I work in the field of criminal law and have penchant for Southern Gothic (and also I am human) so of course I followed Alex Murdaugh’s 2023 trial for the murder of his wife and son. The story was sensational, and the facts spooled out like an old-school television mini-series, weaving a tale in which a small-town southern family dynasty was strangled by the privilege that once helped it flourish. But if you watched the new-school Netflix series, Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
What I am here to tell you about is The Devil at His Elbow, a non-fiction work by Valerie Bauerlien, which chronicles the Murdaugh family through five generations, the intertwined history of Hampton County, South Carolina, where they lived, and the investigation, prosecution, and conviction of Alex Murdaugh for murder and numerous financial crimes. Bauerlien, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, attended and reported on both the murder trial and the court proceedings in the fraud cases, and her recounting of those matters, including the investigation and the attorneys’ trial tactics, is a riveting read. But the aspect of the work that I found most compelling–indeed haunting–was the institutionalized behavior that affronted my notions about justice and fair play, the role of the courts as the protector of individual rights, and the inviolate right to trial by jury. Bauerlien exposed the manner in which generations of Murdaugh men co-opted their public positions and exploited the justice system to serve their own ends. Until Alex’s downfall in 2023, this behavior had gone unchecked for nearly a century.
Four generations of Murdaugh men before Alex had been solicitor (in other words, the chief prosecutor) for the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit, a swath of territory that encompasses four counties situated to the south of Charleston, South Carolina: Allendale, Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton and Jasper Counties. As Bauerlien put it, the solicitor was “the chief lawman for a hundred miles.” (Bauerlien, at 41). Put more plainly, “the solicitor was the law.” Id.
Alex’s great-grandfather, Randolph Murdaugh Sr. was the first chief lawman, then his grandfather, Randolph “Buster” Murdaugh Jr., then his father, Randolph Murdaugh III. Alex himself turned down the chance to serve in this powerful public position that also was part-time, permitting the office holder to simultaneously maintain a private practice in the district. Bauerlien posits that Alex’s addiction to opioids would have made that difficult as “[r]ealistically, there was no way he could prosecute every accused criminal in the Fourteenth Circuit, while secretly committing felonies of his own.” Id. at 20. Yet she reports that Alex’s predecessors did not treat the role as requiring its occupant to himself stay within the bounds of the law or morality. She recounts Randolph Sr.’s record of both ignoring and actively participating in jury tampering.
Next in the line of succession was Buster who, while serving as solicitor, was hauled before the South Carolina State Bar on allegations that he misappropriated funds. While those the charges ultimately were dismissed, he was later tried in federal court for his alleged role in running the state’s biggest bootleg ring. In that case, Buster used his dual role as a solicitor and defense lawyer to defend himself, testifying that he paid money to the local sheriff not for check kiting but instead for investigations carried on in a civil case. The jury returned guilty verdicts against fifteen of Buster’s co-defendants, but they Buster not guilty. Not long after, the Justice Department reported that witnesses had been intimidated and bribed. Nevertheless, Buster remained as solicitor for another thirty years, stepping down only after the South Carolina legislature enacted a mandatory retirement age of 72.
Randolph III was appointed in 1986 to complete his father’s term. Randolph III prosecuted drug cases as solicitor, and then, in his private capacity, defended alleged drug smugglers in federal court. Bauerlien reports that Randolph III was rumored to have followed his father’s example by working with the drug runners and accepting bribes to look the other way. She also recounts the potential boat scandal that Randolph III faced in 1998. A boat his office had seized in a drug bust and which he kept at his private beach compound (dubbed Murdaugh Island) crashed during a party hosted by his son John Marvin. A boat passenger was seriously injured in the crash. Unlike the fatal boat wreck by Alex’s son, Paul, in 2019 that led to criminal charges against Paul and a lawsuit against Alex Murdaugh, the 1998 investigation went nowhere.
Bauerlien homes in on the hypocrisy inherent in the Murdaughs’ relationship to their community. Through their work as personal injury lawyers, they created “‘a judicial hellhole’” where local jurors groomed by the family’s apparent beneficence returned verdicts in personal injury cases that were ten times larger than were typical in other parts of the state. Id. at 97. That environment discouraged businesses from opening in the community and inhibited doctors from opening medical practices, which in turn deprived people of jobs and made it more expensive to live. The upshot was that the Murdaughs thrived “as the town around them sank.” Id. at 98.
A few lessons emerge from the tale. First is the critical need within the legal profession for peer-governance, reporting, and formalized financial review and auditing. Alex was a partner in a multi-lawyer powerhouse firm staffed by professionals, including a chief financial officer. Yet somehow his financial misdeeds did not come to the firm’s attention nor apparently to the attention of any other non-colluding lawyer with an obligation to report until more than a decade after they began. By that time, dozens of clients had been defrauded. The lesson was not lost on the South Carolina State Trial Lawyers Association, a group founded by Alex’s grandfather and of which Alex was elected president in 2015. After Alex was convicted, the association excised his name from the roll of distinguished past presidents and featured him as an object lesson during a keynote session on legal ethics.
