The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230301_lori-lightfoot-voted-out-and-murdaugh-closing-argu
Aired: 2023-03-01
Duration: 01:35:48


=== The Decision to Marry Doug (06:56) ===

[00:00:20]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:32]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:34]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:36]  Happy March 1st.
[00:00:38]  15 years ago today, I married Doug Brunt.
[00:00:42]  The single best decision of my life, I'm not afraid to tell you.
[00:00:47]  We got married at OHIKA Castle on Long Island, New York.
[00:00:50]  It was a perfect winter day, just like today.
[00:00:53]  The light snowfall of those fat, fluffy flakes outside the window, as inside we burned wood fires and we topped the tables with cherry blossoms just coming into season.
[00:01:06]  It was my second marriage, Doug's first, and I actually feel lucky that it was a second marriage for me.
[00:01:11]  I went in eyes open, having learned a lot about what it takes to make a marriage work and probably even more important, a lot about myself.
[00:01:20]  What do I really want in a man?
[00:01:23]  How do I want to communicate and be?
[00:01:25]  Those are things you need to think about.
[00:01:28]  When I met Doug, I was confused at first.
[00:01:30]  He was different from what I thought I wanted.
[00:01:33]  More reserved, less cocky.
[00:01:35]  I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
[00:01:37]  He was kind.
[00:01:38]  He was smart.
[00:01:39]  He was strong, but not in a domineering way, and in no way intimidated by me or my strength.
[00:01:45]  He was a gentleman raised by loving, thoughtful parents in the Philadelphia suburbs.
[00:01:50]  The kid who got the all-around best guy award at his private high school.
[00:01:54]  And if you know him, you're not surprised by this.
[00:01:56]  The kind of guy who never bullied anyone, who fought his way out of desperate shyness as a young boy to a man who, yes, writes for a living, which certainly appeals to his time as an avid young reader who spent lots of time alone, but also is now hosting his very own podcast, speaking and interacting with others for a living.
[00:02:16]  It's called Dedicated with Doug Brunt, and it's about books and authors, and it's great.
[00:02:21]  Our romance was a whirlwind.
[00:02:22]  14 months after we met, Doug asked me to marry him.
[00:02:26]  Within six months of that, we were married.
[00:02:29]  Three kids later, still going strong.
[00:02:32]  I watched some of our wedding video, which we're showing you here this morning, believe it or not.
[00:02:36]  I cried as my friend and stylist Sarah did my hair and I saw the part with the vows.
[00:02:42]  Kelly Wright, my dear friend from Fox News, was our minister.
[00:02:46]  I cannot get through this video without crying.
[00:02:50]  But why?
[00:02:52]  Because it's so optimistic, isn't it?
[00:02:54]  There's something so beautiful about love and commitment to the promise of building a life together all the days of my life.
[00:03:03]  Over that 15 years, we've suffered loss.
[00:03:06]  His dad, my sister, my nana, to name a few.
[00:03:10]  We've seen our careers go through massive highs and lows.
[00:03:13]  He left his CEO job to write full-time.
[00:03:16]  I had very weird public battles with men like Trump, Ailes, and Putin.
[00:03:21]  The NBC thing was traumatic.
[00:03:23]  More so on Doug than on me, because it's always worse seeing the ones you love suffer and knowing there's nothing you can do.
[00:03:31]  But in the end, it all brought us closer together.
[00:03:35]  We spent a lot of hours holding each other, doing nothing, just hanging, being with one another.
[00:03:40]  We refused to let the stressors cause strife between us.
[00:03:44]  He's always been my number one supporter, and I have always been his.
[00:03:48]  Any constructive feedback is gentle and from a loving place.
[00:03:52]  More typically, our instincts are to defend the other avidly and fight any attackers.
[00:03:57]  Creating three humans feels like an accomplishment, not going to lie.
[00:04:00]  All parents know you look at your children and you think, oh my God, I will never do something more meaningful than this.
[00:04:08]  Not a day goes by that I don't look at Doug and say, thank God.
[00:04:13]  Thank God I am doing this with him.
[00:04:15]  Thank God I don't have to do this alone as so many single parents do.
[00:04:19]  Parenthood is incredibly rewarding, but it's tough in a lot of ways.
[00:04:23]  It tries your patience, your energy, your anger management skills, your wisdom, your sense of justice, and more.
[00:04:30]  The reprieve of having a partner for it all is a gift from above and one to be treasured and protected.
[00:04:37]  The family unit is worth fighting for.
[00:04:41]  That love you built this whole thing on is worth nurturing.
[00:04:47]  15 years in, what I want to say to the young women of this country is this is where the pot of gold is.
[00:04:54]  Not in random sexual partners who don't give a damn about you.
[00:04:57]  Not in weird new sexuality titles that pronounce you will sleep with anyone and everyone and often at the same time.
[00:05:03]  Not in an all-in profession that asks so much of you.
[00:05:07]  There is no time for personal connection.
[00:05:10]  The thing, the thing that matters is finding meaningful connection in your life.
[00:05:17]  Even just one can be life-changing.
[00:05:20]  Ideally, I would say romantic love, but it could be in another way too.
[00:05:25]  To have that partner with institutional knowledge of you, who makes your coffee in the morning or puts a flower on the bed or moves you to the inside of the sidewalk so you're not by the traffic, who calls you out on your BS and is quick to hug you after an argument, who laughs at himself and lovingly at you too, and helps remind you not to take any of this too seriously.
[00:05:47]  Nothing in my life has been as fulfilling to me as that relationship and the goodness that stems from it.
[00:05:53]  The beauty and the love I see and feel toward my kids, it all started there.
[00:05:58]  It started there.
[00:05:59]  It started on this day, all those years ago, in something so good, it could only ever lead to more goodness and joy.
[00:06:07]  It's something Doug and I created, and you can do the same.
[00:06:11]  If you're alone and you don't want to be, take a risk.
[00:06:16]  Join a book club or the newcomers club or take music lessons or something to get yourself out there and start meeting people.
[00:06:23]  Stay open-minded.
[00:06:25]  Maybe the package doesn't arrive just as you expected it to.
[00:06:29]  Try, fail, try again.
[00:06:32]  Stay open-minded again.
[00:06:33]  If you know that you have stuff to work on that's preventing you from meeting someone, work on it.
[00:06:39]  Get therapy like I did after my first marriage often.
[00:06:42]  Maybe group therapy, which I did too.
[00:06:44]  I remember asking my lady Amy, how screwed up am I?
[00:06:48]  But I worked on it and I did better.
[00:06:51]  Put that excess energy into yourself.
[00:06:53]  Build a more solid you and then the more solid partners will come.
[00:06:58]  Trust me.
[00:07:00]  And if you're in a marriage, especially one with children, here's your reminder that it's worth the effort.
[00:07:05]  Use a generous lens on your spouse.
[00:07:08]  Speak your peace with kindness.
[00:07:10]  And in those moments where you inevitably forget all that, recover quickly and apologize even faster.

=== Finding Solid Partners Through Therapy (02:26) ===

[00:07:17]  As Dr. Laura says, wake up and ask yourself each day, what can I do to make his day better?
[00:07:22]  How can I make him happy?
[00:07:24]  It all comes back to you.
[00:07:26]  It's an investment in all the things you likely hold most dear.
[00:07:32]  Doug, thank you for asking me to marry you on that beautiful fall day at the beach in September of 2007.
[00:07:40]  Thank you for meeting me down that aisle on Long Island on March 1st and for walking next to me ever since.
[00:07:48]  Should our lives be long or short, as the queen said, from this point forward, our kids will always know we spent them well because we were together.
[00:07:56]  Somehow in the vast universe, we found each other.
[00:07:59]  We loved each other and we treated each other well.
[00:08:03]  That's something in today's world.
[00:08:06]  It's everything, in fact.
[00:08:09]  Happy anniversary, babe.
[00:08:11]  So now we're going to turn to the news, the news of the day.
[00:08:15]  And there's plenty to get to.
[00:08:17]  Joining me now, my old pal from the Kelly file, Mark Stein.
[00:08:21]  He's a conservative journalist and host of his own show called The Mark Stein Show, which you can find on YouTube.
[00:08:27]  Mark, great to have you here on Doug and My Special Day.
[00:08:31]  It's a pleasure to have an old pal in the room.
[00:08:33]  I don't know that I can, I don't know that I can follow that, Megan.
[00:08:36]  That was absolutely lovely.
[00:08:39]  I will say, though, that I was a bit confused when you started talking about the 15th anniversary, because in fact, it is 15 years since you first interviewed me.
[00:08:51]  2008, it was the Obama-McCain campaign, and you had some show, pre-election show on at like three in the afternoon or something.
[00:09:02]  And you interviewed me and I came, I walked off the set thinking, this interviewer is pretty good.
[00:09:10]  Where'd she come from?
[00:09:11]  And so that's my 15th anniversary.
[00:09:14]  And I'm a little bit disheartened to find that you're all about this Doug guy 15 years later, because being interviewed by you was the highlight of my 2008.
[00:09:23]  Oh, well, happy anniversary to you and me as well.
[00:09:26]  I didn't realize we had that special bond.
[00:09:28]  But yes, I remember that.
[00:09:29]  I was doing the America's Newsroom with Hemmer, but then they gave me this, yeah, this like special election show that we were working on.
[00:09:36]  And that was super fun.
[00:09:37]  I met a lot of great political voices.
[00:09:39]  And you would go on to become a big star at Fox and somebody who I always like there.

