ASHLEIGH BANFIELD: A digital star witness brought down murderous family father Alex Murdaugh

Ashleigh Banfield is the presenter of ‘Banfield’ which airs weekdays at 10 p.m. ET on NewsNation

It was the cell phone of Paul, the murdered son of Alex Murdaugh, that exposed the latent hoax his father had been telling for a year and a half.

Alex, a 54-year-old disgraced lawyer, had claimed he was nowhere near his doomed wife, Maggie, 52, and son, Paul, 22, when they were brutally gunned down on their sprawling Carolina estate. del Sur in June 2019. 2021.

And ever since that fateful night, Alex maintained, for anyone who would listen, that he was in the main house napping and had no idea of ​​the horrors taking place 1,100 feet away outside the family’s kennels.

But it was the dumbest, most damaging lie he could ever have told.

Because a chance video Paul shot of one of the dogs inside the kennels featured the high-pitched, yet haunting voice of Alex Murdaugh in the background.

If there’s one thing the Alex Murdaugh murder trial has taught us, it’s that star witnesses lurk in just about everyone’s back pocket.

In the video, Alex could be heard chattering to Maggie about a chicken on the property. And she proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Alex was there, in the pound, minutes before his family was wiped out.

So clear and convincing was the electronic evidence presented in court that even Alex had to reverse course on the witness stand and admit, after 20 months, that it was, in fact, his voice on the tape.

A deliberating juror told Good Morning America that this was the moment, right at that moment, when he decided Alex was guilty.

But that wasn’t the only electronic information that was critical to putting Alex Murdaugh behind bars for the rest of his life.

The mountain of electronic data that filed through this South Carolina courthouse no doubt helped seal Alex’s fate. And it is this type of data that almost all of us carry in our daily lives.

It was amazing to learn during this test that a simple cell phone will record, for posterity, almost every instance of its own movement when the device’s backlight is activated.

There is also a record of each switch from portrait to landscape mode when a phone is raised in front of the face.

We all know what happens. We just didn’t know that all those movements are hidden away, in a small memory vault located deep within the device.

And so, when experts testified about the movement of Maggie’s phone after her death, it gave us some startling insight into what might have been going on.

Expert testimony suggested that Alex held his phone in one hand and hers in the other, as he called her to leave a false alibi message.

As a former lawyer, he may have been trying to trick future investigators into thinking he was calling her from the main house to tell her he was leaving to visit his elderly mother.

But when dead Maggie’s phone was picked up, the screen changed from landscape to portrait. One could almost imagine Alex fumbling with the phones in his hands.

Alex’s problem was that Maggie’s phone recorded the movement for two seconds. before Alex’s call came through. It certainly seemed like he was looking at her phone to confirm that his call was received.

It was also jarring to realize that the phone will record every step you take, even if you’re not connected to a fitness app and track them.

Alex’s lie, that he slept while his family was massacred, was debunked by the frantic 283 footsteps captured by the electronic spy in his pocket.

And dead Maggie’s phone also seemed to be recording her steps. That data was consistent with the prosecution’s assertion that Alex quickly hosed himself off and cleaned up any evidence of blood after shooting his loved ones.w

When the smartphone connects to a vehicle’s Bluetooth, another small digital witness is born, which becomes another window into criminal behavior.

Alex’s suburban logged his 80-mph run through dark, winding country roads, something he assumed he was doing in secret.

When her GMC slowed down, precisely at the spot where Maggie’s phone was found dumped in the woods, it was hard to believe she hadn’t.

Finally, an innocent Snapchat video Paul recorded less than an hour before the murders, showing his father fussing with a stubborn sapling that had just been planted, provided another clue.

The clothes Alex was wearing in the video were not the clothes he was wearing when he claimed to ‘discover’ his family dead just hours later. And no one could find the button-down shirt and chino pants he was wearing in the video.

Remarkably, the only electronic spies that didn’t show up at this trial are now pretty much standard evidence in most other courtrooms: doorbell cameras.

There was no one operating in the main house, and certainly none near the kennels.

Typically, those cameras are everywhere, tracking your every innocent (or sinister) ride, ride, or other movement.

A veritable network of neighborhood cameras provided the genesis of the investigation into Bryan Kohberger and his White Elantra. Footage of Kohberger’s car eventually leads to his arrest.

His vehicle was seized speeding through a Moscow, Idaho neighborhood around 4:00 am, which is the approximate time that four innocent University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in their own home.

This proliferation of electronic witnesses and their increasing importance in American jurisprudence cannot be underestimated.

The human eyes of decent, law-abiding citizens cannot peer into all the dark corners where criminal behavior festers, but these electronic eyes are a powerful and ubiquitous substitute.

Electronic and video data have become the most important criminal investigation tools since fingerprinting, black-and-white photography, and DNA became ubiquitous in courtrooms.

So the next time someone says “it’s just circumstantial,” it’s good to keep in mind that this kind of evidence is circumstantial evidence, and it’s downright convincing, because it has the power to remove all reasonable doubt.

Increasingly, it can be considered even more powerful than direct evidence, as we learn more and more about the fallibility of eyewitness accounts.

There is no doubt that phones and gadgets have become essential to modern life.

Now it turns out that they have become essential tools in avenging death.

Ashleigh Banfield is the host of ‘Banfield’ which airs Monday through Friday at 10 pm ET on NewsNation. Click here to find NewsNation in your area.