CBS News
Convicted killer Alex Murdaugh sentenced to 40 years in federal prison for stealing from clients and his law firm
For maybe the last time, Alex Murdaugh, in a prison jumpsuit instead of the suit he used to wear, shuffled into a courtroom Monday in South Carolina and was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison.
Murdaugh was punished – this time in federal court – for stealing from clients and his law firm. The 55-year-old disbarred attorney is already serving a life sentence without parole in a state prison for killing his wife and son.
A report by federal agents recommended a prison sentence between 17 1/2 and just under 22 years.
The 40-year sentence will be insurance on top of insurance. Along with the life sentence, Murdaugh pleaded guilty and was ordered to spend 27 years in prison in state court on financial crime charges. The federal sentence will run at the same time as his state prison term and he likely will have to serve all 40 years if his murder convictions are overturned on appeal.
U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel said he sentenced Murdaugh to a harsher punishment than suggested because Murdaugh stole from “the most needy, vulnerable people” like a client who became a quadriplegic after a crash, a state trooper who was injured on the job, and a trust fund meant for children whose parents were killed in a wreck.
“They placed all their problems and all their hopes on Mr. Murdaugh and it is from those people he abused and stole. It is a difficult set of actions to understand,” Gergel said.
The 22 federal counts are the final charges outstanding for Murdaugh, who three years ago was an established lawyer negotiating multimillion-dollar settlements in tiny Hampton County, where members of his family served as elected prosecutors and ran the area’s premier law firm for nearly a century.
Murdaugh will also have to pay nearly $9 million in restitution.
Prosecutors are asking to give Murdaugh a harsher sentence because FBI agents think he is not telling the whole truth about what happened to $6 million he stole and whether a so-far unnamed attorney helped his criminal schemes.
Andrew J. Whitaker / AP
Murdaugh’s largest scheme involved the sons of his longtime housekeeper Gloria Satterfield. She died in a fall at the family home. Murdaugh promised to take care of Satterfield’s family, then worked with a lawyer friend who pleaded guilty on a scheme to steal $4 million in a wrongful death settlement with the family’s insurer.
In all, Murdaugh took settlement money from or inflated fees or expenses for more than two dozen clients. Prosecutors said the FBI found 11 more victims than the state investigation found and that Murdaugh stole nearly $1.3 million from them.
Murdaugh again apologized to his victims at his sentencing Monday, saying he felt “guilt, sorrow, shame, embarrassment, humiliation.”
Just like at his state sentencing, Murdaugh offered to meet with his victims so they can say what they want to say and “more closely inspect my sincerity.”
“There’s not enough time and I don’t possess a sufficient vocabulary to adequately portray to you in words the magnitude of how I feel about the things I did,” Murdaugh said.
Murdaugh blamed nearly two decades of addiction to opioids for his crimes and said he was proud is has been clean for 937 days.
Gergel scoffed at him blaming drugs.
“No truly impaired person could pull off these complex transactions,” the judge said of the maze of fake accounts, juggled checks and money passed from one place to another to hide the thefts for nearly 20 years.
Murdaugh was convicted a year ago of killing his younger son Paul with a shotgun and his wife, Maggie, with a rifle. While he has pleaded guilty to dozens of financial crimes, he adamantly denies he killed them and testified in his own defense.
Evidence at the trial included bloody crime scene images, Murdaugh’s interviews with investigators, details about Maggie Murdaugh’s autopsy, cell phone evidence and testimony from a forensic engineer.
There will be years of appeals in the murder cases. In January, a South Carolina judge denied his bid for a new trial after his defense team accused a clerk of court with tampering with a jury.
The case has captivated true crime fans, spawning dozens of podcast episodes and thousands of social media posts. It continued its odd twists in the days before Monday’s sentencing hearing.
Lawyers for Murdaugh said an FBI agent who conducted a polygraph test asked Murdaugh if he could keep a secret, then confided he had just examined notorious Dutch killer Joran van der Sloot.
Murdaugh flunked that polygraph test, according to prosecutors who want a harsher sentence. Each of the 22 counts Murdaugh pleaded guilty to in federal court carried a minimum of 20 years in prison. Some carry a 30-year maximum.
The defense said the alleged odd behavior and unusual questions from a FBI agent caused Murdaugh to fail the test.
