The Murdaugh trial is twisted true crime at its peak

The murder trial of prominent South Carolina patriarch Alex Murdaugh has it all: two deaths, a lethal drunken boat accident, a suicide-for-hire plot, the mysterious death of the family’s housekeeper and a suspicious hit-and-run.

That’s why the case has caught the attention of true crime fanatics and the national media — ABC News, Discovery, HBO, CNN and Netflix have all taken a stab at various documentaries and podcasts. Others still might find themselves lost in the schadenfreude of watching a powerful and wealthy family descend into tragedy.

The Murdaugh family has long exercised a significant amount of legal influence in the Low Country region of South Carolina. Alex Murdaugh worked in the family law firm, while his father, grandfather and great-grandfather served consecutively as district solicitor, a position that puts them in charge of prosecuting all criminal cases in a particular region.

Over the past near decade, Alex’s immediate family has been involved in a series of scandals that have tarnished the family legacy. The trial is centered on the deaths of Maggie and Paul, Alex’s wife and youngest son, respectively, in June 2021. However, Murdaugh is also facing separate charges on nearly 100 financial crimes. If he is convicted of those, it could result in Murdaugh spending the rest of his life in prison.

The Murdaugh downfall starts back in 2015 when Buster, Alex’s oldest son, was brought up in connection with the killing of Stephen Smith. Smith, a gay teenager, was found dead from blunt force trauma in the middle of a road. Witnesses claimed that Buster was in some kind of a relationship with Smith, but law enforcement ultimately classified the death as a hit-and-run with no suspects, even though Smith’s body showed no other signs of being hit by a car.

Three years later, in 2018, the Murdaughs’ housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, hit her head after falling down the front steps of the family’s estate and died from resulting complications. There was no autopsy performed, and a coroner listed the cause of death as “natural.” Murdaugh encouraged Satterfield’s family to sue his insurance company for wrongful death, and although the Satterfields won to the tune of $4.3 million, they never received the money. Murdaugh is accused of stealing the settlement for himself.

The following year, Alex’s youngest son Paul was charged with three felonies related to a boat accident. Witnesses say Paul was heavily intoxicated and driving his friends on the family boat when he lost control and crashed into a bridge. Mallory Beach was thrown from the boat and was found dead over a week later. Several other passengers were seriously injured. Some have claimed that Alex Murdaugh tried to get them to deny that Paul was the one driving the boat and wanted to set them up with Murdaugh family lawyers. Beach’s family filed a wrongful death suit against several members of the Murdaugh family.

It’s here where prosecutors say Alex started to spiral out of control. By spring 2021, the wrongful death suit had begun to expose Alex’s financial information, which suggested he was pilfering money from clients and his law firm. In response, Maggie Murdaugh ordered her own forensic accounting of the family’s finances. Alex was also battling a twenty-year addiction to opioids.

On June 7, 2021, Alex called the police to report that Maggie and Paul had been “shot badly” at the family’s hunting lodge near their dog kennels. Maggie was killed with a rifle while Paul was killed with a shotgun.

Prosecutors argue that Alex murdered Maggie and Paul to distract from his financial crimes but, lacking a murder weapon and DNA evidence, have relied on building a circumstantial case. They note that Alex texted Maggie asking her to meet him at the lodge so they could visit his ailing father together, and Maggie relayed to a friend that her husband was acting “fishy.” Alex also reached out to Paul to ask him to do some work at the lodge. Could Alex have lured them to their deaths?

Alex claimed that he never visited the dog kennels that evening before finding his wife and son’s bodies. He said he was inside the house napping at the time of their deaths. However, the prosecution presented a bombshell piece of evidence in court last week that contradicted Alex’s alibi. Witnesses testified to hearing Alex’s voice in the background of a cell phone video recorded by Paul shortly before he was killed.

There are other parts of Alex’s timeline that evening that don’t appear to add up. For example, he left the house to visit his parents without physically checking to see if Maggie was still planning to join him, at which point he would have discovered her dead body. Also, Alex’s alibi requires the jury to believe that the seven gunshots used to kill Maggie and Paul did not wake Alex up from his nap or cause him to go investigate.

The defense is now making its case. On Tuesday, Alex’s surviving son, Buster, took the stand. He tearfully recalled being with his girlfriend when his dad called him to let him know about the deaths.

Alex asked if Buster was “sitting down” and “sounded odd and he told me that my mom and my brother had been shot.” Buster testified that his father was “destroyed” by the loss of Maggie and Paul.

The defense has questioned if Alex would have been able to murder his family in cold blood shortly after he was heard cheerfully talking to the dogs in the kennels on Paul’s cell phone video. They also noted his horror at the crime scene; Alex told officers that night, “That’s my boy over there. I can see — I can see his brain.”

The Murdaugh story doesn’t end there. In September 2021, a few months after Maggie and Paul’s deaths, Alex’s law firm accused him of taking millions in missing funds. Just a few days before his resignation from the firm, Alex called police to say that someone had shot him in the head. Murdaugh later admitted that he hired someone to kill him in a suicide-for-hire scheme so that Buster could recover $10 million in insurance money. Murdaugh was worried that if he committed suicide, his son could not retrieve the cash from the insurance company.

Investigators recently reopened the case into Stephen Smith’s death and said last year they will exhume Gloria Satterfield, the deceased housekeeper, to re-examine her cause of death.

Alex Murdaugh could conceivably be found not guilty of the murder of his wife and son, but it seems unlikely he’ll walk free from the plethora of financial crimes he is accused of. Not to mention he has effectively destroyed the family legacy that has been nearly a century in the making. Will this be enough to satisfy the Murdaugh family’s many alleged victims?