The Murdaugh Case Came Apart Amid a True Crime Frenzy. What Happens Next?

By Andrea Marks

Andrea Marks

Alex Murdaugh’s bizarre fall from grace gave the public a crime story too strange to look away from, and at times, too twisted to keep up with. Even by recent standards of true crime consumption, where appetite for morbid and procedural play-by-plays has felt all but bottomless, the rapidly developing story’s many tentacles prompted a voracious true-crime feeding frenzy. Murdaugh’s murder trial, his family’s influence in their rural South Carolina county, and several deaths associated with them have prompted the release of dozens of adaptations, including at least three docuseries, a scripted Hulu show, a two-part Lifetime movie, and three Dateline episodes, as well as other TV specials, podcasts, and books, all within the past five years, since Murdaugh’s stranger-than-fiction behavior first began capturing national attention.

Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and her son, Paul Murdaugh, 22, were found shot to death in June 2021 on the grounds of the Murdaugh family’s hunting estate in the South Carolina lowcountry. Maggie’s husband and Paul’s father, Alex, called 911. The case went quiet for several months, but Murdaugh was charged with dozens of financial crimes in the meantime, many of which he later pleaded guilty to. He was charged with Maggie and Paul’s murders in 2022 and, following a six-week trial, convicted in March of 2023.

Now, Murdaugh’s convictions for the murders of his wife and son have been tossed out, and the case will be retried, thanks in part, the state’s highest court has ruled, to the moneymaking ambitions of one woman who got a little too close to the story. The state Supreme Court reviewed juror testimony and found Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill made comments to the jury about Murdaugh’s body language and the evidence presented by the defense, pushing for a guilty verdict to help sell the book she would go onto write from her front row seat at what might have been the conclusion of this yearslong saga. Now, the revelation of her behavior has opened a new chapter in the story of Murdaugh’s fate, and brought back into question the search for justice in the deaths of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. Hill resigned from her job in 2024, and her attorney in a civil suit brought by Murdaugh against her did not respond to a request for comment. Murdaugh remains in prison, because he’s also serving 40 years for stealing millions from former clients of his law firm. 

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Murdaugh lead prosecutor Creighton Waters believes Hill’s interference was inappropriate, but tells Rolling Stone it was not enough to sway the verdict. “We argued to the Supreme Court that it’s ridiculous to conclude that after six weeks of trial, 75 witnesses, 556 exhibits… some juror was like, ‘I don’t know what I was going to do,’ but then Becky said something, and that carried the day,” he says. 

Defense attorney Dick Harpootlian says Murdaugh maintains his innocence and will not consider a plea deal ahead of the index trial. He is excited about the new trial, but surprised by the key player in this reversal. “You never, ever, ever suspect that something untoward is happening with the clerk,” he says, lending this latest development an air of cinematic plot twist. 

The sordid tale of the Murdaughs unfolded in the public eye during a boom in true crime media, when actual instances of death and deception could hardly keep up with the demand for packaging and repackaging sinister stories of shocking human behavior. Between documentaries rolled out before charges were even filed to dramatized renderings of family tragedies, the many adaptations of the Murdaugh case challenged the public to separate the facts of a horrifying real-life saga from the stories we tell about it.

MURDAUGH, A PERSONAL INJURY ATTORNEY and descendent of three generations of elected circuit solicitors (prosecuting attorneys) in the area, first gained national attention in 2021, after he asked a friend to shoot him in a botched insurance-fraud scheme. On Sept. 4, Murdaugh called the police to report that he had been shot while changing a flat tire by the side of the road, before confessing that he had actually asked a friend, former client, and distant cousin to kill him in the hopes that his older son, Buster, could collect on his $10 million life insurance policy. The incident occurred shortly after Murdaugh had been pushed out of the law firm his family founded more than a century ago for misappropriating funds.

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That strange, headline-grabbing ordeal soon gave way to a backdrop of much darker recent violence in Murdaugh’s family. Earlier that same year, Murdaugh’s son Paul and wife, Maggie had been found shot dead on the grounds of the family 1,700-acre hunting estate, Moselle. Murdaugh had called 911 and said he’d found them when he returned home from visiting his ailing mother. 

At the time of his death, Paul had been facing felony charges for allegedy drunkenly crashing a boat in 2019 and killing 19-year-old Mallory Beach. Murdaugh claimed that his family had received anonymous threats following the horrific accident, and that he’d fallen into opioid addiction while grieving the deaths of his wife and son, the combination of which led him to attempt suicide-by-hitman.

From there, one eyebrow-raising development emerged after the next. In October of 2021, Murdaugh was charged with stealing insurance settlement money from the family of their housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, who had died in 2018 after a fall at the Murdaughs’ home and whose surviving family Murdaugh had approached with a recommendation that they file a claim against his homeowner’s insurance. 

Then there was the unsolved 2015 death of 19-year-old Stephen Smith, found dead in the road 10 miles from the Murdaugh home. The Murdaugh name was reportedly mentioned “dozens of times” by witnesses and investigators in the highway patrol case file on Smith’s death, according to CNN. The case drew renewed attention after the deaths of Maggie and Paul, as authorities announced plans to reinvestigate Smith’s death as a homicide. 

By the end of the year, Murdaugh faced dozens more financial charges, many related to taking money from personal injury clients. Murdaugh would later admit to stealing $4.3 million from the Satterfield family and pleaded guilty to 22 financial crimes. In 2023, law enforcement said they would exhume the bodies of both Satterfield and Smith as part of renewed investigations into both deaths. Waters, the lead prosecutor, would not comment on the status of those cases, citing ongoing investigations. “I will say that cold cases are hard,” he says. 

