MURDAUGH MURDER SQUEEZE PLAY!
Patriarch charged in new swindle as law probes role in wife & son killings
ALREADY facing accusations of a mega-million insurance swindle and hiring a hitman to arrange his own murder, disgraced South Carolina power broker Alex Murdaugh is now being targeted by lawmen probing the executionstyle deaths of his wife and youngest son.
Murdaugh’s lawyer Jim Griffin admits authorities see his client as a “person of interest” in the death of his wife, Maggie, 52, and troubled son Paul, 22, who were gunned down at the influential family’s hunting lodge. Murdaugh, a prominent lawyer with a secret drug addiction, called 911 after finding the bodies this summer.
Sources say Murdaugh, 53, who claims to have blown through millions to feed his drug habit, had a powerful reason to silence Maggie — she’d consulted divorce lawyers in April and was asking questions about the shoddy state of the family fortune!
“Maggie’s knowledge of her husband’s financial dealings, coupled with the fact that she was seeking the advice of a divorce attorney, spelled disaster for Alex,” says New York defense attorney Peter Gleason, who is not involved in the case.
“Very often, when there’s an inkling that a whistleblower will come forward that whistleblower finds themselves on the wrong end of a gun.”
When Maggie and her son’s bullet-riddled corpses were
GLOBE / November 8, 2021 found June 7, lawmen initially believed the unsolved slaughter might be a revenge murder triggered by Paul’s link to a booze-fueled 2019 boating crash that killed 19-year-old Mallory Beach. But cops soon focused on Murdaugh as the disgraced attorney’s life spiraled out of control.
Now Murdaugh is charged with hiring a handyman to end his life. Cops claim the lawyer masterminded a bungled Sept. 4 attempt to blow his brains out so his surviving son, law student Buster, 26, could cash in on a $10 million insurance policy. But the plot went haywire and Murdaugh only suffered a superficial head wound while changing a tire by the side of the road. His story unraveled, too, say police, who reveal Murdaugh then admitted his drug addiction. His legal partners subsequently claimed he’d embezzled millions from their firm.
On Oct. 14, cops busted the legal eagle at an Orlando, Fla., rehab facility where he’d spent six weeks detoxing after his botched death scheme. This time he was charged with pocketing millions in an insurance payout for the death of his housekeeper Gloria Satterfield at his Islandton, S.C., home in 2018. The family’s longtime, 57-year-old housekeeper and nanny died of a brain hemorrhage several weeks after tripping over the family dog and falling down Murdaugh’s front steps.
At her funeral, Murdaugh reportedly referred Satterfield’s sons Tony and Brian to lawyer Cory Fleming — without telling them Fleming was
his close pal, lawmen charge.
Fleming negotiated a $4.3 million settlement with insurers and then forked over $2.8 million — what was left after attorney’s fees — to Murdaugh, say investigators. Gloria’s kids insist they never got a dime.
Now sources claim police are using the Satterfield case to turn the screws on Murdaugh — hoping he may crack under pressure and cop to involvement in his wife and son’s deaths. But his lawyer insists Murdaugh loved his wife and son and had “no motive” to commit the brutal two-gun slaying.