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Good Evening, Power, Privilege and Blood. This is the definitive and thrilling true story of Alex Murdau's violent downfall from a veteran Wall Street journal reporters become an authority on the case. Alex Murdau was a benevolent dictator, resident of the South Carolina Trial Lawyers Association, a political boss, a part time prosecutor, and a partner in his family's law firm.
He was always ready with a favor, a drink, and an invitation to Mozelle, his family's seventeen hundred acre hunting estate. The murder name ignited respect and fear for one hundred miles. When he murdered his wife Maggie and son Paul at Mozelle on a dark summer night, the fragile facade of Alex's world could no longer hold his forefathers had covered up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad, crossing, a bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder
of a pregnant lover. Alex, too almost walked away from his unspeakable crimes, with his reputation intact, But his downfall was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes, and a fateful decision by an old friend who'd finally seen enough. Why would a man who at everything kill
his wife and grown son. To unwind the roots of Alex's room, Award winning journalist Valerie Borlin reported not just from the court house every day, but also along the back roads and through the tidal marshes of South Carolina's Low Country. When the jurors made their pilgrimage to the crime scene, trying to envision Maggie and Paul's last moments, she walked right behind them, sensing the ghosts that haunt
the murdas now shattered legacy. Through masterful research and cinematic writing, The Devil at His Elbow is a transporting journey through Alex's life, the night of the murders and the investigation that culminated in a trial that held tens of millions spellbound. With their stunning insights and fearless instinct for the truth. Borline uncovers layers of the Murdaw mystery case that have
not been told. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Devil at His Elbow Alex Murda and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty, with my special guest, National affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal and author Valerie Borline. Thank you very much for this interview and welcome to the program. Valerie Borline, good morning, Good morning, and thank you so much for this interview, and congratulations on this book, The Devil at His Elbow.
Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Tell us how you came to be involved with this story.
Well, I'm from the South. I grew up one county north of the South Carolina line in North Carolina, and so i have followed politics in South Carolina for a really long time. I used to work in Colombia and the capitol, and so I'm very familiar with kind of
the collegiate. I guess I could call it collegial would be the term of art, but really the good old boy system that still is pervasive in South Carolina politics, and so I follow I follow South Carolina stories as part of my job at the Wall Street Journal, and this story was percolating for a couple of years. You know, there was the boat crash in twenty nineteen that I was aware of, involving the death of Mallory Beach, and
then when the homicides happened, it was really shocking. So it wasn't national news immediately in the rest of the country or the rest of the world, but in South Carolina it was big news when Maggie and Paul Murdoch were killed on June seventh. So I was following along and just out of interest, really, and a top at of mine at the Journal reached out and said, Hey,
are you following this case in South Carolina? And I was like, yeah, I'm aware of it, but I'm not sure what the Wall Street Journal version of this is, right. I mean, we care about business and we care about power, and it wasn't immediately clear to me, oh, this is
a Wall Street Journal story. And he's like, Val, you know, sometimes a great story is just a freaking great story, and he was right, and so I actually it was on my radar very early on in June of twenty twenty one, and I made my first trip to Hampton in July of twenty twenty one, so it came on my radar out of interest and then also just because it was pretty clear immediately that this was a really fascinating story.
You say your book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews and includes scenes witnessed over four months of reporting in South Carolina. You were in the courtroom for every major moment in Alex's legal saga, from his initial bond hearing in October twenty twenty one to his hearing on his request for a new trial in January twenty and twenty four. In this book project, you found out really what the Murdoch family represented in this area in
South Carolina. Tell us what you found about that family. And before we talk about the events preceding the murder, you talked about the boat crash in twenty nineteen. And we're doing this interview considering that many most people that will listen to this story have a certain grasp of the story from certain things like the Netflix series and various podcasts and just the social media itself and reporting well I found.
You know, it may be surprising to those of us that live in cities, but I don't think it's really super surprising to people that live in small towns or rural areas that it's still common, particularly in the Deep South, to have one family or kind of one, you know, one political boss maybe that runs things, that's the patron. And what I found in Hampton, South Carolina, where this story is set, the Murdoch family had been that family for more than one hundred years. And you just can't
overstate the case. Right if you wanted to be not just run for sheriff, but if you wanted to be a sheriff's deputy, if you wanted to be a county commissioner, if you wanted to work for the local road department. You know, if you want it, particularly if you want to run for judge, you had to have the blessing of the Murdochs. And they ran the civil justice side.
They ran this big, powerful law firm that was by far the economic engine of Hampton, but they also ran the criminal courts, so they had immense amountpower if you were if they could make they could make a dui go away, they could make you know they could make more serious things go away, and then if you happen to be on a jury later, or a family member was,
you might remember that they did you a favor. So what I found was that this family had a huge amount of influence and power in the community where they operated for one hundred years.
