LOW-DOWN IN THE LOW COUNTRY
How four generations of the Murdaugh men led their family along a path of misery and murder
WHEN Alex Murdaugh was convicted in 2023 of murdering his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at the family's 1,800-acre South Carolina hunting retreat, it was a shocking downfall. For decades, Alex was a big-talking, glad-handing schmoozer of an attorney known for earning multimillion-dollar settlements at his family's long-standing law firm. No one would have predicted he'd end up sentenced to life in prison -- except maybe a Murdaugh being convicted of a crime was long overdue.
For nearly a century the family ruled the legal world of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. From 1920 to 2006, a Murdaugh held public office as the area’s “solicitor,” a position solely responsible for deciding which alleged crimes went to trial and which were dismissed. While the three successive generations of Murdaugh solicitors (first Randolph, then Buster, then Randy) were known to do good work prosecuting the worst criminals, they also used their authority to enrich themselves and accumulate power.
“I think they were worse than the Mafia,” an anonymous local is quoted in Jason Ryan’s “Swamp Kings: The Story of the Murdaugh Family of South Carolina and a Century of Backwoods Power” (Pegasus Crime, out now). “It was sickening to watch them in action.”
The first Murdaugh solicitor was Randolph Murdaugh, Sr., who held office from 1920 to 1940. He may have been the most benign Murdaugh of all. Randolph Senior’s only real crime was funneling local defendants he was prosecuting to hire his private law firm for their defense, a kind of dubious double-dipping that ensured he got rich while working the low-paying job of county solicitor.
WHEN kidney failure doomed Randolph Sr. to an early grave, he purposely drove his car onto local railroad tracks and was killed by an onrushing train in 1940. But before that suicide Randolph Sr. resigned as solicitor and pulled enough strings to ensure his son, Buster, was given the role.
There was nothing benign about the reign of Buster, who filled the position for 46 years. Buster began his tenure by suing the railroad company CSX for his father’s death, holding them responsible for what had clearly been Randolph Sr’s purposeful actions. Responsible or not, CSX soon settled for an undisclosed sum.
Until 1986, Buster ran the Lowcountry as his own personal fiefdom, deciding who would be elected to public office and who would be charged with crimes. He was repeatedly investigated by the South Carolina Bar Association and indicted by the federal government, but none of the charges ever took.
“There are two types of laws in South Carolina,” Ryan quotes an opposing attorney as saying. “The laws on the books, and Buster’s laws.”
Law enforcement was entirely on his side, too. Once when Buster asked a police officer the color of an alleged get-away car, the cop shrugged his shoulders and said it was whatever color the solicitor needed it to be.
IN 1945 Buster impregnated a local married woman and later admitted he’d tried to hire someone to kill her — that confession was of course never investigated.
When federal authorities prosecuted Buster in the mid-1950s as the mastermind bootlegger of a local whiskey-making conspiracy, the Murdaugh man was one of only three accused deemed innocent — 15 others were found guilty.
Plus, Buster’s brother Johnny was known as a wife-beater and childmolester — and a likely murderer of a farmhand who went missing — but he never suffered any legal jeopardy while his older sibling ruled the Lowcountry courts.
By the time Buster retired in 1986, he’d pulled his own strings to guarantee his son Randy was named solicitor. Randy held the job for 20 years and shared his father’s sense of invincibility, first by flouting the rules of decent society by ignoring his marriage as a serial philanderer.
“He had a grand time screwing fat girls,” was the gossip regarding the Lowcountry’s newest lead prosecutor.
PLUS Randy bent all the legal rules, too. When a friend’s teenage daughter was wooed by an older ne’er-do-well of a boy, Randy wrote a restraining order against the innocent suitor and eventually had him arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. When an acquaintance was arrested a third time in 2004 for pirating compact discs, Randy both opted not to prosecute and even returned the man’s illegally-acquired belongings.
The Murdaugh chokehold on the solicitor position officially ended in 2006 with Randy’s retirement, mostly because Randy’s son Alex was more of an ambulance-chaser than a serious attorney. Alex had always been known as a “meathead,” a drunken loudmouth given to big talk and fisticuffs.
“He was an underhanded piece of s--t,” a fellow attorney said. “A bully all of his teenage and adult life.”
Before retiring, Randy did make his son Alex a volunteer assistant solicitor though, a powerless position which the younger Murdaugh nonetheless used to get himself an official law enforcement badge and blue lights atop his personal vehicle. That allowed him to run rampant in the Lowcountry.
Alex was a star at the Murdaugh family law firm though, enriching both the company and himself — in 2013 Alex personally earned more than $5 million.
It wasn’t the most honorable work though. In 2007 a car crash left one teenager dead and the driver with a brain like “silly putty.” But Alex sued the brain-injured boy for reckless driving — even though his fatal accident resulted from a truck driver negligently leaving his semi parked across both lanes of a darkened country road. Why did Alex Murdaugh target the injured teenager? The truck driver had no insurance but the teen driver’s father did, ensuring a much bigger financial settlement.
Amid all his monetary successes, Alex’s massive opioid addiction, high-living lifestyle of golf vacations, private-plane travel and wild realestate purchases left him in massive debt. He got dubious million-dollar, loans from a friendly local bank to cover his expenses but eventually needed to steal from the family law firm and siphon cash off from his clients to cover those. In one case, Alex’s client was awarded more than $2 million, but Alex gave him only $370,000 and kept the rest.
DID Alex’s never-ending financial shortfalls turn him into a murderer? Probably. When his housekeeper mysteriously died from a fall at his hunting retreat, Alex sued himself as homeowner to ensure a big insurance payout for her family. Most of that money ended up in his pocket, too.
Alex’s son Paul was known as a “little Dylan Klebold” for his fascination with blood and guns, and rumors abounded that he’d bashed the head in of a local gay man who was said to be having an affair with Paul’s brother. Paul definitely killed another local though, when he drunkenly crashed into a bridge a boat he shouldn’t have been driving one cold, foggy night.
Paul and the Murdaughs always managed to stay one step ahead of the law though, at least until they didn’t. Alex’s firm eventually found out that for years he’d been stealing millions from them and his clients, and that very same day Alex’s wife Maggie and son Paul were viciously murdered.
Paul’s head was blown away with his own shotgun and Maggie cut down from behind as she ran for her life. Alex Murdaugh’s desperate need for money had pushed him too far, turning him into a heartless killer and, eventually, a convicted murderer.
And as Ryan so meticulously recounts in "Swamp Kings," until the end, Alex probably believed he could get away with it.
He was an underhanded piece of s- -t. A bully all of his teenage and adult life. A fellow attorney on convicted double murderer Alex Murdaugh