Editor’s note: After deliberating for less than three hours, a jury in S. Carolina found Alex Murdaugh guilty of murdering his wife and son in June 2021 on the family’s rural estate. Judge Clifton Newman said that “given the lateness of the hour and the victims’ rights that must be taken into consideration,” he would delay sentencing until a later date. Murdaugh faces a minimum sentence of 30 years in prison, but prosecutors have said they are seeking life without parole.
Original article:
The Alex Murdaugh murder trial has a tragic scope as vast as the downfall of any of Shakespeare’s eponymous tragedies. Not only did Alex Murdaugh fall from his luxurious heights to utter wreckage, but a powerful 100-year-old family dynasty was also destroyed.
The tragic Murdaugh tale represents the end of a Southern power structure in a rural corner of South Carolina. This power structure, as we shall see, is a relic from a time long ago, when family and race dictated circumstances as often as merit and ingenuity.
Like any Shakespearean tragedy, the Murdaugh tragedy has plenty of villains. The accused family annihilator Alex, the hothead violent Paul, Timmy, or Paw Paw, whatever you want to call him, is another. But so are the enablers in the Murdaugh family. The brother who removed guns from the house, or worked over the police after the boat accident. Or the disgraced plagiarist son Buster caught giving the finger to a witness during the trial.
You would think people who were expelled from law school wouldn’t disrupt a courtroom with such behavior. But when it comes to the Murdaughs, they are set in their ways.
But there are also heroes in the Murdaugh tragedy. Ironically, one of those heroes comes from a politically accomplished family himself—namely South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson. Without the courage of Alan Wilson, the Murdaugh crimes might never have been prosecuted.
After all, that’s the story of the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit of South Carolina for a century isn’t it? The Murdaughs were the law.
Alan Wilson stripped this corrupt local system from control over the investigation into Paul Murdaugh’s deadly boat ride. Wilson had the courage to say enough was enough, and that the Murdaugh Way was no longer acceptable in 21st-century South Carolina.
By stripping local law enforcement authority away from the locals, Alan Wilson stood for equal treatment under the law.
This was a welcome change for a part of South Carolina familiar with the opposite, rank unequal treatment.
That’s the difference between the Wilsons and the Murdaughs.
Related: An Unexpected Lesson From the Alex Murdaugh Trial
This is a lesson the students at the University of South Carolina School of Law should learn. For too long Murdaugh money went into that school, and as a result, the school churned out lots of trial lawyers willing to sue anyone in sight.
I went to the University of South Carolina School of Law with Alex Murdaugh. I saw it firsthand.
Alan Wilson should get accolades, commendations, and praise at the law school after this trial.
Will he? I’m not holding my breath.
The Murdaugh family became modern-day duck-hunting, dip-spitting wreckers.
Like the wreckers of old, they stood ready on the rocks for ships to enter their territory. When a train or UPS truck rolled anywhere in South Carolina and injured someone, the Murdaughs were ready to file suit in Hampton County, where reliable juries would deliver seven-figure verdicts to the locals.
The wreckers stood ready to profit from the carnage.
And profit they did. The murder trial has seen astonishing evidence admitted. Verdicts in this rural backwater in the tens of millions of dollars for an accident. Of course, Alex Murdaugh sometimes pocketed the settlements and never even told the clients there was a settlement.
Murdaugh even appeared in a commercial endorsing a litigation tool sure to bring people “to tears,” he said. Highly skilled wreckers, indeed.
The Murdaugh trial is about the end of a way of life in the South where who your daddy was carried oversized importance. Sometimes it might even let you get away with murder.
Will Folks at FitsNews has been running a daily poll during the trial showing anywhere from 85 to 90% of people think Alex Murdaugh is guilty.
That’s called the wisdom of crowds.
I’ll go even further.
Watching Murdaugh on the stand reminded me of the interviews of Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy. I’m not suggesting Murdaugh is a serial killer, though there remain serious questions about other deaths in the county.
What I am suggesting is that Murdaugh seems to exist inside his own moral universe, where he defines truth and fiction under his terms, where he dictates what is important and what is not. Just. Like. Bundy.
I was struck by the caustic arrogant bitterness when Murdaugh lectured prosecutor Creighton Waters that you “don’t hunt hogs in the daytime.” Murdaugh almost sneered at this petty opportunity to straighten Waters out. He was bitter, controlling, and impolite. He was master of the hog-hunting universe at Moselle, and he wasn’t going to let Waters’ lack of understanding go unscolded.
Then he switched back to crying and apologies.
Did Murdaugh do what Bundy or Gacy did? Of course not. But then again, in my view and the view of nearly everyone in the FitsNews poll, yes, he did.
He killed multiple people.
But this isn’t the first time Murdaughs have tried to escape consequences for their actions. The Netflix series told the tale of Paul Murdaugh flipping a pickup truck while driving drunk with his girlfriend. Guns and beer cans flew through the truck when it rolled. When Paul’s girlfriend called 911, Paul smacked the phone out of her hands.
911 wasn’t the Murdaugh Way. Instead, the Murdaugh Way was to call grandpa, the county prosecutor, and mom. They came and cleaned up the guns and beer cans before any police arrived.
The Netflix documentary on the Murdaugh family has plenty of other examples, among them Alex and Maggie Murdaugh’s repeated alcohol-fueled family gatherings where even teenagers were given free access to handles of liquor.
In the end, you are left with the impression that very bad people ruled an area of America for a very long time. They had the power of life and death over criminal defendants. Their friends and family enjoyed a different standard.
That’s why Alex Murdaugh traveled with a badge on his dashboard. He told the jury it got him “friendlier” treatment.
The poor—often black—feared them. But friends and family in the Murdaugh orbit enjoyed their proximity in myriad ways ranging from dove hunts to escaping accountability for actions.
Let’s hope the jury ends this multi-generational injustice once and for all.
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