Tell us about the situation in terms of you said he was the law. The Murdoch was the law. But tell us about his law firm. And before we talk about this boat.
Crash, well, the law firm Hampton, South Carolina, and really the entire kind of five counties where the Murdochs were most powerful in the southeastern corner of South Carolina. It's very rural, it's very poor, it's predominantly black for the most part. And the law firm is a play. It's a personal injury firm where you don't necessarily hire a law You don't hire our lawyer at the hourly rate, right,
not like you would think about it. But if there's a bad wreck or God forbid a fatality, you would hire the Murdoch law firm and pay them forty percent of whatever judgment you might get. And in a place where the road are really some of the most dangerous in the United States, and in this part of of the country, in the place where very blue collar, so a lot of the jobs are quite dangerous. There is
an immense amount of personal injury work. And the law firm just became this behemoth in our part of the world, in the rural south. And you know they if you go to Hampton, I can see it in my mind. It's this. It's this poor downtown, you know, a couple of streets, most of them boarded up, and then you have this three million dollar, you know, brick edifice that that's built to last forever. And in keeping with their history of a one hundred years, they've always said they
wanted to be so well known. They never have to hang a shingle. And there's no sign out front. Everyone just knows that's the Mordocoli Firm, you know it for one hundred miles. That's where it is.
Now, let's get to this fast forward for our audience that there is a boat crash involving his son. So what happens in this boat crash, but also what is the reaction and what is the behavior from Alex Murdach.
Well, the boat crash is the lynchpin that that changes everything for the Murdoch family. The boat crash happened in February of twenty nineteen. There were three young couples going out and it's called Wright. It's February going out on a boat to an oyster roast, which is a big, a big party in the low Country. And they took the boat to avoid DUI checkpoints, to avoid getting pulled over because they were all underage and they knew they
were going to be drinking. And so Paul Murdoch, who was Alex's younger son, he was nineteen at the time, was driving his father's boat and they went to the six young people went to this this oyster roast. They drank a lot of beer over time. The evidence shows that Paul had nineteen drinks in the course of you know, eight hours or however long it was. And then on the way back, Paul and particular was very drunk and very belligerent and started getting angry at the other young
people in the boat. Is driving erratically and eventually even confronts his girlfriend who's trying to get him to calm down. He slaps her face, he spits on her. This ride is going horribly awry at two o'clock in the morning, in the dark, in the cold, on the waterways in South Carolina, and Paul is angry, the young people later said, and sped up the boat to twenty nine miles an hour and hit at full force, hit the pilings of
a bridge and crashed. And three of the young people went to the water, and one of them, Mallory Beach, who was nineteen, never surfaced and she drowned. And so this creates just a catastrophic event, not just for the life of her family, who was devastated, but also for the Murdocks because by this point Elec Murdoch had a lot of secrets, and this boat crash involving his son threatened to have them all pouring out into the surface.
Besides the a ensuing lawsuit that Alec Murdoch fears on behalf of his son, what does he do to try to cover up the crime?
Essentially, Yeah, they're kind of two main threats to Elick Murdoch at this point. He's a personal injury lawyer, right, he knows immediately there's the threat of a civil lawsuit he has filed. He has filed himself lawsuits involving boat wrecks. He knows the stakes if he isssued, what secrets could come out in terms of his financial his financial crimes that he's been committee for a decade at this point.
But even more than that, the more immediate threat the night it's you know, two twenty in the morning when this happens. Elick Murdoch is at the hospital in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a little over an hour. I mean it's more than an hour away. He drove hugely fast to get to the hospital with his father, Randolph Murdoch, the third who is the most recent prosecutor in that area,
because the snakes are for his son, Paul Murdoch. If she dies as a fear and as it turned out she did drown, Alec the driver of the boat, would be facing a very long prison term, a very long prison term, and he knew that right so his family's prosecutors they prosecuted those types of cases. So what he needs to do immediately after the boat wreck in the hospital is talk to the witnesses, meaning the other the other end people in the boat and get their story
straight and so confusion about who's driving. To protect his son from a long bid in South Carolina prison, which is a place it's very difficult to be It's not it's it's it's one of the more it's it's one of the more difficult states to be incarcerated in terms
of just conditions. Right, he was trying to spare him that, and then he was also trying to spare all these secrets coming out, so you can you can that evening he had a lot of doubt to sew and the evidence shows he really did that very effectively.
Actually, you said that he also had secrets regarding the financial crimes that he had perpetrated on his clients, and we find out his own law firm for over ten years. So tell us about that other pressure and where was he feeling that pressure from specifically.
Well, Alec was living two lives at least, But on the surface he was a hail fellow, well met he was everybody was like, hey bo, which is a Southern thing, hey bo, how you doing. He was everybody's best friend. He you know, if you look at pictures, he's always got his arms slung around the person next to him. He is the life of the party and the big man in town and really in that part of the world.
