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- [00:01]
A
Crime House has the perfect new show for spooky season Twisted Tales. Hosted by Heidi Wong, each episode of Twisted Tales is perfect for late night scares and daytime frights, revealing the disturbing real life events that inspired the world's most terrifying blockbusters and the ones too twisted to make it to screen. Twisted Tales is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts New episodes out every Monday.
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B
This is crime house.
- [00:39]
A
When 22 year old Paul Murdoch and his 52 year old mother Maggie were found shot to death on the property of their estate, no one could imagine who would have done such a thing. But when all of the evidence started pointing to the patriarch of the family, Alec, the skeletons that the Murdochs had in their closet all started coming to the surface.
- [00:58]
B
The case sent shock waves through South Carolina and quickly became national news, especially because the family's patriarch, Alec Murdoch, was a prominent lawyer. But as the story unfolded, people realized it was much more than a double homicide. Investigators uncovered a web of lies and deceit that would burn a 100-year-old legal dynasty to the ground and leave people wondering, can the rich and powerful really get away with murder? Hi guys. Welcome to Clues, where we sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases.
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A
I'm Kayla Moore and I'm going to be the one digging deeper into the timelines, the backstories and the court files on these cases.
- [01:51]
B
And I'm your Internet sleuth, Morgan Abshur. I'm the one who's diving into the Reddit forums to talk about the lesser known details and pulling out the threads that just don't add up.
- [01:59]
A
At Crime House, we value your support, so please share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review and follow clues to help others discover the show. And for bonus episodes, early access and ad free listening, join our Crime House plus community on Apple Podcasts.
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B
More on this case and the clues that defined it right after this quick break.
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A
This episode is brought to you by Vuori. So Vuori is my new favorite loungewear. I must tell you, I just got a pair of the Dream Knit joggers and I'm completely obsessed with them. I never want to take them off. I can wear them to stretch in the morning, to run errands in the afternoon, but I also think they're just best when I'm lounging around the house at night. When I wear Vori, I still look put together despite the fact that the clothes are so comfortable. And what's great About Vori is that it's not your typical gym gear. Inspired by the laid back coastal California lifestyle. Everything is designed to move with you, perform with you, and still look amazing. Amazing when you're out and about. These pieces are soft, they're lightweight, they stretch in all the right ways. It's basically like wearing a hug that lets you do whatever the day brings. Vuoria is also perfect as we move from fall into winter. I can't believe I'm saying that. Already the year has flown by. They're really easy to layer. I have a couple tank tops that I can wear underneath their cozy sweatshirts and it's perfect. Vuori is an investment in your happiness. And for our listeners, they're offering 20 off your first purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet@vuori.com clues. That's V O R I.com CLU exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. Go to vori.comclues and discover the versatility of Vori clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. Did you see they're making a show about this? The trailer just came out.
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B
I just saw the trailer. Yeah, I've watched both seasons of the Netflix doc on this and I have gone down Reddit rabbit hole after Reddit rabbit hole and surprisingly, the Internet seems a little split on this one.
- [03:57]
A
Yeah, you were saying, which I don't understand. At least Reddit, at least you could be split on. But tell me, what are they split on?
- [04:03]
B
They are curious if he did it and why they don't find that the motive presented was good enough for them. But we're going to put it to you guys, the people, after we present this or even now, if you're like, no, no, he did it.
- [04:17]
A
If you truly believe that Alec Murdoch didn't kill his family, put your argument in the comments because I really want to see exactly what your points are.
- [04:24]
B
And, like, what evidence, like, speaks to you. And if you're sure and you're like, how is the Internet getting this even confused? Put it in the comments too. I want to see all your comments on this one, especially how you pronounce his name, because it is a little interesting. We talked about it.
- [04:41]
A
Yeah, so we're gonna be saying Alec because it seems like that's how the people in North Carolina referred to him and that's how he referred to himself. Even it's spelled Alex. Yeah, it's also spelled Murdoch, but people say Murdoch. So we're going to say Murdoch.
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B
Yes.
- [04:54]
A
So don't yell at us. Yeah. Also at the end of the day, I hate this man. So you don't really care. If you get mad at me for the way I say his name, that's totally fine. This is a huge story to cover today. There is a lot going on in this story and a lot of victims in this. So let's just set the scene for where we're going to start our story today. So on June 7, 2021, 53 year old Alec Murdoch wakes up at Mosel Estate. And that's the name of his family's 1700 acre hunting property about an hour and a half west of Charleston in the town of Islandon, S.C. to put things in perspective, the property, Morgan, is twice the size of Central Park.
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B
It's insanely big.
- [05:40]
A
It is so big. We're talking these massive stretches of forest, swampland, riverfront access, a fish pond, there's dog kennels, there's an entire firing range. It's more space than any human would ever need in their life. But this is what they have, this is where they live. There's also an old airstrip that belonged to the previous owner who was, we made a note here, but the previous owner of this was a suspected drug smuggler. So just like context of how much money these people had. Well, that morning of June 7th, Alec gets up a little bit late. Around noon he goes to work at the family law firm, Peters, Murdoch, Parker, Elroth and Detrick. It's in Nearby Hampton, a 15 minute drive from the estate. His great grandfather was actually the one that founded the firm over a century ago. It was a very well established family in the area. They specialize in things like personal injury, industrial accidents, defective products, things like that. And while he's at the office that day, Alec gets a call that his father, Randolph Murdoch III is actually back in the hospital and he has some breathing problems. He has had a ton of health issues recently and it looks like at this moment he just doesn't have that much longer to live. So alec calls his 52 year old wife Maggie and his two sons, 25 year old Richard, who they call Buster and 22 year old Paul. He tells him to come home so that he can presumably break the news to the family. Now Buster was at his girlfriend's house which was more than 200 miles away, and he just says he can't make it. But Maggie And Paul can be there. Alec returns to the Moselle farm in his chevy suburban at 6:43pm Paul gets there a few minutes later and Alec takes him for a drive around the property before they do some shooting practice together. And when they get back to their house, Maggie's there. She just drove back an hour and a half from their beach house in Edisto island, and they all have dinner together as a family. And then Alec says he took a nap in the house. But while Maggie and Paul go down to the dog kennels to check on a puppy, around 9pm that night, Alex says he wakes up and he drives to his mother's house, which is just 15 minutes away. His mom, Libby, has Alzheimer's, so he does try to visit her regularly. But Alex says that when he returns home at 10pm, the house is empty. He calls out for Maggie and Paul, but all he hears is silence. So he decides that he's going to head down to the last place that they were down to the dog kennel, which is 250 yards from the main house, pretty far from the house. You can't really see it from where the house is. But when he gets down there, there's one thing that he notices and that is blood. Paul is face down on the ground and the back of his head is missing. About 30 yards away from the kennel, Maggie is also face down and she's been shot about five times. Alex says that he grabbed her wrist and that's when he knew she was dead. She didn't have a Pulse. So at 10.07pm, Alec calls the police and through tears, he's sobbing. He tells them that his wife and his son were shot. Then he says, quote, I tried to turn her a little bit, but she's got a hole in her head. Within hours, their deaths have become, honestly, some of the most shocking news that South Carolina's seen in years. At least true crime news. But as the police soon learn, once they get to the scene and they start looking at all the evidence, nothing about what happened that night is what it seems. So before we dive a little bit deeper into exactly what the police started noticing, let's talk a little bit more about the Murdochs, because you really cannot understand the extent of this case without really understanding this family.
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B
Yeah, they're a crazy family.
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A
And it includes their family legacy. For almost a century, the Murdochs basically controlled law enforcement in Hampton County, South Carolina. It was said that you couldn't become a sheriff, a senator, or even a judge in those parts without support from The Murdochs. The Murdochs were the prosecutors who decided who got charged and who walked free. But they were also personal injury lawyers who made millions off of other people's tragedies. So you can kind of see how that cycle really starts to line their pockets a little bit.
- [09:57]
B
Yeah.
- [09:58]
A
And they also this entire time lived like absolute kings while they were running this whole system in the town. In 1910, Alex great grandfather Randolph Murdoch Senior started the practice. And at the time, he was the only lawyer in town. So he quickly gained some pretty powerful allies. And 10 years later, when he's just 33 years old, he becomes the 14th Circuit solicitor. And that is the name that they give to the top prosecutor for a five county region that includes Hampton county, where the Murdochs lived. And that basically means that Randolph Senior was the law. They nicknamed him Fire and Brimstone for his ability to command a courtroom. Kind of like a Baptist preacher. But his hands were, as you maybe could imagine, Morgan, not very clean.
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B
Little dirty.
