The dark secrets of the Murdaugh Family dynasty

Every crime that disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh has been convicted of has some precedent in the past, from the theft of $10 million from his most vulnerable clients over the course of a decade, to the coverup of a deadly boat crash in 2019 and even the murders of his wife and younger son in 2021. Alex had been raised to believe that he could get away with all manner of wrongdoing because his forebears had done so for generations.

At his historic murder trial last year, which was followed by millions around the world, the jury found Alex guilty of gunning down his wife Maggie and son Paul on a quiet summer evening at Moselle, the family’s estate. His motive, prosecutors argued, was to throw those close to him off the trail of his thefts and to safeguard his family enterprise.

I spent nearly three years reporting on the back roads of South Carolina and attended every day of Alex Murdaugh’s six-week trial. I also spoke with more than 200 people and reviewed thousands of documents, including newspaper archives, court filings and nonpublic depositions and exhibits. Though Murdaugh’s ancestors were never convicted of serious crimes, my reporting and research revealed that they often acted outside the law and that the family dynasty was founded on fraud.

Alex’s great-grandfather Randolph Murdaugh, Sr. started the family law firm in 1910 in the small town of Hampton, S.C. It quickly became the region’s dominant civil practice. He was also the first Murdaugh to serve as solicitor, or lead prosecutor, for Hampton and four surrounding counties. In those days, the rural counties of the state’s 14th judicial circuit each had a sheriff and maybe a part-time deputy, but it was Randolph, Sr. who investigated crime scenes and decided whom to charge and whom to let free.

By 1940, he had been the law for a generation. He was the most powerful man for a hundred miles, though he had little to show for it. He had lost his fortune in the Great Depression, been widowed twice and raised two sons on his own. He was also suffering from renal failure, which promised a slow, inexorable death. As the disease progressed and his debts increased, Randolph, Sr. began to cut corners, fixing juries and making charges disappear for wealthy and influential friends who still had enough money to buy favors.

Randolph, Sr.’s dying act was controversial in his own day and appears in retrospect to be a clear case of insurance fraud. On a clear moonlit night, at the height of high summer, he drove his Ford sedan onto a deserted railroad crossing and into the path of an oncoming train. As the conductor sounded the whistle and flashed the lights, Randolph, Sr. neither jumped from the car nor pulled it from the tracks. Instead, he waved.

At the inquest investigating his death, the engineer testified that the wave wasn’t the wild gesture of a man trying to avert catastrophe. If anything, he said, it was more casual, friendly even. It was as if Randolph, Sr. were saying hello to whatever waited on the other side.

Randolph, Sr. arranged his death so his heirs could claim it was an accident and sue the railroad, just as he had done many times as a civil lawyer. He just needed the justice system to see one more case his way. The coroner’s jury ruled the death an accident.

With that ruling in hand, his older son Randolph “Buster" Murdaugh, Jr., who had just completed law school and joined his father’s practice, sued the railroad for a record-setting sum. The railroad settled the case quickly, knowing the futility of challenging a Murdaugh on his home turf. The amount of the settlement was never disclosed, but was more than enough to re-establish the family’s wealth. It also sealed the Murdaugh reputation for making a lie look like the truth.

Buster went on to solidify the family’s hold on power. He won the race to replace his father as solicitor in a landslide, the start of a reign that would stretch 40 years, from Roosevelt to Reagan.

In his civil practice, Buster won outsize settlements from lawyers eager to avoid facing him at home, where every juror knew two things about him: Buster was as likely to help them as he was to hurt them, and he never forgot a favor or forgave a slight.

External forces threatened his power, but he beat them all back. The state bar association held weeks of closed-door hearings in 1949 but did not end up disbarring him over claims from clients in multiple counties that he had stolen their money. Buster then ran out the clock on the Internal Revenue Service by having bookkeeping so shoddy it took agents five years to figure out how much income he was hiding, and the infractions were just beyond the statute of limitations.

The most serious threat came in 1956, when the Justice Department charged Buster as the mastermind behind the largest bootlegging ring in the South. Multiple witnesses testified in federal court in Charleston that he pressured them to lie.

The jury convicted a dozen lesser defendants but acquitted Buster, whom prosecutors had called “the man who ran the show." The prosecution accused him of jury tampering; the judge excoriated him for having no shame. Buster went back to the solicitor’s office. One of his first acts was to charge the witnesses against him with state liquor law violations.

Though married, Buster had an appetite for women that was both voracious and tinged with violence. He once took up with a wealthy socialite, the scion of one of the nation’s first families whose husband owned a nearby hunting plantation. She told Buster she was pregnant and having his baby. As the story goes, Buster told one of his fixers to get a gun, hide under her front porch, and wait for her to come home. Burrowed under the steps, the man had a few sips of whiskey and passed out. For years, Buster grumbled that he would have killed the woman if the would-be assassin hadn’t gotten so drunk.