That's the surface, but underneath he has been stealing at this point twenty nineteen from his clients for well over ten years. He was, you know, this personal injury lawyer, and he would meet clients who were at their lowest moment. Right they've been through something catastrophic, either they or a loved one had been desperately injured or killed. He's meeting them at a time where they really need an ally. And he is a person with a reputation whose firm
has a as a stellar reputation for helping people. And so what he was doing at that time was taking advantage of the poorest of the poor at their most vulnerable moment. And for example, he had clients who were
motherless girls. Their mother had been killed in a terrible word explorer wreck on I ninety five going through South Carolina, and you know, he was he told them one thing, that he got them all this money, and then he was taking their money over the course of years, and he would tell clients that he got them a million dollars. You'll never believe I got you a million dollars. Nobody
else could have done that for you. And they're thrilled, right, they get, you know, sixty percent of a million dollars, because what he got three million dollars. Not only did he take his forty percent fee, he took the delta from what he told them he had. So he was robbing his clients at that point and knew it, and knew that if anybody started looking into his bank accounts and records they would find evidence of that. So he had those secrets to keep that night as well.
You write about Jane Seconder, which is the chief financial officer at his law firm, tell us about this rather large check discrepancy.
Sure, So Genie secondary was is a formidable woman. She's the chief, the chief financial officer at the law firm. And she also has known Alex since high school. You can look at their high school in yearbook and she's on the home court. He was the prom king, he was the quarterback. They've known each other forever and they're they're in each other's circle social circles in this small town. So Jeannie knows him as a bullshit artist, is what
she is. What she calls him going way back, but he is he's the great grandson of the founder of this law firm. He's a partner, his brother's a partner, his father's in the law firm.
You know, she.
Gives him a certain amount of deference, but his finances have always been a little bit hinky within the law firm.
There.
He had been fudging expenses on his credit card. So she's a little bit got her, you know her, she's she's a little bit sensitive to what he's doing to start with. And then there's this matter of a big missing fee, the seven hundred and ninety two thousand dollars fee that was that was due to the law firm from a case that Eleck was involved with, and the check for the expenses came in, but the check for the fee itself didn't come in, and typically at the
law firm, those two checks would come in together. So she's looking for this seven hundred and ninety two thousand dollars that's missing. His peer legal had been asking Eleck about it for a number of weeks and he's sort of been putting her off. And finally on June seventh of twenty one, Genie really needs to figure this out. She's got to reconcile the books, so she she goes to Elec's office and he's standing outside the foul cabinet, leaning on the foul cabinet, talking to people, you know,
shooting the breeze. And she walks up to him and she's she's about as big as a minute. She's she's she's petite, and he's six foot four and he's too, sixty five a two hundred and sixty five pounds at this point. And she said he gave her a look just like a like a look that just told her to kiss off, and a dirty look, like the like the kind she'd never seen from him, and said, what do you want from me now? And she said, I
need to need, I need to talk to you. And so they go into his office and close the door and she confronts him. She says, oh, like, you know, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask you about this missing money. I've got to get a straight answer from you. And when you know, right then the phone rings and it's his older brother calling to tell them that their father, Randolf Murdock third, is at the end. He's been he's been dying over the course
of months. He's finally close to the end. And they're rushing him to the hospital. So there's this there's this crisis that afternoon at work where he's finally confronted not about the boat rack necessarily in all those finances, but about a separate matter of seven hundred and ninety two thousand dollars that he is that's missing from the law firm. And he narrowly escapes a really difficult conversation because another crisis in his life, his father, his protector, is dying.
You take us to June seventh, and Alex is at this property called Moselle and he went out and he saw Blanca. Can you tell us what Blanca found regarding Randolph Murdoch IID and some of his medication.
Sure. So, Blanca Simpson is a hugely important person in the life of the family. Blanc is sort of the glue that holds their home together. She's the housekeeper, but she also cooks for them. She runs errand she catches checks. She's Maggie's person that helps run Mozelle, which is this massive, this massive estate, seventeen hundred acres, so essentially twice the size of Central Park in New York. It's a massive Wow. The Blanca is at Mozelle as often as the family is,
or more so. She knows it like the back of her hand. And she's worried about Elex. She knows that he's been used opioids for a number of years. She has a practice of finding She finds, you know, zip hot baggies of pills and residue in his pocket when she's doing the laundry. There's a little red cup in the cabinet over the washing machine where she puts that those pills. So she knows he uses pills, and it's an open secret within the household that he has been
using for a number of years. So she's aware of the the opioids. She's aware of booze, there's they're a heavily drinking family. But what really concerns her is in the weeks leading up to June seventh, she found palliative care drugs, end of life drugs that were on Elex's bedside table, prescribed to his father who'd been dying of
lung cancer. So she's really worried about that. Right, he's staking not just opioids, but she fears that he's also taking these very strong, barbituous or sedative drugs that are meant to soothe the end of life.
