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.

True Crime Files

Knowing Right from Wrong: The Insanity Defense of Daniel McNaughtan
By Richard Moran

The crime:

In January 1843 a disgruntled Glaswegian named Daniel McNaughtan killed Edward Drummond, private secretary to Prime Minister Robert Peel, by shooting him in the back. Apparently McNaughtan mistook Drummond for Peel. At trial, McNaughtan was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a mental hospital for the rest of his life. There was an outcry against the verdict, which resulted in the formulation of the long-lived McNaughtan Rule: that a defendant could only be found guilty if, at the time of his criminal act, he was suffering from such a disease of the mind that he could not appreciate the nature or quality of his act, or that if he did not know that what he was doing was right or wrong.

The book:

This is a short book, but it reads like a long one. I don’t mean that in a bad way, to suggest that it’s boring. It’s just very focused and dense. If you have an interest not only in legal history but in early Victorian issues like Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League then you’ll enjoy all the detail, but these are complicated matters that I think assume some familiarity with the period on the part of the reader. And then there’s more background provided in the extensive appendixes, which even include a transcript of the House of Lords debate on McNaughtan. If you’re like me, you’ll be taking a lot of notes.

Mainly however the book provides a very full accounting of the case itself, and one that Richard Moran gives a significant revisionist spin to. Some indication of where things are heading comes with the dedication: “To the young Scotsman from Glasgow whose search for political and social justice brought him face to face with the ultimate question of right and wrong.” That young Scotsman (actually he was 30 years old, which I don’t think was young by Victorian standards) would be Daniel McNaughtan.

The first point Moran makes is that McNaughtan wasn’t crazy. Indeed, nobody thought he was crazy at the time. Even Queen Victoria (who was sensitive on the subject after having being recently targeted twice by assassins) thought the idea absurd, writing in her diary that McNaughtan was “clearly not in the least mad.” Of course, the understanding of what it meant to be mad was a little different in her day. The then current theory of mind had it that the brain had two compartments: one for intellect and the other for the “moral faculties.” Thus it could be argued that McNaughtan’s moral faculty, the ability to properly distinguish between right and wrong, was impaired while his intellect was still functioning. As for evidence of such impairment, at trial it was argued by his defence lawyer that his love for children and habit of feeding pigeons in the park were “early indicators of a ‘predisposition to insanity,’ portraying the former as a peculiar delight in the ‘innocent ways’ of children and the latter as an odd ‘humanity toward the brute creation.’” Also suspect was his “custom of bathing daily in the nearby river Clyde.” This was said to relieve “the torturing fever by which his brain was consumed.”

None of this strikes a twenty-first century ear as very persuasive, and it’s hard to disagree with Victoria’s common-sense understanding of the matter. But if McNaughtan wasn’t crazy, why was he trying to kill the prime minister?

For Moran it’s clear that McNaughtan’s actions were politically motivated. Which is in fact what McNaughtan claimed they were: a way of fighting back against the persecution he felt he had suffered at the hands of the ruling Tories. So why then did his case become the leading case for over a century on the issue of mental illness and criminal responsibility? Because the political administration wanted it that way. This is where the really revisionist part of Moran’s book comes in to play. “The time has come to challenge the conventional wisdom concerning the McNaughtan case. Far from representing an enlightened humanitarian view of criminal responsibility by a judge and jury concerned with the welfare of a mentally ill defendant, the verdict in the case was mainly the result of political considerations.”