=== Royal Family Scandals and Ratings (08:45) ===

[00:09:43]  This is how I know when somebody's good.
[00:09:45]  Do I turn up the volume when he's on or she's on?
[00:09:47]  Because usually you sit in your office and you don't have the volume on.
[00:09:50]  And whenever you come on, I turn up the volume because you're worth listening to.
[00:09:53]  You always say something that's unexpected.
[00:09:55]  That's not true of all pundits, Mark.
[00:09:57]  No, and you always listen, which isn't true of about 98% of interviewers.
[00:10:03]  So there's that too.
[00:10:06]  The secret sauce.
[00:10:07]  All right.
[00:10:07]  So let's kick it off on a light note since I began the show on sort of a light note.
[00:10:12]  From one very functional and healthy, well-off, you know, well, mentally well family to one that's pretty much the opposite, and that is Harry and Megan.
[00:10:21]  I don't doubt that they care for one another.
[00:10:23]  They appear to actually love one another, I think.
[00:10:26]  At least he loves her.
[00:10:28]  But they're having some problems today.
[00:10:29]  Mark, it just hit the news that they are being evicted from Frogmore Cottage, where they don't live.
[00:10:38]  So I'm not sure why we use the word evicted, but apparently King Charles has given the keys to the cottage to Prince Andrew.
[00:10:46]  And Harry and Megan are angry.
[00:10:50]  The update was, I'm trying to get this because Omid Scobie, their personal stenographer, he purports to be a journalist.
[00:10:56]  He is reporting that sources close to the couple informed him they're in shock.
[00:11:01]  And at least two members of the royal family are appalled.
[00:11:05]  He does not name who those sources are, but the Sussexes are known to be close to Princess Beatrice and Eugenie.
[00:11:11]  Those are Andrew's daughters.
[00:11:13]  A friend of the couple tells Omid Scobie it all feels very final and like a cruel punishment.
[00:11:20]  Well, good.
[00:11:21]  That's how I feel.
[00:11:22]  Good.
[00:11:22]  What do you think?
[00:11:24]  Yeah, I do too.
[00:11:25]  I mean, it's a lovely place.
[00:11:27]  It's not really a cottage in the sense that most people who live in cottages would think of it.
[00:11:32]  It's rather grander than that.
[00:11:33]  I happen to love Frogmore.
[00:11:35]  I love the Frogmore Mausoleum, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are buried in their fabulous sarcophagus.
[00:11:43]  And I don't like the idea of the great queen empress and her consort being within range of Harry and Megan, who have basically, they didn't burn bridges.
[00:11:56]  They basically poured gas on them and set the whole town alight.
[00:12:03]  Harry's book is not the, Harry's book is basically in large part a daddy dearest book to go back to the one that Joan Crawford, Joan Crawford's son wrote, that started this whole thing.
[00:12:16]  And you can't be a little, just like you can't be a little bit pregnant, you can't be a little bit in or out of the royal family.
[00:12:24]  It's a job.
[00:12:26]  It's a job that's actually quite important if you think that systems of government are important.
[00:12:31]  And if you think it's all about you, as opposed to, you know, being somewhere in New Zealand and putting a medal on the Royal New Zealand whatever officer, you're wrong.
[00:12:43]  And you're temperamentally unsuited for that job.
[00:12:48]  The king has a responsibility to his millions and millions of subjects around the world.
[00:12:54]  And that means that when you've got some crazy guy opening up on you, at a certain point, you have to cut the crazy guy loose.
[00:13:02]  So true.
[00:13:03]  So now, here's the irony.
[00:13:05]  You know, they did try to have it both ways, a little in, little out.
[00:13:08]  Want to keep the security, would love to keep the cash flowing.
[00:13:10]  Certainly want to keep their titles, but we want to be in the Montecito mansion, not really having to do any ribbon cutting ceremonies because those are beneath us and annoying.
[00:13:18]  And we want our privacy, of course, you know, as the South Park now has so beautifully mocked them for, we want privacy.
[00:13:26]  Stop looking at us while they do their tours, their meteor, their Netflix and all that.
[00:13:32]  And now on that front, Mark, Harry is going to do some sort of struggle session with the trauma expert on Saturday.
[00:13:43]  You can buy tickets for $33.99, $33.99.
[00:13:49]  You can watch him do his struggle session with this trauma expert.
[00:13:53]  Oh, and get a copy of his book, if you so care.
[00:13:56]  So much for the private life for these two.
[00:14:00]  Yeah, I think if you're really interested in privacy, you don't write a book that has, I believe, 48 mentions of what in Britannic slang he calls his todger.
[00:14:14]  I don't actually, I'm not sure if that's a word you can.
[00:14:18]  I'm not sure if that's a word you can say in American broadcasting, but I've just done it.
[00:14:26]  This is the complete lie at the heart of it.
[00:14:30]  Megan Markle, who was an actress in a rather undistinguished television series, thought that marrying into the royal family would make her an A-list celebrity.
[00:14:42]  And when it didn't really make her an A-list celebrity, she got bored with what she had to do.
[00:14:48]  And she decided that she and Harry would then go to Hollywood and become A-list celebrities.
[00:14:54]  And they're not.
[00:14:54]  They can't act.
[00:14:55]  They can't dance.
[00:14:56]  They can't sing.
[00:14:57]  Well, what are they famous for?
[00:14:59]  They're just famous because they happen to be rather minor members of a ruling family around the globe.
[00:15:07]  And that's the only thing they got going for them.
[00:15:10]  So they left not for, oh, we want to be private.
[00:15:13]  We can't handle it with all these photographers looking at us.
[00:15:16]  But pay $33.99 and you can watch me doing a therapy session.
[00:15:22]  And you never know, I might talk about my private parts for another 48 times.
[00:15:26]  Although you'll have to pay premium for that.
[00:15:28]  That's only if you subscribe.
[00:15:30]  $78.99, I'll talk about my private parts for another 48 times.
[00:15:35]  It's the lie at the heart of this is that they wanted, most members of the royal family are private.
[00:15:41]  Most Americans have never heard of the Duchess of this and the Marchioness of that and the Countess of whatever.
[00:15:50]  They want to be celebrated.
[00:15:54]  They want to be photographed.
[00:15:55]  They want to be famous.
[00:15:56]  They want to be on Netflix, but they have the disadvantage that they have no talents.
[00:16:02]  Yeah, it's a problem that we're all seeing now.
[00:16:06]  And the latest poll show, one more thing on it, and then we'll move off of Harry and Megan, but the latest poll show, they've lost all support.
[00:16:14]  They used to be holding on in America.
[00:16:16]  Then they lost all of Great Britain.
[00:16:18]  They were underwater with the approval ratings over there.
[00:16:20]  But they are holding on in America until the Netflix special and the book spare.
[00:16:26]  I mean, these two, whoever they have advising them on PR, they keep blaming that person, you know, and then replacing that person with a new person.
[00:16:33]  It's not the PR people.
[00:16:35]  No one can solve this for you.
[00:16:36]  You two, it's you two.
[00:16:37]  It's you.
[00:16:38]  And so here are the latest numbers.
[00:16:39]  His popularity has sunk 48 points since December.
[00:16:46]  He now has a net approval rating of minus 10.
[00:16:49]  So he's underwater.
[00:16:51]  He was minus seven just in January.
[00:16:53]  So he's still going in the wrong direction.
[00:16:55]  Her approval rating is down 40 points.
[00:16:58]  He's down 48.
[00:16:58]  She's down 40.
[00:16:59]  Her net approval is minus 17.
[00:17:03]  She was minus 13 in January.
[00:17:04]  So they're both continuing to slide.
[00:17:07]  And Prince Andrew is now above them.
[00:17:09]  He has a net approval rating of minus two.
[00:17:11]  They've managed to go below Prince Andrew, who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:17:17]  Yeah, I think that actually is an accomplishment to rehabilitate his Royal Highness, the Duke of York, because Prince Andrew, I would say, is actually one of the most unlikable members of the royal family.
[00:17:30]  So that's an impressive thing to do.
[00:17:32]  You know, the tragedy here is that is that Harry actually had a connection with people.
[00:17:39]  He represented New Zealand, I think at the, whatever it was, the 70th, 75th anniversary of the Battle of Montecito in Italy.
[00:17:47]  And when you saw him with all these New Zealand veterans, they loved him as one of them, as a soldier of the queen to other older soldiers of the queen.
[00:18:00]  And that was something real and authentic.
[00:18:04]  And he has destroyed that to become this woke, whinging loser being tarted around at Netflix and Disney events.
[00:18:16]  And he will come to regret it very quickly.
[00:18:19]  And the thing about it is that it's increasingly looking like there's just no way back for him.
[00:18:25]  Yeah, this is certainly not it.
[00:18:27]  $33 to watch him in a therapy session.