Now you talk about that. Because his father is in dire straits in the hospital, he uses as this as a He calls Maggie and wants her to return to Moselle and tells her why, and also wants Paul to come there as well. Tell us about this conversation, the call for these people to return to Moselle and the reason why sure.
Which it's shocking if you look at this incredible eighty eight page timeline. That's that sled. It's not kond On a law force division to put together. It's shocking if you look and you kind of like cross reference alex phone records. He's confronted by Genie Seconder right at the law firm in the afternoon. Then it gets the call that his father is dying. And that's such a crucial moment. His father is not just his closest friend and companion.
His father's his protector, his father when he's his father's loaned him a million dollars over the course of time just to bail him out of one one financial strait or another. His father also is hugely influential. He was the he was the prosecutor for decades in that part of the world. So his father is is it's not just a person he loves, it's a person he needs. So within minutes of getting that call that his father's
at the end. You can see, he calls Maggie. You can see he calls her and she doesn't pick up right away, and and then you know, but then she does, and he asks her to come home, and she calls her sister and she's like, I don't know, I really don't want to go, and her sister says you should, And he calls Paul, and he asked Paul to come home to Mozille, and Paul is not planning to he
comes anyway. So it's it's stunning that he lures them both home within minutes of being confronted over this missing money. It's it's very the prosecution made a case that's very damning, the immediate nature of those those requests who come home that night when neither of them have been planning to.
That Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. So you write that Alex got to Mozelle estate first and about six forty three pm, and then Paul arrives, So what do they do? Where do they go? Once Paul arrives at the Mozelle.
You know, they ride the property. It's a bucolic night, right, it's almost almost spun and amber. It's beautiful at sunset or at dusk. In the low country, it's this vast expanse of pine trees and swamp, you know, food plots for hunting. So they ride the property together. They go check on some sunflowers that they'd planted to lord doves. They were dying, so they needed to get those in shape. So they made a plan for how to replant these sunflowers.
They went and checked on some fruit trees that were kind of Alec's pet project. One of them wouldn't stand up straight, so Elk is following with it trying to get it to stand up straight. They crossed, you know Mozelle road over into the other side of the property to go to the target shoot for a couple of rounds,
and you know, they just they spend time together. And Elick has said and many of it Paul's friends say Paul was a delightful person to be around at when he wasn't drunk, he was he could be kind, he could be funny, and so you know, Alex says, they are just having a good time. That you would father and son writing this beautiful property that you love. And all the evidence shows that that Mozelle was Paul's haven. It was his perfect place. He wanted to spend the
rest of his life there. He had a plan to start a logging business there with his friend Anthony Cook, Mallory Beach's boyfriend. So they were at the place they both loved best, having to hang as father and son.
Let's talk about the kennels. And you say that Paul was taking care of a puppy for a friend. So tell us the role of the kennels in this story.
Sure, and you know, I had the chance to be at Mozille and the kennels are their open air right their cover, but they're open air and they house you know, there are a dozen of these kennels on a concrete pad and they house a number of dogs and including the family dogs who are you know, eat twice a day and are labs. And then the hunting dogs who eat once a day and are more you know, they're they're meant to work, the working dogs, and so Paul.
They had a number of anibals there. They typically had about six. And that week Paul was taking care of his best friend. His neighbor, Rogan Gibson, had a puppy, a chocolate lab puppy named Cash, and he was taking care of the puppy forum because Rogan was working out of town and they were worried because there was like a hot spot on the dog's tail, and so so they were taking special care of this puppy because they
did didn't really know. They knew something was wrong with them, but they didn't really know what.
You take us to nine forty six, three hours or so after Alex had arrived at Mozelle, and apparently he calls Maggie's phone and there's no answer, and he calls Paul's phone nine seven, and then he texts a message to Maggie call me babe. And then there was a friend that called that nine fifty seven the Paul and there was no answer. Then you take us to ten o six PM. A dispatcher at the Hampton County Sheriff's Office gets a nine on one call.
Yeah, it gives me chills. I can hear that call on my mind. They get a call from a hysterical Elec Murdoch. And when you first hear that call, it's still a rarshock test for some people. He's either you know, he sounds, he sounds, his voice is high, he's he's breathing hard, and he says, you know, I'm Elc Murdoch at forty one forty seven Mozell Road. I need I need help immediately. My wife and child have been shot badly.
He's in shock, he's crying, he's running around that. Yeah, that call comes in and starts everything rolling to this incredible you know, this incredible chronology of that night.
You write that a sergeant Daniel Green arrives and he parks near those kennels and he saw a shotgun leaning against the suv. Then he asked Alec Murda for his story.
