The killing of a mother and son. Millions of dollars in stolen funds. A fatal boat crash and a housekeeper’s deadly fall. And now, overturned murder convictions.
The story of Alex Murdaugh, a South Carolina lawyer, has begun a new chapter after guilty verdicts for the murders of his wife and youngest son in 2021 were overturned by the State Supreme Court on Wednesday because of what it said was jury interference at his 2023 trial.
Mr. Murdaugh, 57, will remain in prison, despite the decision, because he was sentenced to 40 yearsafter pleading guilty to federal charges of stealing millions from his former clients and from his law firm, which was founded by his great-grandfather. The sentence ensured at the time that he would remain incarcerated for decades, regardless of the murder case. He has adamantly denied killing his wife, Maggie, and son Paul.
Here’s what to know about the case.
What led to Alex Murdaugh’s downfall?
On the night of June 7, 2021, Mr. Murdaugh, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather all served as the top prosecutors across a wide area of South Carolina for over a century, called 911 to report that his wife and one of their two sons had been shot to death.
A sense of mystery enveloped the killings, as more than a year passed without a suspect or motive identified until Mr. Murdaugh’s indictment, in July 2022.
Mr. Murdaugh was also charged with a wave of financial crimes. Prosecutors said he had stolen from clients — many of whom had been severely injured in car crashes and other accidents — and siphoned money from his law firm. In total, state prosecutors charged him with stealing about $8.8 million from a range of victims.
While on the witness stand in his murder trial, Mr. Murdaugh admitted he had stolen money and lied to friends, saying an addiction to painkillers had fueled his behavior. But he has adamantly denied killing his family.
Mr. Murdaugh, who has been disbarred, pleaded guilty in 2023 to 22 federal charges, including wire fraud and money laundering.
He has been in custody since October 2021, when he was first charged with stealing from a former client.
The scrutiny on Mr. Murdaugh has spawned several other investigations into three previous deaths in proximity to the family, and Mr. Murdaugh was also charged with concocting a bizarre scheme to stage his own suicide to look like a murder after being pushed out of his law firm.
What happened in the original ‘Murdaugh murders’?
The fatal shooting of Mr. Murdaugh’s wife, Maggie, 52, and their son Paul, a 22-year-old junior at the University of South Carolina, rocked the state’s Lowcountry region, where the family had established a legal dynasty. The killings began to be known as the “Murdaugh murders.”
Mr. Murdaugh told the authorities that he had discovered their bodies near dog kennels at the family’s isolated home in Islandton, a rural hamlet about 65 miles west of Charleston.
Mr. Murdaugh had been at home with his wife and son earlier on the day that they died, but phone records indicate that he had left to visit his mother around 9 p.m. He has said that he then returned home and found the bodies. Prosecutors accused him of killing Maggie and Paul before leaving, and then trying to create an alibi.
After law enforcement officers arrived, Mr. Murdaugh told them that Paul had been receiving threats because of a fatal boat wreck he had been involved in a couple of years earlier. (At the time of his death, Paul had been charged with felonies related to the crash.)
Among the central evidence at trial was a video taken by Paul showing that Mr. Murdaugh was with his wife and son at the dog kennels shortly before the two were killed there.
Why were his murder convictions overturned?
Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers pinned their request for a new trial on the behavior of Becky Hill, the Colleton County clerk of court, who managed the jury.
In testimony, some of the jurors said she had made comments about Mr. Murdaugh’s testimony at trial, including that jurors should not be “fooled” by him and to watch his body language. One woman said that Ms. Hill’s remarks had influenced her decision to find Mr. Murdaugh guilty.
Ms. Hill, who read the guilty verdicts when Mr. Murdaugh was convicted, has denied tampering with the jury and was never criminally charged with doing so. She later resigned from her job. In December, she was sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to misusing public funds and using her government job for personal gain by promoting her book about the trial.
The South Carolina Supreme Court said that “shocking jury interference” by Ms. Hill in her role as a court clerk meant that Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions must be overturned. They added that Ms. Hill had “placed her fingers on the scales of justice,” denying Mr. Murdaugh the right to a fair trial.
When was Alex Murdaugh shot, and why?
Prosecutors say that nearly three months after Mr. Murdaugh’s wife and son were killed, an employee at his law firm discovered a check that was supposed to have been addressed to the firm but was instead made out to Mr. Murdaugh. That finding led the firm to investigate further and, when they discovered evidence of financial wrongdoing, to ask for his resignation, which he gave.