Buster’s son Randolph Murdaugh III shadowed his father from the time he could walk. The two were fishing one hot Saturday afternoon when the sheriff came to fetch Buster. There was a jailed killer ready to confess, but he only wanted to speak to the solicitor himself. Buster brought Randolph with him to the jail as a witness to the confession.

According to news accounts, the 9-year-old sat petrified as he watched an old farmer describe poisoning his bedridden older sister with strychnine, stirring it into her coffee, “as much as could be placed on the end of a knife." When she didn’t die, he dug a hole beneath the hog pen and buried her. “Her eyes were shut," the man said, “but she was breathing a little."

Randolph III begged not to take the stand in the man’s trial, not wanting to have a part in sending him to his death. Buster told the boy he would make him testify, even if he had to declare him a hostile witness. “You can just sit in court," he said, “and hold your subpoena."

The jailhouse confession became part of the family canon, a story told not with horror but with pride. It was a bildungsroman about the family business, where being a Murdaugh meant becoming acquainted with death, and the worst of what human beings can do to one another, even those they love.

When he became solicitor in 1986, Randolph III developed a reputation as tough but fair, even kind, as he refined his family’s ability to gloss over problems. He knew every juror, and he doled out favors to keep them on his side. Drunken driving convictions routinely disappeared.

Randolph III was married and had a daughter and three sons, including Alex. Like his father, Randolph III was a serial philanderer, and when Alex was school-age, the father spent much of his time shacked up with a girlfriend at the family’s condo in Hilton Head. When Randolph III’s wife started threatening divorce, he allegedly called in her obituary to the largest paper in the state. The warning was clear: Murdaughs don’t divorce.

As his children grew up, Randolph III bailed them out of trouble, smoothing over incident after incident. A young man sustained a traumatic brain injury in a drunken boat crash in the late 1990s, after a party at the Murdaugh family island. One of Randolph III’s other sons was accused of trying to get the young men on the boat to change their stories. The driver eventually admitted to drinking for hours and throwing a cooler of beer overboard. The investigation was quietly closed after two months. The driver was charged simply with having too few life preservers.

Each generation of Murdaugh men sought power in his own way. Randolph, Sr. had started with shining ideals and ended his life with fraud. Buster had reveled in his sharp-elbowed willingness to construe the law as he chose. Randolph III was the dutiful son who did what was required to keep the dynasty going.

Alex’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been able to make secrets disappear, and they had taught Alex to embrace the family ethos: To live above the law, you must become the law. His forebears all served as solicitor their entire career, understanding that they had to do enough good that people excused their bad behavior.

In Alex, that balance no longer held. He declined to run for solicitor when his father retired in 2006, telling people he was making too much money in his personal-injury practice. He did not disclose that he was also addicted to opioids, which he was buying illegally in copious amounts.

Murdaughs before Alex had put the squeeze on the railroad and out-of-state corporations. But he exploited his own clients, often the poorest of the poor, as he looked them square in the face in the intimacy of his office. He stole from motherless girls, a paraplegic deaf teenager and even his own best friend. When his longtime housekeeper fell down the stairs at his estate and died, he won an insurance settlement ostensibly on behalf of her family—but kept $3 million for himself and gave them nothing.

Alex spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on land and luxuries, on private planes to travel to college championship games and on the whims of his wife and children, particularly his younger son Paul.

Over the years, he had bailed Paul out of one drunken-driving wreck after another until a 2019 boat crash that killed a young woman. As part of a wrongful-death lawsuit, her family sought all of Alex’s financial information, records that would potentially reveal his years of grift. He was expected to turn them over at a hearing on June 10, 2021.

That same week, the chief financial officer of his own law firm raised questions about $792,000 in income from one of his cases. She’d walked into his office and closed the door, nervous about challenging the great-grandson of the founder. “I have reason to believe that you received those missing fees," she said. “I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask you about them."

Exposure would mean imprisonment for Alex, a life of shame for his wife and sons and the ruin of his mighty family name. As a personal-injury lawyer, he had spent his career reading people, playing on the fears of insurance executives and the sympathy of jurors. He knew how to make people cry.

The night of June 7, 2021, he decided he could protect himself by killing his wife Maggie and younger son Paul and harnessing one of the most powerful of human emotions, empathy. It worked, briefly. In the wake of the shocking, initially mysterious murders, the civil suit against him was stalled indefinitely and his law firm dropped its inquiry. It looked like he had gotten away with it all.

But within months, the scheme unraveled. Fresh evidence of his malfeasance was found at his law firm. Alex tried to arrange his own death to win insurance money for his surviving son—an act reminiscent of Randolph, Sr. a century earlier—but he botched the attempt and drew the attention of the police. A widening investigation led to dozens of felony charges, including insurance fraud and theft.

Nearly a year later, the police added murder charges for the deaths of his wife and son, who had been shot repeatedly at close range. Finally, there was too much scrutiny, too many deaths and too many secrets for even a Murdaugh to escape.

Valerie Bauerlein covered the Murdaugh murder trial for The Wall Street Journal, where she is a national affairs reporter. This piece is adapted from her new book, “The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty," which will be published on Aug. 20 by Ballantine Books.