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Dec. 30, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
49:38
20241230_alex-murdaughs-life-in-prison-and-web-of-crimes-an
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The Alec Murdoch Boat Accident 00:14:27
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and today's true crime Christmas special.
Today, we are diving deep into the case of Alec Murdoch, and there are updates in this incredible case, believe it or not.
His story begins much earlier than the crimes that made national headlines over the past few years, and no one has covered the story quite like the Wall Street Journal's Valerie Borline, who wrote the book The Devil at His Elbow.
We get into everything from Murdoch's family history to the details of his downfall and the new info.
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Valerie, welcome.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
Okay, so this is all so fascinating.
And one of the most eye-opening things I read was about Alec Murdoch's background.
He comes from a long line of deeply ethically problematic people, which I did not know.
All you ever heard about him was that he came from this very storied family.
They were lifelong solicitors or like the prosecutors in their town in South Carolina, very well respected.
They controlled everything.
It was far more nefarious than that.
Can you take us back?
Oh, it absolutely was.
I mean, I think one of the biggest surprises I had researching this book was that every crime that Elliot was eventually convicted of had some echo in the past.
And that includes like violence against women or overtures of violence against women.
That includes insurance fraud, like by the side of the road, there was an act of insurance fraud that started the family dynasty, stealing from clients, drug trafficking.
There were echoes in the past for every single crime we're talking about, even a boat wreck that caused really a traumatic injury.
So that was that surprised me too.
It wasn't just Elliot, it was the history going back to 1920 of this family.
Yes, I mean, it really does show you: you know, if you have a family, a father, a grandfather who are committing crimes and teaching you, either explicitly or implicitly, that that's okay, your odds of becoming a criminal are obviously much higher.
But hello, women of the world, pay attention.
Pay attention to your spouse, the guys you're dating.
It can work the other way around too, and what they come from, who they come from.
So, this, his great-grandfather, Randolph Murdoch Sr., Basically, he committed suicide and insurance fraud at the same time.
That's right.
And I was in Hampton just last week.
I actually was standing at the train tracks just south of Almeida, where Alex, the home place that Elek went the night of the homicides.
His great-grandfather, Randolph Sr., was a very prominent man.
I mean, every meal he ate was front page news.
Like, where was he now?
He was the district attorney for four counties in the low country of South Carolina.
He was, he was very sick.
He was 53 years old.
He was, um, he was dying.
He was at the end of his life.
He had kidney failure at a time when there just you didn't, there was no cure, right?
There was no dialysis.
He was broke.
He had been a big investor in a bank, and then the bank failed.
And through the depression, he was just, I found documents down at the courthouse in Hampton where he just would say, There's no chance I can ever pay these people back.
So he was broke, he was dying, and he knew how to do one thing incredibly well, which was sue the railroad, which at that time in 1940 was one of the only entities worth suing.
So what happened was he was driving back from a poker game in Yamase, a little town right on the Hampton County line at one in the morning, hottest day of the summer, 90-some degrees.
He pulls, he stops short of his home and turns onto a deserted train tracks and right and is at the base of it.
And as the train is coming, and if y'all, if you grew up in a small town near a railroad, you know what time the train comes through.
The train is coming north and you can hear it for miles.
It's coming north.
It's bearing down on this train tracks.
He speeds up onto the tracks themselves and they're blowing the whistle.
They're flashing the light.
It's a clear moonlit night.
And they see he sees them.
And instead of like driving off, he waves at them.
And what happens is there's a coroner's jury.
And the coroner, of course, was a protege of Randolph Sr.
The sheriff was a protege of Randolph Sr.
There was an inquest the next morning and guess what?
The local coroner's jury found that in spite of the testimony of the engineer and others, it was an accident.
And it cleared the way for Randolph Murdoch Jr., Ellick's grandfather, to sue the railroad for the equivalent of millions of dollars, which is what he did successfully.
Isn't it Randolph Murdoch Jr. Buster?
Randolph Murdoch Jr. is old Buster and Old Buster was a real force to be reckoned with.
He was solicitor from 1940 when he was 25 years old to 1986.
So Roosevelt to Reagan.
And he even stayed in that office beyond that time.
The legislature finally essentially forced him.
They created a rule that essentially forced him to retire, but he kept going into the office as a volunteer solicitor.
So he was Randolph Murdoch Jr., old Buster.
Elek Murdoch idolized him.
He told many people that he wished he'd been born in Old Buster's day because in those days, what you said was what the truth was.
And old Buster was, he ruled with an iron fist.
