In isolated, poor regions of South Carolina, coming from an élite family offered a feeling of impunity. Did this license lead Alex Murdaugh to commit fraud after fraud—and then kill his wife and son?
www.newyorker.com
Well written article! A few things stand out:
-..."There were no bombshells: for all his unexpected affability, Eddie was careful about what he said, and most of what he told me matched statements that he or his lawyers had already made. We started with the roadside incident. By his account, he’d thought that he was meeting up with Alex to do an odd job, only to discover that he wanted Eddie to shoot him. He’d refused, and wrested the gun from Alex. The weapon had gone off during the struggle, but Eddie was certain that no bullet had hit Alex—suggesting that Alex must have injured his head in some other way. After the scuffle, Eddie said, he had hidden the gun in a place that he intended to keep secret until his “dying day.” None of this was new information, but, when I broached the topic of the double homicide, Eddie mentioned something that surprised me. He claimed that, although he’d spent a lot of time with Alex, he’d never met Maggie and barely knew her sons. (He was close enough to the family, however, to have paid his respects when Randolph Murdaugh III died, shortly after the murders.)"...
-...A portrait of his grandfather, Randolph (Buster) Murdaugh, Jr., hung at the back of the court. (The portrait has been taken down for the trial.)
Buster was a notorious reprobate who was linked to an illicit liquor ring. His father, Randolph, Sr., died in what some suspect was a suicide made to look like an accident, staged with the intent of enriching his heirs. Nobody knows what caused his car to stall on railway tracks and get hit by a train one night, but he was in poor health, and his
son certainly wasted no time in suing the rail company. Ancestral echoes seem to haunt the family."...
bbm
