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.
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