to bolster the prosecution case.

It shows footage of a brown labrador at the kennels where the shooting took place.

Paul filmed it approximately five minutes before he was shot dead and witnesses have said one of the voices heard on the video is that of Murdaugh. Prosecutors point out that doesn’t square with his initial alibi that he hadn’t seen his wife or son for 90 minutes before coming across their dead bodies.

In addressing the contradiction in court, Murdaugh admitted in evidence that he had lied. His explanation was that he had an opioid addiction stretching back 20 years which made him paranoid and distrustful of police.

Investigations into other deaths

As the murder trial progresses, so do new investigations into other deaths in Murdaugh’s orbit.

Gloria Satterfield was their long-term housekeeper until her death in 2018. Its cause was originally thought to have been an accidental fall on steps at the front of the Murdaugh home. Suspicion of a different explanation has been given traction by Murdaugh’s subsequent financial dealings.

Following Ms Satterfield’s death, he secured an insurance payout on her sons’ behalf worth more than $4m (£3.3m) but pocketed the cash himself.

Only when they pursued him through the courts, did he agree to a $4.3m (£3.6m) settlement.

Michael Tony Satterfield, son of Gloria Satterfield, points out Alex Murdaugh during the lawyer's double murder trial. Pic: AP
Image:
Michael Tony Satterfield, son of Gloria Satterfield, points out Alex Murdaugh during the lawyer’s double murder trial. Pic: AP

Fresh investigation launched

The murder charges against Murdaugh have also coincided with a fresh investigation into the death of Stephen Smith, 19, who was found dead on a road around 10 miles from Murdaugh home. He had suffered a head injury and, at the time, it was deemed to have been a hit-and-run incident.

The teenager was a classmate of the Murdaughs’ oldest son, Buster. Whilst enquiries are ongoing, law enforcement officials haven’t publicly acknowledged any connection to the Murdaugh family.

99 other charges

As well as putting Mr Murdaugh on trial for murder, the South Carolina Attorney General has laid 99 other charges against him for financial crimes dating back several years. He’s accused of swindling more than $8m (£6.6m) from unsuspecting clients.

Curtis Edward Smith was charged with assisted suicide, insurance fraud and several other counts in the Sept. 4 shooting of Alex Murdaugh. Pic:  Colleton County Detention Center via AP
Image:
Curtis Edward Smith was charged with assisted suicide, insurance fraud and several other counts. Pic: Colleton County Detention Center via AP

The jury at Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina, has also heard of a bizarre ‘suicide attempt’ by Murdaugh three months after the death of his wife and son.

Having been picked up by an ambulance crew from the side of the road with a head injury, he told them he had been changing a tyre when someone stopped to help him and then shot him in the head.

He later admitted to investigators that he concocted the episode with a drug dealer in an effort to secure a $10m (£8.3m) life insurance payout for his son Buster. The dealer in question, Curtis Edward Smith, was subsequently charged with a number of offences, including assisting suicide, assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature.

If convicted of the double murder, Murdaugh could face 30 years to life in jail. Prosecutors in South Carolina chose not to pursue the death penalty.

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Demolition work begins on White House East Wing for Trump’s £186m ballroom

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Demolition work begins on White House East Wing for Trump's £186m ballroom

Demolition on parts of the White House’s East Wing has begun in order to build Donald Trump’s new ballroom.

On Monday, builders were seen tearing down the facade of the building.

The US President, who insists the $250million (£186m) ballroom will be paid for by himself and donors, said in July it would not interfere with the existing landmark.

The East Wing was built at the beginning of the last century and was last modified in 1942.

Mr Trump said in July: “It will be beautiful. It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be – it will be near it, but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favourite.”

Mr Trump confirmed on Monday that ground had been broken on the project, despite lacking approval for construction from the federal agency that oversees such projects.

Windows of the complex could be seen being torn down. Pic: Reuters
Image:
Windows of the complex could be seen being torn down. Pic: Reuters

Photos of the demolition work showed construction equipment tearing into the East Wing façade and windows and other building parts in tatters on the ground.

He added that future parties would start with cocktails in the East Room, before they are taken into the “finest” ballroom in the country.

It will also boast views of the Washington Monument with room for 999 people, he added. Other estimates have claimed it will house some 600 people.

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On his social media platform, Truth Social, he said: “Completely separate from the White House itself, the East Wing is being fully modernised as part of this process, and will be more beautiful than ever when it is complete!”

Trump has also claimed on social media that the project would be completed “with zero cost to the American Taxpayer! The White House Ballroom is being privately funded by many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly”.

Earlier this year, Trump said they have “wanted a ballroom” in the White House for 150 years.

“There’s never been a president that was good at ballrooms,” he said. “I’m good at building things and we’re going to build quickly and on time. It’ll be beautiful, top, top of the line.”

Since being in office, Mr Trump has made a number of changes to the White House.

He has hand-picked gold ornamentation for the Oval Office and has redone the Rose Garden.

A former Republican member of Congress, Joe Walsh, called the latest plans an “utter desecration”, and said if he became president would take “a bulldozer” to the ballroom.

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Inside ‘data centre alley’ – the biggest story in economics right now

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Inside 'data centre alley' - the biggest story in economics right now

If you ever fly to Washington DC, look out of the window as you land at Dulles Airport – and you might snatch a glimpse of the single biggest story in economics right now.

There below you, you will see scattered around the fields and woods of the local area a set of vast warehouses that might to the untrained eye look like supermarkets or distribution centres. But no: these are in fact data centres – the biggest concentration of data centres anywhere in the world.

For this area surrounding Dulles Airport has more of these buildings, housing computer servers that do the calculations to train and run artificial intelligence (AI), than anywhere else. And since AI accounts for the vast majority of economic growth in the US so far this year, that makes this place an enormous deal.

