The Re-Trial Of Alex Murdaugh

Twelve hours of financial crimes testimony. A parade of defrauded clients. A pattern of lies so relentless the jury convicted in under three hours. That was the first trial. The Supreme Court just erased it. Now Creighton Waters has to build a murder case on physical evidence alone, and SLED’s investigation is about to face the kind of scrutiny it avoided the first time. The crime scene was rained...

Buster Murdaugh told a jury his father wasn’t capable of killing Maggie and Paul. That was three years ago. Since then, he’s barely spoken to Alex, got married without the Murdaugh spectacle, and built a life that looks like someone trying to put distance between himself and a last name that carries nothing but wreckage. The conviction just got overturned. A retrial is coming. And the person both...

Before the retrial even starts, the Murdaugh defense has to make a decision that could determine the outcome. Do they fight to exclude financial crimes evidence entirely — and risk the judge letting it all back in under the motive exception? Or do they let it in on their terms and attack the connection between a man stealing money and a man allegedly killing his wife and son? Defense attorney Eric...

AG Alan Wilson confirmed the State will retry Alex Murdaugh for the murders of Maggie and Paul. But the South Carolina Supreme Court attached a condition that could reshape the entire case. Prosecutors spent over twelve hours presenting financial crimes evidence at the first trial. The court called that excessive and ordered any retrial to limit financial testimony to evidence that directly suppor...

Blanca Simpson calls them “the cleaners.” In her telling, Alex Murdaugh did not handle the aftermath of Maggie and Paul’s murders alone. Someone moved Maggie’s car and parked it in a spot she’d never use — close to the kitchen entrance, as if following Alex’s vehicle without knowing the household’s parking routine. Someone removed one of Maggie’s three wedding bands, and Blanca believes it fell fr...

The first officer at the Moselle crime scene described Alex Murdaugh's eyes as wrong — low blink rate, staring off as if reading from a script. Hours later, in dashcam footage from a SLED agent's vehicle, Alex was sobbing and it looked absolutely real. James Lasdun's book The Family Man argues that the grief and the deception may have been happening at the same time — and that both were genuine. T...

The Murdaugh divorce rumor traveled through the case like established fact. Blanca Simpson says it started as a joke — Maggie telling the boys she was going to divorce Alex and marry Tom Brady. Somebody overheard half a phone call and ran with it. Blanca was in the room when Maggie said it, and she’s been waiting to set the record straight ever since. That’s the kind of access fifteen years inside...

The most comprehensive legal analysis of the Murdaugh reversal and retrial. Eric Faddis covers every layer — from the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Toal’s ruling to the evidence restrictions that will reshape the prosecution’s case to the strategic realities both sides face walking into a second trial. The ruling adopted a new legal framework for South Carolina, found Hill’s comments far more ext...

The retrial won’t be a replay. Eric Faddis walks through every major variable that has changed since the first jury convicted Alex Murdaugh in March 2023. The evidence restrictions from the Supreme Court’s ruling. Becky Hill’s perjury conviction. The locked-in transcript of Murdaugh’s testimony. The unresolved forensic questions. The jury selection nightmare. Faddis identifies the single most dang...

The South Carolina Supreme Court calculated that the prosecution spent twelve and a half hours of jury testimony on Alex Murdaugh’s financial crimes — spread over ten days of a six-week trial. The court said the State could have made the motive argument in a fraction of that time and ordered any retrial to present this evidence efficiently. Eric Faddis provides a witness-by-witness analysis of wha...

Juror Z had doubts about guilt. She said so under oath. She said the Clerk of Court’s comments made her feel like Murdaugh was already guilty before deliberations started. Former Chief Justice Toal heard that testimony and found it not credible. The Supreme Court disagreed — and reversed everything. Eric Fadds provides a detailed legal breakdown of the unanimous ruling. The court adopted the Fourt...

The complete interview with The Family Man author James Lasdun — covering the findings that reframe everything about the Murdaugh case. The book traces Alex's manipulation patterns back years. The boat crash narrative may have been constructed after the fact. After the staged roadside shooting, Alex helped create a composite sketch of his supposed attacker that looked like one of the boat crash su...