=== Chicago Mayor Race Bombshell (14:17) ===

[00:18:29]  No, thanks.
[00:18:29]  I'm good.
[00:18:30]  I'm busy.
[00:18:30]  I have a plant of water.
[00:18:32]  But I'll, you know, I didn't even know you could monetize that, Megan.
[00:18:38]  You know, I mean, that's, that's like, oh, I've got a bit of a problem with my hernia.
[00:18:43]  I think I'll charge people, you know, $47 for me to go and see my doctor while she pods about my hernia or whatever.
[00:18:51]  I mean, that's what he's reduced to.
[00:18:54]  It's true.
[00:18:54]  What's next?
[00:18:55]  Let's see him get his planner's wards taken off.
[00:18:57]  Terrific.
[00:18:58]  How much can you get for that?
[00:18:59]  You know, he's soon going to be on that cameo service where you can pay $15 to have him wish you a happy birthday.
[00:19:05]  Yeah, no, no, I know.
[00:19:06]  I know people who do that.
[00:19:08]  And I can't, I think that's the most, oh, yes, for $17, I'll wish your granny a happy birthday.
[00:19:16]  You can get Harry and Megan, but you have to pay like $32.
[00:19:20]  I think that's the market rate we've established.
[00:19:22]  Refund, refund.
[00:19:24]  Somehow they'll find a way to make it all about them.
[00:19:27]  Okay, so let's move on to news, real news, not Harry and Megan news.
[00:19:30]  I don't know if you've been following what's happening with the Chicago mayor race, but it was a bombshell last night.
[00:19:36]  And here's, you can speak to it even if you're not following Chicago politics, because what's happening there is happening in a lot of places.
[00:19:44]  She's out.
[00:19:45]  Mayor Lori Lightfoot is out.
[00:19:48]  And this is how the Chicago Sun-Times talked about it this way.
[00:19:51]  Four years ago, she was a darling among national Democrats, the first openly gay black woman to serve as mayor of Chicago and only the second woman to do so in the city's history.
[00:20:01]  Her popularity soared during the pandemic and so on.
[00:20:04]  But you know what else soared?
[00:20:06]  Crime.
[00:20:07]  And this woman didn't know how to fight it, didn't understand the value of good policing and of supporting the cops to the contrary.
[00:20:15]  She threw them under the bus at every turn.
[00:20:18]  And as I tweeted last night, this is a city that is essentially bathed in blood now.
[00:20:22]  And her closing message, Mark, was to remind people she's a black woman.
[00:20:27]  She's a black woman.
[00:20:28]  People don't normally support black women.
[00:20:31]  And if you don't support somebody like me who's a black woman, stay home.
[00:20:34]  Turns out that didn't work for her.
[00:20:36]  Now there's two other people who have to have a runoff.
[00:20:39]  One guy ran to the right of her.
[00:20:42]  It's a former public school chief named Paul Vallis.
[00:20:45]  And he ran on public safety.
[00:20:47]  Then there's another guy who's a black progressive who got the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson.
[00:20:53]  He does not use the defund the police rhetoric.
[00:20:56]  He's argued for police resources to be redirected to the city's social service agencies, but he's not as rabid as Lori Lightfoot is and has been.
[00:21:06]  And she's out.
[00:21:07]  So what's your perspective on it?
[00:21:09]  Well, when you said she's the first openly gay black woman to be mayor of Chicago, the qualification for being mayor of Chicago is that you should be able to be mayor of Chicago.
[00:21:23]  And she failed that test.
[00:21:25]  And so if you happen to live on the receiving end of her policies, it's not really any consolation that she's an openly gay black woman.
[00:21:34]  You know, when this whole identity politics thing started, we sort of assumed it wouldn't go to anything that mattered.
[00:21:44]  So that if some professor at some college you've never heard of is the first openly gay black woman, or if some NPR host is the first openly gay black woman, who cares?
[00:21:55]  But when it's things like being mayor of Chicago, or like being Johernia surgeon, as I was saying a minute ago, or like being the pilot of the Delta flight that's flying you from JFK to LAX, then if you can't do it, being the first openly gay black woman isn't really any consolation.
[00:22:17]  And that's why, I mean, I can't even, I don't even know why we're still talking about this because we've had all the first this and the first that.
[00:22:26]  And the result in Chicago is the wreckage you see all around.
[00:22:32]  The ruination of a great city.
[00:22:34]  At a certain point, people have got to move beyond.
[00:22:38]  If you're excited about the first openly gay black woman, get a new album.
[00:22:42]  Watch her new movie.
[00:22:44]  But when it's something that's going to wreck your life, like the first mayor of Chicago, you need someone who can do the boring, boring, boring job of municipal chief executive, which isn't anything to do with identity politics.
[00:22:59]  I lived in Chicago for five years after law school, and you could eat off the sidewalks.
[00:23:05]  It was so clean and well run back then under Mayor Daly.
[00:23:09]  I mean, it was a well-oiled machine.
[00:23:12]  And now it's disgusting.
[00:23:14]  She's helped make it that way.
[00:23:16]  She is to Chicago what de Blasio is to New York.
[00:23:20]  Two people who took a once great city and ruined it.
[00:23:23]  Because while she wasn't as loud on the defund the police front as we've seen in other cities, some other mayors, Baltimore, et cetera, she was defunding them.
[00:23:31]  She was quietly defunding them and not replacing retiring offers some 400 of them.
[00:23:36]  And you need cops if you want to fight crime.
[00:23:39]  And the crime in her city has been out of control.
[00:23:42]  Here's just some of the numbers for people not paying attention recently.
[00:23:46]  Violent crime there up 40% since she promised during her inaugural address to, this is via the New York Post, to stop the epidemic of gun violence.
[00:23:55]  Okay, up 40% since then.
[00:23:57]  Under her, Lightfoot.
[00:23:58]  Chicago recorded 695 murders at the end of 2022.
[00:24:03]  695 and 804 the year prior, a level not seen there in a quarter century.
[00:24:11]  In 2022 alone, the city saw more than 20,000 cases of theft.
[00:24:15]  In the first three weeks of 2023, crime rates in the city have skyrocketed by 61%.
[00:24:21]  Sexual assaults, robberies, I could go down the lift, car thefts, murders, all of it, Mark.
[00:24:27]  And she wants to run around talking about her identity and lecturing people that if they can't get behind it, then they should stay home because probably they're bigoted and sexist.
[00:24:39]  Well, I don't know Chicago as well as you do, but I lived there for, I think it was four or five months, basically, at the Intercontinental Hotel when my friend Conrad Black was on trial in that city.
[00:24:52]  And Conrad and I liked to eat down the other end of the Magnificent Mile at what was Barack Obama's favorite restaurant at that time.
[00:25:01]  And we would then, you know, at two in the morning when they kicked us out, we would stroll up that magnificent mile without a care in the world.
[00:25:09]  It was a perfectly safe city.
[00:25:11]  As you said, you could eat off the off the sidewalk.
[00:25:15]  And I just started noticing that my little shrunken world of Chicago, all the violence had suddenly percolated through to.
[00:25:23]  Like, I think it was the Nordstrom that's across the street from the Intercontinental got broken into and trashed.
[00:25:31]  And even that restaurant down the other end had some problem going on.
[00:25:37]  And at that point, you can't do it.
[00:25:39]  It's like you're not containing all the violence, the crime, the shootings to particular neighborhoods that people know to avoid.
[00:25:46]  When it's on the magnificent mile, basically it's everywhere.
[00:25:50]  And she did that.
[00:25:52]  Daly wasn't the most likable guy, but as you said, he's a machine.
[00:25:56]  You said he had a well-oiled machine.
[00:25:58]  He was a machine politician and the machine delivered.
[00:26:02]  And that's actually what's happened in a lot of these Democrat municipalities is that the machine can't deliver anymore.
[00:26:08]  So life is hell for all kinds of people who thought the corrupt, well-oiled machine would manage to take care of it for them.
[00:26:17]  Right.
[00:26:18]  People start, you know, seeing the murder rate increase.
[00:26:21]  They start seeing things.
[00:26:22]  There's a reason they call that part of Michigan Avenue Magnificent Mile.
[00:26:28]  It was spectacular, leading into this beautiful row of apartment buildings called the Gold Coast.
[00:26:35]  I mean, absolutely pristine.
[00:26:37]  And the place you'd love to just walk around and see the twinkly lights and think maybe someday I could make it here.
[00:26:42]  It had that kind of effect on you.
[00:26:44]  And now, I mean, I was there about a year and a half ago and you do have to walk around even Mag Mile very differently.
[00:26:50]  You got to watch out.
[00:26:50]  You got to hold your bag tight.
[00:26:52]  This used to be only areas of Chicago, never mind, this place.
[00:26:56]  Thanks to her and her response.
[00:26:58]  And we've seen this in city after city.
[00:27:00]  This is why Chessa Boudin got recalled as the DA of San Francisco.
[00:27:04]  This is why the LA DA almost got recalled.
[00:27:08]  This is why in all these blue, blue cities in blue, blue states, you're seeing blue, blue voters start to look at their leaders and say, you're not doing a good job.
[00:27:17]  You might need to be recalled or replaced because you get messages like this.
[00:27:20]  Lori Lightfoot came out and blamed the victims in 2021 of the smashing grabs, you know, where they go into the department stores.
[00:27:28]  She blamed the victims saying too many retailers had failed to hire private security.
[00:27:34]  You know, like it's not my fault you're not protected.
[00:27:37]  It's your fault.
[00:27:38]  You should make the expenditure.
[00:27:39]  And then there was this recently, Mark, where she was upset about the street vendors, you know, the people out in like the kiosks.
[00:27:48]  She was like, why are you taking cash?
[00:27:50]  You know, you should only do a credit card business.
[00:27:52]  Here's that soundbite, just to remind the audience, Sat 10.
[00:27:56]  Heard a lot of rhetoric here, a lot of soundbites, but not a lot of concrete solutions.
[00:28:00]  And your solution is we have been in Little Village working with those street vendors to help them make sure that their money is secure, not use money, if at all possible, using other forms of transactions to take care of themselves.
[00:28:16]  No, this is crazy talk because this is the normal aspect of metropolitan life.
[00:28:23]  You stop at a street vendor, you get a kebab or whatever, and you hand over a crumpled bill.
