Alex Murdaugh Sentenced to Life in Prison for Murdering Wife and Son
When it comes to Murdaugh: Death in the Family, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
The true crime series currently unfolding on Hulu takes on the stranger-than-fiction saga of the downfall of South Carolina’s Murdaugh family, an influential Lowcountry clan whose legacy is forever scarred by fraud, corruption and murder.
While the family’s public unraveling ostensibly started with a 2019 speed boat crash that killed 19-year-old Mallory Beach—and ended with patriarch Alex Murdaugh being sentenced to life in prison for the 2021 murders of his wife Maggie Murdaugh and son Paul Murdaugh—further probing of Alex’s business practices and a closer look at other mysterious deaths in their orbit painted an even more complicated picture.
“It is one of the most out-there, devastating, wild cases about unchecked power and privilege that you’ve ever seen,” Death in the Family co-creator Erin Lee Carr told the Los Angeles Times, “and is incredibly significant as it relates today.”
The apparent heart of the series is Maggie, who can no longer speak for herself but is portrayed by Patricia Arquette as a dutiful wife and mother who’s awakening to the vast web of lies being spun by her husband.
“What was really interesting to me about this story,” Arquette told People, “was this charming, charismatic personality who is the head of the family, but also a pathological liar, betrayer, manipulator. And for [Maggie], for her to start realizing, ‘I have no clue who I’m married to.'”
The family was “dealing with so many different things,” she added. “Addictions and alcohol and drugs and all of these different things, betrayals. It’s like layer by layer of nightmare things.”
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Based on Mandy Matney‘s sprawling Murdaugh Murders Podcast, Carr and co-creator Michael D. Fuller obviously had plenty of on-the-record mayhem to draw from to craft an eight-episode limited series.
But it’s not as if they took no artistic license, as makers of scripted true crime dramas are wont to do, usually to fill in the blanks when it comes to how people behave behind closed doors, where the court transcripts and documentary cameras can’t follow.
“There’s the truth and there’s the story truth,” Carr told MovieWeb. But, she stressed, in addition to being rooted in fact, there are true-to-life details in there “for the deep-cut Murdaugh people.”
See which pivotal moments in Murdaugh: Death in the Family are ripped from reality or fictionalized to punch up the plot:
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Who Was Maggie Murdaugh?
The late Maggie Murdaugh, portrayed by Patricia Arquette in Murdaugh: Death in the Family, is a main character in the series but what was going on in her mind as her family was falling apart is unknowable.
So, the series’ creators had to improvise.
“She owned a store in town, she got married when she was younger, she was being pursued by other people and Alex Murdaugh just sort of said, ‘This is my wife,'” co-creator Erin Lee Carr told MovieWeb of crafting the Maggie character. “To be able to fictionalize the relationship between her and her sister, and what had previously potentially happened in her marriage, that just gives you so much more access to the story.”
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Did Alex Murdaugh Try to Silence Witnesses of Son Paul Murdaugh’s Fatal Boat Crash?
After a night of partying, Paul Murdaugh was drunk in the early morning hours of Feb. 24, 2019, when the boat he was driving slammed into Archers Creek Bridge with his girlfriend Morgan Doughty, Mallory Beach, Anthony Cook, Connor Cook and Miley Altman aboard.
Mallory was thrown overboard and died, while the others were injured.
Paul was charged two months later with one count of boating under the influence causing death and two counts of boating under the influence causing great bodily injury. He was awaiting trial in the felony case when his father Alex Murdaugh shot him and his mother Maggie Murdaugh to death at their Islandton, S.C., home.
In Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family, Alex (Jason Clarke) and his father Randolph Murdaugh III (Gerald McRaney) go to the hospital to encourage the kids not to speak to authorities—which, by multiple accounts, did happen.
Alex later denied in a legal filing attempting to influence Connor, but the young man said in the 2023 Netflix documentary Murdaugh Murders that Paul’s dad approached him in the hall at the hospital and whispered to him not to say anything, that he would take care of everything.
