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Aug. 5, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
57:52
Edition 745 - The Case That Shocked America
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope everything is good with you.
At the moment, it is incredibly muggy here in London.
It's not really hot, but it's really, really humid.
And I hate it when it's like this.
I know other parts of Europe are having incredibly hot and fiery weather.
We've got hot and steamy weather here in London.
I think it's just because of the maritime nature of our climate.
I don't know.
But anyway, that's by the bye.
Thank you very much for all of your emails, the nice things that you say.
Remember, when you get in touch with me through the website, theunexplained.tv, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Very important warning.
We are about to talk details of a murder and some other crimes.
Some of those details are of necessity unsavory.
I have spared you the worst of them.
But this material is not for young ears, is not for sensitive ears.
If you are disturbed by descriptions of murder crime, please turn this off now.
That's the warning.
Listener discretion advised, as they say in the U.S. What we're going to be talking about on this edition of The Unexplained is Rebecca Pittman.
Rebecca F. Pittman has a book out.
She's an investigator, of course, and author, on a murder case that is beyond bizarre, that gripped the American imagination in the last year or so, involving a man called Alex Murtau.
Murdor.
And it is, well, let me tell you, I've got an account of it here that I just cut and pasted.
Okay, this is one of many accounts.
Walterborough, South Carolina, the killing of a mother and son, millions of dollars in stolen funds, fresh investigations into a fatal boat crash and a housekeeper's deadly fall.
The tragic circumstances swirling around a lawyer and his family in South Carolina became only more perplexing over time, leading to several arrests, stunning twists, and one of the most closely watched trials in the country.
At its center, Alex Murdoch, 54, whose family dominated the legal landscape in the southern part of the state for 100 years.
In March of this year, a jury convicted him of murdering his wife and son in a failed attempt to conceal his own financial crimes.
He is currently serving life in prison, but that is by no means all of the story.
As I say, it is a disturbing story.
I don't often do true crime here on the unexplained, but I think this is one you might want to hear.
But of course, please bear in mind those caveats about the nature of some, and it's not much, but some of this material is unpleasant.
You know, what crime of that kind is not unpleasant.
Okay, what else have I got to say?
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his ongoing hard work.
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Remember, if you need to know whatever's happening with the TV show, with radio show, with this online show that's been running for 17 and a half years, you can always do that at my official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, the one with the logo on it and no other similar page.
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And donations.
Thank you very much if you've recently made a donation to The Unexplained, which you can do through the website theunexplained.tv.
It is very, very kind of you.
You know who you are, and thank you.
Thank you very, very much.
All right.
Let's get to Rebecca F. Pittman in the United States in Colorado, who's written this book.
It is 700-odd pages long.
It's a long read.
There's a lot of detail in it.
I believe there has been at least one documentary or documentary series about this case in the United States.
I think there are going to be more.
So it is, as we say in the United Kingdom, it's a celebrated case, meaning in its literal sense, it is a case that people are aware of and have talked about is what that means.
I'm sure you know that, but just have to say it, just in case.
Okay, let's get to Rebecca F. Pittman.
Rebecca, thank you very much for doing this.
Howard, thank you.
I think I was here in February of last year and I so much enjoyed our time together.
You know, we don't do true crime stories too much here.
I know the audience enjoys them.
We don't do a lot of them.
They have to be impactful to get on here and this one certainly is.
I've still got a headache reading about it.
I still don't think I understand all of the details of it.
And from a British perspective, I don't think we've had very many cases in our recent history quite as complex as this one.
Because this, first of all, appeared to be a murder case involving two members of an important family.
But that also has connections to a number of other incidences in which three other people died.
And those things are linked with this.
So I think we need to unpick it right from its start.
And I wonder where you believe that start is.
We're talking here about the case of Alex Murdor, a member of a very important legal family in South Carolina.
I think they go back close on 200 years, don't they?
No, it's more like 100.
All right.
They go back 100 years.
They were the solicitors and then a lot of power started about 100 years ago.
Okay, but these are in their own area.
They're a very well-known name.
And these are, as was Alex Murdor, as is Alex Murdor, very well known and in his time doing his job, very important.
You couldn't get much more important because the solicitor, which is what we call the defense attorney, prosecuting attorney, they're the ones that can really put a lot of people in office.
They can make sure a judge gets voted in.
They can make sure who becomes sheriff.
So they had all of the law enforcement and some very high-ranking people in their back pocket.
And it was a, I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine kind of situation.
And they got away with a lot for a very, very long time.
And we have to say that's in the world not unique, of course.
Power brings, I won't say benefits, but brings advantages, let's put it that way.
And, you know, these people certainly had that.
And as you say, their history goes back 100 years or more, so they're very well known in their area.
Where do you want to start this?
Because, like I say, there was a double killing directly involving the family.
There was a speedboat accident where one person connected to the family died.
There was a death, I think, by a roadside, and there was a member of staff, a family employee, who plunged, didn't they, from a balcony or in a fall and died.
So that's five people.
