In the early hours of February 24, 2019, a seventeen-foot-long fishing boat entered a narrow coastal inlet near Beaufort, South Carolina. It was foggy, the passengers were navigating with a flashlight, and they had been drinking all evening. At around 2:30 A.M., a bridge loomed up in the dark, and the boat hit pilings before running up the nearest bank, with a gashed hull. Three of the six people on board, all young adults, were thrown into the icy water. Two resurfaced, but there was no sign of the third, a nineteen-year-old named Mallory Beach. Her body was found a week later, in a marsh a few miles away.
There was some uncertainty at first about who was steering the boat at the moment of impact, but it was known to be one of two young men. Both had consumed alcohol, though the survivors reported that one of them, a nineteen-year-old named Paul Murdaugh, was more inebriated than the other. He had slipped into an aggressive alter ego, nicknamed Timmy by his friends. One of the passengers later testified, “When they can tell he’s drunk, somebody will say, ‘All right. Here comes Timmy. We got to go.’” The boat belonged to Paul’s family, and he was behind the wheel for most of the evening. However, Paul’s friend Connor Cook had sometimes taken over while Paul stepped away to argue with his girlfriend, eventually hitting her. Whoever was steering faced dire consequences if found responsible for the accident. But there was a significant disparity of power and privilege: Connor was a construction worker, and Paul was a Murdaugh.
The surname, pronounced “Murdock,” was a potent charm in the state’s southernmost region, known as the Lowcountry. Since 1920, three generations of Murdaughs had presided as solicitors—prosecutors—over the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit, while also amassing a small fortune from private litigation through the family firm. The solicitorship passed out of the family in 2005, but Paul’s father, Alex, served as a volunteer in the office and apparently retained close ties to local law enforcement.
Four of the survivors of the boat accident were brought to the hospital, where an officer entered Paul’s room to take a statement. Paul was just starting when his father and his grandfather barged in. “I am his lawyer starting now,” the grandfather, Randolph Murdaugh III, told the officer, according to law-enforcement records. “He isn’t giving any statements.” While Randolph stood watch, Alex Murdaugh began wandering around the hospital, in an apparent effort, as one witness put it, “to orchestrate something.”
A towering ginger-haired man, Alex was hard to miss. Numerous witnesses observed him going in and out of the survivors’ rooms. A hospital employee heard him repeatedly warn Connor Cook not to say anything. In a later deposition, Cook recalled Alex promising him that “everything was going to be all right. I just needed to keep my mouth shut and tell them I didn’t know who was driving.”
As the investigation continued, however, Cook and his parents came to suspect that the Murdaughs were trying to pin the blame on him, possibly with the connivance of local law enforcement. Fortunately for Cook, the other survivors eventually testified with near-certainty—in one case revising a previous statement—that Paul had crashed the boat, and in April, 2019, Paul was charged with three crimes, including boating under the influence resulting in death. But the Murdaughs’ ability to shape events was far from exhausted.
Judges in South Carolina are elected not by voters but by the state’s General Assembly. To defend Paul, who pleaded not guilty, the Murdaughs hired Dick Harpootlian, a powerful state senator and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Harpootlian’s edge is his built-in advantage with the judges,” a prominent Charleston attorney told me. An acquittal for Paul could have placed Cook under a cloud of suspicion, and permanently muddied the question of culpability in Mallory Beach’s death.
But there would be no trial. On the night of June 7, 2021, the case took the first in a series of brutal swerves that were to become its hallmark. Paul and his mother, Maggie, were found dead outside the kennels at Moselle, the Murdaughs’ seventeen-hundred-acre hunting estate. It was Alex who reported the crime, calling 911 shortly after ten o’clock. He told police that he’d just returned home after spending most of the evening out. Paul had been shot at close range twice, with a shotgun. Maggie had been shot multiple times, with an assault rifle.
Like most observers, I assumed that the murders were vengeance (or preëmptive justice) for Beach’s death. A radically different possibility was raised by a local media site, fitsNews, which reported that Alex was a person of interest in the killings. But the claim was widely dismissed as a baseless slur against a grieving husband and father.