- [10:44]
A
Little dirty. He had this reputation for supposedly helping his rich friends get out of jail. And he also was known to manipulate the jury pool in order to get convictions in his favor. However, his reign did seem to come to an end in 1940 when he drove his car in front of a moving train. That one was a little surprising to learn about. His son, Randolph Jr. Said that it was an accident. This whole thing was like, so bizarre to read about. So his son Randolph Jr. Basically says that the whole thing was an accident, and he sues the railroad for a hundred thousand dollars, which is basically is like $2 million.
- [11:21]
B
It's a lot of money.
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A
And that was big for Junior because he then inherited his dad's entire law firm. And that same year, in 1940, he became the 14th Circuit solicitor. And just like his father, Randolph Jr. Had a pretty shady side. He was once seen accepting a bribe in a courthouse hallway, just like in front of everyone. And Junior was also reportedly the boss of South Carolina's biggest alcohol bootlegging operation. Can you believe he was involved in something so, like, below board?
- [11:52]
B
I mean, this whole family's just. These are the first two big ones.
- [11:56]
A
And it's like, I know this is.
- [11:58]
B
Already insane, and the more you read.
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A
About him, too, is like he has this reputation. He's like stealing from his clients, but he would just beat every single charge. Anytime someone tried to come forward and say, hey, I think this guy's doing something, he could just beat the charges because he ran the whole system. And by the time his son, Randolph iii, now in the Family tree of things. That's Alex, father. So Randolph III becomes an adult. Junior had turned his inheritance into this really big empire of wealth. Randolph III didn't have to get his hands as dirty, probably because of this. Because the family at this point had so much money, he easily won the election to take over his dad's job as solicitor. He also inherited the family firm. It's just getting passed down to all the kids, which at that point was one of the biggest private law firms in the state. And by the time his son Alec was born in 1968, the Murdoch family was so ingrained into Hampton's heritage that they were pretty much untouchable. We don't really have royalty here in America, but this is like as close as you can get. As a result, Alec and his two brothers grew up in this really, really privileged environment where they were just treated like royalty. They'd never really heard no all that much. Alec was the prom king. He was also the star quarterback who led the high school football team to win a regional championship. So people just loved him. So when he met his wife Maggie in college at the University of South Carolina in 1987, people actually thought that they made a really strange pair. He was really loud, he was known to be arrogant, and she was super quiet and super shy. He was this South Carolina royalty. And she was a southern transplant from suburban Philadelphia. She never even really had a boyfriend before, but Alec and his status and his money and all of this was like pretty hard to resist at the time. She said he promised her that if she married him, she would never have to work again. And true to his word, she never did. And while he went to go work at his father's law firm, she became a stay at home mom to their two boys, Buster and Paul, who we talked about earlier and from all accounts that we have of these two boys growing up, they were a huge handful of. They were both physically imposing. So you have these two sons. They're strong, they're athletic, they're taller than you almost immediately. And they're also really spoiled. And from a very young age, they started acting like they could get away with anything.
- [14:19]
B
I mean, the whole family ran the town. When you grow up like that, you're going to be very entitled.
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A
Yeah, it alters your brain.
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B
Exactly.
- [14:27]
A
I mean, Buster loved baseball, but he was not very good at school. He was allegedly expelled from law school for having low grades and also plagiarism in 2021. And his brother Paul was even more difficult to manage, it seems now Paul was born in 1999, and from the start, he was described as being like this daredevil kid, but also huge bully who thrived on attention and relished being from an elite family. His behavior only got worse once he got a little bit older and started drinking. Turns out Paul had this alter ego that came out when he drank too much. He would get naked, aggressive. A lot of people were afraid of him when he drank that much. His friends even had a nickname for him when he got this drunk. They would call him Timmy. As if this was like some alternate version of Paul.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Even though it's all the same kid.
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B
Yeah. And just for context, for those that aren't in the United States, the legal drinking age in the state is 21. It's pretty much across the board. I know there's some weird rules in certain states where you might be able to drink with a parent, but drinking age in South Carolina? 21.
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A
Yeah. So when he was drinking, it was definitely when he was too young.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But of course they're able to do it because they know no matter what happens to them, they will be able to get away with it. Yeah.
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B
Untouchable.
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A
So they start drinking. They're doing all this stuff. Paul was young at the time, and at least his mother was hoping that that impulsivity would just kind of go away. As he got older, the family didn't seem like they were going to do anything to raise the boys right. But his mom was hoping that they would just kind of course correct on their own. Like Buster would stop plagiariz in college. That's not really how it works. But as we know from the beginning of this episode, his life was taken from him on June 7, 2021. And now, even though with everything that's happened kind of like thus far, the town knowing who these people are, they were just really focused on figuring out what happened to Paul and his mother that day. So let's go back to the scene. Police arrive on the scene at around 10:30pm that night. Right. The call came in at like 1007. So they get there as fast as they can. And that's when Alec tells them his story again. He says that after he found his wife and son like that, he ran into the house and he armed himself. He asked the uniform officer if his wife and son were still alive, but it seemed like he knew the answer to that already. Almost everyone in law enforcement in the region knew who Alec Murdoch was and that he warranted special treatment. The fire battalion chief lived nearby. He was a Friend of the family, of course. And when he heard about the murders, he raced over to help the first responders, even though he didn't really have to. And another high ranking officer, a captain personally, drove to the house to oversee his detectives. When he arrived, one of the first things that Alec did was he handed him Paul's phone. He said that he had taken it from his son's pocket. However, he didn't know the code to unlock it. There wasn't much that he could do. But here, you guys take it. Alec was shaken, but everyone on the scene noted that he was being pretty cooperative. Meanwhile, though, back 250 yards away, the crime scene techs were working at pretty much a breakneck pace to start documenting everything, which it had just started raining before the rain started to wash away any of this evidence.
- [17:46]
B
And that brings us to our first clue, the crime scene itself. Because when we really look at the details of how Maggie and Paul were killed, it tells us a lot about who might have done this. First off, we're actually dealing with two different weapons here. Scattered around the bodies were shell casings for a.300 caliber blackout rifle and a plastic wadding of a 12 gauge shotgun. And wadding is basically a layer of plastic that separates the powder from the shell. It's actually this thing that helps launch the projectiles forward. And so when a shotgun is fired, the wadding gets blasted out of the shell along with the pellets or slug. And this piece usually ends up on the ground. Sometimes like 30 yards away, it gets launched. And so from the injury patterns, it's clear that Paul was killed with a shotgun. The first shot went through part of the left side of his chest and left arm and was not fatal. According to one medical examiner, the second shot entered through the top of his left shoulder and entered the left side of his neck and and head and came out the right side of the top of the head. Maggie was shot at least four times with a different weapon and assault rifle. The first two shots were fired from the front while Maggie was standing. One went through her abdomen and the other went through the inside of her left thigh. The next shot went upward, starting at Maggie's chest and going through the left side of her face. One medical examiner said that this could have been attributed to the first two shots, causing her to double over. And then, with her head bent over, the shot went through her face. This wound would have been immediately fatal. And then the last gunshot was to the back of the head. There was a fifth wound, a gunshot through her left wrist. But one examiner kind of accounts this for being from one of the other shots and it just happened when she was doubled over. But what's really telling with this scene is that both victims were shot at an incredibly close range just a few feet away.
- [19:50]
A
When they come on the scene, they know that these two probably saw the face of whoever did this.
- [19:55]
B
Yeah. I mean, one medical examiner went so far as to speculate that Paul actually turned and faced the person, like right on for the second shot. So he was looking directly at.
- [20:08]
A
So he maybe got hit, didn't see who it was, turned, saw, and then was killed. And Maggie, it sounds like, was looking straight at the person.
- [20:15]
B
Yeah. Facing them and then doubled over. And then obviously there was a shot to the back of her head.
- [20:21]
A
Yeah.
- [20:22]
B
And when police look further, there's no signs of forced entry anywhere on the property. No evidence that someone had broken into the main house or that there was any sort of robbery. I mean, Maggie's purse was still there, jewelry untouched. Nothing was really taken. And as far as police could tell, there wasn't really any signs of a struggle. There were no footprints or unusual tire tracks leading away from the property. So right off the bat, investigators are thinking this crime is super personal and whoever did it was maybe known.