Where would you want to start this?
You know, Howard, that is an excellent question.
I'll start it with what put the spotlight on it, and then we can work through.
The bolt crash case of 2018, February 2018, is what got the ball rolling.
Alex Murdaugh is the subject of who we're talking about here.
He was a volunteer solicitor at the time.
His father was still alive, but he had retired as solicitor.
So Alex is in a pretty powerful position.
He has a badge he can carry around, letting everybody know how important he is.
Well, Alex's son, Paul, at the time, was 19 and had a huge drinking problem.
Everyone was aware of it, including Alex and Paul's mother, Maggie.
Yet they let him continue to drive drunk, take the boat out, drunk.
So on this particular fateful evening in February of 2018, or pardon me, 2019, he and five of his friends went out on a boat at night to go to an oyster roast.
He already had downed seven beers before they even got onto the boat.
They went to the oyster roast where they drank a whole bunch more.
It is now, for South Carolina, very chilly.
It's February.
They have what they call a sea fog, which is a low-lying fog that actually hugs the water to where you can't see through it.
He had no working boat lights.
His friend Connor was standing next to him with a small flashlight, trying to see through the fog.
After the oyster roast, Paul decides he needs some real liquor and talks all of them into stopping at a local bar near Beaufort, and he gets two shots, Jaeger shots, lemon drop things.
Anyway, strong alcohol.
Now he is completely blitzed.
They get back on the boat.
All of them were begging him to let someone else drive.
He wouldn't hear of it.
He turned into what they called his Timmy personality.
They'd all seen it come out when he is very drunk.
He splays his fingers out in a really weird way and for some odd reason strips off his clothes.
So he stripped down to his boxers.
He slapped his girlfriend around in front of everybody.
And the boat was going in circles at this time.
His friend Connor would grab the wheel periodically to try to steady it.
But then Paul took it back, pushed the throttle all the way over.
They're doing almost 30 miles an hour when they hit the bridge on the river.
They hit the piling.
They glanced off of what are called dolphin heads first, which split the side of the boat wide open.
They bounced off two more pilings before it came to rest on the bank.
But it threw a young 19-year-old girl named Mallory Beach out of the boat, threw her boyfriend Anthony Cook out of the boat and Paul.
For some reason, fate's timing, I don't know what you want to call it, Mallory was the only one who hit the pilings.
Anthony sailed past them, as did Paul, but Mallory was hit head on and disappeared beneath the water.
And they found her a week later.
So she drowned.
And Paul was, they went back and forth between who did it.
There was rumors of a cover-up right there at the scene.
Alex showed up.
His powerful father, Randolph, showed up.
His mother, Maggie, showed up.
They went down to the boat when they wouldn't allow other people to go down to the boat.
And I think she grabbed Paul's pants and it had his wallet in it.
The wallet showed that he had used his older brother, Buster's ID, to get the alcohol and his mother's credit card.
And all of these things were established later, were they, in an inquiry?
Yes.
Well, right now, there is still obstruction of justice case that's supposed to still go forward about the boat crash.
But I think Mallory's, hasn't Mallory's family, haven't they received very recently some recompense for this?
Yes, they have a $15 million settlement between them and Parker's, which is the store that sold Paul the alcohol.
But there is still in the wind that there might still be an obstruction of justice charges against Alex.
He went through the hospital where they took the boaters and told them to shut up and not talk to anybody, that he'd take care of them.
And it became clear that they were going to throw Connor under the bus and say he was driving the boat at the time of the impact and not Paul.
What happened?
Well, as you know, later, Paul was murdered.
He was Alex's youngest son, and he and his mother were murdered on the family property, Moselle, in June of 20.
There's so many dates.
2021, isn't it?
Or is it 2020?
No, it's 2021.
It was two years later.
7th of June, 2021.
I've got it here.
Correct.
Thank you.
So that's a couple of years after the boat accident, isn't it?
The boat crash.
And there was a lot of people upset about it because it took so long.
They thought, you know, a Murdaugh is not even going to be in a jumpsuit.
They'll never take this to trial because it's Paul Murdaugh.
And so there was a lot of upheaval about it.
And at that point, People were sick of it, and that's when the rumors of these other deaths started circulating and said, Well, while you're looking into this, there's a young boy named Stephen Smith whose body was found in the middle of a road in 2015, and the Murdoch name was linked to that death.
And that's what it says in your book, isn't it?
Linked.
Was he a friend of the family?
What was this man Smith?
What was his connection?
Stephen, and I interviewed his mother.
It just touched my heart.
Stephen was an openly gay, young, 19-year-old boy, but everybody liked him.
But for some reason on that night, somebody got hold of some weapon.
They used to think it was a baseball bat.
They're backing away from that now that they've done a second autopsy.
They exhumed his body this year.
And they're doing a whole new investigation in a second autopsy.
But somebody split the front of his head open and beat him up in the back of the head and left him in the middle of a rural road, hoping he'd get run over.
What a horrible crime.
Yeah, to hide what they had done to him.