News of the hitman-suicide indicent broke amid the recent wave of modern true crime enthusiasm. Dirty John, a podcast about serial scammer and abuser John Meehan, had recently completed its circuit from 2017 LA Times investigation and partner podcast to Netflix documentary to TV drama starring Connie Britton and Christian Slater. Audiences had binged Tiger King in 2020, following the lead-up to Joe Exotic’s conviction for hiring someone to kill Carole Baskin, his competitor in the big cat world. A proliferation of crime chat and recap podcasts found a loyal listener base as they dissected cases alongside equally common investigative programs competing to be the next Serial. 

It didn’t take long for the Murdaugh saga to take off in the true crime world. Just two weeks after the 2021 double-homicide of Paul and Maggie, local reporter Mandy Matney launched The Murdaugh Murders Podcast, taking listeners through the details of the 2019 boat accident and the Murdaugh family’s power and influence in their community. By November, it ranked among the top 10 most-popular new podcasts that year. The podcast would eventually be developed into a successful Hulu scripted series starring Patricia Arquette. Today, it’s one of about a dozen Murdaugh series on the Apple podcasts app, along with titles including Murdaugh on my Mind and Murdaugh, She Recapped.

By July 2022, when Murdaugh was charged with the murders of Maggie and Paul, the story of the deaths and the family’s history had generated Dateline and 20/20 episodes and documentaries on Oxygen and Investigation Discovery. In the lead-up to the trial, HBO Max premiered the docuseries Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty, and the Murdaugh family was the subject of a CNN Special Report and two episodes of American Greed on CNBC. In February 2023, while the trial was underway, Netflix premiered the docuseries Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, which quickly climbed to the top of the platform’s viewing charts. 

Murdaugh’s trial lasted nearly six weeks, during which dozens of witnesses took the stand, including Murdaugh himself. In one of the trial’s most memorable moments, he testified through tears to lying about his whereabouts on the night of the murders. He was caught on a cell phone recording with Maggie and Paul the night of the murders, near the dog kennels where their bodies were later found. He admitted that he’d lied but maintained he did not kill his wife and son. 

In closing arguments, Waters described a “gathering storm” of financial wrongdoing that he said had led Murdaugh to murder his family in an effort to protect his reputation and money. Jim Griffin, an attorney for Murdaugh’s defense, said authorities had focused on Murdaugh too early and had failed to adequately investigate the killings. On March 2, 2023, the jury deliberated for less than three hours before reaching a guilty verdict, which clerk Becky Hill read aloud. Murdaugh was convicted of killing Maggie and Paul, and he received two life sentences without parole. 

IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED the verdict, Netflix released Season 2 of its docuseries, Lifetime released a two-part movie starring Bill Pullman, and Hill, the Colleton County clerk, published her book, Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders. 

All the attention on the case turned courtroom figures into minor celebrities themselves. Hill wrote in her book about taking her first plane ride ever to travel with some of the jurors after the verdict to New York, courtesy of NBC, according to South Carolina’s The State newspaper. In September, Murdaugh’s attorneys appeared at CrimeCon in Orlando. The defense and the state spoke at separate panel discussions to hundreds of attendees — thousands, in Waters’ case. “Creighton was clearly the favorite, because they like the prosecutors better,” Harpootlian says, laughing. He recalls the event as “bizarre.” Waters played guitar with his band during a kickoff party for the event. “I joked that’s the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like a Beatle,” Waters says. 

Meanwhile, Hill’s book was getting her some attention, but not the kind she might have hoped for. In fact, the publication of Behind the Doors of Justice had prompted some jurors to come forward with allegations that Hill had influenced the jury, according to a lawsuit filed by Murdaugh against Hill. Harpootlian also says that shortly after the trial was over, his team got some information that led them to seek out jurors to ask them about their experiences with Hill, known to them as Ms. Becky. He recalls an early visit one afternoon to the mobile home of an alternate juror: “She let us in, and she was cooking collards,” he says. “She said Ms. Becky was talking about how you shouldn’t believe Mr. Murdaugh, and don’t trust the defendant’s lawyers.” Harpootlian tells me they spent the summer driving the back roads of Colleton County, where trees drip with Spanish moss, taking statements from more jurors. “It was a process,” he says. “I’m proud that we did not just walk away from it once he was found guilty. We didn’t give up.”

That fall, Murdaugh’s team accused Hill of influencing the jury, and filed a motion for a retrial. 

At a January 2024 evidentiary hearing, one juror testified that when deliberations began, Hill had told the jury that “[T]his shouldn’t take us long.” Another submitted an affidavit claiming Hill had told the jury, “’not to be fooled” by evidence presented by the defense, and “to watch him closely,” “look at his actions,” and “look at his movements.” This juror said they understood that to mean Murdaugh was guilty. Furthermore, a colleague of Hill’s testified that Hill had told her repeatedly that she wanted to write a book on the case so she could buy a lake house. That colleague also testified that Hill had told her that a guilty verdict would be the best way to sell books.

After a post-trial court found that while Hill had behaved inappropriately, her comments had not affected the verdict, Murdaugh appealed and the state Supreme Court reversed the decision, saying that Hill had “egregiously attacked Murdaugh’s credibility and his defense,” and the state had been unable to prove there was “no reasonable possibility” that Hill’s comments influenced the verdict. 

Murdaugh is also suing Hill, claiming she violated his constitutional right to a fair trial by an impartial jury. Harpootlian hopes the suit will help to recoup some of the $600,000 he says the first trial cost. It will also give them a chance to depose Hill and others. “The civil suit we have brought will allow us to drill down,” he says. “What was going on there, and was there anybody else involved?”

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