Wealth, luxury and power: Alex Murdaugh watched as his universe fell apart.
The fourth-generation scion of a dynasty of South Carolina lawyers whose great-grandfather, grandfather, and father served as chief prosecutors across much of the state and who founded a prestigious firm under the Murdaugh name, Alex became the missing link and the protagonist of the collapse of a legacy of more than a century.
Addicted to opiates and appearances, he was plagued by debts. The partners of the office demanded money from him. And in turn they pressured the courts to reveal his finances, a circumstance that could unravel the framework that he allegedly used for years to steal millions of dollars from clients and colleagues.
And suddenly, on June 7, 2021, his wife, Maggie, 52, and young son, Paul, 22, were found dead next to the kennel at their expensive 1,700-acre mansion and hunting estate, called Moselle.
They received bullet wounds from two different weapons, execution-style, finishing them off with shots to the head. The head of the family himself called 911 to report that he had found the bodies on his return from visiting his father.
The matter was unresolved for 13 months. But on July 14, 2022, Alex Murdaugh was indicted for the two murders.
Prosecutors claimed that, faced with the accumulation of crises that awaited him, he committed the double crime thinking that he would avoid the investigation by earning the mercy of the people if it appeared that unknown persons had killed his wife and son.
These days, Americans are fascinated by the trial against Murdaugh, 54, who pleaded not guilty. There are channels that broadcast it live and it is in all media.
Elements arise from the already fictional case on a daily basis. On Wednesday the hearing was suspended due to a bomb threat and the judge ordered this Friday that Lynn, the defendant’s sister, and Buston, his surviving son, sit in the background and not behind the protagonist and his defenders.
The son was banished for making obscene gestures at a lawyer and Lynn for giving her brother a book without permission. It was considered contraband because it was not known if it contained anything inappropriate. In jail they confiscated it. It was a John Grisham play, a court thriller called The Judge’s List, a novel and novelist more than appropriate for the occasion.
From the arrest for murder to the trial, the event has only gained in attraction, with a plot with more and more threads, more deaths, a suicide attempt by the defendant, for which he hired a gunman, and some ninety supplementary charges for fraud, money laundering or counterfeiting.
For these matters and even for the failed suicide (if it seemed like a crime, his son Buston would collect the death insurance) he was arrested on several occasions.
After the double murder, the police reopened the investigation into the death of Gloria Satterfield, the housekeeper who worked for the Murdaughs and who died in 2018 when she fell down the stairs of the Moselle mansion. It was classified as an accident, but the matter was seen differently when it was discovered that the defendant appropriated the millions that the insurance had paid for the relatives of the employee. At the moment there are no charges. The main line of defense is that that night someone went in to hunt Paul Mordaugh, who was out on bail and awaiting trial for killing a teenager when in 2019 he was driving a boat under the influence of alcohol. They say that he had received threats and that he had told his mother so.
But the prosecutors presented testimonies that dismantle the defendant’s alibi. They found messages in which he asked Maggie to be at the mansion that night. Everything indicates that there was a crisis in the marriage and she was in another family home. She agreed to go because he told her that she wanted to talk to him about her father, who was very sick.
Murdaugh confessed that he went to Moselle after visiting his father for 45 minutes at the residence where he was cared for. The employees declared, however, that she was only there for barely 20 minutes. In this way, she was able to return to the scene of the crime in time to commit the two murders.
A video, recorded by Paul, and sent to a friend, minutes before he and his mother died, was shown in the living room. Murdaugh’s voice is heard. As Grisham writes in The Judge’s List, “everything leaves a trace.”
According to prosecutors, the defendant tried to reinforce his alibi. Maggie, now deceased, still received several calls from her husband and a text message:
“Call me, darling”.