Yeah, and you know, we talked a little bit about how remote Mozille is. This will give you a sense for it. So Daniel Green is in downtown Walterborough, which is in Collington County, and as is Mozille. He knows it's going to take him twenty minutes to get from Walterborough where he is, to Mozelle. And he beats feet right. He runs lights and siren to get out there, still takes him twenty minutes, and it's so dark and so isolated.
Even though he has GPS and he knows where he's going, he misses the term, so by the time he gets there, it's twenty minutes after the nine one one call comes in. And he rolls up on this quiet, quiet scene and he sees he parks near the kennels, and he sees he sees a young man lying face down on the
kennel concrete pad. He sees a woman face down, you know, a few steps away, and then he sees this tall, redheaded, sobbing six foot four to sixty pounds man pacing, and he sees a shotgun leaning up against a suburban with a you know, big suv with the flashing lights on. So he's just up on this very quiet place, in this very chaotic, tiny crime scene, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.
He tests Alec for GCR gun shot residue, and he also notes that when he asks him for anything that Alec is not shaking at all, not really nervous.
That's right. He sees the shotgun leaning up against the you know, the tire of the suburban. He's questioning Alec and he realizes, you know, he takes the gun this officer and puts it in his car. And he's talking to Alec and another deputy comes up and they need to test his hands for GSR for gunshot residue, and they do and test positive because he had been holding He said he'd been holding that shotgun. He later said, told about the target shooting that he supposedly did with Paul.
So it's not surprising the GSR on there. But what might have been surprising as the deputy who tested his hands said they were not shaking at all. He seemed relatively calm and aware of what of everything that was happening around him, very aware of his surroundings for someone who'd been to such trauma so shortly ago.
Tell us how Deputy Rutland gets involved from the Sheriff's office, but also how the you mentioned this acronym SLED SLED agents, So what does that stand for and how do they become involved and what is their role in this investigation?
Sure so SLED sounds for South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, State Law Enforcement Supportman Division, and what that means is like the state f BI and state wide agency that comes in and helps with complex crimes or white collar crimes,
corruption involving law enforcement or political figures. But most commonly in a state like South Carolina that's quite rural, you'll have small police departments, small sheriff's offices that just don't have the equipment or the expertise to handle homicides or things. So it's very common for SLED agents as they're known to be the assistant agent's assistant, the assisting agency on
complex crimes in rural areas. So what happens at night is the sheriff's office comes in Collington County, which is the slice of Mozille where this happened was in coll Itton County as opposed to Hampton County, the adjacent county. It's kind of split between the two. So coll Itton County is the first arrived. Deputy Green's part of that. His detective Rutland, who is Laura Rutland, is she's good with words, and so they send her to get the
search warrant and to get it signed by magistrates. So she kind of rolls up on the scene later than the other deputies and by that time they had realized, oh my gosh, this is Alec Murdoch. This is not just the boat wreck. This is this family that you know, everybody knows, including most of the deputies that are there. And so her captain asked, are you familiar with the Murdock family? And she's not from around there. She grew up a little bit away, and she has not been
with the department very long. And she had been just three young children at this point, so she had not been back at work very long. She's like, no, that name doesn't mean anything to me. They some, well, congratulations, that makes you the lead detective on this. So she catches, you know, the hot potato there, you know, an hour or so after the call comes in. But then pretty soon after that, you know, an hour, hour and ten minutes sled realizes that the SLED is on the scene.
It takes them a while to get there. They're on the scene. They can't say to Collington County, oh, we know what we know, which is that they are investigating the boat wreck. They're investigating Alex's They're investigating Alex's actions the night of the boat rack. Trying to so disinformation about who is driving and they can't say that it's a secret investigation, but they have to make the call that they need to take over because of the potential.
Elk is already on their radar's as he's a person they have a reason to be suspicious of to start with. So they just say, hey, look we is it okay, we're the lead on this. We have reasons that we need to be So SLED takes over the investigation two hours into it roughly, and an agent named David Owen arrives just after a little after midnight, and David is coming up from Charleston, which is pretty good ways away.
So you know, the lead agent is is Laura Rutland for a hot minute, and then it becomes David Owen, so pretty you know, and your your listeners are pretty pretty savvy. It's not it's not it's not ideal to take over a case where a key decisions have already been made. But that was the that was the situation. Rural area, rainy night, far from anywhere this. You know, SLED is based all over the state. It takes a
while to get rolling. So by the time the lead case agent is on the scene and taking over, it's about roughly two hours after the call comes in.
You say, David Owen takes over as a lead investigator. So he gets a chance to speak to Alec Murda and have Alec Murdoch explain this incredible situation where these people were killed.