At the time, the rumors just started flying that it was connected to Alex's older son.
But rumors can get started and just go like wildfire.
All these kids, 40 different times that name came up.
And we have to say, though, that there was no, there was never, and it is being reinvestigated, but there was never anything that substantiated these rumors.
They were just that rumors.
Absolutely.
And Buster came out this year.
He said, I'm sick of it.
This has been going around a long time.
I'm grieving the loss of my mother and brother.
My father's incarcerated, and he stands by it that he was not involved.
And so a grand jury just finished, and we're anticipating what they're going to say.
They brought in a lot of what they said were people of interest and new evidence.
So I was happy to hand over some new evidence to them that I found during interviews with people who did not want to come forward because they live in the area, but they were so grateful to be able to tell somebody else because it had been weighing on them.
And I took their information and turned it in to the law enforcement agency.
Okay, so this, although tangential and peripheral, is in the orbit of this and we may hear more, you know, that will either connect it further or not as the case may be in due course.
They're saying by Labor Day.
All right.
Well, let's see.
And that's quite soon.
When is Labor Day?
Here it's September 7th, I think it is this year.
So we're talking, as I'm recording this with you, you know, we're talking six weeks, seven weeks or so.
All right.
I'll watch out for that.
Then there is somebody who worked for the family, wasn't there?
She died.
Did she go over a balcony or something like that at their home?
Talk to me about this person.
No, Gloria Satterfield had been in their employ, the Murdoch employee, for over 20 years.
She helped raise the boys.
Paul was only like two years old, and he followed her everywhere, hung onto her skirt while she cleaned.
He called her Go-Go.
He adored her.
So on the day that this incident happened, according to Alex, you have to remember this is according to him, she had showed up to pick up a check that Alex's mother owed her for some work she'd done for her.
And as she was climbing up the brick steps to the house, the dogs tripped her and she fell backwards and cracked her skull and was taken in an ambulance and was in a hospital in intensive care for three weeks before she died.
He has just recently this year, after being found guilty for the murder of his wife and son, finally admitted, and this was 2018 when it happened, he finally admitted, the dogs didn't trip her, I made it up.
I don't know what he thinks he's going to get from this, but I never believed, no one believed that the dogs tripped her up.
In the 911 call that Maggie, Alex's wife, made, with Gloria laying at the bottom of the stairs, you don't hear any dogs.
Maggie doesn't mention that there's any dogs.
Paul picks up the phone.
At that time, he was like 18.
He picked up the phone because Maggie got tired of talking to the dispatcher.
He takes over.
He never mentions the dogs.
He just says, ma'am, she fell and cracked her skull.
Now, here's something you might find interesting, Howard.
I listened to that 911 call a lot.
And one of the big things was everyone was saying Alex wasn't there.
Maggie even lied about what time she called him at work to tell him Gloria had fallen.
This is the part I'm kind of proud of.
I kept listening to the 911 call.
And in the space between Maggie stopping talking and handing the phone to Paul, there's about 30 seconds.
And if you listen in the background, you could hear voices.
And when I amplified it, you hear Alex saying something to Paul and Paul says, we didn't give her anything.
And then you hear Alex say, good.
So it puts him there at a specific time because we know what time Maggie made the 911 call.
And it's about four minutes into the call that you hear he is there.
So it is important because it shows when he arrived and that there was some stuff going on before the paramedics arrived.
And to be clear, under questioning, subsequently, he denied that he'd been there.
He actually went back and forth and said, yeah, he did show up.
And he got there before the paramedics and just in time to hear her say, the dogs tripped me, which was a lie in itself right then.
She was incoherent.
She had a concussion.
And now he admits, okay, I lied.
The dogs didn't trip her.
But there's in the book, I have all of the interviews from the insurance companies that had to find out what happened before they paid out on Gloria's fall.
And it's interesting, the groundskeeper that day said he got there at work at 7:30.
At 8:30, he saw Gloria drive in, as usual, got out of the car with a person like a 7-Eleven cup of drink, whatever.
And that's all he said.
And then he says, 15 minutes later, Maggie called him and said, quick, get up here.
There's been an accident.
Well, that would make it 8.45.
Why did she wait and call 911 at 9.24?
What were they doing for 45 minutes that they didn't call 911?
And he claims Alex wasn't there.
He said he didn't see him.
In the United Kingdom, they would have a coroner's inquest, and that would come out with a verdict.
Presumably, you have the same.
Well, that's the other part.
When she died in the hospital, the assistant, the coroner at the time, this was some time after, said, I never got a notice.
No one told me that this person died and there was no autopsy.
And she blew the whistle on it, went to the FBI.
Subsequently, she lost her job.
I mean, it's really awful.
They just pretty much blackballed her for coming out and saying there's something wrong here.
And am I right?
Did I read in my preparation for this that they're going to exhume that body?
The family gave permission shortly after in 2021 when this all came out.
But now they're kind of hedging.
I interviewed Gloria's youngest son, and I'll tell you that tore up my heart.
