Why was the Murdaugh murder trial captivating?

Here in Los Angeles, thousands of miles from South Carolina, the obsession with the double-murder saga of the Murdaugh family has seemed slightly ridiculous to me.

Cable TV news channels pumped up interest, treating it as the trial of the century, as if proceedings against Alex Murdaugh, charged with murder in the shooting deaths of his wife, Maggie, and young adult son Paul, could recapture the ratings “magic” of the O.J. Simpson trial.

The Simpson case, which launched a thousand legal pundit careers, was a nation-jarring collision of race, celebrity, privilege and spectacularly over-the-top courtroom theatrics. Because of this — and the insanely slowspeed white Bronco chase that preceded Simpson’s arrest in the death of his exwife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman — many Americans with absolutely no personal connection to the Simpson case had a deep emotional investment in its outcome.

But none of that applied to the Murdaugh trial, which featured an unsympathetic defendant, the scion of a South Carolina legal dynasty, who was a confessed drug addict and had admitted pocketing millions of dollars in judgments owed to his clients.

To me, Alex Murdaugh, who was found guilty last Thursday and sentenced Friday to two consecutive life terms in prison, seemed guilty from the get-go. I didn’t see much suspense there.

It wasn’t until after the sentencing that TV clued me in on why the Murdaughs were so compelling. I watched Netflix’s three-part docuseries on the family. The tale of the Murdaughs may not have the racial or celebrity components of the Simpson case, but who doesn’t love a story about the mighty falling under the weight of their own misdeeds, about powerful people behaving so very badly?

“They were the law in this area,” local reporter Michael DeWitt told the documentary makers Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason in Netflix’s “The Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.” “And at times, they were above the law.” (HBO Max aired its own documentary, “Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty” in November.)

For generations, the Murdaughs embodied the privileged white justice system in rural South Carolina. They straddled the system, as prosecutors and as plaintiffs’ attorneys. The family owned the largest law firm in the area. They were cozy with law enforcement.

Paul may have come to a grotesque end at the hands of his father at age 22, but he’d already played a part in the death of a classmate. Mallory Beach was 20 years old when she was thrown from his speedboat as he drunkenly piloted it home from a bar in 2019. Four other passengers survived; two of them were seriously injured.

At the time of his murder, Paul was awaiting trial on three felony counts of boating under the influence in connection with Beach’s death. He was never arrested, never handcuffed and never jailed for his role in the horrific crash. (The hospital found the 19-year-old’s blood alcohol level was 0.28, more than three times the legal limit.)

His father and grandfather showed up at the hospital where his seriously injured friends were being treated and, according to the young crash victims in the documentary, tried to get them to lie about who was driving the boat when it crashed, and exhibited no concern for their well-being, nor even for the life of Beach, whose body was recovered from the water eight days after the crash.

That’s not the end of it. This family’s gothic history groans under its head-spinning weight.

In 2015, a high school friend of Buster, Alex and Maggie’s elder (and now only surviving) son, was found dead on an isolated road. Stephen Smith’s death was ruled a hit and run, but authorities have now reopened the case based on evidence they discovered in the course of the Maggie and Paul murder investigation.

In 2018, the family’s longtime housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, died after falling down steps at the family hunting lodge, tripped by their dogs, the Murdaughs said. Alex engineered a multimillion-dollar insurance payout meant for Satterfield’s sons but has been charged with keeping most of it for himself.

Three months after his son and wife died, Murdaugh is alleged to have conspired with one of his former clients to shoot him and kill him, making it look like a random crime so his surviving son could collect $10 million in insurance.

The more I learn about the trail of devastation left in the South Carolina Low Country by one powerful family, the more I understand the public’s fascination. Very few families are tied to this much pain and anguish. It is the stuff of nightmares — and blockbuster TV.