He was one of those guys that would rather be feared than loved.
And he also continued fraud and potential violence against women.
So Old Buster, there's, I was able to pull 900 pages from the National Archives of the records from his trial, his federal trial.
The feds charged him with bootlegging, actually running the largest bootlegging ring in the South.
He was the ringleader.
They charged two dozen people.
Old Buster, Elli's grandfather, was charged with leading this entire ring in Colleton County.
And he was accused of taking a cash bribe in the hallway of the Colleton County Courthouse, which is the hallway that we went in and out every day of Elec's Murdoch trial.
He was accused of intimidating witnesses, buying off witnesses, And eventually of tampering with the jury by buying off the foreman.
And he was one of the only people in that entire weeks long federal trial that was acquitted.
So there's a history of, you know, Elec Murdoch was convicted of drug trafficking.
His grandfather was credibly accused and narrowly escaped being convicted of bootlegging.
So again, those echoes in the past.
Tell us about the mistress who got on the wrong side of Alec Murdoch's grandfather.
So there was testimony in Alec's trial, as you remember.
There was testimony that Elec was somewhat of a philanderer.
And that certainly is a history in the family going back generations.
His grandfather, old Buster, had a mistress, not several, but one in particular who he was in touch with for many, many years.
And her name was Ruth Fox.
And Ruth Fox was married to a local, like a northern baron who came down and bought a plantation.
And she was from one of the nation's first families, a really impressive woman in her own right.
And she had been in the Navy during World War II, like training pilots, which is kind of wild to think about what kind of woman was doing that in the 40s.
And she met Buster and asked for his help in getting out of her obligations.
He's like, I know everybody.
I'll know all U.S. senators.
I'll help you get out of this out of this bind.
They got to know each other.
And what you know, a year later, she is pregnant with his child.
She goes to, it's just such an incredible story.
She goes to the house and we're talking about the same house that Ellik went to the night of the homicides at Mozell.
She goes to the house, knocks on the door, speaks to Elec's grandmother and says, you know, you have a son.
I have a son.
These boys should meet.
And the grandmother says, you know, don't let my name come out of your mouth ever again.
Go away.
And it was, it was a stunning thing because she had survived essentially when she had told old Buster that she was pregnant.
He had tried to have her killed.
He had a fixer.
The story goes, he had a fixer of one of many who laid laid in wait underneath her porch one night and got a little bit too drunk and fell asleep and didn't kill her.
So there was just like this incredible, incredible echoes throughout this story.
Isn't it amazing?
Yes, it is amazing.
I mean, I cannot, you must have been just slackjawed when you read up about the direct line from which he came.
And it's, it makes sense of everything.
So it didn't stop there.
It didn't even skip a generation.
Alex's father also had a history of paying people off to cover up a boat accident, which of course would set off Alex's own story with a different boat accident as well.
Well, there was, and there was certainly a terrible boat accident in 1998 from the same island, like Murdoch Island, where you'll remember the tragic boat wreck that killed Mallory Beach in 2019.
They took the Murdoch family boat from the family compound, which is called Murdoch Island.
Back in 1998, Elec's younger brother was having a party on Murdoch Island.
There was a boat there, and it's incredible.
I couldn't believe it when I saw the documents.
It had been seized in a drug raid by the solicitor's office, so by old Buster, and he liked the boat.
So he kept it for his own use at the island.
And everyone, the family used it.
So it's late at night.
There are some guests there that wanted to take the boat home rather than the roads because they didn't want to get in trouble.
They've been drinking for many hours.
And these young men set off on a boat ride home.
And it's tricky.
We know from what happened with the wreck that killed Mallory Beach.
It's very shallow waters in places.
They hit a shoal and stopped and then immediately started back up and didn't realize that one of the guests had fallen overboard and had gotten run over by the motor and sustained a traumatic brain injury.
And, you know, I've got hundreds of pages of documents from the state that show that the Murdochs were involved in trying to make that wreck go away.
Even some of the same DNR, the natural resources officers, even some of the same officers who were involved in the Mallory Beach wreck were in, they were working that night as well.
So the echoes in the past are just, just, sometimes I couldn't believe it.
I really was gobsmacked many times in a row.
Yes.
Same.
I'm having the same reaction just sitting here.
So then, of course, we get to Alec and this whole thing that we watched, this double murder trial in which he was found guilty of killing his wife and his own son was set off by that boating accident.
The second one, not the one you discussed where the woman was run over, but more recently with the younger generation while Alec was out on a boat, was drinking, and they had an accident and Mallory Beach was thrown from the boat and wasn't found for some time later and she was dead.