- [20:57]
A
This episode is brought to you by Zoc Doc. One thing about me is I'm pretty bad when it comes to making doctor's appointments. It's very hard to do. I often find that there's insane wait times to get into specialists. Sometimes it's hard to find a dentist. I like it. The whole process can be a nightmare, as I'm sure a lot of you understand. But ZocDoc makes it easy to find the right doctor. And it's all done online. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in network doctors and instantly book an appointment. With Zocdoc, you can book in network appointments with more than a hundred thousand doctors across every specialty from mental health to dental health, from primary care to urgent care and more. Once you find the right doctor, you can see their actual appointment openings. Choose a time slot that works for you and click to instantly book a visit. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to Zocdoc.com clues to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's Z o c d o c.com clues zocdoc.com/clues so when the detectives start interviewing Alec, they ask him really the first obvious question which is can you think of anyone who wanted to hurt Maggie and Paul. Because whoever came here did not want your jewelry, did not want your money, didn't want any of your fancy things. They wanted these two dead, and they wanted to leave. And in that conversation, Alec mentions, as he's thinking of it, that their groundskeeper, who's this guy named CB Row. Well, he's actually been acting a little strange recently, is what he tells the police. And he just starts kind of trying to bring up anything he can about this guy that would make him look a little bit guilty. He said that Ro had killed some of their sunflowers. And then as they were talking about it, Ro apparently spun this weird story about, like, one time he got in a fight in high school. That kind of struck Alec as being weird. So he thought to bring it up to the police.
- [22:52]
B
Okay, he kills your sunflowers, and then that's what.
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A
Yeah. So that he's just, like, trying to think of anything he can that kind of makes this guy look guilty. He also says that Ro allegedly told him once that he was once recruited by an undercover FBI agent to assassinate Black Panthers.
- [23:08]
B
Okay.
- [23:08]
A
Which is. I don't even know where he got that from. It sounded really bogus to the police at this point.
- [23:14]
B
It's fishy.
- [23:15]
A
Alex said that when he was initially told this information, he didn't really think much of it. And he still is, like, telling the police, listen, I don't know if this makes him a killer, but maybe it's worth checking this guy out more if he's getting recruited by the FBI to be a trained killer. And besides that, Alec doesn't really have any useful information about who might have done this. He wasn't anywhere near the kennels that evening, and he didn't see or hear anything unusual. He says he also told the police he was napping the whole time. Then he went to his mother's, and then he came back, and all of this had gone down in that time. Naturally, the detectives do follow up with this groundskeeper. It does turn out they find that he has this history of domestic violence, and that, for one, catches their attention. Anyone with a history of violence that was close to the family immediately kind of makes a good suspect. But the groundskeeper said that he wasn't anywhere near the property that day. And also his phone records back that up the second they look at his phone. And now the police are kind of turning their attention to Alec. As we know, in cases like this, you can't ignore the possibility that a family member was involved. Although with someone like Alec, the detectives know they have to be really careful during this investigation. This guy is powerful. He's close friends with all of their bosses. But there were a few red flags at the scene that immediately caught the detective's attention. Even in the first few hours, as they're trying to piece together, do you know anyone who could have done this? They start kind of immediately thinking, like, Alex seems like he's acting a little weird. Like, one of the things that they really point to is the whole situation with Paul's phone. Alex said that he took it from Paul's pocket, but then actually, maybe it fell out. He didn't know the code to unlock it, so he just gave it to the police. It makes it look like he's being cooperative. But as a lawyer, wouldn't he have known better than to mess with evidence at a crime scene?
- [25:14]
B
He would think so.
- [25:15]
A
Especially a phone. That's such a strange thing to take from the scene. And as for Maggie's phone, they actually find that it's missing. Cops ended up finding it a day later near Moselle Road, which is about three quarters of a mile away from the house. Also, when he was being interviewed by the detectives, Alec told them to that he had touched both of their bodies to check for pulses. But here's the thing. When the police got there, his hands and his clothes were completely clean. There was not any blood on him anywhere. And from how grizzly the scene was, when the police arrived, they were like, I don't know how you would have touched one of these bodies and not gotten some of their blood on you. He could have washed it off. That's a possibility. But again, they're thinking a lawyer would know to not do that. That's destroying evidence. And a lawyer would know to not do that. Finally, there was one more detail that seemed to maybe be insignificant at the time, but then again, maybe it's not. But it was nearly midnight. Alec had been running around all day in the heat before he was hit by a terrible tragedy. But really, one very strange detail that the cops notice is Alec smelled good when they got there. That is something that, like, stuck out to them.
- [26:34]
B
Yeah.
- [26:35]
A
Lead detective Laura Rutland noticed as soon as she got near him. Actually, she said that Alex smelled like laundry detergent.
- [26:43]
B
Fresh clothes.
- [26:44]
A
He hadn't mentioned that he had showered that day or that he changed his clothes at any point. So what's the deal with that? Is he lying? Is he withholding information? None of these things, of course, are smoking guns by themselves. But they did give Detective Rutland pause before she accepted Alex's story especially because once they started searching Alex house, they found his gun room.
- [27:08]
B
Which brings us to clue number two, the missing weapons. Now, this family had a serious gun collection. I mean, you guys are gonna have to look at the pictures we post.
- [27:18]
A
I know you. You even were like, can we post that many guns on YouTube?
- [27:21]
B
I was like, I don't know if we can post the pict.
- [27:23]
A
I think we can. There's a lot of guns here.
- [27:25]
B
If we can't and we have to blur them a little bit, like you'll still get the idea. This whole family, they were avid hunters, right? Like they have this 1770 acre estate just for hunting. They've got dogs and kennels and like I think most people, when you say, oh, you have a dog, like you keep your dog in a house. No, no, no. These dogs were yards away from the house. All Captain Kennel's, like, I don't even know how many kennels they had. But like in the videos I've seen, they have a lot of dogs. So. Okay, I get it. Like they'd have a big weapon collection, but for me, they had so many. The guns were just out, like they weren't in gun safes. They weren't like responsibly, like kept safe. They were just out. Like this is a clubhouse, like a close room where they'd all kind of go and hang out near the kennels. And the guns were just lining the walls.
- [28:16]
A
I mean, to be fair, I know my husband's family would be like, that's normal. That's just our, this is just our house. But I think it shows kind of like the backgrounds that Morgan and I maybe have.
- [28:25]
B
My, my family's avid hunters, but like they, they bow hunt and like they do also have guns, but they're kept neatly in a gun safe away from just easy access. So this was just shocking for me. Clearly, you guys, I'm like, I'm crashing out on this. So on the morning of June 8, investigators searched the room for a 12 gauge shotgun and a.300 caliber blackout rifle. The guns that were used to kill Paul and Maggie. Inside one of the bins, they found an open ammo box labeled S&B 300. This is the ammo used for a blackout rifle and the exact same rounds that were actually found at the scene. They also found 12 gauge shotgun shells there. Even though the ammo matched, none of the guns they found were used in the crime.
- [29:16]
A
So it's just the ammo that they found, but not the guns that's sus.
- [29:21]
B
Yeah. Especially because two weapons were actually unaccounted for. So by talking to surviving family members, the police learned that Paul owned a custom.300 caliber blackout rifle and a 12 gauge shotgun with a camouflage pattern on the grip. It turns out that these specific guns were actually Paul's favorites.
- [29:45]
A
I know, because when you first said that it was the surviving family members that were able to tell the police he had these guns. I'm like, how do the. How do surviving family members know, like, all 30 guns this guy's had? But those were his favorite ones to.
- [29:56]
B
Those were his favorite guns. I mean, his parents had gifted him that rifle as a Christmas gift.
- [30:01]
A
Yeah.
- [30:02]
B
And one of Alex law partners, Ronnie Crosby, he even knew about these guns and suspected that they maybe were in Paul's truck that was in the garage for repairs. He just, like, really wanted to help the police. So he went down to the garage that day to see if the guns were still there. But all he found was a pistol and a few shotgun shells in Paul's truck. So it was kind of looking to investigators that these were the murder weapons. But now the question is, what happened to them? Who would have access to them?
- [30:34]
A
Yeah, because there's no sign that anyone else was in the house besides Alec.
- [30:38]
B
No. And so they're really starting to put Alec Murdoch on the top of their list. Which meant they were seriously gonna start questioning his alibi. You know, he claimed he was at the house napping, then left around 9pm to go visit his mother, Libby, which was about 17 minutes away from the estate. Then he came back around 10pm to find the bodies. So investigators ask Alec for his phone to verify his story. He hands it right over, no hesitation, no lawyer involved. He wanted to show that he was cooperating fully. And that brings us to clue number three. His phone data. For a good part of the evening on June 7, the night of the murders, Alex's phone basically showed no movement. But then at 9:02pm there's a sudden burst of activity which could line up with the story that he woke up from a nap and headed over to his mom's house. But the autopsies on Maggie and Paul, which were completed on June 10, indicated that they were killed between 9 and 9:30pm so this sudden flutter of movement occurred right in the middle of that. According to his phone data, alec had taken 283 steps in just four minutes. If he was just walking to his car after a long nap, he probably wouldn't have taken so many steps. Plus his phone Also shows him making multiple calls and texts to Maggie and Paul between 94 and 9 52. None of them were answered. In Alex version of events, the first call was him trying to tell Maggie that he was leaving the house. Then the GPS data from his truck shows him driving to his mother's at 9:07pm at a very high speed. We're talking 74 miles per hour on rural back roads where the speed limit is 45 and it's dark, it's night, there's.
