The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty

“There, among the cypress trees and loblolly pines rising out of the ashes, the Murdaughs carved an isolated empire. For decades, the family reigned as the region’s chief prosecutors—solicitors, they were called—as well as the Lowcountry’s most feared civil litigators, amassing power and wealth through a system of control that served as Alex’s true inheritance.”

Using descriptive language that mimics the structure of fiction, Bauerlein illustrates the isolation of Hampton County and the surrounding district that the Murdaughs exploited throughout their term as solicitors. Royalty is a central motif that Bauerlein frequently uses to indicate the scale of the power that the Murdaughs wielded over the citizens of Hampton, and this habit is evident here in her use of words such as “empire” and “reigned.” Bauerlein also stresses that Alex inherited this power rather than earning it, a fact that contributed to his wildly overblown sense of entitlement.

“The one state trooper who dared to ticket him for having an open container of alcohol was mysteriously reassigned two months later, and the ticket was dismissed.”

Bauerlein shares this brief anecdote to demonstrate the extent of Alex’s influence over law enforcement in his county, highlighting her broader thematic focus on The Corrupting Influence of Family Legacy and Power. Although the reason for the trooper’s dismissal appeared to be a mystery, Bauerlein implies that Alex exerted his power and weaponized his family name to have the trooper fired, rather than owning up to his own transgression.

“He was tall and confident and made her feel at ease, even though he was in a suit and she was in a hospital gown with her hair undone, her body immobilized, and screws sticking out of her ankles.”

Bauerlein contrasts Alex’s put-together, charming appearance with the immobile and disheveled appearance of Pamela Pinckney on their first meeting after her car crash. The contrast emphasizes Pamela’s vulnerability at the time, which Alex manipulated in order to steal a portion of her lawsuit settlement money with ease. Bauerlein follows this same descriptive pattern when detailing the circumstances of Alex’s other financial victims, thereby demonstrating the depths of Alex’s cruelty and his willingness to exploit people at their lowest moments.

“He was the kind of guy who could, in the course of a day, score some pills, cheat on his long-suffering wife, fix three different court cases in three different counties, head to Hampton’s Little League fields to coach one of his son’s teams, and then host the after-party for players’ families.”

In many instances, Bauerlein makes it a point to describe Alex’s deceptive character and his chameleon-like adaptation to the social requirements of different situations. As Alex donned a fake persona with his friends and family to conceal the darker aspects of his life, this passage highlights the text’s thematic focus on The Construction and Maintenance of a False Self-Image, an approach that Alex used often.

“He’d been given a whistle to blow in an emergency, but one day she found it behind his bed, dusty and forgotten. Another time she discovered her son’s bedsheets soggy with urine as dark as tea, signs that they’d been soiled for hours.”

Bauerlein shares this story to illustrate the impoverished position in which Alex left his financial victims while he lived a life of excess on the money that he stole from them. In his last months, Hakeem Pinckney lived in a nursing home that had a poor wellness record, waiting until his mother could hire an at-home caregiver. Hakeem ultimately died in the nursing home, and Bauerlein implies that Hakeem would still be alive if Alex had given the Pickneys their settlement money as he should have.

“Initially he stole from one to put money back into the account of another, robbing Peter to pay Paul. But after a while, he was no longer paying anyone back. He was just grabbing as much as he could from as many people as he could, not just from his clients but from his partners and business associates, too, many of them his friends.”

As Alex continued to evade punishment for his thefts, Bauerlein argues that the adrenaline of stealing made him bolder, indicating The Corrupting Influence of Family Legacy and Power. To build tension in the narrative, Bauerlein depicts the escalation of Alex’s crimes, which he soon committed against his own friends. Because Part 1 has already revealed that Alex ends up on trial for at least some of his crimes, Bauerlein creates a sense of anticipation for the moment when Alex will finally make a fatal mistake.

“Almost nobody would talk to them, and when someone did answer questions, they couldn’t corroborate anything that mattered. As the days grew into weeks, the investigators realized that even some Hampton County officials appeared to be dodging their calls. Maybe someone had gotten to them.”

Highway Patrol troopers faced many setbacks in their investigation of Stephen Smith’s murder, primarily due to the witnesses’ reluctance to talk. Bauerlein connects this story to a pattern that the Murdaughs exhibited in criminal cases that implicated them. Simply the mention of the Murdaugh name—and the implied actions that they could get away with—frightened people into silence out of fear of retaliation.

“I thank God that the jury brought in a true verdict insofar as I am concerned.’ Insofar as I am concerned. That five-word flourish revealed so much about Buster, who was so willing to condemn his accomplices as long as he walked away.”

