It's not quite time to be mum on the Murdaughs
In Jason Ryan's "Swamp Kings," the crime, punishment and power of one dynasty is a cautionary Carolina tale
Ah, Alex Murdaugh. He’s a man of a thousand press clippings, a TV ratings rainmaker, a rubber-necker’s go-to guy.
In short, the convicted murderer and ginger-crowned scion of a lawyer-lousy dynasty emanating from Hampton, S.C. is the journo’s gift that keeps on giving.
The media melee looked to be all but over when in March 2023 a jury found him guilty of killing his wife Maggie and son Paul on their Colleton County property, resulting in two consecutive life sentences.
But in true Murdaugh fashion, it was a verdict the defendant’s lawyers almost immediately appealed, asserting that county court official, Rebecca Hill, compromised the jury. Once again splashing the family name “above the fold,” in the parlance of the industry, news outlets reported that the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of verdict.
This week, Murdaugh headlines rear again. This time they involved the family of Mallory Beach, who was killed in the boating accident involving Paul. Their legal time has requested recusal of Judge G.D. Morgan Jr. in a lawsuit regarding the leak of photos of Beach’s body.
Still, even with the years-long, constant news churn, I craved a deeper perspective. How could one family so successfully wield and retain power for generations? Did it point to some Carolina-style systemic corrosion that still needs outing?
My own return to the South more than a decade ago was my first foray into the workforce as a fully formed adult. After a quarter of a century in New York City, I quickly gleaned that the good-old-boy paradigm hurdles on, operative everywhere from the college classroom to the local newsroom.
It can be stunning in its insidious silence. Whatever backslapping and frat-boy fealty plays out behind the doors of board meetings and social clubs, a shroud of silence muffles the gory details.
Meeting Jason Ryan
Trust me: What you don’t know can most certainly hurt you.
With that roiling in my mind, I dove headfirst into author Jason Ryan’s fastidiously researched, deftly penned “Swamp Kings: The Story of the Murdaugh Family of South Carolina & a Century of Backwoods Power.” The definitive tome on the topic leaves no Murdaugh misdeed redacted, offering an often shudder-inducing playbook for grassroots, male-dominated power mongering, and the fallout from not coming forward to correct it.
Ryan is a former colleague of mine, and a friend. As journalists we share a fascination with South Carolina stories and their standout figures, how the histories and eccentricities of this state conspire to make the man or woman, or undo them.
Ryan’s 2012 book.,“Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, And The Sting That Launched The War On Drugs,” details a billion-dollar marijuana smuggling enterprise that played out in the late 1970s and early 1980s along the Eastern Seaboard. When it all went down, it was big news in South Carolina, landing more than one person with whom I may have crossed paths in federal prison.
Ryan and I met for coffee recently at Philosophers & Fools, the bookstore bar in Charleston’s Cannonborough-Elliottborough neighborhood. When he arrived, he was already animated by his visit to his former stomping grounds; he lived with his family on nearby Ashe Street.
Then, he was bent on restoring the block to its former historic glory by uncovering the Belgian brick pavers that lay dormant under the asphalt, going so far as getting the powers that be to expose a patch of them to consider their condition. Efforts eventually stalled by city bureaucracy, and the bricks were paved over once more.
Into the swamp
Like the quest for those hidden bricks, “Swamp Kings” mines a similarly thick layer of obscurity, one that the author uses as a central metaphor. That is the titular swamp, that festering Lowcountry stew of algae-murky waters, teeming with unseen snakes and gators and able to hide all manner of menace. Throughout his book, Ryan deploys this, with lyrical passages on the confounding, inscrutable terrain that serve to reveal Murdaugh character — or perhaps the lack thereof. Consider this passage:
In Hampton, there’s no escaping the swamps. On one side of the county sprawls the Salkehatchie. On the other side oozes the Coosawhatchie. In between sits Hampton, perched just above the muck. These swamps spread across thousands of acres, surrounding Hampton with sunken, submerged forests. At the heart of these swamps are small, slow-moving rivers and their creeks swell and spill over their banks and flood the nearby forest floor, replenishing the shallow, dark pools from which bald cypress and water tupelos grow tall.
Over coffee, he reflected on how the Murdaughs fit into these cypress swamps, which are found in the American South. “There's something reptilian, instinctual about their behavior. They're predators, they're creatures of opportunity. They are still, until they see some prey and snap quickly,” he said.
As such, writing the book was at times forbidding. In that neck of the soggy, cypress woods, the default response is to remain mute on all things Murdaugh. With three of Alex’s forebears holding the position of circuit solicitor in a five-county jurisdiction, the family had long ago learned how to leverage position to muffle potential outcry.
“As solicitors in this official prosecutorial position, they doled out so many favors,” he said, noting that they were often small scale like forgiving traffic offenses or the like. “But once you took that help, you were on the hook.”
This favor economy, coupled with fear of reprisal, meant that no one was willing to speak up or step out. As Ryan pointed out, anyone who was inclined to do so was deemed an idiot, met with sentiments such as “Why would you make life miserable for yourself to challenge that, even if it's blatantly wrong?”
Rinse, repeat
These days, the question Ryan currently contends with is this: Do we need more ink on one particularly twisted South Carolina murder? (Incidentally, this is my very first time chiming in on the crime.)
After reading Ryan’s rigorously researched, deftly penned and hefty contribution to the topic, I’m going with yes. I say this because the making of a Murdaugh is a cautionary tale, one that should be deeply chronicled and fully comprehended lest it repeat itself in these parts or elsewhere.
Over two and half years, the author conducted numerous interviews, some harrowing and hard won that demonstrate a pattern handed down from one generation to the next.
“It was tough to nail down the details exactly of what happened, but there are enough people saying consistent things that something along those lines happened,” he said, adding that “it echoes, of course, the murder then of Maggie Murdaugh and her son Paul if his grandfather allegedly tried to kill his mistress and unborn son.”
Ryan also pored over old court cases involving each successive Murdaugh solicitor. Slogging through South Carolina newspapers like the The Hampton County Guardian and The Post and Courier and its earlier iterations, Ryan became enamored with fellow journalists who had covered the family over the years, a testament to how this modus operandi spanned the good part of a century as the Murdaughs amassed unchecked sway.
“The behavior was identical in some cases between grandfather and grandson,” Ryan told me. The structure of the book revealed these crimes in parallel, mirroring each other across decades. “They stole from their clients the same way.”
When it comes to the recent development with Alex, Ryan was level. “I think any one who's convicted has a right to exhaust their appeals. And if they have a claim that they feel is legitimate … that a conviction was unjust, they have a right to bring that to the court's attention.”
At the same time, he observes that with Alex Murdaugh, there is always an exception. “There's a wrinkle.” he said.
Call it a wrinkle, or perhaps a new opportunity. Whether or not Alex prevails, as long as the tried-and-true family playbook proves efficacious, there are plenty of other chancers lurking in the swamps of South Carolina, ready to snap.