A divorce filing in the Murdaugh case would have triggered financial discovery. Depositions. Forensic accounting. Every stolen settlement, every fabricated claim, every opioid pill — all of it exposed. Alex was not losing a wife. He was losing the architecture that kept decades of fraud from collapsing. According to reports, Maggie had consulted an attorney. She was living at the Edisto beach hous...

The final part of our interview with The Family Man author James Lasdun tackles the question everyone asks and nobody can fully answer: How does a father kill his own son? The book draws on criminal psychology research going back decades and finds specific, documented cases that parallel Alex Murdaugh's almost exactly. Jean-Claude Romand — eighteen years of fabricated success, financial fraud fund...

Juror Z had questions about Alex Murdaugh’s guilt. She swore to that in an affidavit. But before deliberations, Becky Hill had already told the jury not to believe the defense. When it came time to vote, Juror Z felt the outcome was predetermined. She convicted. The South Carolina Supreme Court just ruled she never should have been in that position — and reversed every murder conviction. The per c...

Part 2 of our interview with The Family Man author James Lasdun gets into what happened the night of the murders — and what was deliberately kept from the jury. The full SLED timeline included communications between Alex and men with criminal records on the day of the killings. Prosecutors removed those names from the condensed version. Alex had deleted his entire phone log from that week. Cousin...

James Lasdun covered the Murdaugh case for The New Yorker — and his article became the magazine's most-read story of the year. Now his book The Family Man goes further than any previous reporting, with original interviews and evidence that reframe who Alex Murdaugh actually was. This isn't a man who lost control one night. The book traces a pattern of staging, manipulation, and control going back...

SLED built a full timeline of Alex Murdaugh's phone activity on the day of the murders. The version the jury saw had names missing. James Lasdun's The Family Man reveals that the complete version included calls and texts between Alex and two men with criminal records — Kenneth Singleton and Demetrick Manigo — hours before Maggie and Paul were killed. Singleton texted asking Alex to call. Alex repl...

For eighty-six years, the Murdaugh name meant something specific in South Carolina's lowcountry. It meant problems got handled. It meant consequences were optional. It meant that three generations of family power could insulate whoever carried the name from the accountability that applied to everyone else. This week in Hidden Killers' Week in Review, the series that examines how all of that produc...

His mother is dead. His brother is dead. His father murdered them both. Buster Murdaugh still carries the name. Part 5 of "The Name" explores what remains after the Murdaugh dynasty collapsed. The victims who'll never be made whole. The survivors trying to figure out who they are. Can you escape your family's legacy? The Murdaugh law firm is gone. The property is being sold. The century of power i...

Alex Murdaugh murdered his wife Maggie and son Paul on June 7, 2021. Three months later, he paid someone to shoot him in the head. Part 4 of "The Name" covers the complete collapse — the murders at Moselle, the staged roadside shooting, the investigation that caught him, and the trial that ended with guilty verdicts on all counts. The Snapchat video that proved he was lying. The testimony that dis...

Gloria Satterfield was "practically family." She worked for the Murdaughs for over twenty years. After she died in 2018, Alex promised her sons he'd help them get a settlement. The insurance paid out over four million dollars. Alex stole it all. Every penny. For three years, Gloria's sons waited for money that never came. Part 3 of "The Name" explores how Alex Murdaugh got away with crimes for dec...

Everyone loved Alex Murdaugh. Charming. Generous. The guy who made you feel like the most important person in the room. The real Alex was stealing millions. Feeding an opioid addiction. Living a double life that required constant new crimes. Part 2 of "The Name" explores covert narcissism — how it works, why it's so effective, and what Maggie was starting to see in the months before her death. The...

Before Alex Murdaugh murdered Maggie and Paul, four generations built the system that made it possible. Eighty-six years of controlling the prosecutor's office. Decades of making problems disappear. A family mythology that said consequences were for other people. This is Part 1 of "The Name" — exploring the psychology behind the Murdaugh case. How generational privilege creates deadly entitlement....

The South Carolina Supreme Court heard Alex Murdaugh's double murder appeal today — and the justices came prepared to challenge the state. Across ninety minutes of oral arguments covering jury tampering and evidentiary errors, the bench directed its hardest questions at prosecutor Creighton Waters and gave the defense room to build its case. The jury tampering track opened with Justice James askin...