Warning: Spoilers ahead for Murdaugh: Death in the Family.
Murdaugh: Death in the Family, a Hulu drama out Oct. 15, is inspired by the real story of one of South Carolina’s most influential personal injury lawyers, Alex Murdaugh, who was found guilty in 2023 for the murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The series traces what was going on with the prominent Murdaugh family in the years before Alex was convicted of shooting and killing Maggie and Paul on their family farm in 2021 and found guilty of two counts of possession of a weapon during commission of a violent crime. At the time of his death, Paul was facing a criminal trial after his boat crashed in Beaufort, S.C., in 2019, killing classmate Mallory Beach. As Paul’s case was underway, several journalists started taking a closer look at the influential Murdaugh family and the personal injury law firm they operated, and found that Alex was stealing from clients and the practice.
The first three episodes, out Oct. 15, are centered around the fatal boat crash, and in episodes dropping weekly thereafter, viewers will see the Murdaughs’ world come crashing down, culminating in the creators’ interpretation of how Alex Murdaugh (Jason Clarke) might have murdered his wife (Patricia Arquette) and son (Johnny Berchtold) at the family’s kennels in Islandton, S.C.
The drama series is based on the Murdaugh Murders Podcast, co-created by journalist Mandy Matney, who also served as an executive producer on the Hulu show. TIME talked to Matney and showrunner Michael Fuller about what we know and still don’t know about the case.
The driver in the boat crash
The show depicts Paul as a black sheep of the family. His older brother jokes that he’s going to law school just so he can keep Paul out of trouble. It’s true that Paul was known for drinking heavily. Friends called him Timmy when he was drunk in a joke about how he would basically turn into a different person.
While Paul was killed before he could face trial, Matney believes he was the one behind the wheel in the 2019 boat crash, based on conversations she had with friends of his who were there at the time. One of the passengers had shown Matney a cell phone video in which everyone on the boat was drinking and Paul was steering the boat.
“He was the most drunk on the boat, way more belligerent than anybody else,” Matney says. “And second of all, I’ve talked to a lot of people who have been on Paul’s boat, and only Paul drives Paul’s boat…Any confusion that was created of whether or not he was driving at that moment, I believe, came from pressure from Alex Murdaugh.”
In the show, as in real life, Alex Murdaugh tried to point the finger at another young man on the boat named Connor. His father played football with Alex Murdaugh, and when he got into legal trouble once as a young man, Alex enlisted his father Randolph Murdaugh’s help in getting him out of it. In this way, the Murdaughs did favors for people, sometimes even without being asked, to gain their loyalty. As Fuller puts it, “It’s not like there are guns to people’s heads and stuff. It’s more just this social pressure, this obligation.”
The smoking gun that led to Alex Murdaugh’s conviction
As the Netflix documentary series Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal outlined, law enforcement broke into Paul’s phone after his death by typing in his birthday as the passcode. They found a video he took shortly before his murder at a kennel on the family’s farm, and Alex’s voice is in the background, even though Alex had claimed he was at his mother’s house during that time.
As Matney puts it, “In a lot of ways, Paul solved his own murder because of that [video].”
In addition, the GPS information in Alex Murdaugh’s car revealed that he was at the scene of the crime as well. The data showed that where Maggie’s phone was found, Alex had slowed down and then sped away.
Why Alex Murdaugh would kill his wife and son
On top of stealing money from his own family’s law firm, Murdaugh abused drugs and alcohol, and Matney says he might not have been in a clear state of mind when he murdered his wife and son. In Murdaugh: Death in the Family, Alex Murdaugh is constantly taking drugs, hiding pills underneath his bed, and falling asleep on the couch in a drunken stupor.
“I do believe he was using a good amount of drugs and abusing alcohol at the same time and that was just enhancing all of his problems and making his mind spin further and further out of control,” says Matney.
Fuller agrees that Murdaugh seems to have lost control of all rational thinking: “I think the motive in his mind was, create a distraction, make myself a victim, therefore I have to kill my wife and son to do so.”
Matney thinks what drove Murdaugh to kill is clear, but the murder weapons have never been uncovered. The Murdaughs had a lot of firearms because they were avid hunters, and it’s clear from shell casings left at the crime scene that Paul and Maggie were shot with two different guns.
Matney wonders whether Alex Murdaugh had any accomplices: “I still to this day want to know if he had help, and I also want to know if he had investigators on the inside helping him tamper with the crime scene and things like that. He had a lot of connections within the agencies that were investigating him.”
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