Second is that permitting a prosecutor to simultaneously engage in the private practice of law cultivates fertile ground for potential conflicts of interest and abuse of power. In North Carolina, the district attorney and assistant district attorney are prohibited from engaging in the private practice of law (see G.S. 7A-61, -63), but state law does allow a district attorney to delegate his or her prosecutorial function to a private attorney. In South Carolina’s Fourteenth Judicial Circuit there also appears to have been some blurring of the lines between the roles of the prosecutor and law enforcement. To be sure, those functions generally are complementary and interdependent. But they are not the same; the prosecutor is not also the investigator or part of the force. Alex’s brandishing of his grandfather’s solicitor’s badge to curry favor with law enforcement officers and deference from others is a palpable example; Bauerlien recounts how Alex clipped the badge, which he normally displayed on the console of his Suburban, to the outside of his pants where it was clearly visible before he walked into the Beaufort Memorial Hospital following his son Paul’s drunken boat crash. Of course, he was not there in the capacity of prosecutor or law enforcement officer, but as parent.
In truth, the conflicts of interest in this part of South Carolina’s Lowcountry were so rife that line-blurring may not have been chief among them. Bauerlien reports that support from the Murdaugh family was required to obtain elected office in the district. Nearly everyone knew the Murdaughs and many owed their positions to the family’s largesse. As a result of these dynamics, the processing of the murder scene (like the scene of Paul’s boat crash three years earlier) was compromised from the get-go. An out-of-jurisdiction police chief who had been acquitted on corruption charges in a trial where Randolph III and Alex sat behind him in the front row of the courtroom appeared on the scene; the fire battalion chief refused to comply with a request from law enforcement officers to leave the bodies uncovered to preserve evidence; and the coroner did not follow standard procedures out of respect for the victims. When Agent David Owen from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division arrived a few hours after the murder, the Colleton County Sheriff was briefing one of Alex’s law partners.
But what to do about such conflicts? Like North Carolina, South Carolina has a code of professional conduct that requires a lawyer to follow the law and not use its provisions to harass or intimidate others. Ethics codes turn out to be a flimsy shield against rampant corruption, particularly when the offending lawyer is part of a family so powerful that they were referred to as “the Lowcountry Mafia.” Id. at 232. Even so, some South Carolina legal and law enforcement professionals refused to cow. They included Mark Tinsley, the attorney who represented the family of Mallory Beach, the woman who was killed in 2019 when Paul crashed the boat in which she was a passenger. Tinsley doggedly pursued Alex in a personal injury suit, insisted that investigators with conflicts of interest be removed from the boat wreck investigation, and pushed the trial court to order Alex to make a full accounting of his assets. A court hearing in the case was scheduled for Thursday, June 10. Alex murdered his wife and son on Monday, June 7, and the lawsuit was subsequently dismissed.
While Tinsley was himself a successful personal injury lawyer who stood to gain a large fee from a successful suit against Alex, other professionals who had no such financial incentives likewise stood up to the Murdaughs’ power. They include Agent Owen, the lead investigator on the case, who pursued the case notwithstanding his belief that if Alex was acquitted, the Murdaughs would sue him and make his life “a living hell.” Id. at 344. Owen’s ailing mother was hospitalized on the first day of trial testimony and died the day before Owen spent five hours on the witness stand testifying for the State. Another is lead prosecutor Creighton Waters, a public servant who earned one-tenth of Alex’s annual salary. Like Agent Owen, Waters thought the “blowback would be catastrophic” if he lost; yet he was undeterred by that risk. Id. at 287. Bauerlien writes that “[t]he range and depth of Alex’s transgressions” were an insult to Waters, “who saw Alex’s depravity as an affront to the credibility of the legal profession.” Id.
The third point is less of a lesson and more of a reminder about the dangers of unchecked power. True, Alex ultimately was checked, but long after tremendous and irreparable damage was done. And his being held accountable at all was far from a foregone conclusion at the inception of the criminal trial. Systems in which a small circle of people determine the fortunes of all those around them are breeding grounds for corruption. If you think such conditions exist only in a bygone era, the Murdaugh tale is a word to the wise about their staying power.
All lessons aside, Bauerlien masterfully tells a multi-generational story that rises, falls, and rises again on the best and worst of the human condition: ambition and indolence, venality and morality, self-indulgence and self-restraint, loyalty and betrayal, honesty and deceit, and love and hate. Ultimately, as Bauerlien’s editor told her when she asked early on about the Wall Street Journal’s angle: “[S]ometimes a good fricking story is just a good fricking story.” Id. at 415.