- [32:31]
A
There's animals, like racing to get away.
- [32:33]
B
From something that's pretty fast. You know, he was kind of known for driving pretty fast, so maybe this wasn't super unusual. But it is worth mentioning that in route, Alec drove right past the spot where Maggie's phone was later found. So a couple of days end up passing here and detectives are, you know, they're still really bothered by something from that first night. And it's his smell. How did he go through his whole day and smell so fresh? And no mention of changing or showering. Or showering. Yeah, nothing of that.
- [33:06]
A
Like laundry detergent.
- [33:07]
B
So investigators are having a strong suspicion that he changed his clothes and he's just not mentioning it for some reason. Which brings us to clue number four. The missing clothes. So while investigating, police actually issue a search warrant to Snapchat in order to gather data from Paul's social media due to them not being able to access his phone. Right. Like, Alec didn't know the password and police were worried that if they entered the wrong one too many times, it could, like, erase the data or, you know, corrupt it. They, they were just worried. They didn't want to tamper with it too much. So Snapchat cooperates and investigators are delivered a handful of interesting details, which also.
- [33:49]
A
This is not the first time that Snapchat has immediately handed over data to the police.
- [33:53]
B
No.
- [33:53]
A
So that everyone's aware.
- [33:54]
B
Yeah, if you Google Snapchat data, handing over it. Like Snapchat has a policy on their website that they're like, very open, they.
- [34:01]
A
Just have to ask nicely and we will give them whatever they want. Yeah, like, we are not in the business of hiding your data from the authorities. Just so everyone is aware.
- [34:08]
B
Which, with that in mind, we should maybe be a little more cautious about what we post on Snapchat. I don't know, it just. It's kind of interesting. Your data's not that safe.
- [34:16]
A
No, it's not.
- [34:17]
B
So it appears that Paul had uploaded a video taken of his dad at 7:39pm to his Snapchat memories. And then he sent that video to some of his friends at 7:56pm in this video, Alec is fussing with a dying fruit tree while Paul laughs hysterically. I mean, he's kind of like shaking the tree back and forth and it flops over and he's kind of like, disgruntled with this tree. But the biggest thing they notice about this video is Alec is wearing his office clothes. A light blue shirt, khaki pants, and loafers. Very different clothes from the white T shirt, cargo shorts, and pink running shoes he was in when cops spoke to him after the murders. When detectives confront him about this detail, Alex said that he must have changed clothes when he got back to the house with Paul after their drive around the property. He didn't know exactly when, but again, that's kind of a small window considering these videos were taken at like 7:40 ish. And then he was napping, like, and then he went to his mom's mom.
- [35:24]
A
And he starts running around at 9:02.
- [35:26]
B
Yeah, small window to forget when you changed. And what's even more odd, these clothes are nowhere to be found. Alex supposedly asked his housekeeper Blanca, if she knew where they were, but she said she had no idea. She had never seen them after that night.
- [35:46]
A
And so even though the police are now starting to think something is fishy, something's going on, Alec is still defending his innocence. He describes his relationship with his family as, quote, wonderful. He did mention that his marriage wasn't perfect, though. He and Maggie, you know, like any married couple, they had their issues. But he loved Maggie and he loved Paul. There was no way that he could have done something as horrific as what the police were now suspecting him of. He basically claimed that because he was a pillar in the community, everyone loved him. He never would have been able to do something like this. But that was very far from true. The Murdochs had a pretty big stain on their reputation as of fairly recently, one that was incredibly public. Though they tried to make it as not public as it could be. And really nothing about their reputation had been the same since. On June 10, three days after the murder, an agent from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or sled, named David Owen invited Alec to his SUV for a second interview, which.
- [36:58]
B
Can we talk about how crazy that is? You get interviewed by the police and you're just like, casually in an suv. Like, I think that speaks to the privilege he had versus being taken in.
- [37:07]
A
I know, absolutely. And you can watch the whole video on YouTube too. They just kind of. He's just like sitting in the car.
- [37:13]
B
I know.
- [37:13]
A
Friends just chatting.
- [37:14]
B
Maybe we'll put a little clip here so you guys can see how. How comfy this appeared.
- [37:20]
A
All right, sir. So he's got it and he's taking.
- [37:23]
B
Care of that, but I get it back. Yes, sir.
- [37:26]
A
Yes, sir.
- [37:27]
B
All right, sir.
- [37:28]
A
So when we spoke the other night, I got kind of a basic overview. Yes, sir. And it was pretty traumatic.
- [37:39]
B
That's okay. I know you need to ask me.
- [37:41]
A
You asked me what you need to. So I just. I want you to. Let's start Monday morning and. And take me through your day. And after he recounts the events of June 7th again, Alec told Owen and his colleagues that he actually had figured out what the motive for this attack would have been. It had to be vengeance for a boat accident that happened two years ago. So let's go back to February 23, 2019. Paul was just 19 years old at the time, and that night he had bought a bunch of alcohol using his brother Buster's id. He had loaded it onto the family's boat, which was docked at Murdoch Island, A private. I've never known a rich person to own an island where they were just not up to, like, the most nefarious stuff, but. So this family had a private island that they owned near Beaufort, South Carolina. It was about an hour south of Moselle. So around 7pm, Paul and five of his friends got in this boat, and that was his friend Anthony Cook, Anthony's girlfriend, Mallory Beach, Anthony's cousin Connor Cook, Connor's girlfriend Miley Altman, and Paul's girlfriend, Morgan Doughty. They all are just planning on having a fun night in this boat. They navigate the maze of channels and marshlands, finally docking at a friend's house sometime in the next hour, that friend was throwing an oyster roast party, and the group stayed there for several hours, really pounding beers, having a lot of fun, but definitely drinking a lot. Around midnight, they end up taking the boat back, despite the fact that some of the other partygoers who were there insisted that they just get an Uber home. People at the party could see how obliterated this group was getting. And really, when you look at some of the footage that comes out, because I know that there's some CCTV footage of the group. Paul is the drunkest of everyone. Yeah. And he's actually really drunk. It seems like early on in the evening as well. I think in the documentary, too, they're talking about how some of his friends and his girlfriend were telling him to not drink so much and he just was not listening to anyone.
- [39:42]
B
Timmy was coming out.
- [39:43]
A
About halfway back to Murdoch Island, Paul decided that he actually just wanted to keep the party going. So at 12:45, they tie up the boat at a dock in Beaufort and they stop by Luther's Rare and well done, which is this waterfront bar. Paul paid for their Jaeger bombs and their lemon drops, all with Mommy's credit card. And then the group leaves about 50 minutes after they arrive. By now, it really seems like Paul's wasted this. That's where the CCTV footage comes from, where you can just see how drunk he is. And at this point, his friends really wanted to go back home. They did not want to get back in the boat, though, especially considering that Paul was being very adamant that no one else drive. He wanted to be the one to drive them all home. And it seems like the friends had at least the wherewithal to be like, paul is way too drunk. I don't want to get in this boat with him. But he kind of pressures the group into it. He insists that no one knows the river better than he does. So they all get in and Paul just starts driving the boat exactly how you would expect him to do in that state, very fast, very reckless. And he is ignoring the fact that his friends are all in the back, basically begging him to slow down. When his girlfriend, Morgan, shouted at him to stop acting crazy, he slapped her and he spit on her face. Yeah.
- [41:00]
B
And from one source I saw, he actually was driving the boat. They're yelling, he left. Just like left the wheel as the boat's going to go back and hit her and spit on her. So then someone had to step in for a second, but of course he wouldn't let them continue driving.
- [41:15]
A
And someone also has to confront him and that becomes Mallory Beach. Anthony's girlfriend, she decides that she's going to challenge Paul because she knows that what's happening is not right, especially after.
- [41:24]
B
Witnessing your friend get assaulted.
