MURDAUGH FAMILY MYSTERY - SECRETS AND SCANDAL

AFTER THE MURDERS OF HIS WIFE AND SON, ALEX MURDAUGH WAS ACCUSED OF EMBEZZLEMENT, SHOT IN THE HEAD AS PART OF AN INSURANCE-FRAUD SCHEME – AND ARRESTED. WHAT’S NEXT?

The breaking news out of the South Carolina Lowcountry on Labor Day weekend was like an impossibly cruel joke: Alex Murdaugh, the moneyed and influential lawyer who discovered the bodies of his wife and son – shot dead in an unsolved murder mystery – outside the family’s hunting lodge on June 7, was a gunshot victim himself. He was ambushed on a rural Hampton County road, “shot in the head while he was changing a tyre,” his attorney Jim Griffin told People magazine on that Saturday, September 4. “He is conscious and talking, which is a very good sign.”

But within days all the signs turned bad. Though Alex survived the gunshot, he announced a two-decade addiction to opioids and entered rehab at an undisclosed location out of state. By the time he was back in South Carolina on September 16 – shackled at the wrists and ankles and sobbing in court – the 53-year-old, nicknamed Big Red as much for his 193cm tall frame as for his domineering influence over the region’s judicial system, was a shell of his former self. He was out of a job, allegedly broke, charged with conspiracy and fraud for a botched suicide attempt and facing new investigations – one into millions of dollars missing from his family law firm and another related to the mysterious 2018 death of his long-time housekeeper. “If you feel a swoosh of wind blow by,” one local resident says, “that’s my head spinning around in circles trying to follow this craziness.”

NEW CHARGES

Just 12 days after Alex’s shooting, he was in court (above, Sep. 16) on charges of conspiracy and fraud for his scheme allegedly abetted by Curtis Smith (far right).