[imagesource: Maggie Murdaugh / Facebook]

Be grateful that you never had Alex Murdaugh as a family member.

The South Carolina ex-lawyer stands accused of going above and beyond to protect his alleged financial fraud and prescription painkiller addiction with murder and elaborate cover-up schemes.

A Netflix true-crime documentary series, titled Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, details how the Murdaughs, once South Carolina’s most prominent and powerful family, saw their legacy unravel when their son got into a drunken boat accident that left teenager Mallory Beach dead.

Then, around two years later, Paul Murdaugh, the alleged driver of the boat, and his mother Maggie were found brutally murdered, bringing to light 100 years of corruption, misused power, and cover-ups wrought by the family.

What filmmakers Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason (Fyre Fraud, LulaRich) put together in the three-part series is currently playing out in real-time as Alex Murdaugh stands trial for double murder in the courtrooms that he once ruled.

Vanity Fair points out that the killing of Alex’s wife and son happened several months before he was pushed out of his family law firm.

The reason was that he was allegedly misusing millions of dollars, while Alex’s lawyer says a large portion of the money was used to pay for painkillers.

Prosecutors also argued that Murdaugh killed Paul and Maggie to distract from a wrongful death suit pitted against him, which would have forced him to disclose incriminating financial information.

Sometime after the murders, Murdaugh even reported surviving a roadside assassination attempt that turned out to be a suicide-for-hire scheme so that he could secure a $10 million insurance payout for his son Buster.

Buster, Murdaugh’s only surviving son, backs his dad in the trial.

The Murdaugh trial, and the larger scandal-ridden saga, have gripped the world:

During cross-examination on Thursday, prosecutors painted Murdaugh as someone who exploited his family’s legal reputation and coziness with law enforcement to act above the law.

…Generations of Murdaughs, whose ruddy faces and preppy clothing make them almost a caricature of white southern gentry, have been attorneys at a white-shoe litigation firm known for winning lucrative personal-injury lawsuits. Murdaughs have also often controlled the office of solicitor, a powerful prosecutorial position.

In the trial, Murdaugh admitted to the web of lies he weaved, reported The Guardian:

In a startling reversal, however, the once-powerful South Carolina lawyer admitted to lying for 20 months about a key detail in his account of the night that Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were killed on the family’s hunting estate. Contradicting his previous claims, Murdaugh said that he did, in fact, visit the kennels where they were later found dead of gunshot wounds.

He blamed his deception on paranoia brought by panic, compounded by his addiction to prescription painkillers, and described a cascading effect as lies mounted on each other. “What a tangled web we weave …” he said, adding that once he started lying he had to “keep lying”.

In the trial, a caregiver for Murdaugh’s elderly mother testified that she saw him carrying a tarp the day after the murder, and a rain jacket found on the property tested positive for gunpowder.

Prosecutors also pointed out a video taken by Paul Murdaugh about four minutes before he died, wherein his father can be heard shouting, “Come here, Bubba!” to a dog.

Besides the blood of Mallory Beach, as well as his wife and son, being on his hands (be it directly or indirectly), there is also that of his former housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, who died after reportedly falling on the Murdaughs’ property.

He was accused of stealing money from the settlement intended for her children, and separately, was also indicted on five counts of tax evasion.

I just can’t help but pull a nasty face at the uncanny coincidence between the name Murdaugh and murder.

[sources:vanityfair&guardian]