And he said that he doesn't want them to.
So right now, they have been given permission, law enforcement, but I don't know if the family is still on board wanting it done at this point.
Okay, that's very disturbing in a whole lot of ways.
So there are lots of unanswered questions there.
And this may not be connected to the main event in any way.
None of this may be, but they all add to this soup of events, don't they?
Well, I'll tell you something that very much jumped out at me.
And Maggie is dead now.
She was Alex's wife that was murdered.
But when I was reading her report to the insurance company, I found it very odd.
Right the day before Gloria died in the hospital, she was doing better.
She was coming around.
She was talking.
Her best friend allowed me to interview her for the book.
She was with her every day.
And she said, Rebecca, her legs were moving.
She was talking.
I was so excited.
I even told the orderly, look, she wants to get up right now.
And he said, looks like she could get up and get out of here right now.
Yes, ma'am.
And the next day, she's dead.
And part of the report that I read, the death certificate said that the tracheal tube was pushed clear back into her throat and some other hookup was wrong.
And then they skimmed right over it.
But what Maggie said to the insurance investigator really stuck out in my mind.
Twice, she said, I went to see her at the hospital, but I never went alone.
And I thought, what a weird thing to say.
And then she said it again.
And she said, I did go and visit with her, but I was never alone.
What did that mean?
Well, to me, she knew something was off.
The minute they move that woman out of ICU, where she would have been under constant surveillance and monitoring, she dies.
The minute they put her in a private room where there aren't all the bells and whistles going on.
I mean, wouldn't you just say, yeah, I went to see her.
I went with Paul or my sister and I went to see her a few times.
But who says, I never went alone?
I just found that really odd.
Well, it may have been that she just felt she needed support.
I don't know.
I don't know either, but it was interesting to me.
Okay.
There was a documentary, wasn't there?
Was it a series of documentaries made about this?
You've written about it in the book.
Were those details included in the documentary that you just told me?
No.
These came from my research into the insurance documentation and from talking to the best friend.
All right.
I hear what you say.
There's quite a lot of new evidence in the book.
I did.
You are, at the moment, you are the only person saying this in the book.
I am the only person saying this in the book.
I'm also the only one that's turned in some new evidence for Stephen Smith's murder that was given to me and some of its physical evidence.
And I turned it in.
And hopefully it did some good.
And it is mentioned in the book, so I can tell you there's something about a gate crashing in that was right up the street from where they found his car.
This is the young man that was found in the middle of the road.
That has never come out.
And that Gloria told this same friend that somebody associated with the Murdoch family turned their truck in that same day for repairs.
And you've got a smashed gate right by where Stevens' car was.
I'm wondering if they chased him.
Let's get to the main event.
Chilling and disturbing it is.
This is June 7, 2021.
Alex Murdoch, whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all served as the top prosecutors around a wide area of the state, called 911 to report that his wife and one of their two sons had been shot to death.
That is how one of the accounts that I've read put it.
So that's the night.
That's the call.
What happened?
Well, Alex's version is he had had dinner with Paul and Maggie, very Short dinner that he couldn't seem to recall anything about, didn't even remember what they talked about.
Then, afterward, he took a nap on the couch.
He said Maggie was going to go down to the kennels on the property to run the dogs.
She had her two favorite dogs down there, and she lets them out and lets them run around a little bit while she kind of cleans out their cage.
So she was planning on doing that.
He said, I don't know where Paul went.
He was somewhere around the house.
So according to him, he went down in a golf cart, which that only came out during the trial.
He never said that in all three of the interviews.
All of them, he said, I didn't go down there.
I was nowhere near the kennels.
I was asleep on the couch, and then I left to go see my mom.
Finally, because of this amazing thing that happened, but let me finish.
He goes, claims he went down there and found Maggie shot and sees Paul laying out of the feed room that's right next to the dog cages, laying face down.
The back of his head is blown off and he can actually see his brain laying next to him, which had to be horrific no matter what.
So what he said was, is that he called 911.
He's hyperventilating, he's screeching, he's doing all of this.
When they show up, he's in a pristine white t-shirt, no blood and shorts and tennis shoes, and there's no blood on him anywhere.
And he gives his first interview.
Then, according to him, he had taken off and gone to see his mother who was dealing with dementia.
She didn't even know who was there, who wasn't.
Her nurse was sitting with her, and she backed it up that he showed up, stayed 20 minutes, and left.
Supposedly, it's when he got back home, he found the bodies.
What sunk him was what he didn't know is Paul during right before the murders had been on a video.
He was making a video of one of the dogs that he was keeping for a friend.
And he was trying to show the friend that something looked wrong with the dog's tail.
In the background, in the audio of the video, you hear Maggie, and it sounds like she's turned the water on, like she's hosing down the pins.
You hear her say, ah, he's got a bird in his mouth, the dog that was running around.
His name's Bubba.
And you hear Alex yell, and she goes, it's a guinea.
And Alex yells out, it's a chicken.
And then very softly, because Paul was in the cage behind his mother, Paul goes, it's a chicken.
