I was in South Carolina last week: scene of the trial and home of the Murdaugh dynasty. Both tell us a lot about race and power today.
here have been bigger trials with splashier consequences, but for pure drama – and a window on the way entrenched privilege works in the US south – the events unfolding this week at the Colleton county courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina, are hard to match. In the dock: the 54-year-old Alex Murdaugh, scion of a legal dynasty stretching back 100 years, who is accused of murdering his wife and son. That is the matter at hand and it is lurid enough: 22-year-old Paul Murdaugh and his mother, Maggie, found shot to death in 2021 in the grounds of the family’s hunting lodge, 65 miles west of Charleston – killed by Alex, say prosecutors, to distract attention from his financial crimes.
Behind the double murder, however, lies layer upon layer of further alleged criminal activity, from vast embezzlement from the family law firm, to cover-up, to the involvement of Paul in a drunken boat crash in which a 19-year-old died, and for which the 22-year-old was facing trial at the time of his murder. Three months after the killings, someone shot Alex Murdaugh in the head – an act, it is alleged, that Murdaugh commissioned himself, paying a gunman to kill him so his surviving son could collect on insurance. Meanwhile, the death of the family housekeeper in 2018 has been the subject of renewed police interest.
Going back to the 1920s, Alex Murdaugh’s great-grandfather, grandfather and father – respectively, Randolph Murdaugh, Randolph Murdaugh Jr, and Randolph Murdaugh III (Alex Murdaugh’s older brother is Randolph Murdaugh IV) – all served as top prosecutors across a five-county district, an area of about 8,300 square kilometres (3,200 square miles) over which they had responsibility for all criminal prosecutions.
So great and far-reaching was the power of the Murdaugh name that locals in that part of South Carolina refer to it as “Murdaugh country”. Alex Murdaugh, a lawyer at the family firm he is charged with defrauding, stands accused not only of murder but, by implication, of being the embodiment of what happens when people are cushioned over generations from the consequences of their own actions.
At an earlier hearing, one of Alex Murdaugh’s lawyers used as mitigation his addiction to painkillers, inviting the judge to look upon Murdaugh’s sorry face as the encapsulation of what the opioid epidemic has done to the US. This was, surely, an accurate statement, just not in the way the lawyer intended. If Murdaugh represents some aspect of American life, it is one that is as old as the country itself.
Article URL : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/02/alex-murdaugh-murderer-privilege-us