Three months later, another swerve: Alex again called 911, telling the dispatcher that he’d been shot in the head by a stranger while changing a flat tire on his car. His story seemed to confirm the existence of a wrathful nemesis stalking the family. But a passerby who also called 911 reported that the scene looked like a “setup,” and Alex’s story quickly unravelled. While the fabrication was falling apart, the Murdaughs’ law firm—known by the unfortunate acronym pmped—disclosed that he had been pushed out of the firm a day before the incident, for allegedly misappropriating funds. In an interview on the “Today” show, Harpootlian, who was now representing Alex, declared that his client was suffering from opioid addiction, and had used a significant portion of the stolen money to buy drugs. Alex was in rehab, full of remorse and asking for prayers. And he’d revised his account of the roadside incident: he claimed that, overwhelmed by the loss of his wife and son, he’d persuaded a distant cousin who did odd jobs for him, Curtis (Eddie) Smith, to shoot him dead and make it look like murder, so that his surviving son, Buster, could collect on a ten-million-dollar life-insurance policy. Cousin Eddie had botched the job.
Alex and Eddie were promptly charged with attempted insurance fraud. But the picture soon blurred again. About two weeks after the incident, Alex showed up for a bond hearing with no sign of injury to his head. (When I asked Harpootlian about this, his response was terse: “Good hair.”) In the “Today” interview, Harpootlian indicated that the suicide-exemption clause in Alex’s policy had expired. There was no reason to fake a murder. Meanwhile, Eddie was denying everything. “If I’d a shot him, he’d be dead,” he told reporters.
I’d been interested in the case since the murders of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh, but it was this inexplicable roadside incident which turned me into a full-on Reddit-scraping, podcast-devouring follower. Years ago, I wrote a novel in which the protagonist sets up a similar suicide-disguised-as-murder scheme for an insurance payout. I’d worried at the time that this turn was a stretch, and it had nagged at me ever since. But here was real-life vindication of my plotting, with the added twist that even the underlying suicide story appeared to be a fiction. The narrative seemed to be entering the realm of deepest noir, complete with serial fake-outs, intimations of corruption, and a true psychological puzzle at its center. Who was this jolly-looking, ruddy-cheeked attorney, smiling like Santa in one family photograph after another, his arms draped lovingly around his wife and sons?
I flew to Charleston and drove across the coastal plain to Hampton, the Murdaugh seat for a century. The terrain there is the gray-green of Corot landscapes, but flatter and drabber, with Dollar General stores and El Cheapo gas stations instead of viaducts and windmills. Hampton has seen better days, and a former Westinghouse plant stands as a poignant monument. The laminates it once manufactured were close to indestructible (they were used for bowling-alley floors), but the plant itself is in ruins.
“Just need a minute to send a quick e-mail and then three hours to wonder if the tone was appropriate.” Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz Link copied
The only other structures of any scale in town are the red brick edifices of the First Baptist Church, the law office where Alex used to work, and the county courthouse. A courthouse guard showed me the trial room, pointing out ancestral portraits of Murdaughs staring down at the jury box. I asked him what he thought of Alex. “Real nice gentleman,” he said, but declined to speak further. Nearby, a county employee explained to me that some locals were too afraid of Alex to talk openly.
By now, Alex’s lawyers had confirmed that their client was indeed a person of interest in the killing of his wife and son. No motive for an act of such inconceivable horror had been offered. People reported that Maggie had consulted a divorce lawyer weeks before the shooting, but that hardly amounted to an explanation for the slaughter. (Harpootlian has said that there is no evidence for the claim.) Online forums were full of theories, but they seemed derived more from Norse myth than from human psychology: a typical conjecture proposed that Paul had murdered his mother during an argument, then was killed by his enraged father. (Alex’s attorneys declined to respond to questions about many of the allegations. He has generally denied wrongdoing and has disputed facts about his case in the media and in court.)