And that old Murdoch instinct to cover it up, run cover for those involved, or especially for Alec, kicked in and would set off a chain of events that would ultimately destroy the Murdoch family.
And it's so poignant to look at pictures of Mallory.
She was 19 years old when she died.
She was just full of life.
I've gotten to know her, her family over the course of reporting this story.
And it was, it was Alec's boat, but it was his son, Paul Murdoch, who was 19 at the time, who was driving.
I mean, I think the facts established that he was driving.
He was criminally charged with it.
And so he is incredibly drunk.
He drank a lot.
I talked with people that knew the family.
He had been sneaking beer since he was eight years old.
And at a certain point, not even sneaking them.
So he was very, very drunk.
He had 19 drinks that night.
His BAC when he got to the hospital was 0.286.
But he was a person, even at 19, who'd been drinking for numbers of years and had been driving drunk for numbers of years, according to people I talked to who were involved in wrecks with him before.
But so he gets angry at his girlfriend, who's one of the passengers on the boat, confronts her.
She says, you're too drunk to drive.
Give everybody the keys, slaps her, spits in her face, goes back to the wheel of the boat and floors it, the equivalent of 28 miles an hour.
And they're going through a very narrow, very shallow path and hit a bridge that fast.
And Mallory is thrown overboard and never resurfaces.
The Law Firm's Undoing 00:08:08
And what all the evidence, I've got thousands of pages of documents, some of them public, many of them not, many of them that had not been reviewed before, that just showed that there was, when Elek got to the hospital that night where these young people had been on the boat was, he went room to room to room, trying to get everyone on the same page.
He had his his grandfather, Old Buster's badge outside of his pocket, pretending to be a law enforcement officer.
And I have his cell phone records and have tracked his path that night.
Do you remember when he testified that he put blue lights and siren on the suburban that he was driving?
It was almost physically impossible for him to get from Mozell, where he and Maggie were living at the time, to the hospital unless he was going fabulously fast, 80 or 90 miles an hour.
Think it stands to reason and I argue this in the book that he almost certainly used lights to to get to the hospital before the other families and get everyone on the same page.
But it really was his, his undoing.
The reason that he said he wanted to live in oldbuster's time is that, you know, there was so much evidence in the video cameras in the hospital that night, so many statements.
There was so much.
Everything is recorded right, you know, and and he, he could not outrun modernity and and in the end, that night and his actions, the night of the boat wreck, really was the beginning of the end of the family.
For, among other reasons, he was then sued by the Beach family and that in the course of that lawsuit he would have to produce discovery speaking to his economic status, his financial data and so on.
And he was, we know separately now, running a massive fraud stealing from his law firm.
Uh, had a massive drug problem, or so he testified, and was very worried this is all going to come out, he would be exposed, and that, and at the same time his law firm.
Was this coincidental?
Was this coincidental Valerie that, like the law firm, started an investigation of Alec at the same time for possible ethical breaches, or were those two things related, the lawsuit and the law firm getting interested in him?
Well, it's all kind.
It's all kind of woven together and what?
What happened in the immediate aftermath of the boat wreck is that Mallory's family was having a tough time finding a lawyer to represent their interest.
Um, and Renee Beech, Mallory's mom, tells the story of being down at the, at the landing, where the boat was had come to rest, and wanting to go down there and see um, where her daughter was, where she was the last time she was spotted and the the police were very, very kind but said, i'm sorry, you can't go down there.
Here's a case of water for you and your family while you wait.
And there was a moment where Randolph Murdock ii, Elec's dad and, and Maggie, his wife, came down in in their pickup truck and he waves at the officer and waves him through, and Renee Beech realized then, oh my gosh, this is not a vigil.
I thought I was at a vigil mourning my daughter.
This is a crime scene and the family that's been the law in this area for 100 years is in charge of it.
I need a lawyer.
And she made a critical decision, which is to hire a lawyer to represent the family's interest.
And that lawyer was a key player and a big character in this book and his name is Mark Tinsley and there's no um enemy.
Like your former friend, he was very close to Ellick.
He knew the playbook, he had a, he had a card key to get in and out of the Murdoch law firm at will and he recognized those relationships.
He's like oh, I know he knows these particular officers because of my own personal information and once he decided to take the case, take the Beach's case he was relentless in showing that um, that Ellick and potentially the officers who were involved in in protecting the scene were really um, really protecting Paul from charges.