Buster Murdaugh, Alex’s grandfather, was the only person in a federal bootlegging investigation to walk out of the trial a free man, despite the fact that he was guilty of running the operation. Bauerlein describes Buster as someone who was intensely focused on self-preservation, and she eventually depicts Alex the same way. Bauerlein asserts that the Murdaughs nurtured an insularity in their family and regarded all of their exterior connections as disposable. This is one characteristic that went even further with Alex, who Bauerlein claims also saw his own family members as disposable.

“‘I’ll take care of you,’ Alex said. ‘You’re like family to me.’”

Alex said these words to several of his financial victims before he stole from them. By repeatedly including this phrase in her narrative, Bauerlein emphasizes the fact that Alex concealed his ulterior motives behind fake intimacy and friendship. In this instance, Alex speaks to Tony Satterfield, the son of Alex’s late housekeeper Gloria, from whom Alex stole millions of dollars while Tony struggled to pay his mother’s medical bills. The phrase “like family” also takes on a tone of bitter irony over the course of the narrative, given that Alex is ultimately convicted for brutally murdering two members of his own family.

“The Murdaughs perpetuated the illusion that they were Hampton’s benefactors, fighting for neighbors who had nothing. But their legal chokehold chased away businesses, deprived people of jobs, kept doctors from opening practices, and made it more expensive to raise families.”

Bauerlein argues that although the Murdaughs presented the appearance of generosity to the townsfolk, their hostile lawsuits against businesses and corporations actually kept the region impoverished. Throughout the text, Bauerlein describes the relative stagnation of Hampton compared to surrounding counties, and she points to businesses’ collective fear of the Murdaughs as the main reason why the county was so poor.

“On the night of the oyster roast, he drove a boat owned by his father while drinking beer obtained with his brother’s ID and paid for with his mother’s credit card. Later that night, after the oyster roast, he planned to crash with his friends at his grandfather’s river house at Murdaugh Island.”

Bauerlein contends that the entitlement nurtured in the Murdaugh family was amplified in Paul. In this excerpt, Bauerlein illustrates how Paul used his family’s things as if they were his own. She emphasizes in this list of items that nothing he interacted with on the night of the boat crash were items that he obtained himself. These details foreshadow his later willingness to rely on his family’s power—another thing not of his own making—to get him out of trouble.

“Now his father was walking around the emergency room as if he owned the place and talking to these young people without their parents present. The nurse couldn’t believe it. The Murdaugh name might give him cachet where he was from, but it meant nothing to her. She was from Beaufort and did not care how things were done in Hampton County. In this ER, there were rules.”

On the night of the boat crash, Alex walked around the hospital, blatantly coaching the victims on what to say to police in order to obscure Paul’s responsibility for the crash. Bauerlein shares that Alex experienced the first setbacks in his family’s untouchability from a nurse in the hospital who had no fear of the Murdaugh name because she was from Beaufort. In this passage, Bauerlein also adapts the tone of her narrative, speaking as though the nurse is directly relating her private thoughts and emotions on the matter.

“Tinsley was drawn to both the suit and the blade. The law, for all its decorum and rules, was an inherently savage profession. He cared deeply about the ideal of justice and the social order the law is designed to uphold. But his cases weren’t abstractions to be debated in a symposium. He was fighting for real people whose lives had been broken in the most brutal ways.”

Mark Tinsley was the lawyer whom Mallory Beach’s family hired after her death and Alex’s attempted cover-up of Paul’s crime. Bauerlein depicts Tinsley as a foil to Alex throughout the narrative. Whereas Alex immorally bent the law and tricked his clients for his own personal gain, Tinsley was morally upright and fought for his clients, almost as if he had to put his actual body to the hazard on their behalf.

“More officers were showing up. As one approached, Alex looked up and said, ‘How you doing?’ Greene continued with his questions.”

This interaction occurred on the night of Paul and Maggie’s murder as Sergeant Greene, the first responding officer, questioned Alex about how he found the bodies. Prosecutors used the interaction as proof of Alex’s culpability at his trial, arguing that his casual greeting of the officer was completely out of place for someone who had ostensibly just discovered the bodies of his murdered wife and son. For the prosecutors, the interaction indicated that Alex’s show of grief was merely performative.

“The ideal crime scene was indoors. This one was outdoors and sprawling. A light rain was falling off and on, possibly diluting evidence or even washing it away. Moselle was so remote that SLED’s crime scene technicians were just arriving from Columbia two hours after the 911 call.”

