Tangled Vines: Power, Privilege, and the Murdaugh Family Murders
By John Glatt

The crime:

Scion of a long line of powerful South Carolina lawyers, Alex Murdaugh killed his wife and youngest son in June 2021, just as he was about to be exposed for having stolen millions of dollars from clients in order to pay for his drug habit.

The book:

For reasons not worth getting into I had CNN on a lot in the background when this case exploded with wall-to-wall coverage. I didn’t pay much attention to it then, figuring a book was soon on its way, from which I would learn more. That book didn’t take long to arrive, though I can’t say I was keenly anticipating it. From what I could gather, it didn’t seem like a particularly remarkable crime. Why had it caught the public’s interest?

I think mainly because it fit a popular archetype: “a roller-coaster of murder plots, financial crimes, and drug addiction, straight out of a Southern Gothic novel.” The story of a powerful family’s decline into criminality, madness, and degeneracy may have had people thinking of Faulkner or even Poe, but I don’t think either of those authors is ever mentioned. Instead, Glatt goes further back and likens the fall of the house of Murdaugh to Greek tragedy. In fact, I think he makes that connection four times (and once, just for good measure, to Shakespeare). Is this a fair comparison?

The Murdaughs were big fish in the small pond of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, so I guess they qualify as being of tragic stature. Of Alex Murdaugh Glatt writes that “His greed and hubris were limitless,” which has an Aristotelian ring to it. But by the time of the main events recounted here the family was guttering out in a big way, to the point where it’s hard to see how Alex and his son Paul were functioning at all given the amounts of booze and drugs they were consuming. Alex was also more of a Shakespearean villain than a hero with a tragic flaw. In a final judgment that made me sit up and take notice Glatt concludes that “Whether or not Alex is a sociopath is not for me to say, but in all the true crime books I have written, I have never come across anyone as dark and totally devoid of conscience as he appears to be.”

That’s a bold claim – I believe this is Glatt’s twenty-fifth book – but it has some merit. The curious thing I found was that despite shooting his wife in the back with an AR-15 and then standing over her body and “firing again and again,” and then blasting a shotgun at his son’s head and chest at point-blank range, the murders seem not to have been crimes of passion. I didn’t even see where Murdaugh was particularly angry at either of them. They had just become inconveniences. That’s cold.

Was it the drugs Murdaugh was taking? There seems to have been little evidence that his mental or moral functioning was greatly impaired. To be sure he was an addict, but I don’t see where that changed his personality much. Where did all his rage come from? Or was it rage?

Nor was what was happening on the financial front easy to understand. This is usually a place where true crime books shine. My basic question was just why Murdaugh was in such financial distress, or, as described by Glatt, “drowning in debt.” He was presumably well remunerated as a partner in the large law firm his great-grandfather founded back in 1910. Then, by the nearest accounting we get here, he stole some $10 million from clients over a roughly ten-year period. Was it all going for drugs? I guess it’s possible. He claimed at the end to be spending up to $60,000 a week on pills, taking more than two thousand milligrams of oxycodone a day. That adds up, but I don’t think he could have been medicating that heavily for a decade. Glatt mentions how he was also involved in some kind of drug dealing operation, but if so it apparently wasn’t making him rich or else he was too busy getting high off his own supply.

While he and his wife liked to live large (as an exercise in family branding she posted pics of their opulent lifestyle on Facebook “to burnish the Murdaugh image”) it just seems to me that with that kind of money in such a relative backwater he should have had more to show for it. I mean, his home property was a whopping 1,772 acres, complete with hunting lodge and dog kennels, but was put up for sale after his arrest for only $3.9 million. I know neighbourhoods near where I live where a decent-size detached home on a suburban lot will put you back close to that. My point being that with a million bucks you could have been a very rich man in the Lowcountry, and Murdaugh had a lot more than a million.