[00:28:29]  And she's saying that part of normal life is not possible in this city.
[00:28:33]  And the thing about this is it's true in, as you mentioned, it's true in a lot of other Democrat cities.
[00:28:40]  I first visited San Francisco when I was 18 and I thought this was a dream city.
[00:28:47]  I thought it, you know, I bought into all that Tony Bennett rubbish about leaving your heart in San Francisco.
[00:28:54]  The last time I went there, it was hell.
[00:28:57]  It was a filthy, ruined garbage dump.
[00:29:01]  And I wouldn't, and where the hotel doorman tells you to be careful, you don't step on needles in the street around the fancy hotel.
[00:29:11]  And I just thought, I have no desire to come to this city again.
[00:29:16]  And the thing about this is the Democrats believing the rubbish here, you know, all the pieties about, you know, defund the police and all the rest.
[00:29:25]  It affects everything.
[00:29:27]  Burlington, Vermont, which is nobody's idea of a great city, although there was a book written about it back in the late 90s by a prominent writer who said it was the model of the future.
[00:29:40]  Well, now it's not even safe to, because of the homeless, because of the drugs, because of the crime, it's not even safe to walk around little old Burlington, Vermont at night.
[00:29:52]  There's no town too small that going along with all this rubbish doesn't eventually kill.
[00:29:59]  And once you kill a city, bringing it back is extremely difficult.
[00:30:04]  Yeah, but you have to start with safety.
[00:30:06]  You can't get anywhere without safety.
[00:30:09]  Former Attorney General Bill Barr was on this show not long ago, and he had been the Attorney General under George W. Bush, too.
[00:30:15]  And he was talking about, he had written this memo that is now considered controversial, but he stands by every word, talking about how you fight crime.
[00:30:24]  How do you clean up cities from these murder rates and these theft and robbery and carjacking rates?
[00:30:30]  You know what you do?
[00:30:31]  You fund the police.
[00:30:33]  You arrest the criminals.
[00:30:35]  You get DAs willing to prosecute them.
[00:30:37]  You keep severe penalties on the books and then you give them real sentences that they have to serve.
[00:30:43]  You lock up the felons and keep them there.
[00:30:46]  That's how you do.
[00:30:47]  Not only do you punish the criminals and keep them off of the streets from law-abiding citizens, but you deter crime that way.
[00:30:54]  The recipe is right there.
[00:30:55]  It's just now considered racist.
[00:30:57]  So people like Lori Lightfoot don't want to pursue it.
[00:31:00]  They'd rather let their citizenry, including large portions of the black population, die at the hands of these felons.
[00:31:07]  Well, they're the first victims of these kinds of policies because the wealthy can insulate themselves from the predations they loose on the general population.
[00:31:19]  So you can have fancy pants, San Francisco liberals who then decide, oh, you know, it doesn't matter for me.
[00:31:28]  I've got a gated community.
[00:31:30]  I've got home security and all the rest of it.
[00:31:34]  So you can turn a blind eye to the fact that the poor people are the first victims of bringing in these kind of policies.
[00:31:43]  And I have no idea why they are allowed to do it.
[00:31:47]  When you have things, it's perfectly obvious.
[00:31:50]  All the crime, this is basically true across the planet.
[00:31:53]  It doesn't matter whether you're talking about some township in Africa or in India, or whether you're talking about a particularly bad suburb in Belgium or Germany.
[00:32:06]  It's a tiny number of people who cause most of the crime.
[00:32:11]  And if you let them get away with it, so if you do as New York and other cities have done and say, well, if you break in, if you just walk into a store and you steal whatever it is, 300 bucks worth of merchandise, we're not going to do anything about it.
[00:32:27]  Then you purport to be stunned suddenly when now people are stealing 700 bucks of merchandise.
[00:32:35]  Well, you incentivize that.
[00:32:38]  Once the criminal fraternity finds it's got a comfortable environment to operate in, oddly enough, crime gets worse.

=== Lab Leak Conspiracy Claims (06:34) ===

[00:32:46]  Yeah, it flourishes.
[00:32:47]  And now all these other Democratic mayors and governors, leaders should take note.
[00:32:52]  If Lori Lightfoot can lose, first black gay woman to be mayor of Chicago, if she can lose, so can you.
[00:33:00]  So can you.
[00:33:00]  Pay attention.
[00:33:01]  All right, Mark Stein stays with us after this quick, quick break.
[00:33:04]  Don't go away.
[00:33:08]  I'm sure you saw the news over here that now the Department of Energy is saying it is more likely than not that COVID originated in that Wuhan lab in China and not from some pangolin in the market as Fauci and others have been trying to stuff down our throats.
[00:33:25]  So yeah, of course, I mean, none of us that's been paying attention is surprised.
[00:33:29]  But Fauci actually gets cornered and he weighs in on this and in a in a couple of interesting ways.
[00:33:36]  Okay, so he spoke with a magazine and we have part of that.
[00:33:41]  So some of his comments with the Boston Globe are off-cam, but some are on-cam.
[00:33:46]  So let me give you what's on cam first and his messaging in the wake of this report at SOP1.
[00:33:52]  We must all keep an open mind as to all possibilities until one definitively nails down what the origin is.
[00:34:01]  I don't see any data for a lab leak.
[00:34:04]  That doesn't mean it could not have happened.
[00:34:06]  And that's the reason why I keep an open mind.
[00:34:09]  We may not ever know.
[00:34:11]  Do you?
[00:34:12]  Do you keep an open mind, really?
[00:34:13]  Because the record does not reflect that at all.
[00:34:18]  No, that's not consistent with his texts and emails and other communications in the very early days of this thing.
[00:34:30]  As you say, it's not normal to be this far into a new pandemic and not to know where it came from.
[00:34:39]  And, you know, certainly in 1665, they knew roughly where the ships that brought the great plague to London had come from.
[00:34:48]  They could do it in the 17th century.
[00:34:51]  They can certainly do it today.
[00:34:53]  And it hasn't been done.
[00:34:53]  And this is what's bad.
[00:34:54]  It hasn't been done today for political reasons, because for whatever reason, and the obvious reason is that because this lab actually is funded indirectly with U.S. taxpayer dollars.
[00:35:10]  Fauci approved.
[00:35:11]  Fauci approved.
[00:35:12]  Which Fauci approved.
[00:35:14]  And that's, in a sense, I'm sympathetic to Chairman Xi and the Politburo when they blame this thing on the Americans, because there are American fingerprints on this COVID.
[00:35:26]  So if you take the COVID seriously, oh, it's killed millions of people all over the world, then you should be concerned about where it came from.
[00:35:34]  And instead, what happened is the people who wrote about this very moderately were demonized, their reputations trashed, their careers ruined.
[00:35:45]  Matt Ridley, who was a colleague of mine at the Daily Telegraph and is the most temperate fellow on earth.
[00:35:53]  He's a viscount.
[00:35:54]  His forebears have sat in the House of Lords for however long it is.
[00:35:59]  And he's not someone who goes full crazy and thinks that this is the WHO trying to depopulate the planet or anything like that.
[00:36:08]  He's the most moderate person on earth.
[00:36:11]  And he said over two years ago, the balance of probability is that it came from this lab in Wuhan.
[00:36:19]  And the problem here is that the gain of function research that Fauci signed off on, that was being done on that lab, makes this a disaster with American government fingerprints on it.
[00:36:35]  You're exactly right.
[00:36:36]  And Fauci, who has been working very closely with the Chinese for the past 20 years, approving all these joint projects and research over there, has got his fingerprints all over that lab, this gain of function research, and the sisterhood that we formed with the Chinese when it comes to these types of projects.
[00:36:54]  So that's why he's defensive.
[00:36:56]  It's amazing.
[00:36:56]  We even look to him for a reaction on this.
[00:36:59]  He's guilty.
[00:37:00]  Like you can't go to the guilty party and say, hey, do you think you did something wrong?
[00:37:04]  No, you got to go to outside sources and say, what do you think Fauci's role was?
[00:37:07]  What was our role?
[00:37:08]  What was the Chinese role?
[00:37:09]  And now he comes out, Mark, and says this.
[00:37:11]  This is behind the paywall in the magazine, so not on camera.
[00:37:14]  He says, the only way we'll know is if China opens up and we get American scientists, Canadian scientists, Australian scientists to go there and do the kind of surveillance in the wild.
[00:37:26]  The problem is that they've attacked the Chinese so badly.
[00:37:31]  That's the problem.
[00:37:32]  We've been too mean to China, you see.
[00:37:35]  And so now we have only ourselves to blame that they won't let us into the lab.
[00:37:40]  No, he knows that lab inside.
[00:37:44]  That lab, by the way, is a great place to do so-called gain of function research because it has the security protocols of the average American dentist's room.
[00:37:54]  Now, when I go to my dentist and they're all wearing all the gear and protecting themselves, as they brought about in my mouth, I think that's a little excessive.
[00:38:04]  But if that's the best you can do when you've got a coronavirus lab, I laughed when you said the word pangolin, because pangolin was like the work to all the clever people for most of 2020 into 2021.
[00:38:21]  Oh, you know, these crazy people saying it came from a lab.
[00:38:24]  Everyone knows that it just jumped from a bat to a pangolin.
[00:38:28]  Well, what is a pangolin?
[00:38:29]  Do you have a pangolin?
[00:38:30]  Can you go to the Humane Society and get a pangolin who's been abused by a bad pangolin owner?
[00:38:37]  Pangolin, And Fauci and co. actually were putting in basically a conscious pangolin operation as their cover.
[00:38:48]  Well, it's now safe to forget you ever heard the word pangolin, at least until, you know, the next variant comes along.
[00:38:57]  So it's not just Fauci trying to stir up our sympathies for China or for those who misled us on this pandemic.
[00:39:04]  It's also the White House.
[00:39:05]  Corrine Jean-Pierre wants you to know if you're mad at Fauci.
[00:39:08]  You're really not being helpful.
[00:39:09]  It's really not helpful.
[00:39:11]  Here's what she said.
[00:39:13]  The political attacks on someone like Dr. Fauci, these attacks have been counterproductive.
[00:39:19]  They have not been helpful.

