Alex Murdaugh spent most of the past year locked away from society in a county jail, yet he still managed to dominate news cycles on an almost daily basis across South Carolina and beyond.
The former Hampton attorney’s precipitous fall from grace became more of a Southern gothic marathon in 2022 as investigations multiplied, criminal charges piled up and more collateral players got sucked into the vortex of the swirling Murdaugh saga.
Along the way, Murdaugh’s legal problems morphed into a many-headed beast that has monopolized dockets in criminal and civil courts alike, spawning a lineup of lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants and potential witnesses that can take a scorecard to follow.
The 54-year-old scion of a Lowcountry legal dynasty ended the year staring down a double-murder trial scheduled for late January in the killings of his wife and son. Dozens of fraud, drug and money-laundering charges wait on the other side. So do nearly a dozen lawsuits aimed at clawing back money from his diminished fortune to compensate victims.
The blizzard of indictments, legal motions, counter motions and court proceedings in 2022 kept Murdaugh’s name in the public eye even as the man himself was squirreled away in a Midlands jail cell. His story dripped with intrigue, a salty stew of wealth, power, corruption, vice and violence. And it found a global audience.
The Murdaugh case is a fascinating tale that is “both salacious and significant,” said Randy Covington, a veteran television news journalist now on the faculty of the University of South Carolina. It has all the elements of a lurid potboiler while exposing malfeasance and serious, systemic flaws in oversight, Covington said.
“It’s a phenomenon but also an extraordinary story with so many layers, so many nuances to it,” he said. “It raises significant issues of accountability and how things are supposed to operate.”
Alex Murdaugh walks outside the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro on July 20, 2022. File/Laura Bilson/Staff
To date, the Murdaugh saga has given rise to at least four podcasts, four network television specials, documentaries on CNN, HBOMax and Oxygen, and countless newspaper and magazine stories. A scripted series on the case is under development by Hulu, and at least three book deals have been inked.
Which means the Murdaugh story isn’t going away anytime soon.
Few could have imagined it would come to this when a frantic call rolled into rural Colleton County’s 911 center on June 7, 2021. Murdaugh told a dispatcher he had discovered his wife and son shot to death at the family’s sprawling hunting lodge. Authorities found Maggie and Paul Murdaugh near kennels on the property, each taken down by a different gun.
The case drew instant attention. The Murdaugh name, after all, was synonymous with prosperity and power in this southern corner of South Carolina. Three generations of Murdaughs had controlled the local prosecutors office for 86 years, and the family had amassed millions of dollars suing deep-pocketed corporations through its century-old civil law firm in Hampton. They occupied rarefied space, the de facto lords of this Lowcountry land.
But Alex Murdaugh tumbled hard off that pedestal his forefathers built in the weeks and months ahead, mutating from a well-heeled barrister into a desperate drug addict, a con man and a “person of interest” in the grisly killings.
His implosion began in full over Labor Day weekend in 2021 when he claimed to have been shot in the head while changing a tire on a country road. Murdaugh soon changed his story, telling law enforcement he staged the shooting in a desperate bid to collect on a $10 million life insurance policy for his surviving son, Buster. And, we were told, he did so because he had a raging opioid habit. What's more, he had been booted from his family’s law firm after money was found to be missing.
The car containing Alex Murdaugh and his legal staff prepares to leave the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro on Wednesday, July 20, 2022. File/Laura Bilson/Staff
The case only got stranger in 2022, with each passing week seeming to bring one stinging revelation or another. Murdaugh was accused of plundering millions from clients and his former firm, preying on desperate people who turned to him for legal help after suffering grievous injuries or losing loved ones in horrific accidents. The money flowed through fraudulent checks and a bogus bank account into Murdaugh’s clutches as bankers, lawyers and judges missed warning signs or looked the other way.
A bank chief executive lost his job and faced criminal charges in the growing scandal. So did a veteran attorney who had been Murdaugh’s college roommate. His reputed handyman/drug dealer landed in jail, as well, as did two others caught in the orbit of his alleged drug crimes.
Investigations mounted into Murdaugh’s drug and money laundering pipeline, the 2018 slip-and-fall death of his former housekeeper and the mysterious 2015 passing of a young man rumored to have ties to the Murdaugh clan. Agents probed claims of obstruction of justice in the handling of a 2019 fatal boat crash investigation involving Paul Murdaugh. And a team of lawyers scoured Murdaugh’s assets to see what could be sold off to compensate his victims.
The biggest shoe dropped in July when a grand jury indicted Murdaugh in the slayings of his 52-year-old wife and his son, 22. He was accused of blasting Paul with a shotgun and killing his wife with a rifle.
Through his high-powered defense attorneys, Murdaugh has acknowledged mistreating clients and letting his firm, family and friends down. He has copped to a drug habit and instances of theft, as well. But he has adamantly maintained that he is not guilty of murder. His attorneys have unleashed a fountain of motions to prove that is so, ripping the state’s case at every turn as a largely flaccid and circumstantial prosecution.
Prosecutors maintain that they have more than enough evidence to convict Murdaugh, including a cellphone video that undercut his initial alibi by placing him at the crime scene shortly before the killings occurred.
They also submitted a motion this month that painstakingly lays out Murdaugh’s alleged motive for the killings: the imminent threat of “personal, legal and financial ruin.” They say he hoped to portray himself as a victim and shield himself from multiple investigations that were about to uncover his decade-long financial crime spree.
Alex Murdaugh confers with attorneys at a pre-trial hearing. File/Staff
So far, only one case in the Murdaugh universe has made it to trial. Russell Laffitte, former CEO of Palmetto State Bank, in November took his chances before a federal jury in Charleston on bank fraud charges. Accused of helping Murdaugh fleece millions from client accounts, Laffitte maintained he was an unwitting fall guy, duped into aiding the rogue attorney like so many others.
A jury convicted Laffitte on all six counts. He now faces a possible 30-year stretch in federal prison.
Murdaugh is next up. In another month, we should see whether an end is in sight for the murder case that has captured the public’s imagination, or if yet another unexpected twist lies in wait to take this saga in another surprising direction.