And so he filed a lawsuit in very short order and that lawsuit sought, like you said, all of Ellipt's financial records.
Is just a standard part of a civil lawsuit to say, how much insurance do you have?
What resources could you potentially pay if there was a judgment?
And Ellick knew more than anyone else that he had been robbing his personal injury clients, the poorest of the poor, for more than a decade.
And he knew what any serious inquiry would do.
And so he had to stave that off.
And in the end, it was his undoing.
So he killed his own wife and his son, Paul, who had been at the helm for that boating accident.
And it was an attempt to garner sympathy, like to make him a sympathetic character so that his law firm would move away, would stop investigating him, so that the lawsuit involving Paul would be less strong because, you know, the main culprit would be gone.
And who would put this poor man now through the torture of seeing a civil lawsuit through?
It was an effort to just change his own financial and reputational fortunes.
No, I think the prosecution argued that very effectively.
And one of the things that I think that Mark Tinsley said on the stand is, you know, personal injury lawyers don't think like other people.
Their gift, their understanding of a successful one is understanding emotion, like what motivate, what might motivate a jury to pay blood money and a lot of it in a case.
They understand what makes people tick.
And he knew that, you know, the day of the homicides, June 7th of 2021, and I'm sure we'll talk about this, he had been confronted over some of that missing money that he had been stealing.
$792,000, not a small amount.
He knew that the law firm was on to him.
And he knew also that his father was dying, the patriarch of this family who had also loaned him a million dollars over time, and who he had just been texting with his buddy at the bank.
Oh, I'm going to get another loan from my dad for some money he was short.
He knew his dad was dying.
He knew this lawsuit was pending about his financials.
He had been confronted over the missing money.
And he also knew that Paul was a mess.
I mean, sadly, and may he rest in peace, Paul's actions, drunken actions, did not cease with the boat wreck.
There's testimony that even just 10 days before he was killed, he was on a boat drinking, taking some people out, and he had to call his father to get out of it.
So Paul's behavior was not de-escalating.
If anything, his behavior is getting worse.
So, yes, I think that the state made a really effective argument that he needed to do something to become instead of the object of suspicion, an object of sympathy.
And what more would do that except becoming instead of a instead of somebody, a potential thief, a grieving father, a grieving husband, someone who was the victim of a horrible crime.
And for months, he was right.
It completely changed the subject.
And he had prior to getting arrested, done what I guess it was his great grandfather did, which was attempt to create a suicide situation that would lead to an insurance payout.
I mean, now it's like kind of all connecting.
It's all connecting.
And it really is extraordinary.
So over the course of the summer of 2021, he did almost get away with the murder of Maggie and Paul.
He really did.
And he almost got away with the thefts that he's now admitted to dozens and dozens of people, millions and millions of dollars by, you know, getting, borrowing more money, borrowing money from his best friend, Chris Wilson, borrowing money from the bank, getting fronted money and trying to repay the $792,000 back to the law firm, which he did.
And they stopped, they kind of let it go until, and that goes in July and in August, until the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, his paralegal is in his office looking for some paperwork, which she knows he doesn't like, but she really needed it.
Eddie and the Missing Funds 00:07:47
She lifts up this folder, finds the check that was missing that proved that he had been stealing.
So what happens then is the gig is up.
Alex confronted by his brother, his law partner, and many other law partners.
And they say, you've been stealing.
We've got evidence you've been stealing from the firm.
You have to go.
So he gets fired that Friday of Labor Day weekend.
And what happens the next morning?
Saturday morning, he tries to fake his own death on the side of the road.
And what he said was an insurance fraud attempt to get money for his surviving son, Buster.
But what really looks like another way to change the subject, just like he had done back June 7th with the homicides of his wife and son.
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Do we think he did not intend to die then when that guy who was next to homeless?
I mean, that guy seemed, you know, not like a sophisticated character.
When he got him to, quote, shoot him, but it just grazed his head.
That was always so confusing to me.
And they're like, was this some sort of a sharpshooter?
How did the guy manage to actually barely connect with him to the point where it looked like he actually had been shot at, but not so much that he actually killed him?
Yeah.
No, there are many theories about what happened actually at the side of the road, but the man you're talking about, Curtis Eddie Smith, will tell you, and he said it.
He's like, if I'd shot him, he'd have been dead.
So what he believes happened is there was a struggle.
There was a struggle over the gun.
And he has said he thinks that Ellik was trying to frame him, that they were struggling over the gun.
And maybe Elli was going to, Ellik was bigger, like 6'4, 200 pounds.
Can he overpower this?