=== Booster Shot Safety Debates (02:48) ===

[00:39:20]  This is someone, again, who has spent his almost entire career fighting for the well-being, the health of the American people.
[00:39:27]  And you've been grateful to Dr. Fauci's wisdom.
[00:39:31]  Mm-hmm.
[00:39:32]  So be quiet.
[00:39:34]  Yeah.
[00:39:35]  Basically, I find this very odd because basically he was doing his job.
[00:39:40]  I think he started doing that job in like 1968.
[00:39:44]  So he's basically the J. Edgar Hoover of public health.
[00:39:48]  There is no way that in a normal, healthy government bureaucracy, that guy would have been doing his job for over half a century.
[00:40:00]  Now we have a great walk, the great walk backening across the Western world and all this.
[00:40:09]  And they're trying, oh, yes, well, mistakes were made, but we didn't know too much about.
[00:40:14]  The guy who's been doing the job since 1968 certainly knew that the policies he imposed and which a lot of the rest of the West followed were basically a rejection of all virological policy that I mentioned the Great Plague of London 1665, but you can take the Spanish flu a century ago.
[00:40:34]  It was a rejection of public health policy on these kinds of virological problems that the guy who'd basically been in office since 1968 certainly knew about.
[00:40:48]  And this idea that we're going to have a modified walk back and we're not going to blame anybody.
[00:40:53]  You know, they talk about following the, oh, must follow the science, must follow the science, like we're all zombies.
[00:41:01]  Once you actually read the, they unleashed a big bunch of the UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, his WhatsApp messages, 2 million of them yesterday, I think it was.
[00:41:16]  And when you plow through them, you realize actually there's no science to follow.
[00:41:21]  They're making it up as they go along.
[00:41:23]  And what they did made things worse, caused all the old people to die in New York care homes, ruined the mental health of a generation of children, imposed all these deaths and injuries from vaccines for medical procedures that nobody under, you know, unless you've got a serious underlying condition, nobody under 70 needed to take a lot of this.
[00:41:49]  Everything they did, every decision they made made things worse.
[00:41:54]  In the United States, a German businessman still can't get on a plane from Frankfurt to JFK without having all these booster, booster, booster shots up to date.
[00:42:04]  There's no science behind that at all.
[00:42:07]  None whatsoever.

=== Pearl Nelson Nursing School Secrets (03:38) ===

[00:42:08]  No, I saw you.
[00:42:10]  You were raising questions about are these boosters even safe?
[00:42:13]  You know, are people dying because of these boosters?
[00:42:15]  Very good question.
[00:42:16]  There are very well respected doctors here who have been saying, especially if you're a young man, you don't need that booster and the risks outweigh the benefits.
[00:42:25]  And people like Fauci continue to push this stuff with impunity.
[00:42:29]  So it is helpful, Karine, for us to hold him to account and to keep a tally, a running tally of his falsehoods.
[00:42:37]  I mean, that's what's actually happening, I think.
[00:42:39]  But even to be charitable to Fauci, his mistakes.
[00:42:42]  Let's be super charitable and see how he's wrong about virtually everything.
[00:42:46]  All right, listen, I have to get this in.
[00:42:48]  Otherwise, I'm not going to forgive myself today.
[00:42:50]  We were speaking about healthcare.
[00:42:51]  You're speaking about nursing care and so on.
[00:42:54]  I don't know if this is the solution, Mark, but our president over here, he's got some strong thoughts on how to improve the nursing community.
[00:43:02]  He made remarks on Tuesday in Virginia about protecting Americans from high health care costs.
[00:43:10]  And this is where he went with that.
[00:43:15]  Pearl Nelson, military.
[00:43:17]  She'd come in and do things that I don't think you'll learn in medical school, nursing school.
[00:43:22]  She'd whisper in my ear.
[00:43:23]  I couldn't understand him.
[00:43:24]  She'd whisper and she'd lean down.
[00:43:26]  He'd actually breathe on me to make sure that there was a connection, the human connection.
[00:43:31]  She even went home and brought back her pillow.
[00:43:35]  Oh, my God.
[00:43:38]  I love this, Megan, because Pearl Nelson is, I love Joe Biden's fantasy life, because just like corn pop sounds like one of the sharks or jets in Summerstock Westside story that he saw in Baltimore.
[00:43:52]  So Pearl Nelson is the perfect name for a nurse in a daytime soap opera of 1958.
[00:43:59]  It's just his fantasy life is so much better than his actual life.
[00:44:06]  And what I find interesting, the whole trick to being a politician, if anyone ever asked me, I was to say that after years of having people traipsing through by State of New Hampshire, the whole trick of being a politician is to have that default, that mechanism in your gullet that tells you when not to say things that are tonally wrong.
[00:44:27]  They're creepy or whatever.
[00:44:29]  And he has, that thing has completely broken down.
[00:44:34]  And so some blameless non-Egenarian nurse, Pearl Nelson, wherever she is, if she exists, whispering in Joe Biden's ear and teaching him to whisper in all the ears he creepily whispers.
[00:44:49]  Pearl Nelson is the proverbial Canadian girlfriend.
[00:44:53]  Pearl Nelson does not exist.
[00:44:55]  She never did exist.
[00:44:56]  This didn't happen.
[00:44:57]  But you're right.
[00:44:58]  This is like his imprint for all the weird stuff he would do to like all these 12-year-old girls and 30-year-old women ever after, right?
[00:45:07]  She would breathe on me.
[00:45:09]  What is he saying?
[00:45:10]  She would come in and do things I don't think you learn in nursing school.
[00:45:13]  She'd whisper in my ear.
[00:45:14]  She'd whisper, she'd lean down.
[00:45:16]  She'd actually breathe on me to make sure there was a human connection.
[00:45:20]  Pearl ought to be brought up and charges, first of all.
[00:45:22]  Yeah, if she taught, there's a reason they don't teach it in nursing school, particularly.
[00:45:31]  But particularly, it's one thing if you're in the hospital, you can't really, I was in the hospital.
[00:45:36]  When you're like that all wired up, you can't really do anything about it.
[00:45:39]  But these poor little seven, eight, nine-year-old girls he's breathing in the ear of can't really do anything about it either.
[00:45:46]  So he should cut it out.