- [41:27]
A
And Paul does the same thing to her. He makes this threatening move towards Mallory and then Anthony ends up stepping in between both of them so that Mallory also doesn't get slapped by this maniac. And. And for a moment, it seemed like Anthony and Paul were about to throw down, which, like, to your point, Morgan, who is driving the boat, but instead of doing this, Paul grabs the wheel and he starts driving full speed ahead, faster and faster and faster. And seconds later, after this interaction, the boat slammed into a wood and concrete bridge at 29 miles an hour. Yeah, Paul, Anthony and Mallory were all thrown into the Water. Morgan's fingers were crushed. Connor's jaw was shattered. And at 2:26 in the morning, Connor was somehow able to call 91 1. Paul and Anthony soon emerged from the water with scrapes. Anthony has a dislocated shoulder, but Paul seems to be in relatively okay condition. But as the group is kind of coming out of the water, coming out of the boat and regrouping, Mallory is nowhere to be found. And 20 minutes later, the police and paramedics arrive and they just begin searching for Mallory in the water. Meanwhile, Paul makes a phone call. Not to authorities, not to help his friends, but to his grandfather, Randolph iii. He tells him what happened, and Randolph asks Paul who was driving, and Paul says emphatically, connor. Alec was next to learn about the accident sometime around three in the morning after his own night of drinking. And he sped to Beaufort Memorial Hospital to check on his son. He gets there at around 3:45 in the morning. At this point, Paul is still really drunk. I mean, his blood alcohol level measured at over 0.28.
- [43:17]
B
Yeah, I think, like, what is that? Like, three times the legal limit.
- [43:21]
A
He is also 19 and he's a child. Some states, if you have anything in your system and you're a minor or you're under the age of 21, immediately in trouble.
- [43:30]
B
Yeah, I'm not.
- [43:31]
A
Three times. And you just crash. You were driving intoxicated, you crash, you're under the legal age. Like, all of this points to consequences.
- [43:39]
B
Yeah. If we have any South Carolina Carolinians. Yeah, Carolinians, please let us know what that would be in your state. Like, fill us in on drinking laws. But yeah, I mean, clearly intoxicated and also probably why he wasn't as injured. Like, being that drunk.
- [43:59]
A
I know you rag doll. Yeah. A lot of times it's the drunkest person in the group that survives the most horrible crashes. Now when Alec gets there, Paul is screaming at doctors, he's making lewd comments to nurses, but physically he is like, okay. So Alec immediately springs into action. Miley and Connor had already told the nurses who was actually behind the wheel. But Alec wants to kind of work his little power in the situation. And he starts intercepting people before they can talk to law enforcement. He catches Connor, who is on his way to a CT scan, and he threatens him, basically saying, keep your mouth shut. By the time the police arrive to interview Connor, all he tells them is that he didn't remember who was driving. Meanwhile, this entire time, Mallory is still missing. The authorities searched the whole bridge area for hours that morning, but they didn't find anything. And it wasn't until eight days later that two volunteers discovered her body five miles downriver from the crash site. Now, this whole thing should have been an open and shut case for manslaughter, but it wasn't. Because Paul wasn't just anyone. He was a Murdoch. And the Murdochs had a lot of levers in this specific situation that they could pull to just make this go away. First off, Randolph was friends with both the lead investigator and the Department of Natural Resources captain who was overseeing the investigation. During the search for Mallory, her mother remembered seeing Alec and Randolph drive up to the scene and the police let them through. The yellow tape didn't let anyone else through, but let these two guys into the crime scene. And it's impossible to ever say exactly how much they manipulated this investigation. But we do know that within days of this accident, evidence just started disappearing.
- [45:54]
B
Yeah, I mean, there was a lot right after the crash. Anthony, who's distraught, devastated. I mean, his girlfriend is missing in the water somewhere. I mean, he even says, like, Paul was driving the boat. Do you know whose son it is? Good luck. Like, good luck.
- [46:07]
A
They have him in a recording saying that to the police. And that recording vanishes after Alex starts getting involved in this investigation. An officer also made a note that originally included that statement, and that note disappears. Paul's iPhone was also gone, which now the phones are missing from Paul and his mom at their crime scene. The phones are gone. The phones just disappear every time something happens to this family. There's also these crime scene photos and 11 DNA samples taken from the scene that also disappear. And it wasn't long before pretty much the whole community kind of starts whispering about a cover up. So it's pretty obvious that the Murdochs live in this really special world where rules just simply don't apply to them. But Alec also had a lot of dangerous secrets that he was keeping really close to his trust. And one of the reasons that people, I think, started pointing to a cover up was because they already knew that Alec had a lot of skeletons in his closet. Like, you can cover things up, but you can't stop a community from talking to each other. So whispers about the Murdochs had been going around forever. Like, one of the things that was kind of like the best kept secret was that Alec blew his knee out when he was in college. And he had been nursing a pretty, pretty extreme but secret addiction to opiates since that happened. Also, there's the fact that Alec has been cheating on Maggie really regularly. That's something that I feel like every community just like, figures out too. He's also been cheating with strippers. It's pretty wild, which is audacious because he's such a public figure. And I think the community just figures that out. They're all talking to each other about this, but, like, either Maggie knows or no one's told her. Who knows? But he would really blow through his money like it was nothing. He spent a lot of it on drugs, a lot of it on women. Basically, whatever he wanted in that moment, he would just go out and buy. But there was this even darker secret that was kind of lurking in the family's past, One that once again, the community knew about and would talk about, but never would dare say anything to police. And that was something that was like, really going to start coming to the surface as this entire investigation was coming forward. So this happened just a few years before the boat accident. It was 3:59am on July 8, 2015, and a 19 year old named Steven Smith was found dead in the middle of a rural road in Hampton County. Steven was this really vibrant kid in the community. Everyone knew him, everyone loved him. He was really smart. He was very unapologetically himself. So he wasn't afraid for people to know that he was gay. And that was kind of a rare thing at the time in rural South Carolina. He had these dreams of becoming a doctor. He wanted to dedicate his whole life to just helping others. But those dreams were cut short when they found Steven on this small rural road. His head had been split open. And the first thing the patrol officers thought about that was that maybe he had been shot. Maybe this was from a gunshot wound. However, the coroner soon determined that this was actually from blunt force trauma. Now, you find a body in the middle of a road, there's blunt force trauma. The first thing you're gonna think is car crash. Like maybe he was walking on the side of the road, he got hit by a car. But nothing else about this scene looked like it had been a car accident. Steven had no other injuries that are common with car accidents, like road rash, signs of being dragged. Oftentimes when people are hit by cars, their shoes come off. Their shoes will stay there, but their body moves. So you'll find shoes just in the road that wasn't at the scene. It just didn't seem like he'd been hit by a car. There's also no plastic or glass in the road signs that a car had been damaged. No sign of skid marks, like someone tried to stop so the best explanation that they had at the time was that he was actually hit by a small object that had been sticking out of a car, like maybe a piece of metal or potentially a baseball bat. Now, a police officer who spoke with the coroner said that he was told emphatically that this was not a hit and run. Yet several hours later, that's exactly what the pathology report declared. Meanwhile, the police had located Steven's car. It was about three miles away from where he was found. It was pulled over by the side of the road, and the gas cap was hanging out. The officer who found it thought it looked incredibly weird. It almost looked staged, like someone had been trying to make it appear as though Steven had run out of gas and was walking down the road to get help.
- [50:49]
B
I mean, that was my first thought.
- [50:50]
A
Gas.
- [50:51]
B
Cat's open. He ran out of gas.
- [50:52]
A
Yeah, and walking down the road to get help. But Sandy, who's Steven's mother, just didn't really think that that made sense. She didn't know what he was doing out there in the middle of the night or who would want to target him. I mean, with everything we know about Steven, though, there's, like, a real chance that this was a hate crime. Now, apparently, the night he died, Stephen had told someone he was in a relationship with that two guys in a pickup truck were messing with him. And Steven's mother could not shake the feeling that somehow the Murdoch family might have been involved. See, Stephen had been friends with the older Murdoch brother, Buster, who so far in this story has not really come up. And one of the first calls that she received after Steven's death was actually from Alex brother Randy. He called to offer his condolences, and he actually volunteered to help with the case pro bono, which incredibly sweet at the time, especially at a community where maybe you think that people are targeting your son because he's gay. But now that she's looking back, in hindsight at the case, Sandy's not so sure that this was altruistic. Yeah, she remembered Steven talking about how he was going deep sea fishing with someone who was, quote, a prominent person. She wasn't exactly sure who that could be, but according to her mother's intuition, she thought it sounded like a date. And because this was a prominent person, the first person she thought of was someone in the Murdoch family. Now, highway patrol officers had actually heard these rumors as well, but they were unable to verify any leads that implicated members of the Murdoch family. So in 2016, Steven's case just goes cold. They don't really have any other leads than that. But still, Sandy held out hope for justice. She called the FBI, the press, anyone that she thought could help solve this. But help just wouldn't come for a very long time.
- [52:42]
B
I mean, extremely small town.
- [52:44]
A
Yeah.