And Curtis Eddie Smith is his, cousin Eddie is a smaller guy.
He's been out on disability for a number of years.
Elek was his disability lawyer.
And then frame him.
And you remember when Dick Harpoulian and Jim Griffin, Elliot's lawyers, they said in court filings, they're like, you know, the real killer is Eddie Smith.
He was the one who killed Maggie and Paul.
And so one of the theories is that Elli may have been trying to kill Eddie and then say, see, he was coming after me to kill me the same way that he killed my wife and son.
And it's strange.
I don't know if you remember, but he was paying, he was paying, Eddie was cashing a lot of checks for Elliot over a number of years.
And the checks accelerated that summer, the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Elliot was effectively paying Eddie in a way.
So was he going to say he was blackmailing me?
Look at these payments.
There are multiple ways to look at what actually happened there.
But one of them is that if you look at the photos and the defense released the photos, they signed a HIPAA release and released all the photos.
There are people locally that say, that's not a cut in his head.
He fell and that's the gravel on the side of the road that caused him to be cut.
But one thing I should add about Cousin Eddie is that he's actually a cousin.
I could not believe it.
But if you go back more than 100 years to the Civil War, Elec's great-great-grandfather, so Randolph Sr.'s father, was an officer in the Southern Army.
And so was Eddie's great-great-grandfather.
And they were brothers.
His great-great-grandfather was named Lazarus Murdoch.
He was what they call a fire eater.
So he was an especially virulent anti, he was anti-union.
He made these these incredible speeches that got picked up by national media and actually were read by Abraham Lincoln.
So Eddie is, he says he's like, I'm half Murdoch and he's right.
He's a part of it.
Wow.
Do we know we ever figure out?
And by the way, just for the audience, I'm talking today to Valerie Borlein.
She wrote the book, The Devil at His Elbow, Alex Murdoch and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty.
Do we know where all the money went?
This is one of the mysteries.
It just seemed like Alec was taking in so much money via fraud from the law firm, the clients, and so on.
And where did it go?
Like it seemed like he claimed he just spent it on drugs, but the conclusion by many was always, how many drugs could he possibly have taken?
He took in more than he could ever have spent was the layperson conclusion on the on the funding.
No, and I think I think, you know, one of the key voices in the book is Blanca Simpson, who was the house, the housekeeper at Moselle for many years.
And I think the evidence establishes that Elliot was using drugs.
But I think there's no evidence that he was using the amount of drugs and opioids in particular that he says he was.
And I had the benefit of 10 years of spending.
I could see his, through some federal exhibits, I could see what he and Maggie spent over the course of 10 years down to like when they when they would go to the honey baked ham store at Thanksgiving.
You could see what that expenditure was.
And what was so shocking about it, and I think we probably know people like this in our own lives, is as soon as money came in the door, it went out.
He was overdrawn tens of thousands of dollars multiple times in a year.
Maggie would have to call him and say, can you call the bank?
I need to be able to, I'm at the grocery store.
I need to be able to cash this check and be able to pay for my groceries.
He just putting it on.
You know, it's extraordinary.
It was, you know, they would take a private plane to a USC bowl game instead of flying first class or, you know, they, they, Blanca told me, and there's a farm equipment out on Moselle, which is 1700 acres, a huge, huge property, twice the size of Central Park.
And rather than fix, you know, a big piece of heavy equipment, they would just put gallons of oil in it every day.
So he was spending hundreds of dollars on oil.
It was just, it's hard to even understand where the money was going.
But there is missing money, you know, millions of dollars, the feds say that's still missing.
So he spent a lot of it.
He spent some of it on drugs.
He, I think there is, I do subscribe to the idea that he buried some of it at Moselle and PVC pipes.
I've talked with people who've been there when those pipes had been dug up.
But you can't, I mean, cash is tough.
It's tough to bury millions of dollars in dirt over time.
There is a theory, and I think the feds have been pursuing it, that some of the money is offshore.
And was he going to run that summer is one of the ideas.
But there's the feds say about $6 million that's still missing.
So that makes more sense that we've got millions missing than that he spent it all on the drugs.
All right.
Becky Hill Faces Prison 00:15:51
So then we go to trial.
He does wind up arrested.
This all comes out.
There is the moment he is found guilty.
Actually, we have that.
Let's just watch that.
Shop 51.
The state of South Carolina, County of Colleton, in the court of general sessions, the July term of 2022.
The state versus Richard Alexander Murdoch, defendant, indictment for murder, SC code 16-3-0010, CDR code 0116, verdict guilty, signed by the four lady.
