There have been bigger trials with splashier consequences, but for pure drama – and a window on the way entrenched privilege works in the US south – the events unfolding this week at the Colleton county courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina, are hard to match. In the dock: the 54-year-old Alex Murdaugh, scion of a legal dynasty stretching back 100 years, who has been found guilty of murdering his wife and son. That is the matter at hand and it is lurid enough: 22-year-old Paul Murdaugh and his mother, Maggie, found shot to death in 2021 in the grounds of the family’s hunting lodge, 65 miles west of Charleston – killed by Alex, say prosecutors, to distract attention from his financial crimes.
Behind the double murder, however, lies layer upon layer of further alleged criminal activity, from vast embezzlement from the family law firm, to cover-up, to the involvement of Paul in a drunken boat crash in which a 19-year-old died, and for which the 22-year-old was facing trial at the time of his murder. Three months after the killings, someone shot Alex Murdaugh in the head – an act, it is alleged, that Murdaugh commissioned himself, paying a gunman to kill him so his surviving son could collect on insurance. Meanwhile, the death of the family housekeeper in 2018 has been the subject of renewed police interest.