=== Juror Rumors and OJ Arguments (15:28) ===

[00:45:47]  It's a good point, right?
[00:45:49]  You're their helpless victim, poor Pearl.
[00:45:51]  Who knows how many people she hurt?
[00:45:53]  All right.
[00:45:54]  Before I let you go, I only have a minute left, so I apologize for that.
[00:45:58]  But you're no longer with GB.
[00:46:00]  Basically, the crazy Ofcom cracked down on your comment about vaccines that I just mentioned.
[00:46:06]  And he had a dispute with JB or GB.
[00:46:07]  Now you're on your own.
[00:46:08]  But Ofcom, can you just spend a minute on Ofcom and how insane that system is, Mark?
[00:46:13]  That's the UK regulator.
[00:46:15]  And it's one reason why so many television current affairs discussions aren't worth watching, because they think everything should just be done in a sterile partisan way.
[00:46:26]  So you have a ding-dong, a punch and judy between the conservative guy and the socialist guy, or if it's Northern Ireland, between the loyalist guy and the Republican guy.
[00:46:37]  And it's such a sterile, it's no way to actually conduct a conversation into anything that matters.
[00:46:45]  And the management, you mentioned this at the top of the show with regard to a certain other broadcaster.
[00:46:52]  They preconceded, they pre-caved.
[00:46:56]  And at a certain point, you just don't want those kind of managements in your life right now, as you well know, Megan.
[00:47:02]  Now you are free.
[00:47:02]  Yes, I love not having any corporate overlords.
[00:47:04]  I absolutely love it.
[00:47:06]  So for people who want to support you, Mark, as an independent broadcaster now, again, can you give us the website?
[00:47:10]  How can they find you?
[00:47:11]  Make sure that you're supported.
[00:47:12]  It's S-T-E-Y-N online.
[00:47:15]  That's as in Stein with a Y, as in why do I have to listen to this snotty, hoity-toity foreigner telling me everything that's wrong with America.
[00:47:24]  Steinonline.com.
[00:47:26]  And you can watch today's show and tomorrow's show right there.
[00:47:30]  Great.
[00:47:30]  I'm looking forward to it.
[00:47:31]  Always love hearing your voice.
[00:47:33]  Thank you for being here.
[00:47:34]  Come back anytime.
[00:47:36]  Always a pleasure, Megan.
[00:47:37]  And happy anniversary.
[00:47:39]  All right, we'll be right back with the latest on the Murdoch trial.
[00:47:43]  The jurors are off site today.
[00:47:45]  They took a visit to Mazell, Alex Murdoch's house.
[00:47:50]  This is fraught, fraught, especially for the prosecution.
[00:47:52]  People predicting this could be another OJ visit, you know, by the jury situation.
[00:47:56]  We'll get into it.
[00:48:00]  Closing arguments underway right now in the double murder trial of disgraced South Carolina attorney Alec Murdoch.
[00:48:08]  Earlier this morning, the jury went off-site from the courthouse visiting Murdoch's 1700-acre hunting estate known as Mizell.
[00:48:17]  That is where the murders happened.
[00:48:19]  There, the jury spent time at the dog kennels, which were the scene of the crime.
[00:48:24]  Joining us now to discuss Dave Ehrenberg, state attorney for Palm Beach County, Florida, and from South Carolina Courthouse, where it's all happening.
[00:48:32]  Attorney Eric Bland, founder and partner of Bland Richter.
[00:48:36]  They have had a role in at least one lawsuit against Alec Murdoch.
[00:48:41]  Welcome, guys, to Kelly's Court.
[00:48:42]  Great to have you.
[00:48:44]  Hey, thanks for having us.
[00:48:45]  Great to be with you, Kelly.
[00:48:46]  So what an eerie morning to take the jury to Mizelle.
[00:48:49]  The defense wanted it done.
[00:48:50]  The prosecution objected, but the judge said it's fine.
[00:48:53]  They can go.
[00:48:54]  The prosecution, I'm sure Eric was worried about an OJ situation, right?
[00:48:59]  Where, you know, we now know Johnny Cochran went in there, restaged OJ's entire house, took down all the pictures of the white women, put up pictures of black women, OG with his black friends.
[00:49:08]  You know, it just made him look like he was much more a part of the black community than he'd ever been.
[00:49:13]  I don't know how you could do that to Mizell in a way that would help the defense, but that was the concern.
[00:49:17]  The judge overruled it.
[00:49:18]  The jury went.
[00:49:19]  What do we know about how that went?
[00:49:22]  Well, I think the greater concern was it wasn't an apples and apples type of jury view.
[00:49:28]  If it really was going to have meaning, it should have been done exactly at the time of night at about 8:45 or anywhere from 8 o'clock to 10 o'clock at night.
[00:49:39]  And so that the jury can see the darkness and how dark it is in this rural area of our state, plus hear the quiet.
[00:49:48]  So that I think was the concern of the prosecution.
[00:49:52]  Plus that, you know, there's been a number of trees that have grown in the last two years.
[00:49:57]  That's the problem.
[00:50:00]  You know, this can cut both ways, Dave, because taking the jury to the scene where you know a double murder took place.
[00:50:07]  You know, you may not know for sure who did it, but you know, two people were killed here, a 22-year-old young man and his mother.
[00:50:15]  He was shot first.
[00:50:16]  His mother presumably saw him die.
[00:50:20]  That's tough.
[00:50:21]  That's got to be emotionally rattling for the jury.
[00:50:24]  And I know the defense all along has been leaning into let them see the autopsy photos, let them see how horrific this crime was, because no one will believe that a father could do it.
[00:50:34]  A father could do it to his own son.
[00:50:35]  A spouse could do it to his own wife.
[00:50:38]  The Wall Street Journal reporter, it's Valerie Bowerlin.
[00:50:42]  She's part of the randomly selected press poll that visited Mizelle after the jury went.
[00:50:46]  That's all the judge would allow.
[00:50:48]  She writes, we had roughly 14 minutes to view the kennels and shed.
[00:50:51]  It's a heavy place to visit.
[00:50:53]  The property has stood vacant for 20 months and the grass is high.
[00:50:56]  Some items seem to be left where they fell, including a deflated football behind the kennels and a tube of sanitizing wipes in the shed.
[00:51:03]  There's a yellow hose wrapped haphazardly in the spot described by one witness, the caretaker for the dogs.
[00:51:08]  There are no animals in the kennels and so on.
[00:51:11]  The feed room, this is where they were shot, feels haunted, only 10 feet deep and six feet wide, according to the measurements that goes on.
[00:51:20]  I wonder what you think the risks are to the defense of bringing the jury there.
[00:51:26]  Yeah, Megan, you bring up a good point.
[00:51:29]  It's one thing to hear about a crime scene.
[00:51:31]  It's another thing to be there and to smell it and to see it.
[00:51:34]  It really brings it home.
[00:51:35]  And that's why I was surprised that prosecutors didn't want to go there.
[00:51:39]  I think there's some valuable evidence that could help prosecutors.
[00:51:42]  For example, why didn't Alec Murdoch take his car and just drive down the road that the jurors will see, which is an easy drive to the kennels, instead of just calling and texting and then taking off to his mother's?
[00:51:56]  And I think that's important for the jurors to see how close the kennels are to the house from that road.
[00:52:02]  It was so easy for him because the main gate is not that far off.
[00:52:06]  So just to just to fill that in, because if he allegedly wanted Maggie home to go visit his mom, why, and he purports to have wanted Maggie to come with him when he visited his mom, your point.
[00:52:18]  And he said, oh, I texted her.
[00:52:20]  I texted her.
[00:52:20]  Prosecution's theory is she was already dead.
[00:52:22]  You'd already murdered her when you were sending those texts.
[00:52:24]  They were cover.
[00:52:24]  And your point is they'll see what an easy jaunt it would have been for him to say, Hey, Maggie, come with me.
[00:52:29]  I'm going now.
[00:52:31]  Yeah, there's a road directly from the house to the kennel.
[00:52:34]  And when you go out, apparently it's a really quick trip.
[00:52:38]  It's not going far out of your way.
[00:52:39]  So why wouldn't he just drive there?
[00:52:41]  Why would he just give up after texting and calling?
[00:52:44]  Also, I mean, I know it's not relevant to your question, but I mean, I think it is sort of interesting how he tried to create this alibi by sending these text messages and phone calls 10 minutes after the murders.
[00:52:54]  I mean, how convenient.
[00:52:55]  It shows you what a sociopath this guy is.
[00:52:58]  The jury doesn't yet have the case, but the prosecution is in the middle of closing arguments right now.
[00:53:06]  I have a soundbite of how that's going, which I'll play in one second.
[00:53:09]  But first, Eric, I heard you on my friend Nancy Grace on her podcast, which I listen to every night.
[00:53:13]  I love you guys all on the Nancy Grace podcast.
[00:53:17]  And you were saying, given the fact that you represent the family of the housekeeper who died on the property and who Alec said to her sons, don't worry, I'm going to sue myself basically on your behalf.
[00:53:30]  I'm going to give you the money.
[00:53:31]  Turned out he got $4.3 million.
[00:53:33]  He didn't give those boys one cent.
[00:53:36]  And you stepped in to help those kids.
[00:53:38]  Okay.
[00:53:38]  So that's your kind of role.
[00:53:39]  And given that role, you have a lot of connections in this whole case.
[00:53:43]  And yesterday there was mystery about a possible note.
[00:53:47]  A note did go to the judge.
[00:53:49]  Both counsel for the defense and the prosecution talked to the judge about it.
[00:53:53]  We don't know, but there was reporting that somebody overheard them say it was about a juror.
[00:53:59]  We can't really afford to lose many more jurors.
[00:54:01]  They only have two all night.
[00:54:02]  So we got to protect the remaining jurors.
[00:54:06]  And you had heard a rumor about what it might be about.
[00:54:08]  If you could tell us what that was and whether you think that wound up being true, because right now, as far as I understand, the current jury remains seated as it was 24 hours ago.
[00:54:17]  Yeah, you know, I have a podcast, Cup of Justice, that's a highly rated podcast, and we get a lot of good tips.
[00:54:25]  And I've gotten very close to Creighton Wooders during this trial.
[00:54:29]  In fact, I trade tweets or texts with him beginning at five o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock almost every morning where we strategize and he'll ask me a question, what do you think?
[00:54:39]  And he's so receptive, just like Dave, I'm sure, is during a trial to take anything that somebody's going to give and maybe it makes sense.
[00:54:48]  And one of my listeners said that there was a rumor that one of the jurors possibly had made some statements during the trial, which would indicate where that juror was leaning.
[00:55:00]  Now, I don't know any truth to that.
[00:55:03]  I'm told that that person may have sent an email directly to the judge, and that's all I know.
[00:55:11]  There's nothing that's been released.
[00:55:13]  And then this morning, we also had a delay in getting the closing argument started when there was a at the bench meeting that lasted about 12 minutes.
[00:55:25]  And I had heard that maybe something happened at Maddell.
[00:55:28]  So we have a...
[00:55:29]  you know a number of different things going on.
[00:55:31]  And this judge wants to you're hearing a play in the black background he wants to land this plane.
[00:55:37]  He wants to deliver the evidence in this case to the jury because it's gone on far too long.
[00:55:43]  So Dave, do you think we should assume that that did not pan out?
[00:55:46]  Because, you know, as Eric was saying on Nancy's show yesterday, the rumor was that this juror had said, I think he's innocent, and if a juror says that in the course of a trial, or I think he's guilty in the course, in the course of the trial, they're gone, it's over for that jury, you're bounced, and so in this case, it would be the prosecution who would say, she's gone or he's gone.
[00:56:06]  The fact that that didn't happen I would, I would assume, suggests they didn't.
[00:56:11]  They weren't able to confirm any of that correct.
[00:56:14]  So that's good, because you don't want jurors to make up their minds before all the evidence is in and to communicate that to other jurors.
[00:56:21]  That's where really, where it's a no-no.
[00:56:22]  You can have your own thoughts, but you can't communicate that to others, and so uh, I think that's probably a false rumor.
[00:56:30]  I'm glad that Eric reported it because you want this trial to be as fair as possible.
[00:56:34]  I was concerned by the reports that two jurors were crying when Alec Murdoch took the stand as direct examination.
[00:56:42]  That to me was a problem.
[00:56:43]  Prosecutors never want to see that.
[00:56:45]  But that was a thursday, Alec Murdoch, friday, Alec Murdoch, when he was under a withering cross-examination was very different.
[00:56:52]  He wasn't as sympathetic, he was combative.
[00:56:55]  You saw him for the liar that he is and hopefully those jurors who were crying on thursday had a different opinion of him on friday.
[00:57:03]  I yeah, you saw, i'm scared guys.
[00:57:06]  I I think he did it.
[00:57:07]  I've said this openly.
[00:57:08]  In my analysis as a lawyer who's been watching this case is he did it, but i'm scared the jury might not get it.
[00:57:14]  I just think you know he was kind of charming up there Eric, and I realized that the cross brought out some very valid points about what a bad guy this is.
[00:57:23]  He was kind of charming and he talked to the jury in their language in this real colloquial way, like on bonding the brother you know, John Marvin.
[00:57:31]  He was really likable too.
[00:57:32]  He's kind of vouching for Alec.
[00:57:34]  I'm worried this jury is not going to be able to get past that Murdoch name.
[00:57:38]  And how nice this man seemed and just sort of chalk it up to well, financial crimes, that doesn't mean he killed them.
[00:57:45]  Well, from John Marvin's standpoint, you know, Dave and I would have asked the same, exact four questions, do you love your family?
[00:57:52]  Do you love your brother?
[00:57:53]  Um, it would hurt the family name if your brother was convicted of double murder.
[00:57:57]  And oh, by the way, he didn't tell you for two years that he was at the cattle and I would have sat down and that would have neutralized John Marvin.
[00:58:04]  As far as far as Alex goes, you know this is a referendum on Alex.
[00:58:10]  This trial started out as a scientific trial.
[00:58:12]  We thought it was going to be about blood, DNA, and GSR.
[00:58:16]  Then it moved to a technological trial of phones, of phone mapping, of videos, and then OnStar.
[00:58:24]  And now, after last Thursday and Friday, it's a referendum on Alex.
[00:58:28]  Are you going to believe him?
[00:58:29]  Look, he said that everybody in this trial has lied.
[00:58:33]  Blanca lied about the Vineyard Vine shirt.
[00:58:35]  Shelly Smith lied about the blue tarp and about the 30 to 40 minute conversation that they supposedly had.
[00:58:41]  Mark Tinsley lied about the meeting they had at the Trial Lawyers Association about the Mallory Beach case.
[00:58:48]  Sled has lied.
[00:58:49]  Marion, the sister-in-law, has lied.
[00:58:52]  T.C. Smith, the African-American sheriff yesterday, who said he never asked me permission to carry a badge or a blue light.
[00:59:00]  And of course, the media has lied.
[00:59:02]  And Alex has told you, I'm a drug addict, I'm a thief, and I'm a liar.
[00:59:07]  And it's only when the devil was at the door, Megan, did he say, hey, I admit I was at the kennel, even though I never told my son, my only living son for two years.
[00:59:17]  I lied to him about the last conversation and meetings and dealings with your mother and your brother.
[00:59:25]  But because I've told you that today, you need to believe me and not anybody else.
[00:59:30]  And I just think I believe he's guilty.
[00:59:33]  I believe that there's at least 10 jurors that believe he's guilty.
[00:59:37]  And if people are going to listen to the judge's instructions and they're going to have to deliberate, it's my hope that people will keep an open mind and let the evidence show you that he did it.
[00:59:52]  Look, if you brought Cyril Wecht, Henry Lee, or the best pathologist that Dave has ever used, the conclusion would be the same.
[01:00:01]  All the evidence points to Alex.
[01:00:04]  And nobody else.
[01:00:06]  10 jurors, why?
[01:00:07]  Instead of 12?
[01:00:08]  Well, I think that there's always two jurors that may be swayed by a closing argument and they walk into the jury room.
[01:00:17]  I've heard a lot of people say, well, I think he's guilty, but I don't think the state proved it.
[01:00:21]  So let's say two people walk in there with that concept of I do believe he did it, but I don't think the state met its burden.
[01:00:29]  Then it's up to the other 10 jurors who had their own set of two eyes and two ears to educate those people.
[01:00:36]  And hopefully they have an open mind.
[01:00:38]  The problem that we have in these kind of cases is if people have a closed mind and they refuse to deliberate and they refuse to listen to reasonable arguments, remember, it's reasonable doubt.
[01:00:51]  And Dave will talk about that.
[01:00:53]  It's not any doubt.
[01:00:54]  It's got to be a justifiable, reasonable doubt.
[01:00:59]  You know, we all have doubts in life, but then they may be irrational and not reasonable.
[01:01:04]  Dave, what do you think about this?
[01:01:06]  This is not a case where I think, I don't, maybe I'm wrong, guys, but I feel like if you're a juror who's just like, I like him, and I don't believe a man would do that to his son and wife, you have it.