Okay, and that's interesting for a few reasons.
One, he was found guilty.
Two, old Becky Hill reading the verdict would come to play a major role in this story, which no one knew at the time.
But Becky almost got this verdict thrown out because of her behavior behind the scenes with the jurors.
And could it still her behavior get this verdict thrown out?
Is that totally settled?
I know that we had a hearing in which a different judge said, no, I'm not throwing out the verdict, but could that be reversed on appeal?
I imagine Alex lawyers are taking that up.
No, it's incredible to watch that footage.
I was sitting there that night and I was leaning forward on the edge of my seat just listening to it because I remember that emotion.
And all of the docket numbers and numbers were like, well, what's the answer?
So, but we had been in that courtroom.
It's very tight corners.
These soaring ceilings, it was built in, it was designed in the 1820s, but very tight quarters.
And we had been in there every day for six weeks.
And by we, I mean the lawyers, the law enforcement officers, the jury, the Murdochs, they were across the aisle from me.
I could, you know, exchange pleasantries every day.
And so it was an extraordinary result to be there that night and listen to the verdict read by Becky.
And Becky was really like the den mother of the courtroom because the clerk of court makes sure the jury has lunch, make sure that the press has the credentials.
Or, you know, do they, there's so many people in downtown Walterborough didn't have places to eat.
What about food trucks, which they ultimately bought in?
She was sort of the principal of an elementary school is what it felt like a little bit.
So it's surreal for Becky to be the center of so much scrutiny.
But what that scrutiny is about is her relationships and potential talking out of school with members of the jury, many of whom she knew beforehand.
And many of the jurors knew each other.
It's a small town.
I always, you know, I'm from a relatively small town myself in the South.
And, you know, if you had 100 people in church the day before jury selection, you know, five of them would have gotten a jury summons.
So, you know, people knew each other and the jury wasn't sequestered.
Everybody in town knew who they were.
And Becky, you know, knew a lot of them personally.
And so the question was, did she talk to them out of school?
And did she say things that would prejudice them against Ellic, particularly when he took the stand?
And our...
And the jurors come forward to say yes.
At least one of them said she influenced my verdict.
And it is a small town.
And we talked a little bit about the bootlegging case involving old Buster.
You know, it's extraordinary, but Becky's grandmother and grandfather and her uncle, who was a teenager, were charged, federally charged with felonies in that bootlegging ring.
They were on Buster's payroll.
And she's connected.
Everything's connected there.
But to your question, Megan, I think that we did have a first answer.
There was a hearing back in January where the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Jean Toll, was asked by her former colleagues in the Supreme Court to take a listen to this request for a new trial.
She denied it, but the defense is appealing it back to the Supreme Court.
They've agreed to hear it, even though it seems unlikely they will overturn their own special, the person that they trusted with this decision.
And then also they're very close allies with Judge Newman, who presided over the initial proceeding.
He's very tight with the Chief Justice Don Beatty.
So I spoke with Dick.
I saw him recently in Columbia, Dick Harputlian, and they see their best chance at a new trial at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, just a little bit further removed from South Carolina, which is such a small state, and getting fresh ears at this idea of not just did Becky Hill say things to the jurors that were prejudicial, but also did the state apply the wrong standard.
And it was a degree, it's a measure of degrees.
Like, yes, we acknowledge that she talked with a jury, but did it move the needle?
And so what they hope is that the federal court will apply a different standard.
Yeah, that they're going to argue they were held to too high a burden of proof to prove jury tampering and that a lower standard should have been applied, which would have allowed them to prove jury tampering, which would allow him to get a new trial.
Justice Toll was great when she came in and held that hearing over Becky Hill.
The allegations against Becky Hill just got to be a little bit more difficult.
Justice Toll, I will say, was, I'm sorry, she's just such an extraordinary figure in South Carolina history.
I used to cover South Carolina politics when I was a reporter at the state newspaper in Columbia, and she was the chief justice at the time, former Speaker of the House.
She's been in public life there for 60 years and came was a young lawyer.
And this is so extraordinary to me, was a young lawyer in a time when women weren't even allowed to serve on a jury until 1968.
And so she was, yes, she was talking to all those juries.
When she was up there, I say this lovingly, she seemed like a tough old broad in the best sense.
You know, like she was.
She's hearing you say that.
And she knew the Murdoch.
She knew the Murdoch.
And she had actually, both in the legislature, I talked with her about this, both in the legislature and on the bench, had pushed for laws that would kind of claw back some of the power that they were using inappropriately in her view.