In a nutshell, McNaughtan claimed he had been harassed and persecuted by the Tory government, and there may have been some merit to the charge. But for the Victorians being anti-government was itself a form of madness. At least that’s the way it was seen in establishment circles. Only a few days after McNaughtan’s trial one John Dillon was arrested for threatening to shoot the chancellor of the Exchequer. Upon his arrest he declared that at his trial he would “not plead insanity, but injustice.” But as Moran notes, “The very act of threatening violence against a public official was sufficient for the Victorians to view Dillon as insane. Even the knowledge that his complaint was legitimate did not alter their opinion of his mental condition.” But there was an even stronger argument for proceeding against McNaughtan the way the Crown did:

Beyond serving the purpose of prolonged incarceration [there is no fixed sentence for those found criminally insane], the insanity verdict can function to deter potential political offenders. It was not necessary for the Tories to execute or imprison McNaughtan in order to discourage others from committing similar crimes. All that was necessary was to make him unattractive as a role model. The insanity verdict accomplished this in the most effective manner. By defining McNaughtan’s crime as outside the realm of human reality, the insanity verdict neutralized him as a model for others. While there was at least some disagreement over the desirability of assassinating the prime minister, there was virtual agreement that mental illness was undesirable. The insanity verdict robbed McNaughtan of his political credibility and negated the symbolic and instrumental aspects of his crime. In this sense it was a much greater penalty than death. The impossibility of having one’s political message properly understood must remain the most powerful deterrent to political murder.

The world would be made safe then through a process of judicial labeling. McNaughtan wouldn’t be a martyr to a cause but politically neutered by being locked away as a nut.

But Moran doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t leave it that McNaughtan was politically motivated and not insane. He goes a step further and argues that McNaughtan was, or at least might have been, justified. This is quite a radical step and it’s worth quoting Moran at length here:

Instead of searching for the pathological motivation in McNaughtan’s mind, we might ask how so many of his countrymen who shared his political perspective and proscriptive analysis stood by and watched as their families and friends suffered from the effects of political and economic exploitation. The important psychological dimension requiring explanation might well be the capacity of so many people to deny quietly the desperate political realities of early Victorian England.

The acknowledgment of assassination as a political weapon is a difficult notion for most people to accept. It violates our social and political norms, causing many of us to adopt the extreme position that political murder can never be justified. Still, when confronted with the specter of Adolf Hitler, most people concede that his assassination would have been a morally acceptable act and his assassin a person deserving of considerable praise. It is often said that in a democracy there are other ways to express dissent, that violence is not the way to influence the course of government, that political influence is exerted through elected officials. Regardless of the possible validity of this point of view, it must be recalled that early Victorian England was not a democracy but a constitutional monarchy. Much of Peel’s political life had been devoted to preventing England from embracing representative government. As a Chartist committed to universal suffrage, McNaughtan could not be expected unconditionally to honor the political rules laid down by an aristocratic government to ensure its hegemony. It makes little sense to suggest that McNaughtan should have continued his futile effort to vote Peel out of office, especially since Peel, a staunch defender of the corrupt boroughs, had repeatedly ridiculed the attempt by the working classes to petition Parliament for the right to vote.

What is at issue here, however, is not whether McNaughtan was justified in attempting to assassinate Peel, but whether the intention to do so was inherently irrational or illogical. A definite distinction must be made between the two. McNaughtan’s belief that Peel’s death would have a positive effect on Britain was not a “peculiar notion” he alone entertained.

From here, Moran argues for allowing defendants, in narrowly defined circumstances, to argue for the political or moral justification for what are admittedly criminal acts. This is not meant as a “get out of jail free” card for social justice warriors of whatever position on the political spectrum, but is instead put forward as an alternative to mislabeling as madness what are political acts; a mislabeling that is itself political.

Noted in passing:

Drummond didn’t die right away but took five days to expire, after the best doctors in England did what they could do hasten him along with excessive bloodletting through the application of leeches. Was there ever a more Victorian passing than this?

On Wednesday morning Edward Drummond was informed that he had less than an hour to live and that he must now put his trust in the Lord. Drummond’s reply was characteristically stoic: “The sooner the better – I don’t feel pain.” Turning to his sister, who was sobbing by his bedside, he said: “We have lived long and happy together, and my only regret is in parting with you.” With a faint smile he added: “That ugly French word malaise expressed most fully my burden.” After taking a sip of wine mixed with potassium water, Edward Drummond, a bachelor whose entire adult life had been devoted to public service, died in the arms of his maiden sister.

Takeaways:

You don’t have to be crazy to want to kill someone.

True Crime Files