And Paul was just starting to give a statement to police when his grandfather Randolph came in and, per law enforcement records, said, “I am his lawyer starting now. He isn’t giving any statements.”
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Did the Murdaugh Family Go on Vacation After the Boat Crash?
In Murdaugh: Death in the Family, Alex, Maggie, elder son Buster Murdaugh (Will Harrison) and Paul (Johnny Berchtold) head to the Bahamas—where a still-reeling Paul gets into a drunken fight with a couple of British tourists.
In the copious accounting of the Murdaughs’ actions starting with the days after the crash, there’s no mention of them going on vacation.
Paul and then-girlfriend Morgan were in the Bahamas in 2017, according to two Brits they struck up a friendship with, who told Fox News in 2023 that they had no idea about the subsequent Murdaugh drama—including the boat crash—until they saw the Netflix documentary.
Max Burton told the outlet that, after he posted a throwback video in August 2019 from the trip and tagged Paul and Morgan, the Murdaugh scion DM’d him on Instagram to ask him to take it down, writing, “Me and that girl are no longer dating and are not supposed to have any contact.”
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Did Murdaugh Family Housekeeper Glorida Satterfield Comfort Paul After the Boat Crash?
The tender moment in Death in the Family in which Gloria Satterfield (Kathleen Wilhoite) assures Paul that everything’s going to be alright after the boat crash is one of the more obvious bits of fiction in the series—since Glorida had been dead for a year when the accident occurred.
The 57-year-old died Feb. 26, 2018, four weeks after she was hospitalized following, according to Alex, a fall at the Murdaughs’ home on Moselle Road. The patriarch told police that she tripped over the family dogs and fell down the outside steps.
“We chose to keep Gloria,” series co-creator Michael D. Fuller explained on the official Murdaugh: Death in the Family companion podcast. “We decided that in order to show her relationship with the family, with Paul in particular, it made story truth sense to have her be alive and see how that plays out in the current timeline of our show.”
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Did Murdaugh Murders Podcaster Mandy Matney Really Stare Down Alex Murdaugh at the Hospital in 2019?
In Death in the Family, which is based on Mandy Matney‘s Murdaugh Murders podcast, the journalist (played by Brittany Snow) sees Alex at the hospital in the wake of the 2019 boat crash and there’s a dramatic I-see-you moment where she stares him down.
Though her podcast didn’t start until 2021, Mandy did see Alex as early as 2019, but it was in court.
“I did a stare-off with him in Paul Murdaugh’s court hearing in 2019,” Mandy said on the show’s companion podcast. I saw him for the first time, and we did a stare-off, and he looked like he was about to approach me. And then court started.”
She had another “face-off” with Alex during his own trials, when, she recalled, “I was trying to leave the building, and for some reason, he was leaving at the same time, in cuffs and everything.”
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Did the Governor of South Carolina Pull Strings for Alex Murdaugh?
To paint a picture of how Alex was able to grease the wheels of local power to further his own interests, Death in the Family features the patriarch introducing an official from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control to the state’s governor—at a party at the Murdaughs’ home.
In the show, Alex is seeking a permit for a jellyfish harvesting business and is dangling the prospect of research money from the governor for the SCDHEC.
Alex did try to start that jellyfish business, but it was shut down due to permitting and environmental issues in 2014—five years before the boat crash—and there’s no record of him seeking assistance from then-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
“What he was involved in, in truth-truth, was a lot of land deals, a lot of other types of side businesses,” Fuller explained to MovieWeb, but they included this one for atmosphere, as it “felt like a very Southern business endeavor to undertake.”
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Was Alex Murdaugh’s Father Honored by the Governor of South Carolina?
As portrayed in the series, Randolph III—who like his father and grandfather before him served as 14th Circuit Solicitor—was honored with the Order of the Palmetto, the governor’s highest civilian honor, on Sept. 20, 2018.
The ceremony took place in front of the Hampton County Courthouse with Randolph’s sprawling family, including Alex and Maggie, in attendance.
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