=== Eddie's Motive and Paranoia (15:15) ===

[01:01:16]  Yeah.
[01:01:16]  The defense gave you enough outs, enough reason to question that you could credibly go that way and possibly withstand the pressure from those other jurors.
[01:01:28]  It's not how I would vote, though.
[01:01:30]  To be honest, I've always been more prosecution-oriented in my approach to these cases.
[01:01:35]  It's not to say they never get it wrong, but I mean, this one, I feel like, yes, it's mostly circumstantial, but it's overwhelming circumstantial evidence that he did it.
[01:01:43]  Let me just jump in and show you part of the prosecution's closing argument.
[01:01:47]  It began shortly after 12 p.m.
[01:01:49]  This is lead prosecutor Creighton Waters at the beginning of his closing argument.
[01:01:55]  And after an exhaustive investigation, there is only one person who had the motive, who had the means, who had the opportunity to commit these crimes and also whose guilty conduct after these crimes betrays him.
[01:02:19]  This defendant was the one person who was living a lie.
[01:02:23]  The defendant is the person on which a storm was descending.
[01:02:27]  And the defendant is a person where his own storm would actually mean consequences for Maggie and Paul and consequences for those who trusted him.
[01:02:38]  And that person is the defendant, Richard Alexander Murdoch.
[01:02:44]  Pretty good, Dave.
[01:02:45]  And that stuff is just chilling.
[01:02:47]  And the theater of it won't be lost on the jury either.
[01:02:50]  They realize what they're in the middle of right now.
[01:02:53]  Yes, and you saw how Waters leaned into the motive there because he knows that's probably the weakest part of the state's case.
[01:03:01]  Why would a father slaughter his beloved son?
[01:03:05]  By all accounts, he had a really good relationship with his son and his wife.
[01:03:09]  And, you know, as a prosecutor, as you know, Megan, it's not uncommon, sadly, for someone to be on trial for killing a spouse, but to kill their own son.
[01:03:17]  And that's why the defense tried to make their whole case on, hey, this is about reasonable doubt.
[01:03:23]  And look how much this family loved each other.
[01:03:26]  Why would he do that?
[01:03:27]  To me, when he took the stand, it helped the prosecution develop the motive because he himself said, Alec Murdoch, that he was so paranoid from opioids that that led him to nonstop lie for the last year and a half, to lie to everyone because he was so paranoid.
[01:03:46]  But I guess he's paranoid enough to lie, but not paranoid enough to kill.
[01:03:52]  That sounds like selective paranoia to me.
[01:03:55]  And so he gave, I thought, the prosecution a lifeline to say, hey, look, if jurors, if you don't believe that he had the motive to kill based on the financial reasons, well, how about the reasons of opioid abuse?
[01:04:08]  So I think that Eric is right, that I think it's more likely than not he is convicted, but I think there is a very decent chance there will be a hung jury.
[01:04:18]  I think it's unlikely he'll be acquitted.
[01:04:20]  Oh, yeah.
[01:04:22]  Let me ask you.
[01:04:23]  Let me ask you, because they did do a good job.
[01:04:26]  They slipped it in here and there.
[01:04:28]  And the whole Paul Paul thing.
[01:04:30]  He never called him that before in all the interrogation videos.
[01:04:33]  He referred to him as Paul, his son, Paul.
[01:04:35]  Now suddenly he's in front of the jury.
[01:04:36]  It's Paul Paul at Mags.
[01:04:39]  So Alec did his best.
[01:04:40]  The family did their best.
[01:04:42]  His witnesses did their best to try to create this image of a very happy family.
[01:04:46]  Pictures, birthday parties, and so on.
[01:04:49]  They did a good job.
[01:04:51]  And while I heard Nancy talking about how you can't step foot down there, you know, when you land on the plane without hearing about how Maggie was unhappy, the wedding ring was found in her car under the floor mat, and they weren't living together and they were likely headed for a divorce and she might have had to get a forensic accountant.
[01:05:07]  None of that ever got before the jury.
[01:05:09]  In fact, what the jury heard was from Maggie's sister who said it wasn't a perfect relationship, but she was happy.
[01:05:16]  She was happy.
[01:05:17]  So that's on the defense side, right?
[01:05:20]  Like the jury's going to be saying they had a happy marriage and he really seemed to love the son.
[01:05:26]  What kind of a human being would kill a son they love and a wife they're happily married to because they're in a panic about reputation and money?
[01:05:37]  Well, a family annihilator would, a narcissist would, and a modern day monster would.
[01:05:42]  You know, I've said on TV, Megan, that he's a 90-10 guy.
[01:05:47]  90% of the time, he's a loving husband, a great father, a great friend, jovial to be around.
[01:05:56]  It's the 10% of the time that nobody knew existed in this guy.
[01:05:59]  You know, the devil works in the dark.
[01:06:01]  And so Alex worked with cousin Eddie.
[01:06:04]  He obviously had a drug habit that very few people knew about.
[01:06:08]  I can't imagine that his law partners would have condoned it because it would expose the law firm to tremendous liability in letting him handle in cases.
[01:06:19]  But the fact of the matter is, you're looking for rational explanation of why a father would kill a son.
[01:06:25]  Motive is not an element of murder.
[01:06:28]  And sometimes it's a problem-solving reason to commit murder.
[01:06:32]  In our eyes, it's an irrational reason.
[01:06:35]  We would say, really?
[01:06:36]  That's what you were doing?
[01:06:38]  But if you saw his real income in 2016, 17, 18, and 19, and 20 kept decreasing.
[01:06:47]  And his big cases kept decreasing.
[01:06:50]  He needed big cases to be able to steal money.
[01:06:53]  So when you have that perfect storm of your real income decreasing and then your theft income decreasing, he became desperate.
[01:07:02]  And like Dave said, the drug paranoia can now be whipsawed against him.
[01:07:09]  And I believe in his mind, he thought he had a perfect reason to kill Paul.
[01:07:15]  I don't know what the reason would be for Maggie.
[01:07:18]  Look, it could have been a mercy killing for Paul.
[01:07:20]  Megan, Paul was facing 20 to 30 years and he was going to get it for that boating accident with Mallory Beach.
[01:07:28]  And Paul is a five foot eight guy, redhead from a privileged family.
[01:07:34]  Dave knows just as good as I do that in the big house, that's not going to be an easy time to pull 20 to 30 years.
[01:07:41]  And maybe he decided in his own way that he was going to, you know, ease the pain for Paul.
[01:07:47]  Look, the roadside shooting wasn't about Alex trying to commit suicide.
[01:07:52]  All that was was an attempt to divert the authorities away from thinking that he was a suspect.
[01:07:59]  He's a narcissist.
[01:08:00]  He doesn't want to die.
[01:08:02]  Let me ask you a question about the roadside shooting because this is something that's always stuck in my craw.
[01:08:06]  And you're close enough to this case to answer it.
[01:08:08]  I'll tell you, frankly, the woman who, she's my friend and she's my hairstylist, her name is Sarah.
[01:08:14]  And she's, like a lot of women, she's an armchair crime solver.
[01:08:17]  And she asked me a very good question about cousin Eddie, the guy who Alec had shoot him roadside three months after the murders of Paul and Maggie.
[01:08:26]  You know, we think it's because he was trying to make it look like, oh, there's this random killer on the loose.
[01:08:30]  He's after all the Murdoch, including Alec.
[01:08:32]  Alec's not the murderer.
[01:08:33]  Alec was almost a murder victim.
[01:08:35]  And he says, no, he admits now that he had Cousin Eddie do it, but he said, I was trying to get him to suicide me, you know, to kill me so that my remaining son would get a $10 million life insurance policy.
[01:08:46]  She asked a very good question.
[01:08:47]  And that was, is Cousin Eddie some sort of sharp shooter from, you know, like the Army Rangers?
[01:08:55]  Like, how did Cousin Eddie, if this was prearranged with Alec and he didn't actually want to die, he just wanted to make it look like somebody was after him.
[01:09:02]  How did Cousin Eddie manage to like graze his skull without getting the bullet in the skull accidentally, right?
[01:09:09]  Do we give Cousin Eddie that much credit?
[01:09:14]  Well, I think that people where I live, Megan, know how to kill.
[01:09:19]  And if they wanted to kill, they would know how to do it.
[01:09:23]  Whether there was a struggle with the gun and it grazed his head, I think the whole thing is Eddie is part of that 10% of his life.
[01:09:32]  He laundered $2.2 million worth of checks that I discovered from Bank of America from 2018 through after the week of the murder through Cousin Eddie.
[01:09:43]  Cousin Eddie purchased the drugs for him.
[01:09:45]  Cousin Eddie obviously was on the side of the road.
[01:09:48]  And look what this man did, the waste of law enforcement resources.
[01:09:53]  He made them get a sketch artist and he sketched a photo, a potential assailant that looked like Connor Cook.
[01:10:01]  He had a dimple on the chin at the whole time.
[01:10:04]  He knew it was Cousin Eddie.
[01:10:05]  The same way he wasted the state's resources for two years proving that he was at the kennel.
[01:10:11]  And he never did.
[01:10:12]  And oh, by the way, just so you understand, this 11th hour mea copa where I come clean, he entered a plea of not guilty in every single financial crime, even one that was charged two months ago.
[01:10:27]  So the jury needs to be made aware that this guy that you saw on the witness stand, sure, he was congenial when he talked about his drug use and it was sympathetic.
[01:10:39]  And he came and said, I did take money from these victims and I let them down.
[01:10:44]  He never apologized.
[01:10:46]  He never used the word apologize.
[01:10:48]  But then the real personality came out when Creighton was questioning him on the murder facts.
[01:10:52]  You saw the gear spinning in his head of how do I come up with these answers?
[01:10:57]  Did I say, did I check the pulse before I made the 911 call or did I check the pulses after?
[01:11:04]  If I checked them before, there's no way that I could check Paul's pulse, turn him over, phone falls out, put it back in, go check on Maggie, and then make the call within 17 seconds.
[01:11:16]  The timeline has always killed him in this case once he was placed at the kennels.
[01:11:21]  All right.
[01:11:22]  I take all that, but I did not hear an answer to whether Cousin Eddie was that good a shot.
[01:11:26]  I'm sorry.
[01:11:27]  Like, Dave.
[01:11:29]  He was good at the same time.
[01:11:30]  I have a theory on that one, Mason.
[01:11:32]  He could graze the skull, but not penetrate this guy.
[01:11:34]  Like, we are giving Cousin Eddie, who seems to be a rather messy guy, a lot of credit.
[01:11:39]  Go ahead, Dave.
[01:11:40]  Yeah, there's one theory out there that Alec Murdoch wanted to frame Cousin Eddie for the murders.
[01:11:46]  And so he arranged for this.
[01:11:47]  And then he thought he was going to kill Cousin Eddie, that Cousin Eddie would die and that he would lay it all on him.
[01:11:53]  But the gun went off because they're so incompetent and it's grazed Alec in the head.
[01:11:58]  That's just one theory out there.
[01:12:00]  There are a lot of them that are possible.
[01:12:01]  I like that one.
[01:12:02]  That's possible.
[01:12:04]  You know what?
[01:12:04]  If you're Alec Murdoch, that makes sense.
[01:12:06]  Kill off Cousin Eddie.
[01:12:07]  He's a character that you don't need.
[01:12:08]  In the movie of this, Cousin Eddie would definitely be expendable.
[01:12:11]  Go ahead, Eric.
[01:12:12]  And Megan, he told the sled that Cousin Eddie was not responsible for the murders of Maggie and Paul.
[01:12:20]  And he also said that the Cowboys were not responsible for it.
[01:12:24]  So this third-party guilt that the defense has been trying to put before the trial and that there were two shooters, he eviscerated that.
[01:12:32]  And oh, by the way, the cartel, when they come to kill you, they don't borrow your weapons or steal them.
[01:12:40]  They bring their own.
[01:12:41]  Dave, please, you're in for- They don't miss.
[01:12:45]  They come with pistols.
[01:12:46]  They don't use shotguns and they kill you and those guns are gone.
[01:12:50]  They don't steal weapons from you.
[01:12:52]  Isn't that correct, Dave?
[01:12:53]  100% correct.
[01:12:55]  You don't have a series of 5-2 hitmen walking onto your property just at the right time, stealing your guns because they come unarmed.
[01:13:02]  His explanation made no sense.
[01:13:04]  And I think it'll be used against him.
[01:13:06]  And remember, the defense doesn't have to put on a defense.
[01:13:08]  They don't have to say a word, but they put this stuff on.
[01:13:11]  They let Alec say his crazy theories.
[01:13:13]  And I think that will be used against them.
[01:13:15]  Another reason why I thought that his testimony will come back to haunt him.
[01:13:19]  Okay, but what about this?
[01:13:21]  What about this?
[01:13:22]  What about they clearly put Alec on the stand chiefly because we knew it was him at the kennels?
[01:13:27]  He denied all along that he'd ever been down to the kennels with Maggie and Paul where they were killed.
[01:13:31]  And the reason he denied that is because he didn't want to place himself at the murder scene.
[01:13:34]  But then, unbeknownst to him, and this is the most chilling part of this whole case, if you ask me, his son essentially fingered him.
[01:13:42]  His son caught his murderer, his own dad.
[01:13:47]  And the way he did it was without the dad knowing, the son videotaped the dogs at the kennel four minutes before we believe he was murdered.
[01:13:56]  And on that tape, we can't see Alec Murdoch, but we can hear him.
[01:14:01]  And witness after witness took the stand and said, I'm 100% certain that's Paul Murdoch, Maggie Murdoch, and that's the voice of Alec Murdoch.
[01:14:09]  So he had no choice at that point, he felt, but to take the stand and try to explain that, yes, it was his voice because the jury was 100% going to find that.
[01:14:20]  And then to explain what had been introduced already as his lie.
[01:14:24]  He was on tape denying it.
[01:14:25]  to cops.
[01:14:26]  And to me, that's just the most eerie part.
[01:14:28]  If this jury concludes guilty, it's because Paul Murdoch solved his own murder.
[01:14:34]  Exactly.
[01:14:36]  You are correct.
[01:14:37]  Yeah.
[01:14:38]  Paul solved his own murder.
[01:14:40]  And that is Paul's lasting legacy.
[01:14:42]  He was able to get his father convicted and hopefully convicted of murder because of that video.
[01:14:47]  Without that video, I don't think there would be a conviction.
[01:14:49]  It's because of that video.
[01:14:50]  And so when I think what happened was his lawyers, Alec's lawyers did not want him to testify.
[01:14:56]  But Alec realized this was a major problem for his case.
[01:15:00]  And so he said, I can do it.
[01:15:02]  I want to do it.
[01:15:02]  I'm going to explain it away.
[01:15:04]  But he didn't think it through all the way because when he said, look, I was paranoid from the drugs, then it created a new motive.
[01:15:10]  Well, okay, the drugs made him kill.
[01:15:12]  And so when he took the stand, it opened up all these new things out there.
[01:15:16]  Like, for example, when he said that I was paranoid of Sled, state law enforcement.
[01:15:22]  Well, okay, but at the 911 call, you lied, right?
[01:15:27]  Before Sled was involved, when the local police officer showed up on the body camera, you can see you lied to him.
[01:15:34]  If you're so paranoid by Sled, why are you lying to everyone else, including your own family?
[01:15:39]  And this is a guy who's not paranoid of the police.
[01:15:42]  He had privilege.
[01:15:43]  He had his own badge that he showed off.
[01:15:46]  He had it hanging from his pocket when he went into the hospital after Mallory Beach was killed.
[01:15:51]  He had it on his dashboard.
[01:15:53]  He loaded up his car with blue lights.
[01:15:55]  Let me tell you how obnoxious that is as someone who's a who drives around in a car with blue lights.
[01:16:00]  You can't do that.
[01:16:01]  And so here's a guy who thought he was above the law.
[01:16:04]  He thought he had privilege.
[01:16:05]  The whole paranoia thing is just a way to try to get out of what should be a conviction.
[01:16:11]  Eric, you know what jumped on me the other day?
[01:16:13]  Let me just make this point and I'll give you the floor.
[01:16:15]  I mentioned this to our audience, but the other thing he didn't anticipate was I wasn't a big fan of all the open-ended questions that Waters asked him on the cross.
[01:16:24]  I like the, you know, I'll drive the narrative.
[01:16:26]  I'll tell you what the story was.
[01:16:28]  And you either say yes or no.
[01:16:30]  But some of them paid off.

