Disfellowshipped South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh is in a world of trouble, and Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal — a three-part Netflix documentary (February 22) about his numerous alleged crimes — won’t help his cause.
A detailed non-fiction investigation of the scandals that preceded and culminated in the June 2021 killings of his wife Maggie and younger son Paul. It’s a scathing synopsis, told in large part by those who died in a boating accident caused by Paul, Mallory Beach, the 19-year-old. Its only flaw is that since Murdaugh is currently on trial for the murders of his son and wife, it is a fundamentally incomplete portrait – suggesting that additional chapters on ongoing events may be in the pipeline.
Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal is therefore almost too timely, jumping ahead a bit by arriving before its story is complete. While it might be hard to imagine Alex being exonerated for the double murder he’s accused of, strange things have happened when it comes to his clan, as the series from directors Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst reveals. The document initially focuses on February 23, 2019, when Paul took a boat trip to an oyster roast with his girlfriend Morgan Doughty, their friends Miley Altman and Connor Cook, and Connor’s cousin Anthony Cook and his girlfriend Mallory. As was his tendency, Paul was quickly hammered and then refused to let anyone else drive his boat home. After a scuffle in which Paul slapped Morgan – Morgan said this was not the first time such abuse had taken place – the boat crashed into a pillar under a bridge on Archers Creek.
While everyone on board was injured, Mallory was nowhere to be found; Her body was recovered seven days later. As recalled in Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal by Anthony, Morgan, Miley and Connor – as well as their parents – from the moment they arrived at the hospital, Paul’s father Alex and grandfather Randolph tried to manipulate the situation largely in Paul’s favor by they keep her quiet and posit Connor as the actual driver of the boat. They all make it clear that this is in line with the Murdaugh course, as the family was so renowned for their wealth and influence in the Lowcountry that they became synonymous with law and order. With deep connections, they did their best to protect Paul. That wasn’t enough, however, and over the next two years Paul’s accountability became well known among the locals and made him the target of a civil suit.
In Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, Morgan, Anthony, Miley and Connor discuss Paul’s privileged claim, family troubles and Jekyll and Hyde’s personalities (caused by excessive drinking) at length. They give insight into the boy’s crazy headroom and therefore the home environment he grew up in, and portray the Murdaughs as a regional dynasty who use their money and influence to do what they want. That alone would make them gross, if hardly worth attention. But as Nason and Furst reveal, this apparently led the Murdaughs to believe they could get away with taking innocent lives – both in relation to Mallory and two other people who died in previous “accidents”.
The first of them was Stephen Smith, a gay high schooler who was rumored to be romantically involved with Paul’s older brother, Buster. When he was discovered in the middle of an unremarkable road in 2015, the victim of fatal blunt force trauma, law enforcement — who had a habit of watching the Murdaughs’ backs — chalked it up as a hit and run. However, word soon spread that the assault may have been premeditated, and in 2021, police officers reopened the investigation into Stephen’s death after uncovering new evidence in the course of their investigation into the murders of Paul and Maggie had.
Even more shady was the February 2018 death of housekeeper Gloria Satterfield, who appeared to have tripped over the family’s dogs while walking up an outside staircase to the house – a story that seemed dubious at best. Alex, who had taken out a commercial insurance policy on his Moselle estate a month earlier, told Satterfield’s relatives that he would file a lawsuit against himself to get a hefty settlement for them. Instead, he pocketed the eventual payout of $4.3 million himself — a scam that matches the reported millions he stole from clients of his family’s respected law firm over the years, leading to his ban and expulsion out of business.
Alex Murdaugh in Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.
Courtesy of Netflix
The collapse of Alex’s career came shortly after the murders of Maggie and Paul, which Alex claimed happened while he was visiting his ailing parents. Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal dissects that defense – which also depended on Alex’s secret oxy addiction – and touches on his subsequent attempt to stage his own suicide. This ploy allegedly involved hiring his drug dealer, Curtis Edward Smith, to shoot him so Buster could get life insurance. However, Nason and Furst’s documentation strongly suggests that the incident may have been a scam gone awry, in which Alex tried to kill Smith to frame him for the executions of Maggie and Paul and suffered an unplanned gunshot wound during the riot .
Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal doesn’t focus on Alex’s double murder trial for too long, of course, since it’s happening right now. It’s a shame because the only thing missing from this trial is a conversation about Alex’s possible motive for insulting his immediate relatives. (The reporting answer: he tried to use her death as a distraction from his financial crimes.) Nonetheless, the show convincingly asserts that Alex is the by-product of a boys’ club empire that only cared about its own wealth. and had no qualms about eliminating anyone who posed a threat to his survival.
It remains to be seen if Nason and Furst will revisit their Netflix follow-up project once a verdict is reached. But her docuseries are a useful and unflattering introduction to a story that true crime junkies can now watch on the nightly news.