And then you hear him say, hey, Bubba, which means Bubba was running past him, having a great time with this chicken he caught.
But you hear Alex go, Bubba, come here.
And it's on this recording that he didn't know Paul was making.
Not only that, a few minutes before, Paul had been on the phone actually talking with the guy that owned the dog.
And the guy testified he heard Alex's voice then.
So you've got this phone call, but you've got a video that's just undisputable.
Everybody that listened to it recognized Alex's voice.
It puts him at the kennels three minutes before the murders.
And all along, he denied he'd never gone down there.
But changed his story.
He had to.
He had to.
And a talk about somebody talking from the grave, if Paul hadn't made that video, he probably could have skated by.
It's chilling.
It still gives me bumps every time I think about it.
Two factors here.
Alex Murdar was using painkillers quite heavily, I understand.
Abusing painkillers, you would say.
Also, his financial dealings were very much in question.
Two factors.
Yeah.
He's still up for 100 counts of insurance fraud and embezzlement.
He's still got to face all of that.
Yes, I do believe he was on pain pills because a number of people, including Paul, had tried to help him detox.
Paul's girlfriend, who did a documentary, said she had witnessed it one time where he was white as a ghost sitting there going through withdrawals.
So I do believe he did have an opiate problem.
But the insurance embezzlement, which included Gloria Satterfield's sons, in fact, it was the biggest payout from that, from her falling down the steps at his house.
He got $4 million from one insurance company and over $500,000 from the other for her fall, and he never gave a dime of it to the kids.
How was he a beneficiary?
You're going to love this.
At her funeral, he goes up to her two young sons.
She's all they've got.
They're living in a trailer.
They depend on her money cleaning houses.
And they're young.
They're under 20 at that time.
And he comes up to the funeral.
He goes, look, I feel really bad that my dogs tripped your mom.
Here's what we're going to do.
I'm going to sue myself and give you the money.
I've got a good attorney, Corey Fleming.
He'll sue me.
We'll win.
And I'll give you the money because it happened on my estate.
So I've got insurance that covers that property.
My dogs caused it.
And so they went, well, wow, thank you.
You know, and they considered him family.
Their mother had worked with him for 20 years.
They'd gone with her over to the house, you know, on occasion when she was cleaning.
And they trusted him.
So they entered into this.
There'd been a tragic accident.
That's what they understood.
And they were offered the chance to do one of these cases where this man, this sounds bizarre, sued himself.
Then there was a payout.
And he benefited from the payout.
Kept every dime except to pay Corey Fleming, who we later found out wasn't just any attorney.
He was Alex's Best friend.
He had gone to college with him.
They'd shared a dorm together.
All of this sounds.
I don't have a word, Rebecca.
You know, the word I'm going to come up with is a British one and it's awful.
And that just doesn't cover it.
It really doesn't cover it.
So, okay, all of this stuff was going on and other financial misdeeds.
Let's put them that way.
There's another British word for you.
All of that was going on.
The crime in question here, the killing of the mother of the son.
What did police do about that?
Who did they first suspect or what did they first suspect?
Well, the first thing Alex did the second they arrived at the scene, and he's standing there in the dark with a flashlight right next to Maggie's body.
I mean, it's eerie.
And none of the lights, and there used to be tons of lights around this kennel area.
It lit up like the 4th of July because there's a big hangar, old airplane hangar.
None of them are on, which I found suspicious.
So the police are using headlights and a flashlight.
But the minute they got up to him, the first thing out of his mouth was, I know this was the boat crash.
This is about the boat crash.
So he was trying to make them think that because Paul's hearing was coming up for him driving the boat, that somebody involved with that were, you know, that were mad at Paul, they were behind the killings and Maggie just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He threw that out immediately.
But then when they got to make the decision.
Yeah, it's, oh my gosh.
So they get him in the car to interview him, and this is all tape recorded.
You can see it on YouTube.
And he goes back to that again, but he would not give them a specific name of one of the kids from the boat.
He just said, I don't know, I know he was getting threats for quite a while.
He came home with a black eye once.
People were spitting on him, yelling at him from the car because they thought he should be in jail.
But then he throws the grounds keeper under the bus, this guy named C.B. Rowe, who did all of the grounds work, was supposed to be working that day.
And he starts telling them about this guy having a sordid past, that Paul had been working with him.
So he threw two people under the bus for the murders within the first five minutes of the interview.
And what did the cops do about that?
They put it under their hats.
They did interview a lot of people.
They interviewed over 100 people trying to find out what happened.
But it became clear pretty quickly by within a week when they did the second interview, they had started finding inconsistencies in his story.
They did not have the video yet from Paul's phone.
That took over a year, just under a year.
They didn't actually break his phone open, get it open until April of 2022.
Right, so they didn't know there was a video for a year.
Yeah.
So they didn't even have that yet.
That's what sealed it.
But what they did have, finally, on the third interview, was a Snapchat video, again, that Paul took of his father the day of the murders.