- [52:44]
B
There were, I believe, like, some rumors going around that maybe Buster was gay and that they had a little fling going on. I mean, I know in some sources, and anytime people would question him or imply it, he'd. He'd kind of freak out over it.
- [52:58]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for a mother to kind of get the sense that her son's going on a date, I think moms have a good sense about that.
- [53:07]
B
She was probably onto something.
- [53:09]
A
That wasn't the only suspicious death that seemed to be tied to the Murdochs, though. In February of 2018, Maggie Murdoch woke up one morning around 9 in the morning to the sound of her dog's barking outside. She looked out the window and she saw that the family's housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, was face down on the patio, but her feet were still on the steps. Maggie immediately called 911, and Gloria was rushed from the Moselle estate to the hospital. She had a fractured skull, a right side subdural hematoma, basically a traumatic brain injury. And she had several broken ribs. For a few days, it seemed like she was going to be okay. She did seem to be recovering. But then all of a sudden, her health took a turn and she eventually did die from these injuries. Now, at her funeral, Alec approached her son Tony, and he promised Tony to his face at his mother's funeral that he would help them out. After all, Gloria had worked for the family for 20 years at that point. And Alex said, we're gonna take care of your family. And so what he basically does is he encourages Tony to sue him in civil court so that he could get help from his insurance company, from a payout. Tony, of course, trusts Alec because that's his whole business, basically. He, like, he understands the system really well.
- [54:28]
B
Yeah, this is a lawyer, so he.
- [54:29]
A
Decides he's going to take his advice. He was a low paid ER tech and his brother earned a little bit more than minimum wage. They could really use the financial help from this. And at the time, nothing about this seemed particularly all that weird. No one had even suggested at that point that her death had been a homicide. But there were a couple of shady details about her death that seemed to raise a few red flags, at least with the authorities, like the fact that the Murdochs and Gloria, because they were able to speak with her before she passed away. At first, they all said that she tripped over family dogs on the way into the house that day. But later, Gloria actually said she didn't know why she fell. She said that she couldn't remember. There was also some evidence that Gloria had suffered from a stroke, but doctors weren't really sure whether the stroke had happened before or after the fall. There were also whispers that Gloria's death might not have been an accident at all, but instead staged to look like one. Because she maybe knew a little bit too much about the Murdoch secrets, maybe even something connected to Stephen Smith's case. That, of course, is all speculation. None of it's been proven. Gloria's cause of death was still listed as natural. But remember how Alex said he was going to help Tony out with the money? He ended up stealing all of that money. None of that ever went to Tony. Alec had him basically do this insurance fraud so that his family could pocket the money from Gloria's death. Still, at this point, there's nothing that proves definitively that Alec had really committed any of these crimes. But soon, one of Alec's co workers made a pretty shocking discovery.
- [56:08]
B
Which brings us to clue number five, the missing check. In February 2021, Alec had won a $5.5 million settlement for a personal injury lawsuit, one that he had worked on with an old friend and fellow lawyer named Chris Wilson. Wilson was supposed to pay Alec's firm PM PED $792,000 to help cover their fee, but the check never showed up. So Alec's paralegal, Annette, started comparing notes with her counterpart at Wilson's law firm. And everyone's kind of like, what do you mean it didn't arrive? We sent the checks weeks ago. It was deposited. So Annette flags this to the firm's CFO, Jeanne Seckinger, on June 4. And Jeannie, who has known Alec since high school, confronts him about it on June 7, literally just hours before Maggie and Paul are murdered. When Jeannie approaches Alec about the missing money, she gets this dirty look from him, one that she has never seen before. And he asks her, quote, what do you need from me now? In this super hostile tone, according to her, she tells him about the discrepancy. But then he gets interrupted in the middle of the conversation by the phone call about his father's failing health. Then the murders happen, and, like, everyone's kind of just focused on helping Alec through this tragedy. And so according to the firm, like, the missing money kind of takes a back seat.
- [57:39]
A
They stop asking him about it, they.
- [57:40]
B
Stop asking him about it. Then, in July, Alec repays the missing settlement money to his friend Chris Wilson. And he gets him to say that Wilson's firm just discovered that they had had the money all along, but Jeannie is still suspicious. Then, in September, on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, a paralegal is getting a file from Alex's desk when a check literally floats to the ground like a feather. It was the original $792,000 check, and it had been deposited into Alex personal account, not the firm's. The next day, Alec was fired. And once the cops start following the paper trail, they uncovered that Alex financial crimes went a lot deeper than anyone could have imagined.
- [58:31]
A
Now, Alex's schemes weren't super sophisticated, but they did enable him to steal millions of dollars from the firm and its most vulnerable clients. When a settlement would come in, instead of depositing it into the official company account like he was supposed to do, Alec would reroute that money into accounts controlled by a man named Russell Lafitte, this banker, who was also, of course, his very close friend. Russell would allegedly let Alec take whatever he wanted from these accounts in exchange for a cut. And since Alec never told his clients how much money they were officially getting in their settlements, he could look like a hero by giving them thousands of dollars while actually keeping millions for himself. He would also bill clients for experts that he never hired. And he took money that had been set aside for their medical bills, like in the Gloria Satterfield case that we talked about, which is a perfect example of how heartless he was. Alec had been awarded over $3 million for Gloria and her suit, and he neglected to tell her family about any of it. We have records of him spending that money on himself. He bought a $75,000 SUV, and on top of that, he bought more than $200,000 worth of drugs. Meanwhile, at the same time, while Alec is using the money to live his debaucherous life, Gloria's son had his house repossessed. And Alec knew about it, too, because he was still friends with the family or friends, quote, unquote. Alex stole over a million dollars from orphaned children who lost their parents in a car crash. He also stole nearly a million dollars from a woman named Pamela in a different, unrelated car crash. He would target ordinary people at their most vulnerable moments, and he would rob them blind. And when everything came to light in late 2021, Alec had stolen an estimated $12 million from his clients.
- [60:24]
B
That's an insane amount of money.
- [60:25]
A
And that also included his friends and his own law firm. That he was stealing from $12 million. Now, by the time his wife and son were killed In June of 2021, Alex Life was spiraling really out of control. He was spending thousands of dollars a month to feed his drug habit while trying desperately to hide all of that from his family. And despite his best efforts, the boat crash continued to haunt him and his family. They did manage to destroy a good amount of the evidence, like we talked about earlier. But Paul was still on the hook for three felony charges, including boating under the influence, causing a death, which is basically the equivalent of manslaughter, and also boating under the influence causing great bodily injury. Plus, Mallory Beach's parents were suing Alec and Paul in civil court for the wrongful death of their daughter. That case threatened to unravel, really all of Alec's schemes because their lawyer was this guy named Mark Tinsley, and he was demanding access to Alec's financial records. But of course, Alec was refusing to hand them over. So Tinsley was then trying to get the court to force Alec to hand over all of his financials. That hearing was set for, get this, June 10, 2021, just three days after the murder. And on top of all of that, if that's not bad enough, Alex wife Maggie was also starting to look into their finances. Maggie had confided in her housekeeper Blanca, that she thought Alec was lying about their assets.
- [61:56]
B
And Maggie had actually visited a divorce lawyer six weeks before. That's right, Six weeks before.
- [62:04]
A
Just six weeks. Do you know if that was the first time she visited a divorce lawyer?
- [62:08]
B
I only saw that mentioned in my research, but, I mean, with all the cheating, who knows if there were other times?
- [62:14]
A
But think about it. Everything in his life is really coming to a head. Mm. All happening. Really? That month?
- [62:20]
B
Yeah. I mean, the thing is too, this family didn't do divorces. In the documentary, they talk about how one of his, you know, family members, I think it was his dad or grandpa, had taken out a fake obituary for their wife when she was looking into divorce as a threat.
- [62:38]
A
Like, as a threat.
- [62:39]
B
As a threat. Here's your obituary.
- [62:40]
A
Why? I wrote it for you. All I have to do is mail it to the papers.
- [62:44]
B
Yeah.
- [62:44]
A
Wow.
- [62:45]
B
So they didn't do divorce.
- [62:48]
A
No. Even with all this, call it circumstantial evidence mounting, There still was no physical evidence, though, besides the ammunition linking Alec to the murders directly.