Down at ground level you can see the hallmarks as you drive around what is known as “data centre alley”. There are enormous power lines everywhere – a reminder that running these plants is an incredibly energy-intensive task.

This tiny area alone, Loudoun County, consumes roughly 4.9 gigawatts of power – more than the entire consumption of Denmark. That number has already tripled in the past six years, and is due to be catapulted ever higher in the coming years.

Inside ‘data centre alley’

We know as much because we have gained rare access into the heart of “data centre alley”, into two sites run by Digital Realty, one of the biggest datacentre companies in the world. It runs servers that power nearly all the major AI and cloud services in the world. If you send a request to one of those models or search engines there’s a good chance you’ve unknowingly used their machines yourself.

Inside a site run by Digital Realty
Image:
Inside a site run by Digital Realty

Their Digital Dulles site, under construction right now, is due to consume up to a gigawatt in power all told, with six substations to help provide that power. Indeed, it consumes about the same amount of power as a large nuclear power plant.

Walking through the site, a series of large warehouses, some already equipped with rows and rows of backup generators, there to ensure the silicon chips whirring away inside never lose power, is a striking experience – a reminder of the physical underpinnings of the AI age. For all that this technology feels weightless, it has enormous physical demands. It entails the construction of these massive concrete buildings, each of which needs enormous amounts of power and water to keep the servers cool.

Sky's Ed Conway at the data centre
Image:
Sky’s Ed Conway at the data centre

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We were given access inside one of the company’s existing server centres – behind multiple security cordons into rooms only accessible with fingerprint identification. And there we saw the infrastructure necessary to keep those AI chips running. We saw an Nvidia DGX H100 running away, in a server rack capable of sucking in more power than a small village. We saw the cooling pipes running in and out of the building, as well as the ones which feed coolant into the GPUs (graphic processing units) themselves.

Such things underline that to the extent that AI has brainpower, it is provided not out of thin air, but via very physical amenities and infrastructure. And the availability of that infrastructure is one of the main limiting factors for this economic boom in the coming years.

According to economist Jason Furman, once you subtract AI and related technologies, the US economy barely grew at all in the first half of this year. So much is riding on this. But there are some who question whether the US is going to be able to construct power plants quickly enough to fuel this boom.

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Is Trump’s AI plan a ‘tech bro’ manifesto?

For years, American power consumption remained more or less flat. That has changed rapidly in the past couple of years. Now, AI companies have made grand promises about future computing power, but that depends on being able to plug those chips into the grid.

Last week the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned AI could indeed be a financial bubble.

He said: “There are echoes in the current tech investment surge of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. It was the internet then… it is AI now. We’re seeing surging valuations, booming investment and strong consumption on the back of solid capital gains. The risk is that with stronger investment and consumption, a tighter monetary policy will be needed to contain price pressures. This is what happened in the late 1990s.”

‘The terrifying thing is…’

For those inside the AI world, this also feels like uncharted territory.

Helen Toner, executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and formerly on the OpenAI board, said: “The terrifying thing is: no one knows how much further AI is going to go, and no one really knows how much economic growth is going to come out of it.

“The trends have certainly been that the AI systems we are developing get more and more sophisticated over time, and I don’t see signs of that stopping. I think they’ll keep getting more advanced. But the question of how much productivity growth will that create? How will that compare to the absolutely gobsmacking investments that are being made today?”

Whether it’s a new industrial revolution or a bubble – or both – there’s no denying AI is a massive economic story with massive implications.

For energy. For materials. For jobs. We just don’t know how massive yet.

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Nicholas Rossi: US man who fled to Scotland to avoid rape charges jailed

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Nicholas Rossi: US man who fled to Scotland to avoid rape charges jailed

Nicholas Rossi, an American man who faked his death and fled to Scotland to escape rape charges, has been jailed for at least five years.

The sentence handed down to the 38-year-old is the first of two he faces after being convicted separately in August and September of raping two women in 2008.

Utah has “indeterminate sentencing” – meaning jail terms handed down are in a range of years rather than a fixed number, with release dates set by the state’s parole board.

Nicholas Rossi appearing in court in August. Pic: AP
Image:
Nicholas Rossi appearing in court in August. Pic: AP

During August’s three-day trial, Rossi’s accuser and her parents took the stand – with the victim telling the court that he left a “trail of fear, pain, and destruction” behind him.

“This is not a plea for vengeance. This is a plea for safety and accountability, for recognition of the damage that will never fully heal,” she said.

Brandon Simmons, a prosecutor in the case, alleged Rossi “uses rape to control women” and posed a risk to community safety.

Rossi – whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian – maintained his innocence during the sentencing hearing. In a soft, raspy voice, he said: “I am not guilty of this. These women are lying.”

He was first identified in 2018 after a decade-old DNA rape kit was examined.

How Rossi was caught

But in February 2020 – months after he was charged in one of the cases – an online obituary claimed he had died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Rossi was arrested in Scotland the following year while being treated for COVID, after hospital staff recognised his distinctive tattoos – including the crest of a university he never attended.

A protracted court battle meant he wasn’t extradited until January 2024, with Rossi claiming he was an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight who was being framed.

Investigators identified at least a dozen aliases that he had used to evade capture over the years.

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One of his victims had been recovering from a traumatic brain injury when she responded to a personal advert that Rossi had posted on Craigslist.

They began dating and were engaged within a couple of weeks – and according to her testimony, Rossi had asked her to pay for dates and car repairs, lend him money, and take on debt for their rings.

She told the court that Rossi raped her in his bedroom one night after she drove him home – and went to police years later after discovering that another woman in Utah had come forward with accusations.

Rossi is due to be sentenced for the second conviction in November.

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