Prosecutors want to keep many of the FBI statements secret, saying they are still investigating the missing money and who might have helped Murdaugh to steal it. They say making the information public would jeopardize an ongoing grand jury investigation.
Those aren’t early Halloween decorations: giant Joro spiders, known for parachuting through the air, were spotted in Pennsylvania this month.
Six of the spiders were reported on Sept. 5, according to Joro Watch, an interactive monitoring program developed by the University of Georgia’s Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health. An entomologist visited Pennsylvania’s Bucks County and verified there were adult Joro spiders there.
What are Joro spiders?
Joro spiders, which are an invasive species native to Asia, can shoot out long strands of silk that get caught by the wind, carrying them through the air. Some have called them parachuting spiders because of the way they move.
They create large webs that can be up to 10 feet wide, according to PennState Extension.
David Madison / Getty Images
Adult females are large and brightly colored, with legs up to 4 inches long, according to experts. Males are much smaller. While female Joro spiders are about an inch long, male Joro spiders have a body length of less than half an inch.
Female Joro spiders, known for their yellow and gray abdomens, will lay egg sacs holding 400 to 500 eggs.
The spread of Joro spiders — where are they headed?
Joro spiders were first found in the U.S. in Georgia in 2014, but experts believe that the invasive species may have arrived as early as 2010. Joro spiders have spread across the South in the years since. They’ve now been reported across more than half a dozen states.
In 2022, PennState Extension said that it was likely Joro spiders “will be able to spread throughout eastern North America at least as far north as Pennsylvania and possibly further in warmer, coastal areas.” Researchers there thought it may take 35 years for Joro spiders to reach southeastern Pennsylvania, but said there were two ways Joro spiders could reach Pennsylvania more quickly.
One was if young and small Joro spiders were transported tens to hundreds of miles through the air after being picked up by strong winds and storms. The other way would be if they were transported to new areas by humans.
José R. Ramírez-Garofalo, an ecologist at Rutgers University’s Lockwood Lab and the president of Protectors of Pine Oak Woods on Staten Island, in April told SI Live that “it is a matter of when, not if” the spiders arrive in New York and New Jersey.
Are Joro spiders dangerous?
While Joro spiders do have venom, their venom is weak. They also have small fangs, which makes it difficult to pierce human skin.
“We have no evidence that they’ve done any damage to a person or a pet,” Clemson University assistant professor Dave Coyle, who has a doctorate in entomology, previously said.
If a bite does happen, PennState Extension said that it’s less painful than a bee sting, and any localized pain and redness would quickly resolve.
More U.S. cities and states are starting to say “yes, in my backyard” as they struggle to meet the housing needs of growing populations.
The “YIMBY” movement is a political effort to tackle the country’s housing shortage by increasing the housing supply with strategies like changing zoning codes and other regulations that limit home density. The United States is millions of homes short of what’s needed to meet demand, according to the national nonprofit group “Up for Growth.”
Minneapolis resident Bernice Duncan has been searching for a new home with more space for more than five years. The telehealth professional works from home in a cramped two-bedroom apartment she shares with her two adult sons.
“Everybody is not able to move freely, like you would in a in a house or, you know, having your own office space,” said Duncan.
During the years she’s been looking, property values have soared. With a $1,600 monthly housing budget, she says she’s been priced out of the market.
“It’s been a struggle,” Duncan said. “As the economy continues to grow, your paycheck don’t,” she added. “You’re not going to pay less than $2,000.”
Saying “yes” to more housing
Twin-Cities YIMBY was formed in 2023 to advocate for policies that will generate more affordable housing options for people like Duncan. The group supports the elimination of zoning restrictions to allow for more home density across the Minneapolis area.
“In the past five years, our median housing price has increased by $100,000, which is a huge increase” said Paige Kahle, a realtor who founded Twin Cities YIMBY along with colleagues Nichole Hayden and Meghan Howard.
YIMBYs have been building a coalition of pro-housing advocates across the country to counter those who say “not in my back yard,” known as NIMBYs.
“I think it’s getting easier. But literally when you go to the local meetings, the city council meetings, planning commission meetings, there’s still NIMBYs that are very loud and very organized and often kind of angry because they don’t want this kind of housing near them,” said Kahle.
But without a plan to bring housing costs down, Kahle says the shortage is hurting home buyers and renters alike.