Yeah, lucky, lucky David Owen. David was a key voice in this book and has not really spoken extensively about the case. So I felt very fortunate about that. Yeah. So David Owen gets woken up, you know, and said, and it's just like any any homicide detective rotation. He was up, it was his case. Doesn't know what he's getting to. He gets there and then he's briefed not only is this a double homicide in the middle of nowhere and it's not clear what happened, but Elic Murdoch
is somebody that they're already on the sea for. So then he sits down with Elick. It's rainy, it's hot, it's so I cannot tell you what it feels like when it's you know, almost ninety degrees, ninety percent humidity and kind of misting rain in a hot, humid summer in South Carolina. So he and detective Rutland, who's his new partner. He's just met meet up with Elec Murdoch. Elck's personal lawyer, a lawyer named Danny Henderson, wants to sit and agrees to let Elec talk, but only if
he's in the interview. So he guides them out. There's so many cars out there by now they he had to park out on Mozelle Road. He takes them out to his you know, his Bronco and I'm sorry, it's not Bronco. He takes them out to his car and closes the door. It's one in the morning, you know, puts the puts his little his his body cam, clips it to the rear view mirror and starts this kind of epic interview that becomes you know, critical there in the middle of nowhere, not knowing but what this case
is going to become. It's a just fairly incredible moment when you watch it. Now knowing what we know.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. So now you say that they have a statement to establish the events that happened, so that boxes them in later potentially, but you right will fast forward that regardless of those charges. By the end of the summer, Alex was staying in Hampton at a guesthouse behind his law partner, Johnny Parker's house. And then we get to he wants to have a conversation with Blanca Simpson.
Yeah, well I remember, I mean Blanca, Blanca knows all. It's it's summer, it's in August. He has by that point he had the interview with David Owen that night, early morning of June the eighth, one in the morning. He speaks again with David Owen a few days later or a follow up interview when things have you know, jailed to get his his and his up to date memories.
And then they have one this one other critical, this critical interview in early August, to sit down interview, which is when David Owen it's very it's It starts out fairly friendly. They talk about the weather, they talk about the fact that David Owen's air conditioning is on the blitz. But in the in the end, David confronts Alec and says,
did you did you kill your wife and son? And so all of a sudden, Elick has gone from a grieving father who has all this sympathy to the main and only suspect in the killing of his wife and son. So very shortly thereafter, he calls Blanca that the housekeeper who knows everything, and asks her to come over, and he's staying at this guest house and is Bloc is
commonly at the guest house. She told me that she kept stocked with his favorite you know, she would have Amazon deliver his cases of his favorite Caprice sons there and his his his favorite snacks. So she goes to the guest house and he rarely asked her to because he doesn't he's constant, He's a whirling dervish. He doesn't commonly sit and have a conversation, so it was rare for her to be called over there, to sit down
on the couch and have him ask her questions. And what he asked her is you know what I was You know what I was wearing that day. I was wearing this Vinnie Vine shirt, meaning this kind of button up Columbia shirt that he was wearing in the video that Paul, a video that Paul had taken when they were playing with a tree that night at Moselle, and he wanted he needed her to say, I remember, oh, yeah, you wore that shirt to work, because that would mean
she could vouch for his what he was wearing. There was a conflict that came up in that third interview about what he was wearing. She was like, no, that's that wasn't what you were wearing. No, I don't, I don't remember it that way, And it really set off, you know, the hair on the back of her neck. She's like, why is he asking me about what he's wearing? And she also knew. She does all the laundry at the house. She can tell tell you exactly when she
puts in the fabric softener. They like certain and they like certain detergent at certain stages of the wash cycle. She irons his t shirts. She when she she talks about putting things away, her hands moved because she knows where they go in the drawer. She knew what he was wearing and she hadn't seen those clothes since. So yeah, So that was a very very strange conversation conversation for Blanca and uh and set off her her hackles about what is going on here?
Tell us about Connor Cook and his attorney and their relationship to the boat crash well.
Connor Cook. Connor Cook is a person who can't even tell you when he met Palmer, not because they've known each other their whole lives. He can't remember when they met because it's been forever. And Connor's father, Marty Cook, was a classmate of Elis. He was actually on the football team. It was this key like key key receiver or a key, you know, key partner on the football team.
So the families go way back. And Connor was on the boat and Connor was the person that Paul was Paul said was driving and that that Elick wanted to create confusion over whether it was Paul or Connor driving. And Connor has said he felt trapped. He felt like he was going to take the fall for Paul in that boat wreck. So and his lawyer was is a lawyer named Joe McCulloch who's very savvy, it's been around a long time, a very well regarded defense lawyer. And he was on He and Connor and his and his
lawyer were on the offense that summer. They were trying to to use the opportunity of the scrutinial on this homicide to bring attention to the boat wreck, and so they were they were, they were filing key documents over the course of that summer to try and get more information out about the boat wreck.
You say that dn R released hundreds of pages of documents and several videos from the boat crash investig gation, and internet sluice scoured it all of it, posting their theories online. So Alex, all these revelations about the family and the way they hid their secrets, everything was piling up on Alex Murdoch, wasn't it.