In fact, only like an hour or two before they were murdered.
And it shows Alex in his dress clothes that he wore to work, trying to stand up a little tree, and Paul was laughing.
And Alex didn't know he took that one.
Basically, what it showed is sometime between him standing up that tree at about 7.30 and them being murdered at 8.45, he changed his clothes.
I mean, you can't, this is like fiction.
You can't even wrap your mind around that, that here again, Paul's phone, who was murdered that night, has two incriminating videos on there, almost like he is talking from the grave saying, these are important.
You need to look at this.
Isn't that amazing?
It is.
And presumably police did know that he had a phone, Paul.
Oh, yeah.
And that's what was amazing.
What came out in the trial that convicted Alex was Maggie's phone was taken.
I don't know why he didn't take Paul's.
He left it on his backside.
Paul was lying face down.
He said he picked the phone up, was going to do something, changed his mind and put it back down.
And they didn't even really press him on, well, what were you going to do with it?
They just let that sentence go, which is beyond me.
But why didn't he take that phone?
They found Maggie's phone a quarter of a mile up the road thrown into the weeds by the side of the road, and they proved he drove right past where that phone was tossed on his way to his mother's house to set up his alibi that day.
And presumably there were fingerprints on that phone?
Nope.
No.
Because it had rained.
Ah, God.
Okay.
Well, you know, those things happen.
So a whole year's gap discovering incriminating evidence.
That's shocking.
Of course it is.
How did Alex Murdoch come to be arrested?
Oh boy, there's just so much to this.
His father dies only a few days after Paul and Maggie are murdered.
There's actually two funerals, like two days apart.
In the meantime, he's trying to get his housekeeper to lie for him and say the house, or pardon me, the nurse that sat with his mother, he wanted her to change how long he'd been there.
He was only there 15 to 20 minutes.
He said, I want you to say I was here 30 to 40.
Then he tried to get his housekeeper Blanca to change her story about the shirt he was wearing in that Snapchat video.
By the way, none of those clothes were ever seen again, the dress clothes he had on in the Snapchat video.
So all of these things started happening, And then the insurance fraud came out.
At work, they were finding all of these inconsistencies, checks that should have been written to the firm for Alex's work as an attorney had gone straight into his pocket and into a fake bank account he'd set up.
And it's all coming to a head.
And so now they're taking a much closer look at him.
Here's this guy that has been scamming these clients.
We're finding out all these lies he's telling us.
He changed his clothes.
And so what happens is a few days later on Labor Day weekend, another 911 call, Howard.
This time is Alex saying that he'd stopped to change attire and somebody stopped and shot him in the head.
Okay.
So that would indicate if you had that, well, it certainly should have indicated to police that one or two things were happening.
Either he set that up or lied about it, or there was some other person involved who wanted to silence Alex Murdo.
That's what he was hoping.
He'd hoping it would look like someone is targeting the whole family.
They'd shot Maggie and Paul, and now they were trying to kill him.
But within a day, it all fell apart.
The whole story fell apart.
And he finally said, look, I'm going to rehab.
I'm not doing well.
The murders of my wife and son unhinged me.
And he got his attorneys to whisk him away to a rehab center.
And then while he's there, all of it started coming in.
All the lies he's been telling.
They found the person that supposedly shot him.
It wasn't a stranger at all.
It was his drug dealer and buddy that he'd asked him to come out there and help him.
And according to his friend, he didn't know what was going on.
He pulled up to help him and Alex jumped out with the gun saying, I'm going to shoot myself.
And supposedly, while they're struggling over the gun, it went off and nicked him in the back of the head.
His friend grabbed the gun and took off with it.
And they have never found the gun.
So it's just, like you said, it was a hard book to write.
It's 703 pages because the story kept evolving even while I was writing.
And the trial went three weeks longer than it was supposed to.
By the side, what kind of man is Alex Murdoch?
Because I didn't see any footage of the trial.
I've seen photographs and read accounts, but I haven't seen video footage, okay?
But from what you're telling me, the things that happened and the on-the-spot changes of story and the weaving of a plot in his own mind, this man sounds like he's got ice running through his veins.
Well, he'd have to.
I mean, even when he sued himself to give, you know, supposedly to get money for his housekeeper's sons who had nothing, they are calling him saying, how is it coming?
Because we're getting kicked out of the trailer.
He still didn't care.
And at that point, he already had the money.
He'd had it for two months.
And he said, it's coming along nicely.
It's taking a little time.
And they said, well, our mother's medical bills are coming in.
We're about to get kicked out.
And he didn't care.
They lost their home.
Relatives had to take them in.
When I interviewed the youngest son about it, what's amazing is they feel no malice.
They don't hate him.
They've gone on with their lives.
They did finally get a settlement through other people who stepped forward and helped him out.
But he does.
Sociopaths only feel their own pain.
They don't feel a conscience or guilt.
It's just, it's spooky.
When I wrote Countdown to Murder Pam Hup that you and I spoke about last time, I thought, I'll never find another story like this.
And then along came Alex.