So she knew the Murdoch quite well over the course of decades.
She made the comment about Becky Hill that would become very well known.
Here it is, SOP 52.
I find that the clerk of court is not completely credible as a witness.
Ms. Hill was attracted by the siren call of celebrity.
She wanted to write a book about the trial and expressed that as early as November 2022, long before the trial began.
And that led to bad behavior by Becky Hill, which got this whole thing, you know, mucked up.
But do you remember?
Can you, I'm just, it's been a while since we've covered this, but she also has a son who worked in the courthouse.
And there was an allegation about him wiping his phone and wiping her phone on the day that they were supposed to turn them over for an internal ethics investigation.
It smelled to high heaven.
You know, it is, I think it's, if you're not from a small town in the rural South, maybe it just, it, it, it boggles the mind.
But her son was the information technology director for the county.
And that was, you know, it's a, she's an elected official.
She, she is, she is, but she's also, you know, politically powerful.
And some of those jobs are patronage jobs.
He was in that role and is accused of tapping the phone of an county administrator that was communicating with the state ethics board to try to find out what was going on in the investigation with his mother.
There were all sorts of wiping the phone, which the lawyers will tell you is a fairly standard move in some defense cases, but it looked highly irregular to a layperson.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because It's such a big case.
It captivated so much attention that the center ring of the circus is really Elec Murdoch and the trial.
But there's so many outer rings.
With the Mallory Beach case, for example, there's another case that's ongoing about whether the convenience store where Paul bought beer, whether the owner of that convenience store has been trying to harass the Beach family over the years.
That's been going on for several years.
Becky is facing an investigation into her behavior, and that's been going on.
So we're in multiple layers of drama with this story.
And it's just incredible, like the layers.
I remember sitting in court and watching Elek during a break.
He was, you know, six feet away from me.
And he's the center of this, he's the eye of this hurricane.
And there's so much swirling around him that one person could stir up so much chaos is really amazing.
So now here we are where he's appealing.
He's going to argue Becky Hill mucked up the trial to the point where he gets another trial.
We don't love the chances, but one never knows.
And in the meantime, the wrongful death lawsuit that Mallory Beach's family brought against Alec, is that totally resolved?
That was the remnants of that were resolved this week with a $500,000 payment from her, from the from Alec's insurer that had been tied up.
And that was paid to the lawyers this past, the paper was filed this past Monday.
So that case is pretty well wrapped up.
Did the family get a payment too?
The family did.
Not this past summer, but summer of 22, they, I'm sorry, summer of 23, they received a payment largely from Parker's convenience store, this convenience store where Paul bought beer on the order of $14 million.
So it was a significant civil judgment that, and I learned a lot about personal injury law in the course of this, of reporting this book.
But, you know, personal injury, this was considered, you know, what was Mallory's life worth?
It is blood money.
And so it was, it's a, it's a, it's a difficult fact of personal injury law that the more money that you get paid is a reflection of what, you know, a jury might think your, your, your loved one's life is worth.
I'm sure it's a, it's a special form of sentencing for you because every time you get into the car that money bought or the bed that money paid for, it's got to make you feel awful.
And they will tell you and they will, and they will tell you, Mrs. Pamela Pinckney, Hakeem Pinkney's mother, Hakeem was the paraplegic teenager who died in a nursing home and was robbed by Elec Murdoch twice.
She would tell you she would give back all of it for time with her son.
It's just, it's this, it's the, the proxy we have in our judicial system to to make a family as whole as possible, knowing that nothing really ever will.
So what, if anything, is happening with the other piece of this story, which is the possible murder.
There's only one other piece by Buster Paul's older brother of a young gay classmate who was killed on the road, but there's just only speculation that it was Buster Murdoch, not actual proof.
And they were going to reopen that investigation in the wake of all of this.
Where does that stand?
Well, you know, you mentioned the missing money.
There's also the question of the missing guns and the homicide.
But the biggest unanswered question is what happened to Stephen Smith.
He was a 19-year-old young man who was found in the middle of a road in the summer of 2015.
In the course of the investigation, the Murdoch name came up 40 different times.
People would say one of the boys or another was involved somehow.
But I should be clear, there is no evidence that Buster or Paul, there's no proof that either one of them had anything to do with the death of this young man.
Buster has gone so far to say, you know, to that there's he had nothing to do with it.
He wasn't close to it.
He wasn't there that evening.
And he's even sued some of the documentary filmmakers who have, who he alleges have, have said that he had a role in some way, shape, or form.