- [62:58]
B
Yeah, no physical evidence until we get to clue number six, the blue raincoat. Alex mother had dementia, so she had a full time caregiver named Shelly Smith. Shelly told Investigators that she did remember Alex stopping by for about 15 to 20 minutes on the evening of June 7. Though Alec had previously tried to convince her it was actually more like 30 to 40 minutes. Days after the murder, Alex showed back up at his mom's house around 6:30 in the morning carrying a blue raincoat, which was all wrapped in a bundle. When investigators asked Alec about this, he denied it ever happened. But then months later, when cops finally got around to searching his mother's house thoroughly, they found that same blue raincoat balled up in a junk closet upstairs in her home. The inside was covered in gunshot residue. The theory was that Alec had used this raincoat to wrap up the murder weapons after the shooting. Then once he had gotten rid of the guns, he stashed the raincoat at his mother's house during that mysterious early morning visit. This was the first piece of physical evidence that actually linked Alec to the crime scene and the weapons that killed his family. Meaning no matter what way they looked and they seemed to be pretty thorough, like despite his influence, we don't, we don't have anything on the botchboard today. All of the roads kept leading back to Alec, but even with the jacket, there really still wasn't enough evidence to charge him with murder. Sure, a lot of people were finding out that he was insanely corrupt, but many weren't sure, even despite all those crimes, that he would have been capable of killing his family. Until a super bizarre act of desperation kind of showed the world what his true colors were.
- [64:55]
A
So from the beginning, Alec had hinted that his wife and son were killed as revenge for that boat crush that we talked about. He talked about it more and more. He never named anyone that could have been the culprit, but he only always insisted that someone had it out for his family. However, each discovery only led the cops closer to him. By August, he knew that he was the main person of interest in their investigation. The walls were really closing in on Alec, and he needed to do something drastic to throw them off of his scent. So on September 4, 2021, just one day after he was fired from his law firm, Alec called 91 1. And he claimed in this call that he had been shot in the head while changing a flat tire on a rural road about seven miles south of Moselle. His story was that, you know, some guy in a pickup truck drove by, stopped, and just open fired on him. And probably the most sickening part of all of this is the description that he gives to the police makes it sound like the perpetrator was Anthony Cook, which was one of Paul's former friends, was on the boat when it crashed, and was the boyfriend of Mallory beach who Paul killed. Alec was taken to a hospital. He had a fractured skull and a small hemorrhage. But the doctors called the wounds on him, quote, superficial. And right away, investigators start ripping that story of his to shreds. They found that Alec had made multiple calls over the last few days to his drug dealer, who was also his cousin, this guy named Curtis Eddie Smith. He was also known as cousin Eddie to Alec. They also found surveillance footage that showed cousin Eddie went to go see Alec at the location where he was shot. Video from a nearby church showed Eddie's pickup truck following closely behind Alex Mercedes. When the detectives interviewed Eddie, he revealed that Alec, in a desperate state, had called Eddie to help him die by suicide. And when Eddie asked why this was happening, you know, he wasn't just immediately going to jump on this plan with Alec. But then Alec told him, quote, because they're going to be able to prove that I was responsible for Maggie. And Paul just told him.
- [67:12]
B
Okay.
- [67:12]
A
And Eddie, of course, like, immediately tells this to the police. Eddie said that when he arrived, he fired the gun in the air to scare Alec because he actually refused to shoot him. And then he left before any injury happened. So whatever happened to Alec in the car was not a result of Eddie. However, he does later give a different version of events, saying that there was some kind of struggle for the gun and then it ended up going off by accident. Regardless, though, Eddie was adamant that Alec tried to engineer his own death, and Eddie really had nothing to do with it. And confronted with all of this evidence, Alec does end up admitting that he did lie to the police. He tried to frame it as a noble endeavor, making his death look like a homicide so his son Buster could collect the $10 million life insurance payout.
- [68:03]
B
Okay, noble.
- [68:06]
A
I don't even know what to say during half of this because it's just like every thing that comes out just ends up being more shocking than.
- [68:13]
B
Yeah. And I don't. I don't know, we probably will get into it a bit at the wrap up, but, like, cousin Eddie isn't the most peachy clean guy either. Like, Alec was writing Eddie checks to cash and then, like, taking the money back. Like, I mean, they were. They were money laundering together.
- [68:31]
A
All part of the scam. They're all liars.
- [68:33]
B
I mean, they're both fishy. And so it's like, is Eddie saying this so innocently to clear his name? Like, you can't really trust anything without taking heaps of salt. But all of this is coming out. And, you know, investigators are still behind the scenes. They're even more confused now. But one thing they haven't been able to get into is our clue number seven, Paul's phone. So after Alec had handed over Paul's phone, investigators could not get into it. Like I said, they were scared to unlock it. They didn't want to wipe the data. So 10 months actually went by that they had just kind of sat on this phone without really touching it. None of the techs could crack it. And yeah, they could get a subpoena for the phone records and things like that, but they, they couldn't actually get into data that was stored on the physical phone. But finally, in April 2022, a Secret Service agent suggested they try Paul's birthday. No idea why this didn't dawn on them sooner, but as soon as they did it, the phone unlocked immediately.
- [69:38]
A
Wow. Just like that?
- [69:39]
B
Just like that. And what they found was absolutely devastating for Alex defense. They found a 50 second video of Paul trying to get his friend's dog to show its injured tail to the camera. This video was recorded at 8:44pm on June 7, just minutes before the murders.
- [70:00]
A
Right. Because it's like 9:02 when Alex phone shows him running around. Wow.
- [70:06]
B
And in the background, you can clearly hear Alex voice. We're gonna play the clip for you guys right now. Hey, he's got a bird in his mouth. It's a guinea.
- [70:22]
A
This is a chicken. Come here, bubba.
- [70:26]
B
Come here, Cash. Come here, papa. Cash, quick. So for 10 months, Alec had insisted he never went near the kennels that night before the murders, he told police over and over again that he was napping at the house when Maggie and Paul went down to check on the dogs. But this video proves he was lying.
- [70:47]
A
And on July 14, 2022, Alec was indicted by a grand jury on two counts of murder. That's on top of the very, very many financial fraud charges that he was already facing.
- [71:00]
B
Hard to keep up with those.
- [71:02]
A
I know. And his trial officially began in January of 2023. The prosecution argued that Alec killed Maggie and Paul to gain sympathy and distract from his financial crimes that were about to be exposed. They painted him as really this desperate man who thought that murdering his family would buy him time and maybe some public sympathy. Even though the mind of someone like that is so hard to understand. I don't even know if that's exactly what it would have been.
- [71:28]
B
No. And it's like it's hard to rationalize, like, because for us, we're like, he would really kill his family over financial crimes and them finding out. But it's like, this is not a sound minded person. He's got an insane opioid addiction. He is clearly depraved. I mean, stealing millions from orphaned children.
- [71:47]
A
Yeah. He has no empathy for anyone.
- [71:49]
B
There's no moral compass with this person. There's no empathy, ethical bounds, despite having taken them with his law degree.
- [71:55]
A
Like, and it also seems like it was a very impulsive choice maybe made that day. Like, I don't, I don't think he has a lot of forethought in any of the decisions he makes in his life. He's just like, what's going to help me in this moment? And it's stealing money. It's getting his way out of things. It's whatever.
- [72:08]
B
It's whatever it takes.
- [72:09]
A
But I remember reading about family annihilators and what ends up being their motivation. Because I do think he was a family annihilator. Because he asked Buster to be there that day.
- [72:18]
B
Isn't that crazy?
- [72:19]
A
So I think it's going to kill everyone. I think that's what he wanted to do. But sometimes it is embarrassment that I've messed up so bad and now my family's gonna find out how bad I messed up. And I just don't want them to have to go through that. So I'm going to take all their lives. It just doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
- [72:36]
B
It just happened with that woman who killed her husband and two of three kids.
- [72:42]
A
Oh my God.
- [72:43]
B
Like, and that was financial. She was stealing from where she worked. Oh, my God.
- [72:49]
A
Because you don't want people to find out about your crime so you'd rather kill them. So they. It just is so bizarre to me.
- [72:55]
B
Yeah.
- [72:56]
A
And meanwhile, the defense insisted that Alec was a loving father and loving husband who could have never hurt his family. They emphasized how all of this evidence was just circumstantial. The cops never found the murder weapons. They never found the missing clothes they were looking for. And they put a lot of focus onto the actual crime itself. They said that it just didn't make sense for one person to kill Maggie and Paul with two different types of weapons. And they also emphasized how little time that Alec would have had to kill them. Clean up, drive to his mom's house. It just wasn't physically possible is what they're saying. And then as for his lie about being near the kennels, Alec freely Copped to it. He said that his opioid addiction made him very paranoid and that he was afraid that he would become a suspect if he did tell the truth. The defense also drilled into errors and inconsistencies that the police had made during their investigation. For example, there was male DNA under Maggie's fingernails that was actually never identified. Though the forensic scientists for the prosecution said that it was so minimal that it actually could have gotten there just by Maggie having contact with everyday objects that the family shared. And during the trial, too, Alec even stood on the stand and tried to defend himself.
