MURDAUGH FAMILY MYSTERY - SECRETS AND SCANDAL

AFTER THE MURDERS OF HIS WIFE AND SON, ALEX MURDAUGH WAS ACCUSED OF EMBEZZLEMENT, SHOT IN THE HEAD AS PART OF AN INSURANCE-FRAUD SCHEME – AND ARRESTED. WHAT’S NEXT?

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The breaking news out of the South Carolina Lowcountry on Labor Day weekend was like an impossibly cruel joke: Alex Murdaugh, the moneyed and influential lawyer who discovered the bodies of his wife and son – shot dead in an unsolved murder mystery – outside the family’s hunting lodge on June 7, was a gunshot victim himself. He was ambushed on a rural Hampton County road, “shot in the head while he was changing a tyre,” his attorney Jim Griffin told People magazine on that Saturday, September 4. “He is conscious and talking, which is a very good sign.”

But within days all the signs turned bad. Though Alex survived the gunshot, he announced a two-decade addiction to opioids and entered rehab at an undisclosed location out of state. By the time he was back in South Carolina on September 16 – shackled at the wrists and ankles and sobbing in court – the 53-year-old, nicknamed Big Red as much for his 193cm tall frame as for his domineering influence over the region’s judicial system, was a shell of his former self. He was out of a job, allegedly broke, charged with conspiracy and fraud for a botched suicide attempt and facing new investigations – one into millions of dollars missing from his family law firm and another related to the mysterious 2018 death of his long-time housekeeper. “If you feel a swoosh of wind blow by,” one local resident says, “that’s my head spinning around in circles trying to follow this craziness.”

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