It's just crazy.
But the court case, it wasn't open and shut, was it?
Because his defense lawyer, well, I think his defense lawyer at one stage pointed a gun, you know, an unloaded weapon, but a rifle, I think, or some kind of long firearm at the prosecution, which is astonishing to see in any courtroom anywhere.
And I think the claim was that the killer of the two people, of the mother and son, was five foot tall or five foot two, and Alex Murdo was taller than that, so it couldn't have been him.
There were so many times I just sat there with my jaw hanging open when his attorney actually picked up the AR-15 that was in evidence.
He was holding it up as, you know, to show it to the jury.
It wasn't the actual murder weapon, but it was one very similar to it.
And then he gets this smile on his face and points it at the prosecuting attorney and says, tempting.
Yes.
Oh, my God.
I don't think I've ever seen or heard that.
Anyway, that was just astonishing.
So how did he come to be convicted?
Well, it was all of the people recognizing his voice on that kennel video that put him there.
There's no way that he claims it takes less than a minute to drive that golf cart back up to the house from the kennels.
The video ended at like 8.44.
They died within two or three minutes after that.
There's no way that he suddenly jumps in a golf cart, is headed home and didn't even hear any shots when there's seven altogether, didn't hear anything.
It just all fell apart.
His lies crumbled on him so quickly that it was amazing to watch.
And they had him up there for a long time.
He cried the whole time trying to get the jury's sympathy.
But it was basically that kennel video that sunk him.
He couldn't get out of it.
And then he just kept lying and they'd catch him in another lie and he'd stutter and try to get out of that one until there was no credibility left.
And I think he was sentenced, wasn't he, three or four months ago?
He was sent.
That's what was amazing was The trial was in March.
It was very speedy.
As soon as it ended.
Yeah.
The judge, Judge Newman, asked the prosecuting team and the defense team, you know, when do you want to do this?
And he said, because they're going to go out now and deliberate on the verdict.
They were only out three hours.
After a six-week-long trial, I thought it'd be days.
I had gotten up.
I'd been taking notes the whole time.
I thought, well, I'm going to go get a couple of things done.
I barely walked back through the room and they said they're back.
That's astonishing.
What?
You know, when I was a kid reporter, I liked being in the studio, being on air, but sometimes my boss, to give me the experience, would force me out into courts and I'd have to report all manner of cases, including some horrible murder cases.
And you just get used to the long wait in most cases.
And you also get used to the fact that the jury can't decide.
You know, the jury is hung.
The jury can't reach a unanimous conclusion.
Was this a unanimous verdict?
Yes, it was.
Wow.
They've talked to some of the jurors since.
I think there was two or three that were leaning the other way.
they went over things again, and it was unanimous.
So the jurors were at that point?
Well, that adds a whole other dimension to this thing.
Okay, now, from all of that experience of those court cases when I was a kid reporter, the judge in summing up, and I'm sure it's the same in the United States, will have to give you an overview as to the reason for the crime, if there's any motive for the crime, what caused this person to do this thing?
What was that summation?
Was there one?
Actually, he gave it to him with both barrels, if you'll pardon the expression.
He was a very calm judge through the whole thing.
And in his calm demeanor, he had Alex in front of him.
He did not try to go into why he did it.
He was more perplexed of why in the world would you?
And when he said, I'm sure Maggie and Paul come to you every night when you sleep, I thought, whoa.
And Alex tried to slough it off and he goes, I see him every day.
And he goes, I'm sure you do.
So, no, he didn't go into any of the particulars with that.
It was handled during closing arguments.
He just pretty much let him know how despicable he thought he was.
He said, well, I'll be seeing you again because all of these other financial crimes are going to come up.
And he will probably be sitting the bench for those unless he retires before then.
But he did not let him off easy with trying to show him just how horrible this.
And what touched my heart, Howard, was the judge's own son had just died a couple of weeks before the trial started, and he was 40 and died unexpectedly.
And the judge went through with it all.
And he went, you never, I was so impressed with his demeanor.
He didn't ever show anything.
He was professional, but that had to be going through his mind, how much he wished he had his son back.
And this guy blew his away.
So the question of why did you do this then, is that still open and hanging there?
Is it still a mystery?
Are we not going to know?
Because there's another issue here, isn't there?
I'm not sure you can tell me, did this come out in the trial, but didn't Alex Murdor try and put together another scam, a scam involving Paul, that Alex Murdoch, wasn't he going to take his own life or something, and Paul would be the beneficiary of an insurance policy?
Have I got that all the wrong way around?
No, you're close.
The roadside shooting, where he claimed somebody stopped and shot him in the head, he said he was going to, because of the insurance, the way the insurance claim was written, nobody benefits if you kill yourself, if it's suicide.
So according to him, he got his friend that was supposed to shoot him so that his oldest surviving son, Buster, would come into $10 million.
He lied about that too.
There was no such clause in his insurance.
In fact, they couldn't find any life insurance that he had.
This is a horrible case, and it leaves us with a whole bunch of psychological questions, as these things often do.