- [74:15]
B
I think a lot of people speculate that was probably against his lawyer's advice, but, like, kind of being maybe a little centered, cocky. He was.
- [74:25]
A
He really thought he was untouchable.
- [74:26]
B
I got this. And he had the craziest line when he was up there. He said, quote, oh, what a tangled web we weave. Once I told a lie, I had to keep lying. You're getting charged with double homicide, two murders, and you're basically admitting on the stand, under oath, while I lied. So I just had to keep lying. Your whole credibility is shot. My guy.
- [74:49]
A
I know, like, plead the fifth, but I just. When you've gone your entire life without ever facing consequences, I think you just assume you can say whatever and that you'll still be let go.
- [75:00]
B
I know.
- [75:00]
A
I really don't think until he was sentenced.
- [75:03]
B
Yeah.
- [75:03]
A
That he figured he was actually going to go to jail.
- [75:05]
B
I mean, he looked shocked. And one thing I do really appreciate about this judge is like, I think he really thought that his family's legacy would protect him. I mean, there was a. A picture of, you know, one of his family members, I think his great, great grandpa or great grandpa in the courtroom that the judge was like, take it down. Like, take it down. So I don't know, very, very cocky.
- [75:29]
A
Then on March 2, 2023, after less then three hours, the jury found Alec guilty on all counts. Everything. The next day, Alec was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. And Alec continues to maintain his innocence as of this recording date. We'll see if it changes before this comes out.
- [75:52]
B
Yeah.
- [75:53]
A
He's also filed an appeal. But for now, the man who once seemed untouchable within his community is going to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Now, the investigation and trial of Alec had kind of a somewhat unexpected consequence. So on June 22, 2021, this is two weeks after Alec killed Maggie and Paul. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or sled, announced that it was going to take The Stephen Smith cold case away from highway patrol, and they were going to open their own investigation. They didn't really give any details except to say that this was because they felt like they had new information that was uncovered during the investigation into Maggie and Paul's murder. Then on March 21, 2023, just weeks after Alex conviction, they reclassified Steven's death as a homicide, not as a hit and run. Then on March 31, they actually exhumed Steven's body and they performed a fresh autopsy on him. The results were not made public, but a private investigator that was hired by Steven's family stated in May of 2023 that he was fairly sure the object that killed Stephen was in fact attached to a vehicle. It was maybe the side mirror of a truck. While the investigation continues, we're kind of left without answers as to who the key suspects are and what theories the police might have about that night. However, the fact that the Murdochs may somehow be connected is not surprising to many people. At least not to Steven's mother, Sandy Smith. Since 2015, she has maintained that she has always believed there was more to her son's death than just a hit and run. She told the FBI in 2016, almost 10 years ago, that after his death, multiple teenagers had warned her daughter. Daughter that Buster and Paul were responsible for this. She believes that there could be information on Steven's phone that might prove it definitively. However, as far as we know, it hasn't. And not surprisingly, Buster has consistently denied any involvement in Steven's death. And he's really struck back against the rumor mill, both local and on a bigger scale. He actually filed defamation lawsuits against Warner Brothers and Blackfin, which were the companies that made a documentary about the Murdoch murders. In that documentary, the filmmakers really suggest that it was Buster behind Steven's death. And Buster argued that these innuendos and rumors were being used to unfairly paint him as a murderer. Now Buster is also suing Netflix for doing something similar in the documentary that we watch. Yeah, but the truth is he's never been named by authorities as a person of interest or a suspect. Most of it seems like what people think about this case has come from the rumor mill. So I do believe that, like, small towns tend to hold a lot of wisdom and knowledge, but we're probably never gonna know. But I. I hope for Steven's mother's sake that we figure this one out.
- [79:01]
B
There are so many loose ends with this one. Hopefully, Steven's family gets justice. I mean, it was interesting how the Murdoch family Kind of offered their assistance to help pro bono. A lot of rumor mill and Reddit goes down that rabbit hole of, like, why they would have offered for help to kind of maybe keep things close, figure out details before anyone. But.
- [79:23]
A
Well, but they always get involved when they feel like they need to turn the tide in their favor with the, oh, I'll get involved. I'll help you run this insurance scam so you can get all the money. Oh, at the hospital. I'll get involved. I'll help you guys. And they're just shutting down the investigation?
- [79:37]
B
Yeah. It is interesting, but at least it seems that some things are coming to a resolution. I know. Gloria's family reached a $4.3 million settlement to be paid out from the estate.
- [79:52]
A
When did that happen?
- [79:54]
B
That actually came on March 25, 2022.
- [79:57]
A
Okay, so maybe it's been paid out. Who knows?
- [80:00]
B
Maybe.
- [80:01]
A
I mean, I have here that as of January 12, 2023, the family of Mallory beach have reached a tentative settlement with Buster Murdoch in a fifty million dollar lawsuit. So it seems like because Paul is dead, like, the lawsuit just went on to another family member. And so now, in theory, Buster is going to have to pay that.
- [80:22]
B
Yeah. All coming from the estate. I mean.
- [80:24]
A
Yeah.
- [80:24]
B
Dad's in prison.
- [80:25]
A
Yeah. So it's Buster, I guess, handling the estate.
- [80:28]
B
Yeah. I mean, they showed it in the documentary. Like, they auctioned off all of the items from the house. Like, I remember people in the documentary talking about, like, Maggie's turtle lamp collection getting auctioned off. People were clamoring at items. Like, one lady paid so much money for a vacuum that was, like, still full of dirt from their home.
- [80:47]
A
Oh, my gosh. Like, like to have a memento from the crime scene.
- [80:50]
B
Maybe find something like, okay. She actually ended up buying, like, digital cameras and stuff, too, that still had the memory cards and pictures from, like, family trips on them.
- [80:59]
A
Ooh, that's spooky.
- [81:00]
B
I know. So, I mean, they're clearly selling items to help pay for all of this. Apparently, allegedly don't come for us, Buster. But I do want to talk about a lot of people because there are some parts of the Internet that are, like, despite everything we've presented today, are still, like, I don't think he did it. I don't think. I don't think there was enough motive for him to kill his family. I mean, son facing a potentially huge lawsuit. I think the initial lawsuit from the family when Paul was alive was like, 10 million almost.
- [81:33]
A
Yeah.
- [81:33]
B
Wife potentially going to divorce you. Alimony, maybe there's no prenup. Maybe he saw that as stripping away half of his.
- [81:41]
A
The financial crimes coming to light.
- [81:43]
B
There was a lot there, so who knows. But a lot of people also point to the fact that the former county clerk of this court, Becky Hill, was actually charged with perjury, obstructing justice and misconduct. So they kind of were like, oh, well, the court clerk was corrupt. All of this was happening over there. Maybe he wasn't given a fair trial. Maybe like everyone's kind of speculating on like maybe the system, despite having worked for him for so long, was so corrupt. Yeah.
- [82:18]
A
Oh, that's interesting.
- [82:18]
B
Yeah. It's a stretch, I know.
- [82:21]
A
Yeah.
- [82:21]
B
And it was interesting because this woman actually did. She did read the verdict. So not that she decided it, but true.
- [82:29]
A
I mean, it was a jury of his peers.
- [82:31]
B
I know, but I'm curious what you guys think. Did, did we present enough evidence, enough clues to help you guys come to a determination? Is there anything we missed that you're like, wait, you guys, there's also this. Please put it in the comments for us. But we are closing the Murdoch case and moving on to our Missing person of the week.
- [82:52]
A
This week we're highlighting the very recent missing person's case of Susan Hilly. The Philadelphia Police Department is seeking the public's help in locating a missing person. Susan Hilly, the 67 year old female, was last seen on Tuesday, September 9, 2025 on the 5500 block of Old York Road. Her height is 5'2. She's reported as weighing 150 pounds, has blue eyes and white hair. Her clothing description is unknown at this time. If you have any information regarding Susan's whereabouts, please contact east detectives at 215-686-3243. And with that, that's all we have for today's episode of Clues. Thank you for sticking around for the whole episode. Now we just want to hear from you guys. What are your thoughts? What are your feelings? What part of this case do you get hung up on? What part makes you angry? It's all of that feedback that truly makes this community special.
- [83:49]
B
At Crime House, we really value your support. So please again share those thoughts on social media. Comment like subscribe everything and remember to review the show and follow clues to help others discover it.
- [84:00]
A
And we're going to be back next week with another case to unravel. So make sure you tune in then. That's all we have for now. And we'll see you next time on Clues. Bye guys.
- [84:09]
B
Bye.
- [84:15]
A
Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong is perfect for spooky season. Dive into the real events behind the world's most terrifying blockbusters and beyond. Twisted Tales is a crime house original. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes out every Monday.