Overall I thought this was just a decent, quick look at the case, thankfully without too many of the howler typos that often mar such timely productions. I guess the end of Chapter 39, which tells us that “Prosecutors and the defense are now busily preparing for Alex’s upcoming murder trial,” was originally conceived as being the end of the book, as we do get an account of the trial immediately after this. And while there weren’t many typos, I did get a smile out of Murdaugh’s lawyers arguing that he should be “afforded a release on his own reconnaissance.” That’s great.

An interesting aside: In one of Glatt’s previous books – Love Her to Death – an estranged wife looking for a divorce is killed when her husband talks her into meeting him in person, something that she wanted to avoid. That’s what happens here as well, as Maggie, who was also considering a divorce, didn’t want to go see Alex alone but felt obliged. There’s a warning for you, ladies! If you’re nervous about meeting your soon-to-be ex on your own, listen to your gut.

The bigger point that’s illustrated though is that of the corrupting effect of privilege. At bottom, privilege means a freedom from consequences, and a little of it can let you get away with a lot. The Murdaughs had a lot of it, and the suspicion shared by many is that they may have even got away with murder. The deaths of Stephen Smith, Murdaugh housekeeper Gloria Satterfield, and Mallory Beach have all been connected to the family, and Glatt provides enough background on each case for readers to make up their own mind as to what, if any, culpability they may have had.

There is, however, always a point where you can’t take things any further. In the case of privilege that point is a long, long way down, but just as the Peter principle has it that you rise to the level of your incompetence, so the privilege principle holds that the only thing that can really erase one’s privilege is the total destruction of oneself or others. Insulated by his wealth and social position, Murdaugh got to live in a bubble that atrophied any sense he had of personal responsibility or morality. Power just isn’t good for people: not for the people who don’t have it and suffer at its hands, and not for the people who do have it and who are debased by it. But still everybody wants some.

Noted in passing:

When he was in prison Murdaugh made a lot of calls, to family members mainly, talking about financial matters and encouraging his remaining son to return to law school. These calls were recorded, as I suppose is usual. What I did not think was usual was that the recordings of these calls were considered to be in the public domain. Indeed, I was quite surprised to find out that reporters filed a Freedom of Information request for the recordings of these calls and it was approved. They were subsequently released.

Murdaugh’s lawyers then “filed a federal lawsuit in US District Court in South Carolina to prevent any further calls going public, citing the federal wiretapping statute. It stated that although inmates were made aware that every call would be monitored and recorded, they were not told it would go public.”

This sounds like a valid complaint. While an inmate has no expectation of privacy when it comes to prison calls, I wouldn’t have thought the calls were public information. But after a pause allowing for a judicial ruling, a higher court agreed to release more calls. In his notes, Glatt refers to these “highly revealing jailhouse phone calls to his family” as providing “a real insight into his true character.” Which I’m sure they did, but I’m still not sure it’s right. Unless the material in the call has some bearing on the case, or can be interpreted as relating to the planning of some further crime, it seems to me that the press has no business publishing what are private conversations, no matter how psychologically revealing they may be.

Takeaways:

On the subject of family fortunes there’s an old saying that the first generation makes the money, the second conserves it, and the third loses it. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” is the adage. And like many an old bit of folk wisdom, there seems to be some truth to it. According to a couple of reports I found online from the 2010s, some 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and 90% by the third.

In other words, family decline is real. This is something borne out in the history of most dynasties, business and political. Even without their violent end the Murdaughs were locked on a familiar downward spiral, aided and abetted by Alex and Maggie’s staggering incompetence as parents. Paul’s death was tragic, but it’s hard from the evidence to see how he was going to turn things around.

The founder or patriarch of a family dynasty is usually at least a figure possessed of some qualities, though he may be an immoral scoundrel. The second generation are just inheritors. And by the time you get to the third generation – or, as in the case of the Murdaughs, the fourth and the fifth – you’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel with spoiled degenerates who were rotten with privilege, destructive of wealth, and not much good for anything.

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