New Book Explores Alex Murdaugh's Role in Family's Crimes

The saga of South Carolina’s Murdaugh family and their crimes—both actual and rumored—has provided fodder for scads of documentaries and dramatizations in the past five years, from Netflix’s Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal and HBO Max’s Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty to Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family miniseries (starring Patricia Arquette and Jason Clarke) and, inevitably, a Lifetime movie (starring Bill Pullman). Each treatment takes a slightly different slant on the story, but all portray Alex Murdaugh—an attorney in Hampton County, South Carolina—as a monster. And no wonder: In 2023, Alex was convicted of the 2021 murder of his wife, Maggie, and their 22-year-old son, Paul, a crime committed in a stupendously doomed attempt to fend off disgrace and financial ruin. The Murdaugh murders don’t lack for lurid elements, from the rumors of Alex’s infidelities and drug habits to the tendency, in mug shots, for his pupils and irises to appear as a solid black, as if they are holes bored into his ruddy face, exposing an interior of absolute darkness. As James Lasdun explains in his new book on the case, The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh, the murders of Maggie and Paul were linked to a 2019 boat crash. Despite his family’s efforts, Paul Murdaugh was charged with boating under the influence of alcohol and causing the death of a young woman, Mallory Beach, as well as injuring two other passengers. The Murdaughs were known to be wealthy and influential, both socially and in the legal system, where three generations of Murdaugh men had served as circuit solicitor (the equivalent of state prosecutor in other states) for the 14th judicial district. But the crash occurred at a time, Lasdun writes, “in the midst of a broad cultural shift toward the politics of social justice,” and it was “a case that featured a sympathetic victim” and “an almost parodically ‘entitled’ family” who swiftly moved to cover up the culpability of their dynasty’s “spoiled princeling.” In short, it proved catnip to social media crusaders, who also revived rumors that Paul’s brother, Buster, was implicated in the 2015 death of a young man whose body was discovered on a country road. For Lasdun—who covered the trial for the New Yorker—the great mystery of the case is Alex himself. There are tabloid treatments of the murders, limited series with top-drawer actors, and the extensive and detailed reporting of Mandy Matney, the local journalist turned podcaster who first discovered that Alex had been embezzling millions of dollars from settlements due to his clients in personal-injury suits. Among these, The Family Man is the Truman Capote version of the Murdaugh story, a thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written inquiry into how and why a person comes to commit such an appalling crime. Although, unlike Capote, Lasdun was denied interviews with the perpetrator, he is able to draw from other resources, namely, the products of consumer technologies undreamt of in the mid-1960s, when Capote wrote In Cold Blood: texts, smartphone photos, videos, and social media posts. He also interviewed Alex’s friends, colleagues, and attorneys who worked on the murder trial and other Murdaugh-related lawsuits. By James Lasdun. W. W. Norton & Company. Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support. Lasdun, a novelist, had been attempting to write a crime novel about a writer attempting write a crime novel, a female author of “lightly satirical comedies” who becomes interested in the murder of a local realtor by her fiancé. This character gets blocked when she tries “to imagine her way into the story” because “for all her rich experience of pain and rage, she simply cannot get into the killer’s head at the critical moment.” Her problem was Lasdun’s. Specifically, he found it impossible to believe or to understand how a father could kill his own child, a deed that seems to him fundamentally incompatible with human—or even animal—nature. (Lasdun acknowledges that men who kill their female partners are depressingly common.) “I had to wonder,” he writes in The Family Man, “if I was simply exhibiting the same ‘blind spot’ as the heroine of my stalled crime novel, her difficulty in acknowledging the reality of evil, even when it was staring her in the face.” When the news of the murders broke, Lasdun assumed Maggie and Paul were killed in retaliation for the boat crash. He thought the story “had the elements of one of those grand-scale sagas that promise to penetrate deep into some distinct and self-contained world, reframing ancient dramas in new settings.” He had no idea how much it would acquire the outlines of Greek myth: Saturn devouring his children, or Oedipus, but in reverse. Still, the archetypal angle on Alex Murdaugh would never suffice to explain him. The best true-crime writing always illustrates how a particular place and social environment made that crime possible. Even if Alex Murdaugh is a monster, how did South Carolina’s Low Country, with its good-ol’-boy networks and slipshod, glad-handing business practices, allow his monstrosity to flourish? In this inquiry, Lasdun has the advantages of an outsider. An Englishman who lives in New York, he responds to the Low Country’s culture with bemused and often appalled wonder. He’s most shocked by the number of guns the Murdaughs possessed and how carelessly they handled them, leaving them lying around and even out in the rain, behavior that would have made it easy for an outsider to sneak onto the Murdaugh hunting estate, where the murders occurred, and find a weapon easy to hand. (This was the scenario the defense in Alex’s trial advanced.) Lasdun notes all the little mannerisms of Low Country geniality, the lavish use of nicknames and honorifics: “Miss Maggie this, Mr. Alex that,” and “plenty of decorous ma’am-ing and sir-ing.” Alex had no history of violence, and was known locally as a doting husband and father. Then again, the clients he stole from—including several childhood friends—also found him kind and sympathetic, and they believed he truly cared about them. He also seemed to have little difficulty finding accessories for his crimes, despite the regional preoccupation with “honor,” a word that, Lasdun writes, “I heard uttered more times in my months in South Carolina than I had in my entire life.” In Hampton County, Lasdun found men who freely told their friends, “I love you, man,” sometimes even as they stabbed each other in the back (metaphorically!). The extravagant emotionality of this Southern milieu extended to its ambient religiosity. The court clerk on Alex’s trial got in trouble for, after the verdict was delivered, publishing a memoir of her time in office, writing “I think God had been preparing me all along for the ‘Trial of the Century.’ ” This pious book recalled how she and her colleagues escorted the jurors to the scene of the crime, and thanks to God’s grace, “had an epiphany and shared our thoughts with our eyes,” enabling the jury to reach a “verdict of truth.” This nearly got Murdaugh’s conviction thrown out on grounds of jury tampering—and to be frank, it probably should have. After the verdict on the murders, Lasdun attended a hearing on Alex’s financial crimes, part of which gave his victims the opportunity to address him publicly. To his surprise, one after another announced that they had forgiven him. “Not that they didn’t also tell Alex exactly what they thought of him,” Lasdun writes, “but the dressing-downs seemed half-hearted compared with this vehement turning of the other cheek.” The speakers’ theatrical acts of charity seem continuous with Alex’s own florid and insistent apologies for the crimes he admits to having committed—he still denies killing his wife and son—the tears, the protestations of love and concern, the self-reproach, all a sort of secular acting out of the Christian practices of confession and absolution. Who can say what, if any, of it was sincere? Ultimately, Lasdun finds a way to imagine how Alex committed those two murders, and the result, in the final chapter of The Family Man, is a masterful description of moral equivocation, the accumulation of little lies and diversions and excuses that people who do bad things—lying, cheating, stealing, working for the Trump administration, etc., as well as murder—use to jimmy themselves into a course of action without fully owning their decisions. He concludes that Alex was some kind of psychopath who conforms to the patterns of other “family annihilators” who can’t bear the thought of their loved ones learning the truth about them. That Alex was able to so convincingly perform the compassion and warmth of genuine human feeling is certainly consistent with that psychopathology, but in the Low Country it was also all around him all the time. You could say he learned it from the best.