There was, yes, exactly, There was a huge amount of information coming out of the course of the summer of twenty twenty one. Homicides happened on June seventh, and Paul had ultimately been charged in the death of Mallory Beach in spite of Elex's best effort. He was charged with her death, and he was also charged in the serious injuries to Connor Cook and to Morgandoti, another young woman on the boats girlfriend. But with his death the charges
go away right there. And so with the charges drop the investigation by DNR, which is the State Natural Resources Division,
it's over. So they released thousands of pages of documents in the investigation online and by this point, their subreddits, their Facebook pages, they're all these people who are just really interested in this case, in this family, in the history, and people are just pouring through these documents, finding all sorts of interesting facts and nuggets and putting them together. And and Connor's lawsuit that were his legal filing in
that summer, is of the piece with that. He wanted more information to come out about the boat wreck, to make it clear, hey, not only was I not driving, but they were trying to make it look like I was driving. That's what he wanted to show.
Back at the law firm, Jane Seconder opened an envelope and a check flew out. So tell us about her experience and what she concludes as a result of finding this check.
Sure, so, so all this is happening over the course of the summer, right, you know, June seventh is a homicide. The month of July, all these documents are released by dn R. There's there. It's you know, people magazine in all of the big true crime shows are doing episodes about the murdox. It's a it's a huge story. And then in August he's confronted by sled He talks to
Blanca Simpson about what he's wearing. And then you get into September, Labor Day weekend, that first weekend in September, and Elick's pueri legal is they're still fretting over this missing fee even though he's you know, Eleck was able to cobble together some money and say that he found it. They don't quite believe him. He had enough time over the summer to put together some enough money to throw him off the case, but it doesn't quite make sense.
They still had their suspicions. His peer Leegal goes into his office, which is a no no. She typically doesn't, he is so territorial, but she needs a document and he's not there. He's the grieving father still. She goes into his office and it's just like this black hole of paper and folders and mess and legal text and she picks up a folder on his desk looking for something, and out floats a check and she just rib it.
She's like it fell. It was like out of something out of a movie, like a feather falling to the ground, and it was the missing feed check. And she takes it to Genie Seconder and they're like, oh no. In some respects, they're relieved that they were right, and in other respects they're horrified because their worst fears are realized. Elick is stealing from the law firm that his great grandfather found and this is they find this out on the eve of a Labor Day.
Weekend and they realize they have to fire him, and he is told he has to be fired and he understands.
Corract So Geenie takes her her evidence to the partners and she's very well regarded. She's known all these guys. They went to high school together. And they say, oh no, we got to fire him. And they do that Friday before Labor Day. His brother says, you gotta go, and he typically Elick tries to negotiate. He said, well, can I just you just put me on leave so I can have my health care, so I can get the help I need for my drug addiction. They said, no, you need to go, so they fired him, and this
it's just a huge crisis. It's Friday of Labor Day weekend, which is incredibly everything goes dark for several days and he but he the one thing he says that's so amazing. He's like, I'm just surprised it took you this long to find out. So they fire him on that Friday, and then that Saturday is a day we're all familiar with, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend is the day he calls nine one one yet again about another crisis, another shooting.
This time he said, someone's tried to kill him on the side of the road on Old Sacahatchee Road in Hampton County.
And the description you say is strikingly striking resemblance to Anthony Cook.
Coincidentally, Yes, Anthony's mother, Beverly Cook told me that when she saw, you know, he goes to the hospital and and sled is suspicious. By this point, he's the he's the main suspect the side of the road shooting. I sat on that side of the road for half an hour, I said exactly that where he was. No cars came by in either direction for half an hour, in the
middle of the afternoon. It's the middle of nowhere. They knew his story to na up, but they you know, they play kated em or they took it seriously, and they sent a sketch artist to the hospital there in Savannah where he was being treated for a head wound
in this shooting, and he describes as young man. And Beverly Cook told me she's like her jaw drop when she saw it because it looked just it had a striking resemblance to Anthony Cook, who was the boyfriend of Malory Beach it was, you know, killed in the boat rag in twenty nineteen. She felt like she felt for sure that he was trying to frame Anthony in his attempted suicide and also make it look like somebody who'd been involved or somebody had vengeance from the boat wreck
had been involved in Mozille as well. That was her fear.
Slave investigators find out about the person cousin Eddie and the extent of Alec Murdau's opiate addiction and the money used for that.
Yeah, I mean and Elick in some respects. Elick led them directly to Cousinetti, who literally is his cousin that you can trace their their I've got the family tree. Cousin cousin Eddie's great great great grandfather, Lazarus Murdoch was was brothers to Elex's great great grandfather Josiah Murdock, So they really are cousins distant cousins. But yeah, he's from the hospital. He is trying, I mean, he's Elec Murdoch.