They certainly have made those breadcrumbs.
But it is, yeah, you can go through the, you know, it's 90-some pages of a police report where the name comes up over and over again in very strange ways.
So there's always been a rumor that the Murdochs were involved somehow in his death or in making it impossible to find out who was who killed him.
But I can tell you that the state grand jury has still been meeting over this case and taking and trying and is eager to figure it out.
It is one that is, it still haunts Hampton County.
So we may never know, but it won't be for lack of interviews and lack of trying because they're actively working the case from what I understand.
So in the time we have left, what's life like right now for Buster Murdoch, the one who, the son whose entire family has been killed or is now in jail, and for Alec Murdoch, who was living this life of excess and now is convicted of double homicide, not to mention all the fraud charges that were brought against him separately, which he was also found guilty on.
No, it's very poignant.
I've mentioned I was in Hampton last week and went by the cemetery and I saw Matt.
It took a while, but Maggie and Paul's gravestones have been put up and people will leave flowers there.
There's a ceramic dog that was that looks like Bubba, the yellow lab that belonged to the family that's there.
And most poignant of all, it's, you know, on Maggie's headstone, it says, you know, Margaret Bransted or Murdoch, mother.
And on Paul's, it says Paul Terry Murdoch, son.
And it's, it's incredible that that is how you'd be defined.
But the person I was with said, what happens to Alec?
You know, where is he in this picture?
So will he be remembered as a father?
Will he be remembered as the person that killed them?
But he's in prison in the upstate.
He has acclimated to prison life well, according to what I'm told.
And by that, I mean he has, Alec Murdoch is a type of a person who works the system and he has relationships.
He does, he's a disbarred lawyer, but he knows the law and he helps other inmates with their questions.
He's using his notoriety to his benefit.
He was accused by, or the prison's system of prisons found that he had been essentially bribing other inmates to let him use their PIN number to make phone calls.
He's figuring things out on the inside, but he will never, ever see the light of day, even if there's another trial in the homicide case.
The state effectively got an insurance policy.
You remember back in November when he pled guilty to those dozens of financial crimes.
And they got a sentence that will take him, keep him in prison until he's roughly 80 years old.
So regardless of whether the homicide is overturned.
As for Buster, my understanding is, you know, he's living in Bluffton, the community just adjacent to Beaufort.
The Murdoch Family Estate 00:02:31
His fiancé is a woman who was in court with him every day, his girlfriend from law school, who is a lawyer.
He got a substantial settlement from his mother's estate, roughly $500,000.
There's a payment, a document in the book where he participated in a documentary and got several hundred thousand dollars from that.
So he has a small amount, sorry, not a small, but you know, significant amount of money to start a life, although it is difficult to see how he does so separate from his family because his last name is Murdoch and he's got that red hair.
He's so just, he, it would be hard with that, that name and that hair to make an make a new life.
You'd have to go someplace else.
I mean, there's a brother.
Alex's brother seemed non-sociopathic.
Perhaps there's some hope there.
I don't know.
Raised by that man with that family lineage.
Well, you're right about his brothers, his older brother, Randy, and his younger brother, John Marvin, are still in the community as well.
You know, I was, I went by the law firm the other day, and his brother is older brother Randy is a partner there and is actively working cases.
His younger brother, John Marvin, runs a heavy equipment business.
And as you go down the main drag from Linkinghamton and Varneville, you see Murdoch rentals right there.
So they're still in the community and, you know, well regarded to a degree.
But I think that everything's changed with a downfall.
Is anyone living at the estate where it happened?
So Moselle is the estate where it happened.
It actually has been sold and it's been sold in two pieces.
The house itself was sold along with roughly 20 acres to an out-of-state buyer whose name was not revealed.
And the Delta, the other acreage was sold to a neighboring landowner who wanted the land.
You know, it is, I went by there the other day too, just to take a look.
I had been onto the property during the trial.
I accompanied the jury on their visit to see the place.
It still feels, it still seems like there's a heaviness in the air out there.
It is still a haunted place, really.
Dick Arbutlian said so.
And I felt it as well.
Always will be.
A Haunted Place Remains 00:00:36
Wow, great reporting.
Valerie, thank you.
Her name is Valerie Borline.
And the book, again, is The Devil at His Elbow, Alex Murdoch and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty.
Google it, check it out, Devil at His Elbow.
Thank you so much for coming on and telling us the story and the updates.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thanks for joining us today and have a very happy new year.
We will be back later this week with some major updates in the Scott Peterson case.
See you then.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
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