The next day, Sept. 4, 2021, in another bizarre twist, Mr. Murdaugh claimed that he had been shot in the head on the side of a rural road by someone who drove by while he was changing a flat tire. He was taken to a hospital, but his story soon began to fall apart. It turned out that he had not been alone on the side of the road, as he had claimed, but was with a friend and distant cousin, Curtis Edward Smith.
Mr. Murdaugh soon admitted that he had asked Mr. Smith to shoot him in the head. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers said he had come up with a plan to make his suicide look like a murder because he believed it would help his older son, Buster Murdaugh, collect on his life insurance policy. Mr. Murdaugh apologized and said he was entering rehab for an addiction to painkillers.
The episode ended in the arrest of both Mr. Murdaugh and his cousin. Mr. Smith was charged with aggravated assault, assisting in a suicide attempt and insurance fraud. He told The New York Times that he did not shoot Mr. Murdaugh and that the gun had gone off as he grabbed Mr. Murdaugh’s arm to stop him from shooting himself.
Mr. Murdaugh turned himself in to the police on Sept. 16, 2021, and was charged with insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and filing a false police report — all felonies.
In July 2022, Mr. Murdaugh and Mr. Smith were indicted on conspiracy charges for what prosecutors said was years of money laundering related to distributing oxycodone.
How did a housekeeper die at the Murdaugh home in 2018?
In February 2018, Gloria Satterfield, who had worked as a nanny and housekeeper for Mr. Murdaugh and his family for more than 20 years, fell at their home and died from her injuries several weeks later.
After her funeral, Mr. Murdaugh introduced her two adult sons to a lawyer who he said would help them resolve the issues around their mother’s death, but the sons said in a recent lawsuit that they did not know that the lawyer, Cory Fleming, was a close friend of Mr. Murdaugh’s. Mr. Fleming reached a $4.3 million settlement with Mr. Murdaugh and his insurers that was supposed to send about $2.8 million to Ms. Satterfield’s sons after lawyer’s fees, but the sons said in September 2021 that they had learned about the deal only recently and had never received any money.
In October 2021, the police arrested Mr. Murdaugh on charges stemming from the missing settlement funds — this time apprehending him at a detox center in Orlando, Fla. He was charged with two counts of obtaining property by false pretenses, a felony with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
Mr. Murdaugh admitted in June 2022 that he owed Ms. Satterfield’s sons the full settlement plus lawyers’ fees, $4.3 million in all.
The police are also looking into the cause of Ms. Satterfield’s death. Her family had long presumed, based on the Murdaugh family’s accounts, that she had tripped over their dogs and fallen down the front steps of their home. But the coroner was not notified about her death and no autopsy was done. Her death is also listed as “natural” on her death certificate, which is at odds with an accidental fall.
The police said in June 2022 that they planned to exhume Ms. Satterfield’s body after receiving permission from her family.
What about the fatal boat crash?
At the time of his death, Paul Murdaugh was out on bail after being charged in 2019 with drunkenly crashing a boat in an accident that killed one of his passengers, Mallory Beach, 19, and injured several others.
Documents and videos released since his death have raised questions about whether the police were sloppy in their investigation, or gave him favorable treatment. One of the boat’s six passengers told a Department of Natural Resources officer shortly after the crash that Paul Murdaugh had been driving the boat, but the officer wrote in a report that the passenger had said he was not sure who was driving.
A lawsuit was filed against Alex Murdaugh and several others, whom the plaintiffs sought to hold liable in the crash, and at the time of the killings, a lawyer for Ms. Beach’s family was pressuring Mr. Murdaugh, as Paul Murdaugh’s father, to release an account of his finances.
And the young man found along a road in 2015?
The housekeeper’s death is not the only one to receive fresh scrutiny.
In June 2021, a few weeks after the deaths of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division announced that it was opening a new inquiry into the death of Stephen Smith, a 19-year-old man whose body was found on a road about 10 miles from the Murdaugh home.
His death has never been fully explained, and no arrests were made. It was initially investigated as a possible shooting, then it was considered to be a hit and run. Police files have suggested that Mr. Smith ran out of gas on the side of the road several miles away from where his body was found.
The lawyers representing Mr. Smith’s mother, Sandy Smith, have said that they had no evidence to suggest that the Murdaughs had “anything to do with” Mr. Smith’s death.
Jacey Fortin contributed reporting.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on stories across the United States, including natural disasters, protests, unsolved mysteries, high-profile criminal cases and more.
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