Paul and Maggie were shot outside Moselle’s dog kennels, 250 yards away from the main house in the pitch-dark night. The chaos of the scene—both because of the natural elements and the number of people who visited within hours of the dispatchers’ arrival—became a major issue in the state’s case. The defense argued that SLED’s investigation was inconclusive because they didn’t collect key evidence from the outdoor scene that could exonerate Alex.

“After the shock of the roadside shooting wore off, Alex’s public reputation quickly disintegrated. The sympathy others had felt for him after the murders was now transformed into hostility and suspicion.”

Days after Alex was fired from his law firm for embezzlement, Alex hired his drug dealer to shoot him, claiming that he was too humiliated to keep living. However, Alex’s injuries were non-fatal, so he lied about the shooting, claiming that an unknown assailant was to blame—a story that was quickly debunked. Bauerlein argues that Alex’s very public lie about the situation detrimentally impacted his credibility, leading more and more people to believe that he was guilty of killing his family.

“To wheel and deal in the jail, he needed as much currency as possible. He found an easy hustle. After his family members deposited the maximum of $60 a week in his commissary account, he’d have them put an additional $60 in another inmate’s account, with that man keeping $15 as his cut and passing the rest on to Alex.”

Bauerlein uses this anecdote about Alex’s behavior in jail to illustrate his compulsion to lie and manipulate in every situation. Even after his conviction, Alex used his charm and doled out favors so that he could improve his living situation. For Bauerlein, this manipulation of the jail’s barter economy is just a smaller version of the financial crimes that he committed as a free man.

“They all think the dark, black waters took me. But I need them to see… the dark, black secrets needed me. To set them all free… it took me.”

This quotation comes from a dream that Beverly Cook had about Mallory. Beverly took the words to mean that Mallory’s death was the catalyst for all of Alex’s crimes to come to light and for him to finally face justice. Beverly and her son, Anthony (Mallory’s boyfriend) were both riddled with grief following the crash and were infuriated by the Murdaughs’ seeming lack of care for Mallory or her family.

“Alex’s life was a minefield of misdeeds, and it was proving impossible for the defense not to step on bomb after bomb.”

During the trial, Alex’s defense lawyers wanted to restrict discussions about Alex’s life, particularly details that prosecutors could use as motives for the murders. However, Bauerlein points out that the defense’s own lines of questioning often opened the door for the prosecutors to discuss these facets of Alex’s character. In the end, Bauerlein asserts that establishing Alex’s pattern of lying led jurors to produce the guilty verdict.

“He also made a point of slipping back and forth in chronology, circling with one line of questions and then shifting to another to make it harder for the witness to settle into a rhythm. All of the prosecutor’s questions were designed to expose Alex’s capacity for lying about every aspect of his life. Waters needed to harness Alex’s desire to explain himself, knowing that once Alex started talking, he wouldn’t stop.”

Bauerlein explains the various legal techniques that the prosecutors and the defense employed in their arguments and cross-examinations, as is conventional of true-crime nonfiction. Here, Bauerlein describes how Waters intentionally threw Alex off-balance so that he would not have an opportunity to relax, while also prodding him to over-explain himself and get caught in his lies.

“‘Why’d you get out of there so quick, Mr. Murdaugh?’

‘Because it was chaotic. It was hot. And I was getting ready to do exactly what I didn’t want to do.’

The prosecutor paused, staring at the witness.

‘You were getting ready to do what you didn’t want to do?’

A frisson swept over the courtroom.”

In this passage, Waters asks Alex about his unusual timeline for the night of the murders, in which Alex appeared to flee from the kennels just minutes before Paul and Maggie’s estimated time of death. Alex’s response shocks Waters as well as the onlookers in the courtroom because Alex’s statement reads as an admission of guilt. Bauerlein emphasizes the upset of the statement through Waters’ pause—another technique that the prosecutor employed to let Alex’s words and lies speak for themselves.

“A dominant impression, shared by many, was that Moselle felt like a place where the barrier between the living and the dead was very thin.”

Bauerlein utilizes Moselle in the text as a symbol both of Alex’s power and his subsequent undoing. She frequently describes Moselle as isolated—a place that is shielded from prying eyes and from accountability. By the end of the text, Moselle comes to represent the ruin of Alex’s lavish life, and it is tainted forever by the tragedy that he inflicted on his family in his desperate attempt to hold onto his false public image.

“They debated his many displays of emotion and whether there had been any real tears in them. One juror, a carpenter named Craig Moyer, had been sitting about six feet from Alex. He saw no tears, just snot.”

Bauerlein offers an inside look at the jury’s deliberation process. Presenting insider information and behind-the-scenes details is a common element of true-crime nonfiction. Bauerlein therefore provides biographical details about the jurors and also shares their opinions and the reasoning that they used to evaluate the case.