THE MYTH OF THE GOOD FAMILY

The scion of a powerful South Carolina legal dynasty is charged with murdering his wife and son. It seems unbelievable, ghastly, and-as the news trucks roll in and Hollywood producers begin making offers utterly familiar. Is the ideal of the "good family" broken, or have we always just propped it up to watch it fall, again?

- MARK SEAL

The bodies begin dropping in the summer of 2015. Stephen Smith, 19, found dead in the middle of a road in Hampton County, South Carolina, on July 8. Smith is gay, and his mother believes her son was killed in a hate crime, a newspaper will report, "by several local Hampton County youths from prestigious families."

In 2018 Gloria Satterfield, a longserving housekeeper for a prominent local family, is found dead while at work from "a trip-and-fall accident." Nothing suspicious, it is called, until the proceeds from her insurance policy go not to her two surviving sons but allegedly to her lawyer.

A year later, in February 2019, a 19-year-old rich kid, drunk at the wheel of his family's boat, plows into a bridge at 2 a.m. At his side is the beautiful 19-year-old Mallory Beach. She is thrown from the boat and instantly killed.

A name rises from the flotsam of these mysterious yet somehow connected deaths, a name that shocks the South Carolina community where the deaths occur when it is printed in headlines around the globe, bringing the eyes of justice and the media-to this corner of what is called the Lowcountry.

It is a name that is instantly recognized by the police when, at 10:26 p.m. on June 7, 2021, Sergeant Daniel Greene drives through the stone gates of a 1,700-acre family hunting estate at 4147 Moselle Road, in Colleton County, South Carolina, to find a 52-year-old woman and her 22-year-old son "lying on the ground," shot dead with a rifle. It is a name oft-heard by the media-never in this context, but on the other side of the law.