When I was a boy reporter, again, I attended a trial where a young man, and the circumstances were shocking, but they'll stay with me for the rest of my life, brutally stabbed to death a young mother in a shopping center car park in the UK.
And I attended the trial.
I didn't do very many of these things.
And of course, you're sitting there as a reporter.
You're looking over the shoulder of the jury and you can see the photographic evidence that they're being presented with.
And it's going to live with me until my dying day.
And that poor woman, the way that she died.
But at the end of it all, the reason I'm telling you this is that the judge said, we are never going to know why this young man did this.
I wonder if that's going to be the case here.
Oh, all right.
Well, this is going to...
In fact, the prosecuting attorney believes that's what put this in motion, was the morning of the murders while Alex was at work.
The CFO, Ginny Sekinger, who handles all of the money, confronted him and said, time's up.
I need to know where these checks are, which was the money that was supposed to be coming in from Alex's work.
It was supposed to go to the firm, not to him.
He'd been dodging it and dancing, and she goes, we're not doing this anymore.
Where are these missing funds?
It's $392,000 or something like that.
I want to know right now.
He got a phone call fortuitously from his brother saying dad just Went back in the hospital, which is Randolph Sr., who was dealing with cancer.
It couldn't have come at a better time.
Alex says, I can't talk about this right now.
So he's got two whammies.
One, his time's up.
They're about to find out his firm that he has been hiding funds that were supposed to go to the firm, which were the fees he gets paid for, you know, handling these cases as an attorney.
They don't go to the attorney.
They go to the firm and the firm divvies out their payments at the end of the year.
Well, he couldn't wait that long because he was in such a financial mess.
They find that out, he's screwed.
He's got this whole, like over 23 clients he's been scamming for years and a fake bank account.
And at the same time, finding out his father, who has bailed him out over and over and over with money, looks like he's about to die.
He had just gotten out of the hospital a couple of days before and now he's back in again and his world's crushing in on him.
The only thing he can think of is, I got to get the money.
I've already got my friend over at the bank, who is, by the way, being sentenced this coming week for his role in this.
He said he said he'll give me some more money, but this time he's going to need collateral.
Well, the Moselle property is 1,700 acres where Maggie and Paul were murdered.
It's a hunting lodge, 1,700 acres, and a kennel, a hangar, a great big house.
Well, it was in Maggie's name, and he had put it in her name as a tax evasion of his own.
They had an Edisto beach house also in her name and his name.
So he figured if he gets Maggie out of the way, the house goes, all of that goes to him.
There's his collateral.
They were already, everyone believed, headed for a divorce.
She was living full-time at the beach house.
They were separated.
And I think he thought, I'm going to get her out there.
What she always does before she heads back to the beach house is run the dogs for a little bit.
I'll just shoot her down there.
And here's the part that whether people believe this or not, and they, you know, I don't believe Paul was an intended target.
And I spent quite a bit of time in the book.
I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And if people say, well, then why didn't they bring that out at the trial?
I think the prosecution had a decision to make.
They wanted this man to go down in a bad way.
If they brought up that Maggie was the target, but Paul was an accident and such a brutal one where, you know, his head's blown off basically.
I think they worried that the jury might be sympathetic, that this guy accidentally shot his son.
I don't think they wanted them to feel anything but intense hate for this guy and decided to just go for the whole thing.
And he did get two life sentences.
Is his legal team going to appeal either sentence or verdict?
They are going to appeal.
I think on the grounds that they don't believe all the financial stuff against him should have been allowed in, that it tainted the jury's decision when they saw what a bad guy he was.
But I believe there's more evidence to show that Paul was a mistake than that Paul was one of the targets.
When will the appeal be heard?
I don't know yet.
That's going on right now.
So I don't know yet.
What an astonishing story.
What's been the reaction?
Because your book isn't just out.
It's been out for a little while.
What's the reaction to the book?
It's doing so well.
I have a few people in South Carolina that are friends with the Murdochs that have, you know, kind of come after the book, understandably.
It hurts when you get a one-star review when you've worked so hard on it and some of the harsh things that they've said, but that's to be expected.
The rest of it has been incredible.
I'm so pleased with it.
I worked so hard on it.
It's filled with photographs and maps and diagrams, and it's called Countdown to Murder, Alex Murdaugh.
And it is 703 pages.
I worked so hard on that thing.
So I am very proud of it.
It is a sad story to tell, but what made me feel good was getting interviews in from Gloria's family and from Stephen's family to bring those people to life so they weren't just a victim.
Well, my apologies to any members of the audience here who might have been disturbed by some of the graphic, more graphic details of the crime, but you can't tell the story without indicating that, I don't think.
Rebecca, thank you very much.
Well, you're very welcome, and I appreciate, as always, being able to be here.
And again, I apologize for some of the details there, but I think they were essential to what we were talking about.
And as I say, we don't often do true crime here, but I made an exception here, which I've occasionally done on The Unexplained, because we like to cover a variety of subjects.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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