=== Defense Attorney Footprints Theory (15:28) ===

[01:16:31]  And one of them was asking him whether he remembers the last conversation he had with Maggie and Paul four minutes before their murder when he was down there and allegedly leaving the kennels.
[01:16:43]  That's what he wants us to believe, as opposed to staying there and shooting them.
[01:16:46]  And he didn't.
[01:16:47]  That is not possible.
[01:16:49]  That is not possible that a father and a husband four minutes before their family is murdered wouldn't remember his last words to his own son, to his own wife.
[01:17:00]  And it's also not possible that he would then take the witness stand in a case like this and not spontaneously offer to the jury, I'll never get past the survivor's guilt.
[01:17:11]  Why didn't I stay?
[01:17:12]  Maybe I could have protected.
[01:17:14]  That's how an actual dad who had just been through what his story is would have reacted.
[01:17:21]  Megan, listen, I've been married 35 years.
[01:17:25]  I remember the first time and where I was when I got my first kiss from my wife.
[01:17:31]  I will never forget it.
[01:17:32]  I would never forget being with my wife and my son the last moments they were alive.
[01:17:38]  And just so you know, if I did come up and my wife and son were brutally murdered, I would still be clutching them together today.
[01:17:47]  Jaws of life couldn't have removed my arms from them, let alone me getting up and start making phone calls to brothers, to friends of Paul.
[01:17:59]  Remember, the two facts in my mind, which mean, which show his guilt, he didn't call his only surviving son for 42 minutes to tell him that his mother and his brother were brutally murdered.
[01:18:13]  He spoke to Paul's friends.
[01:18:15]  He texted a groundskeeper and told him to fix the sunflower seeds.
[01:18:20]  He did a Google search of a restaurant.
[01:18:23]  He looked at a tech stream of a girl in a bikini.
[01:18:26]  And then he waited two and a half years to tell his son, I actually been lying to you for two years, son.
[01:18:34]  I was there when your mother and your son died.
[01:18:37]  Yeah.
[01:18:38]  But I was there.
[01:18:39]  No father do that to a child.
[01:18:42]  All right.
[01:18:42]  So in this segment, we've been tough on Alec Murdoch and we've all been more prosecution oriented, but the defense has been scoring blows.
[01:18:50]  They are out there fighting, fighting like Alec Murdoch's life depends on it.
[01:18:54]  And we're going to play you some of that in our second segment and get into where the defense made its best points and, you know, whether it could potentially be enough.
[01:19:04]  More with Eric and Dave right after this quick break.
[01:19:09]  One of the defense's main lines of defense is that this shooting wasn't done by one person and could not have been done by one person.
[01:19:18]  There were two people at the scene.
[01:19:20]  And by the way, we think they were really short, not six foot four, as Alec Murdoch is.
[01:19:25]  And to that end, they introduced this testimony from Tim Palmbuck.
[01:19:31]  He's a defense crime scene and blood spatter expert, kind of talking about how that could have gone down at SOT 19.
[01:19:39]  My opinion is the totality of the evidence is more suggestive of a two-shooter scenario.
[01:19:44]  And so I think minimally, minimally, that shooter is getting covered with this material, getting more or less the shockwave of that effect, and more than likely getting hit with at least something that could have done injury, a bone fragment and or a pellet fragment.
[01:20:01]  Therefore, I think that particular shooter for a brief period of time is kind of out of this.
[01:20:09]  It's not as if they could instantaneously suffer that, drop the shotgun, run to wherever the blackout rifle is, pick that up, and then in any kind of a reasonable time period, engage in a meaningful assault, an effective assault, able to shoot straight and make hits.
[01:20:28]  All right, Dave, that's the theory.
[01:20:30]  It couldn't have been done.
[01:20:31]  The first shooting of Paul would have been so traumatic, dramatic, and consequential.
[01:20:37]  It was not possible for one person to do them both.
[01:20:42]  Yeah, and that's a problem for the state because it gives jurors, as you mentioned, the hook where they could find some reasonable doubt because the jurors are either going to convict him or not based on whether they find that he is a liar and someone who could have done such a horrible thing.
[01:21:00]  And if they liked him, if they felt sympathy for him and were crying on Thursday, then they just have to point to, well, that one expert said there was no blood spatter and two people had to commit this crime.
[01:21:14]  And that's the reasonable doubt.
[01:21:15]  Now, if that expert didn't hold any sway, then just liking this defendant would not be enough.
[01:21:21]  They have to hold their hat on something.
[01:21:23]  And the defense gave them something to hold their hat on.
[01:21:27]  I think the state overwhelmed the defense with their evidence.
[01:21:30]  I think they did provide a case that proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
[01:21:36]  But if jurors want to like this guy and want a reason to try to acquit him, they've got it.
[01:21:44]  All right, Eric, what do you make of Dr. Ellen Reimer?
[01:21:47]  She is the pathologist who conducted the autopsies of Maggie and Paul.
[01:21:53]  And I will tell you that her affect is very strange for somebody on the outside, you know, watching this case.
[01:22:01]  Now, this is the nature of her job, I imagine, because she's done 5,000 autopsies.
[01:22:05]  So she's gotten to this place where she talks about dealing with dead bodies like it's you and me talking about what we put in our coffee in the morning.
[01:22:11]  But it was kind of jarring when you first heard her on direct exam talking about the autopsy.
[01:22:16]  Oh, here's where the bullet went in.
[01:22:17]  And here's what part of the brain matter got blown out.
[01:22:19]  But it was like, oh my God.
[01:22:20]  Okay.
[01:22:21]  Remember, the jury doesn't have the same background you do.
[01:22:23]  And I do think this matter, though she's a consummate professional, is coming back to haunt the DA, the prosecution, because the defense is making such a big deal out of it.
[01:22:33]  It had to be two shooters.
[01:22:35]  They're arguing that Paul was shot at close range, that they put the gun, the rifle, the shotgun against his head and pulled the trigger.
[01:22:45]  And the prosecution's rebuttal using their pathologist, this woman, Dr. Ellen Reimer, is basically, that's impossible.
[01:22:53]  Forgive me, but basically, Paul's head would have been blown off if they had done that.
[01:22:58]  And that's not exactly what happened.
[01:23:00]  But Dr. Reimer is like, she can't really bring it home.
[01:23:04]  She's very sort of technical in her words.
[01:23:07]  She doesn't speak like a regular Joe or Jane.
[01:23:10]  And I think they're struggling.
[01:23:12]  Here's just a little bit.
[01:23:13]  We pulled just an interesting moment from Harputlian.
[01:23:16]  He's the defense attorney, lead defense attorney's cross of her, where he's trying to refer her back to like the seminal treatise on these gunshots, these wounds that are up close and why she didn't follow it.
[01:23:29]  Here's how that went.
[01:23:31]  At two feet, is there any gas left or is it all dissipated like this picture shows?
[01:23:37]  Well, you know, what we have here, if there was more gas, if there was a contact wound to hear, it's not a contact wound.
[01:23:43]  I understand.
[01:23:44]  The gas, you know, you're wanting me to say yes or no, and I can't because I have the knowledge to explain how this relates to examining the body.
[01:23:55]  I don't give theoretical talks or, you know, I don't start looking up in this book while I'm doing an autopsy.
[01:24:01]  I use my practical reasoning and my experience and knowledge of.
[01:24:07]  How do you think she's playing?
[01:24:09]  Megan, pathology and doing autopsies is every bit as much of an art as it is a science.
[01:24:17]  Certain pathologists have their own sequence of events on how they reach their conclusions.
[01:24:23]  I differ than you, surprisingly.
[01:24:26]  She's quirky.
[01:24:28]  We want our pathologists and our coroners to be quirky.
[01:24:30]  They're not people people.
[01:24:32]  They like to put their headphones on or put ACDC on the speakers and then start cutting and sawing and doing what they do and do their dizzle.
[01:24:42]  That's who she is.
[01:24:42]  You could tell she's a little quirky because she spends a time alone with dead bodies.
[01:24:47]  And don't forget, Dr. Pombach directly contradicted the expert du jour who played all five positions on the offensive line for the defense, Mr. Sutton, the accident reconstructionist who was originally on the boat case.
[01:25:03]  He said that it was an upward shot.
[01:25:05]  Dr. Pombach contradicted him and said it was a contact wound shot from the head down.
[01:25:12]  So we went from a 5'2 vigilante to a 6'4 middle linebacker who's shooting down.
[01:25:21]  And I just think it's spitballing.
[01:25:23]  It's almost throwing spaghetti on a wall and seeing what's going to stick.
[01:25:27]  I'm not saying that they didn't posit a possibility that there could be two shooters, but there could have been 10 shooters.
[01:25:34]  And Dr. Kinsey in the rebuttal testimony said it could be one.
[01:25:38]  I can't rule out that there could be more.
[01:25:41]  But the fact of the matter is, it makes no sense.
[01:25:44]  Listen, the FBI and SLED have confidential informants all over this state.
[01:25:49]  If there was a vigilante shooter or there was a cartel shooting, they have feelers out there.
[01:25:55]  Listen, if two people shoot somebody, the only way you could keep a secret is kill the other one.
[01:26:00]  Two people, somebody would have spilled the guts or somebody would have traded information on this killing over the past two years.
[01:26:06]  Again, all of the evidence leads to Alex because an innocent man doesn't lie on fundamental facts that would have aided police to find out who the killers were if it wasn't him.
[01:26:20]  Very powerful argument.
[01:26:22]  Yes.
[01:26:22]  All right.
[01:26:22]  But here's what we'll stay on.
[01:26:24]  I want to be fair to the defense.
[01:26:25]  Another theme of theirs, Dave, which is Sled, South Carolina law enforcement, blew this case.
[01:26:31]  They were sloppy.
[01:26:32]  It was disgusting.
[01:26:33]  It was poorly handled.
[01:26:34]  They didn't secure the scene.
[01:26:36]  People were traipsing all over it to the point where even the brain matter of Paul was left over for Alex's brother to find the next day.
[01:26:47]  Here's John Martin Murdoch testifying to that.
[01:26:50]  It's SOT 17.
[01:26:52]  I walked over to the feed room and y'all have heard the descriptions.
[01:26:57]  Y'all saw it.
[01:26:58]  I've never seen pictures and I've told them before coming to this court and I was not going to see pictures.
[01:27:04]  But y'all can imagine what I experienced.
[01:27:06]  It had not been cleaned up.
[01:27:07]  I saw blood.
[01:27:08]  I saw brains.
[01:27:09]  I saw pieces of skull.
[01:27:12]  And when I say brains, it could just be tissue.
[01:27:15]  I don't know what I was saying.
[01:27:16]  It was just, it was terrible.
[01:27:20]  And for some reason, I thought it was mine.
[01:27:24]  Something that I needed to do for Paul to clean it up.
[01:27:29]  I felt like it was the right thing to do.
[01:27:33]  I felt like I owed him.
[01:27:35]  And I started cleaning.
[01:27:39]  And I can promise you, no mother or father or aunt or uncle should ever have to see and do what I did that day.
[01:27:51]  Dave, your thoughts on that?
[01:27:54]  It is criminal defense lawyer 101 to blame the investigators, especially when you have a relatively weak case.
[01:28:02]  I mean, we saw this from the O.J. Simpson trial.
[01:28:04]  If all else fails, just blame the investigators.
[01:28:07]  And that's what they're doing here.
[01:28:09]  And it's expected.
[01:28:11]  But a reason why law enforcement was kind of sloppy was that from the beginning, Murdoch had special treatment.
[01:28:18]  He was a big name in the community.
[01:28:19]  They treated him with kid gloves.
[01:28:21]  And so, I mean, yeah, could they have done it better?
[01:28:24]  Sure.
[01:28:25]  But it doesn't take away from the core question of why did Alec Murdoch lie from day one about the death of his son and his wife.
[01:28:36]  As Eric said, if you want to help these investigators do their job, you don't lie to them.
[01:28:40]  You don't make it harder on them.
[01:28:41]  On one end, you're saying they're sloppy.
[01:28:43]  On the other end, you're saying, yeah, I lied to them.
[01:28:45]  So I made their job even harder.
[01:28:47]  So in the end, this verdict will depend on whether the jurors buy his new story that he waited a couple of years to tell for the first time on the sand.
[01:28:57]  That the reason why he was so deceitful all along was because the drugs made him do it.
[01:29:03]  And really, this case comes down to that.
[01:29:05]  A lot of this other stuff, to me, is window dressing.
[01:29:08]  Yeah.
[01:29:08]  Maggie.
[01:29:08]  I'm not wrong about that.
[01:29:10]  Go ahead.
[01:29:10]  Maggie, I've never met a criminal defense attorney that liked an accident scene.
[01:29:16]  He's never stood up in court and said, you know, I have no questions of this investigator.
[01:29:20]  I think he did a brilliant job on securing the scene and preserving the evidence.
[01:29:25]  If they took 500 photographs, Dick would say they should have taken a thousand.
[01:29:29]  If they did clay prints of 10 footprints, he should have said they should have done clay footprints of 20.
[01:29:36]  Again, just like pathology, it's an art, not a science.
[01:29:40]  But all of the evidence, even if more was garnered from the scene, still pointed to Alex because the timeline, to me, the most powerful evidence was OnStar.
[01:29:51]  OnStar couldn't lie.
[01:29:52]  It's satellite evidence.
[01:29:53]  You can't say, well, it's a cell tower and there's bad reception.
[01:29:57]  That I felt like I was driving in the car.
[01:30:00]  Didn't you, Dave, on that OnStar with Alex as they were going through it?
[01:30:04]  Didn't you feel like it each stopped?
[01:30:05]  But why?
[01:30:06]  Explain for the audience that hasn't been paying that close attention to why the OnStar was so critical.
[01:30:11]  It was when he drove his car from his house, we believe after the murders, over to his mother's house and then back.
[01:30:18]  As Dave said, look, if your whole purpose, and you made a somewhat misstatement, he brought Maggie to Mizell to go visit the father because the father was dying.
[01:30:29]  He was in hospice and was taken to the hospital.
[01:30:31]  That was the whole purpose of Maggie coming from Edisto Beach to Mizzell.
[01:30:36]  And as it turns out, he doesn't go visit the father.
[01:30:39]  He goes and visits his mother twice.
[01:30:42]  And Dave said he could have easily just taken a small left turn and gone out the other driveway, make sure that Paul and Maggie were okay.
[01:30:50]  But what he did is he started with his alibi by getting on that phone at 9.06, calling Chris Wilson, texting Chris Wilson, calling John Marvin.
[01:31:00]  And when he drove, I've been to Mizell.
[01:31:02]  I've been on that property and I've been down that road before it was paved.
[01:31:06]  You can't go 80 miles an hour on a country road that has no streetlights because deer will come out from everywhere.
[01:31:13]  The OnStar showed exactly how long it took him to get to Almeida.
[01:31:19]  He went straight.
[01:31:21]  He accelerated up to the point of 80 miles an hour at an average speed of 64 miles an hour.
[01:31:27]  He got to Almeida.
[01:31:28]  It doesn't show him parking in front of the house.
[01:31:31]  It shows him going all the way behind on this pristine emerald green grass where he supposedly parked.
[01:31:38]  He stayed for 19 minutes.
[01:31:41]  Of course, he tried to tell Shelly Smith it was 30 to 40 minutes because that would have blown his timeline.
[01:31:46]  He then got back in his car and OnStar showed he stopped at the end of his driveway to do more text messaging is what the state posited.
[01:31:56]  He claimed that his phone had dropped down into the under his seat.

=== Maggie Phone Timeline Discrepancies (03:48) ===

[01:31:59]  He was looking for it.
[01:32:00]  And then on the way home, as we were driving with him, he slows down to 40 miles an hour and he chucks Maggie's phone out of the window into the woods.
[01:32:11]  And then he speeds up again.
[01:32:13]  Now, cartel members aren't going to take Maggie's phone.
[01:32:16]  They're going to leave it right there.
[01:32:17]  They're never going to touch the phone.
[01:32:19]  But he took the phone and then it and then it shows.
[01:32:23]  Why does the prosecution argue he took Maggie's phone?
[01:32:26]  Paul's phone remained with Paul, but the prosecution argues he took Maggie's and then chucked it midway home.
[01:32:33]  He couldn't take Paul's phone because he put his blood on it because he grabbed it and then he stuffed it back in the pocket.
[01:32:40]  I don't know.
[01:32:41]  You know, there's no reason when a man's in a frenetic state like he must have been in on trying to clean himself up, take that shower, get rid of the seafoam green shirt, rot the guns up into the tarp.
[01:32:56]  He was in a manic frenetic state.
[01:32:58]  So, you know, I don't know.
[01:33:00]  Do you know, Dave, why they posit he took the phone?
[01:33:04]  You know, I don't think they ever came up with an explanation.
[01:33:07]  One thing, Megan, is that it's a real pity that the phone, when Alec apparently threw it out the window at 42 miles an hour, that the phone didn't turn on.
[01:33:18]  Sometimes the phone will turn on.
[01:33:19]  You know, the screen will come on.
[01:33:20]  If that had happened, then they would have located the exact time not only the phone turned on, but where Alec's car was.
[01:33:30]  And this case would have been solved in a minute.
[01:33:34]  But because the phone did not turn on, that's Alec's lucky break here.
[01:33:38]  He was able to claim, no, it wasn't me.
[01:33:40]  I wasn't the one who threw the phone out the window.
[01:33:42]  It was the murderer, the alleged murderer.
[01:33:44]  I mean, I'll say something else about John Marvin Murdoch's testimony.
[01:33:48]  He's Alex's brother.
[01:33:49]  The other thing that was good about it for the defense, and I hear you, Eric, on the cross, you know, you love your brother.
[01:33:54]  If he gets convicted, it's not so good for your family or all the reputation.
[01:33:57]  I get it.
[01:33:58]  But John Marvin was very likable and seemed kind of sweet.
[01:34:04]  And you're looking at him and you're thinking, that's the brother.
[01:34:07]  How far could the two apples have fallen?
[01:34:10]  Like, he loves Alec.
[01:34:12]  He's kind of vouching for Alec in being willing to be a defense witness.
[01:34:16]  He knows what Alec's accused of, but he's here on his behalf.
[01:34:20]  Couldn't be.
[01:34:21]  You know, it's just, I think it's even more about his demeanor and his likability than it is anything else.
[01:34:26]  Am I wrong?
[01:34:27]  But he wasn't there for the key three hours.
[01:34:31]  The material facts are between seven o'clock and 10 o'clock at night.
[01:34:37]  So even Buster wasn't there.
[01:34:39]  I get it that their testimony shows we support our brother.
[01:34:43]  It was more for appearance purposes for the jury to see Buster and John Marvin and his brother Randolph and Lynn, his sister, sit behind him the entire trial.
[01:34:53]  And then for both the Buster and for John Marvin to get on the stand, it sends a signal to the jury, hey, these guys are insiders and they're still testifying for him.
[01:35:04]  So it's more appearance as opposed to what he said.
[01:35:07]  That's what I think.
[01:35:08]  Just a final word.
[01:35:10]  They're taking a break now for the lunch and the prosecutor is still in the middle of closing.
[01:35:13]  So it's probably going to be a long one.
[01:35:14]  Otherwise, they wouldn't have interrupted his closing for lunch.
[01:35:17]  And we are told the jury will deliberate on weekends and that this judge is, Judge Newman is known for holding juries.
[01:35:25]  He will not let them off the hook too early if they struggle to reach a verdict.
[01:35:29]  This is according to reporter Avery Wilkes.
[01:35:31]  He won't let the jury off the hook too early.
[01:35:34]  So, you know, if it's a hung jury, they're going to have to be really hung.
[01:35:36]  They're going to have to dig in there.
[01:35:38]  Dave and Eric, thank you.
[01:35:39]  Thank you both so much.
[01:35:40]  We'll be back tomorrow.
[01:35:44]  Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
[01:35:46]  No BS, no agenda, and no