“They’re paying 50% of their income, 60% of their income on housing, which just isn’t sustainable,” she said. ”We need more housing and we need it quickly,” said Kahle. “Traditionally, how we’ve addressed the housing crisis is through subsidies, massive subsidies to bring down the cost of housing for folks. But there just aren’t enough subsidies in the world to do that. So, we really need to look at these other mechanisms to increase the density and lower the cost of housing.”
Minneapolis 2040: The city’s plan
Addressing these concerns is the goal of the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan. Passed in 2018, the ambitious bipartisan bill implemented historic zoning reforms to increase the number of available housing units including:
- The elimination of single-family-only zoning to permit build duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes in all neighborhoods.
- Height minimums for new residential buildings in high-density zones.
- The elimination of minimum parking requirements for new housing developments.
The plan has faced opposition from some homeowners who argue that increased density could undermine the character and charm of single-family neighborhoods.
“The 2040 Plan will hurt the uniqueness and architectural heritage of many neighborhoods,” said one opponent during a 2018 City Planning Commission meeting.
Implementation of the plan was paused in 2022 after environmental groups filed a lawsuit arguing the plan may have severe unintended consequences to the environment. In May, a state appeals court ruled to lift an injunction on the plan, and just last month the Minnesota State Supreme Court denied a petition for further review of the objections, clearing the way for the plan to continue.
“People want a place that they can live, [where] they can afford to raise their family, that’s safe and affordable. So, it’s really been part of the … regional conversation as well as the national conversation,” said Alene Tchourumoff of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve.
Over the next decade, the Minneapolis Fed is using multiple data sources to track the economic impact of these changes made as part of the 2040 plan.
“We really wanted to have a deeper understanding of what the effects of the policy change would be, recognizing the fact that these important policy changes in housing often take a long time to actually manifest,” said Tchourumoff.
There is some promising early data. According to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust, between 2017 and 2022, nearly 21,000 new units were permitted in Minneapolis — most in buildings with 20 or more units. In that same time, rents in the city rose by just 1% — far less than the rest of Minnesota, which saw a 14% rent increase.
Deregulation across the country
As Minnesota lawmakers consider expanding these rezoning reforms statewide, other states such as California, Oregon, Massachusetts and Montana have already implemented similar YIMBY policies.
The changes in Minneapolis are already making a difference for residents like Rebecca Hemmans, who became a first-time homeowner at 67 after viewing nearly 100 listings.
“I had this dream about living in a single-family home and sitting on my porch with my table of lemonade and glasses for the neighbors to wave at,” Hemmans said.
To accommodate her budget, she chose to adjust her dream — instead of a single-family home, she purchased an attached townhome, and she’s happy with the compromise.
“I don’t have to check with the landlord to say, “Hey, can I do this or do that?” she said. “If I want to paint my walls orange, I can do that.”
CBS News
Iranian hackers attempted to interest Biden staffers with stolen Trump campaign info, FBI says
Iranian hackers sought to interest President Biden’s campaign in information stolen from the rival campaign of former President Donald Trump, sending unsolicited emails to people connected to the Democratic president in an effort to interfere in the 2024 election, the FBI and other federal agencies said Wednesday.
There’s no evidence that any of the recipients responded, officials said, preventing the hacked information from surfacing in the final months of the closely contested election.
The hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people who were associated with Mr. Biden’s campaign before he dropped out. The emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to a U.S. government statement.
In late July, officials with the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security said that Tehran had started a campaign that was working to weaken Trump’s candidacy, while Russia was attempting to do the opposite.
Last month, sources told CBS News that the FBI was investigating whether Iranian hackers had targeted people associated with both the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns.
In response to the revelation, Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein told CBS News in a statement Wednesday evening that “we’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign,” adding that “a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt.”
Finkelstein said the campaign has “cooperated with the appropriate law enforcement authorities since we were made aware that individuals associated with the then-Biden campaign were among the intended victims of this foreign influence operation.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told CBS News in a statement that “this is further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because they know President Trump will restore his tough sanctions and stand against their reign of terror.”
The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets — Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post — were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what it received.
Politico reported that it began receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source —an AOL email account identified only as “Robert”— passed along what appeared to be a research dossier that the campaign had apparently done on the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The document was dated Feb. 23, almost five months before Trump selected Vance as his running mate.
A Microsoft threat intelligence report last month provided examples about the actions of Iranian groups seeking to influence the 2024 election.
