When Alex Murdaugh was convicted in 2023 of murdering his wife, Maggie, and son Paul on the family’s 1,800-acre South Carolina hunting retreat, it was a shocking downfall.
For many years, Alex was a big-talking, glad-handing schmoozer of an attorney known for earning multimillion-dollar settlements at his family’s long-standing law firm.
Nobody would have predicted he’d find yourself sentenced to life in prison — except perhaps a Murdaugh being convicted of a criminal offense was long overdue.
For nearly a century the family ruled the legal world of South Carolina’s Lowcountry.
From 1920 to 2006, a Murdaugh held public office as the world’s “solicitor,” a position solely accountable for deciding which alleged crimes went to trial and which were dismissed.
While the three successive generations of Murdaugh solicitors (first Randolph, then Buster, then Randy) were known to do good work prosecuting the worst criminals, additionally they used their authority to counterpoint themselves and accumulate power.
“I feel they were worse than the Mafia,” an anonymous local is quoted in Jason Ryan’s “Swamp Kings: The Story of the Murdaugh Family of South Carolina and a Century of Backwoods Power” (Pegasus Crime, out now). “It was sickening to look at them in motion.”
The primary Murdaugh solicitor was Randolph Murdaugh, Sr., who held office from 1920 to 1940.
He could have been essentially the most benign Murdaugh of all.
Randolph Senior’s only real crime was funneling local defendants he was prosecuting to rent his private law firm for his or her defense, a type of dubious double-dipping that ensured he got wealthy while working the low-paying job of county solicitor.
When kidney failure doomed Randolph Sr. to an early grave, he purposely drove his automotive onto local railroad tracks and was killed by an onrushing train in 1940.
But before that suicide Randolph Sr. resigned as solicitor and pulled enough strings to make sure his son, Randolph Jr. (aka Buster), was given the role.
There was nothing benign concerning the reign of Buster, who filled the position for 46 years.
Buster began his tenure by suing the railroad company CSX for his father’s death, holding them accountable for what had clearly been Randolph Sr’s purposeful actions.
Responsible or not, CSX soon settled for an undisclosed sum.
Until 1986, Buster ran the Lowcountry as his own personal fiefdom, deciding who could be elected to public office and who could be charged with crimes.
He was repeatedly investigated by the South Carolina Bar Association and indicted by the federal government, but none of the costs ever took.
“There are two varieties of laws in South Carolina,” Ryan quotes an opposing attorney as saying. “The laws on the books, and Buster’s laws.”
Law enforcement was entirely on his side, too.
Once when Buster asked a police officer the colour of an alleged get-away automotive, the cop shrugged his shoulders and said it was whatever color the solicitor needed it to be.
In 1945 Buster impregnated a neighborhood married woman and later admitted he’d tried to rent someone to kill her — that confession was in fact never investigated.
When federal authorities prosecuted Buster within the mid-Nineteen Fifties because the mastermind bootlegger of a neighborhood whiskey-making conspiracy, the Murdaugh man was one in all only three accused deemed innocent — 15 others were found guilty.
Plus, Buster’s brother Johnny was often called a wife-beater and child-molester — and a possible murderer of a farmhand who went missing — but he never suffered any legal jeopardy while his older sibling ruled the Lowcountry courts.
By the point Buster retired in 1986, he’d pulled his own strings to ensure his son Randolph III (often called Randy) was named solicitor.
Randy held the job for 20 years and shared his father’s sense of invincibility, first by flouting the foundations of decent society by ignoring his marriage as a serial philanderer.
“He had a grand time screwing fat girls,” was the gossip regarding the Lowcountry’s newest lead prosecutor.
Plus Randy bent all of the legal rules, too.
When a friend’s teenage daughter was wooed by an older ne’er-do-well of a boy, Randy wrote a restraining order against the innocent suitor and eventually had him arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
When an acquaintance was arrested a 3rd time in 2004 for pirating compact discs, Randy each opted to not prosecute and even returned the person’s illegally-acquired belongings.
The Murdaugh chokehold on the solicitor position officially led to 2006 with Randy’s retirement, mostly because Randy’s son Alex was more of an ambulance-chaser than a serious attorney.
Alex had at all times been often called a “meathead,” a drunken loudmouth given to big talk and fisticuffs.
“He was an underhanded piece of s–t,” a fellow attorney said. “A bully all of his teenage and adult life.”
Before retiring Randy did make his son Alex a volunteer assistant solicitor though, a powerless position which the younger Murdaugh nonetheless used to get himself an official law enforcement badge and blue lights atop his personal vehicle.
That allowed him to run rampant within the Lowcountry.
Alex was a star on the Murdaugh family law firm though, enriching each the corporate and himself — in 2013 Alex personally earned greater than $5 million.
It wasn’t essentially the most honorable work though.
In 2007 a automotive crash left one teenager dead and the motive force with a brain like “silly putty.”
But Alex sued the brain-injured boy for reckless driving — although his fatal accident resulted from a truck driver negligently leaving his semi parked across each lanes of a darkened country road.
Why did Alex Murdaugh goal the injured teenager?
The truck driver had no insurance but the teenager driver’s father did, ensuring a much larger financial settlement.
Amid all his monetary successes, Alex’s massive opioid addiction, high-living lifestyle of golf vacations, private-plane travel and wild real-estate purchases left him in massive debt.
He got dubious million-dollar loan from a friendly local bank to cover his expenses but eventually needed to steal from the family law firm and siphon money off from his clients to cover those.
In a single case Alex’s client was awarded greater than $2 million, but Alex gave him only $370,000 and kept the remainder.
Did Alex’s never-ending financial shortfalls turn him right into a murderer?
Probably.
When his housekeeper mysteriously died from a fall at his hunting retreat, Alex sued himself as homeowner to make sure an enormous insurance payout for her family.
Most of that cash ended up in his pocket, too.
Alex’s son Paul was often called a “little Dylan Klebold” for his fascination with blood and guns, and rumors abounded that he’d bashed the top in of a neighborhood gay man who was said to be having an affair with Paul’s brother.
Paul definitely killed one other local though, when he drunkenly crashed right into a bridge a ship he shouldn’t have been driving one cold, foggy night.
Paul and the Murdaughs at all times managed to remain one step ahead of the law though, no less than until they didn’t.
Alex’s firm eventually discovered that for years he’d been stealing tens of millions from them and his clients, and that exact same day Alex’s wife Maggie and son Paul were viciously murdered.
Paul’s head was blown away together with his own shotgun and Maggie cut down from behind as she ran for her life.
Alex Murdaugh’s desperate need for money had pushed him too far, turning him right into a heartless killer and, eventually, a convicted murderer.
And as Ryan so meticulously recounts in “Swamp Kings,” until the tip, Alex probably believed he could get away with it.