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In March 2023, 54-year-old Alex Murdaugh received two life sentences for murdering his wife and younger son at the family’s hunting lodge in Colleton County, South Carolina. Since the early 20th century, three generations of his family had been elected as state prosecutors in the “Lowcountry”, a sprawling stretch of lush, rancid swampland on the southern eastern seaboard, marked by severe economic and social inequality. The Murdaughs were the people who could send you to jail or the electric chair, all the while maintaining a veneer of good ol’ southern gentility.
In parallel with these public duties, the family ran a large law firm, specialising in personal injury. In a land of chronic alcoholism and rusty farm equipment, the Murdaughs conducted a brisk business in multimillion-dollar settlements for those who had lost a limb, a parent or their cognitive faculties thanks to someone else’s carelessness. But instead of passing on these life-changing wins to vulnerable clients, Alex Murdaugh used them to fund a lavish lifestyle, featuring big cars, prostitutes, opioid pills and a military-grade private arsenal. For good measure, he also embezzled many millions from his legal partners.
The whispers around Murdaugh’s dodgy finances had been building for years. But they were blasted into insignificance on that evening in June 2021 when Paul and Maggie were killed at the family dog kennels. Alex swore that he had been nowhere near the scene of the crime and tried to pin the murder on someone else. He theorised that hired hitmen must have come for Paul, who was on bail for drunkenly crashing the family boat into a bridge in 2019, killing one of his teenage passengers. Maggie, in this scenario, was simply collateral damage.
Despite Murdaugh’s braggadocio, the prosecution was able to convince the jury that he was the one who had snuck up on his wife and son, pulling the trigger not twice, but seven times. As for a motive, they argued that Murdaugh had been trying to create a diversion from the financial disgrace that was barrelling towards him: in this floridly sentimental community, no one would think of proceeding against “Big Red” – so called on account of being 6ft 4in with ginger hair – for embezzlement while he was dealing with a personal tragedy of such biblical proportions.
When James Lasdun, a British novelist who lives in the US, began his research, he was not certain that Murdaugh had done it. Big Red might be a braggart, a bully and rotten to the core, but Lasdun invokes Thomas De Quincey’s neat point about how a man’s capacity to rob says nothing about his propensity to murder. In addition, there is something about the crime that Lasdun, who is himself married with children, cannot countenance. How could a man with no history of domestic violence or even bad temper bring himself to shoot loved ones merely to delay his own imminent financial exposure?
This kind of ethical audit calls to mind Janet Malcolm’s distinctive approach to writing about well-known criminal cases. Indeed, Lasdun tells us that he “reveres” Malcolm who, like him, typically tried out her ideas in long-form pieces for the New Yorker before expanding them into books. Yet here the similarities end. Malcolm’s approach to writing about celebrated murders was to avoid getting into the narrative weeds in order to retain space for her own psychological and ethical explorations. Lasdun, by contrast, insists on delivering a meticulous retelling of the Murdaugh case, complete with byzantine subplots involving the suspicious death of the family’s housekeeper and the murder of another local teenager.
This impulse for completeness is puzzling given that the Murdaugh murders – the assonance is irresistible – have already been turned over by a small army of investigators. In addition to a flurry of well-regarded podcasts by local journalists, there have been sober and well-received multi-part documentaries on Netflix and HBO. Lasdun rightly acknowledges these contributions, yet still insists on giving us chapter and verse on established evidence.
Yet while it does not reveal anything substantively new about the case, Lasdun’s prose is pure pleasure. His resistance to going full southern gothic is particularly admirable, although the hovering stink of rotting jelly fish caused by one of Murdaugh’s failed side hustles is too good to leave out. Likewise, Lasdun’s refusal to come to an iron-clad conclusion about Big Red’s guilt turns out to be remarkably prescient. On 13 May 2026, by which time his book had gone to press, the South Carolina supreme court sensationally overturned the murder conviction, citing “shocking jury interference” by the clerk to the court. It turned out that Becky Hill – “Miss Becky” – had been nudging the jurors to find Murdaugh guilty. One witness testified that she was writing a book about the trial, and needed narrative closure for the project to really pop. In the process she has, ironically, blown everything wide open again. Murdaugh’s retrial is likely to begin sometime next year and, chances are, Lasdun will be there to see it.
The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh is published by WW Norton & Company (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