He does this later in jail, he's he's he's getting somebody to make phone calls for him, begging to borrow a phone, and he's trying to pay cash to get somebody to learn him his phone. And finally he makes some phone calls from somebody else's phone and calls his drug dealer, his cousin Edti. But you know, unfortunately, by this point, his brother tells Led book Eleck's up to something. He's making calls from somebody else's phone, and they find
out the person he's calling his Cousinetti. So they go interview him and and and guess what, you know, immediately becomes clear that he's been writing a bunhundreds of thousands of dollars of checks over the course of the summer to this cousin for many reasons. So in some respects he was he led them directly to the person he was who was involved in the shooting on the side of the road.
Let's get to somewhat to the evidence and the breaks and the events that lead to finally Sled making an arrest of Alex Murdoch.
Yeah, I mean, finally, it's probably the operative word, right. The homicides were June seventh, twenty twenty one, and it took him until mid July of twenty twenty two for him to be charged. So it took a very long time, and the investigation was laborious and David everyone talks a lot about this. I think you know in David's background, he's a career officer recently retired actually that he made his start in evidence gathering, right, and footprints and fingerprints,
and the scene was chaotic. It was also disorganized because it was staged, so it was difficult. It was a difficult investigation from the beginning. You know, they caught the case late. They did not they did not seal off the house. Everyone roamed around the main house at Moselle, so they lost key, potentially key evidence up at the house because it was it was there were people everywhere, and then the crime scene itself was not what it
seemed to be. It didn't make sense. So the investigation was was slow and laborious, and there weren't a lot of breaks for many many months, and there were red herrings. The key one was sled thought incorrectly, as it turns out that there was blood on Elick Murdoch's white T shirt that he was wearing the night of the murdocks, and they chased the night of the murders. They chased that false flag for months, to the point where they tested the shirt so many times it was actually destroyed.
It was it was, it was, it was, you know, in pieces and turned black, so that the bloody shirt was was something a key piece of evidence they thought helped them know it was it did not have blood on and after all it was false and then they just they couldn't They couldn't really make a case and they couldn't get down Palmardock's phone, this key piece of evidence. Paul was a very private kid in some respects, and his dad said, nobody knew the code of his phone.
There's absolutely nobody knew the code of his phone. He didn't back it up to the iCloud. It was it was his life. He was on it all day and he was down to two percent every night because he used it all day. But nobody could get into it. And they David, no one said, why don't he try his birthday? It's you know, we're creatures of a habit. Try forty one forty seven is his his birthday at or try you know, it's the address of Mozilla. Tried
his birthday in April, but they were scared. We all, you know, those of us have iPhones know that you try too many codes, it's going to lock forever and eventually wipe the phone. So finally, in March of twenty two, the phone gets turned over to you know, another law enforcement agent's agency to try and put it through a series of protocols to unlock it. And they want to put in some key dates. Is kind of like, you know, to prime the pump for this computer program. They said, well,
is anybody tried his birthday? They try his birthday and March twenty twenty two, you know, almost you know what, ten months after the homicides. Guess what, It opens wide right away and the first thing they find, almost it's the last thing he recorded, which is a video of Cash the dog with injured tail, at you know, eight forty five pm, the night of the homicides. And when they play it, you hear three things. You hear Paul
talking to the dog. You hear Maggie saying oh, there's a there's a he's got a burd in his mouth. It's a guinea. And you can hear Paul say it's a chicken. And then you can hear Paul call that other dog bubba, come here, baba baba. And what it shows is the thing that ELC Murdoch has been denying for almost a year, that he was at the kennels minutes before his wife and son were brutally murdered. It is the lone piece of evidence that cracks the case.
And but for that piece of evidence, Sled would not have been able to bring charges against Elig Murdock.
Let's esses as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. You say, this was the break that they needed. So on top of the charges, the grand jury indicted him on twenty three counts for stealing two point two seven million, and there was all this press attention. Now we have a press and media frenzy, don't we we do?
I mean, and throughout the case it has been there's just something about this case that captured people's attention. It was so shocking. There were so many layers, there were so many dead bodies. I mean, we talked about Mallory Beach. But there was also the death of Gloria Sadderfield, the housekeeper before Blanca, who fell downstairs under mysterious circumstances. There was the death of Stephen Smith, the young man was found on the middle of the road in twenty fifteen,
a classmate of Buster Murdock's. The older son case had never been shock, so this case was. It was just like a huge part of national and international news. And when the anniversary of the homicides came and went June seventh, twenty twenty two, people were wondering, well, will anybody ever be charged? And finally he was in July. So yeah, once he was finally charged, that had off a whole nother cycle. Oh okay, so now we see things in different contexts. But you know, what is the evidence that
the state has. You know, Elick, to his credit, hired too of the most well known and well regarded defense lawyers in the state. And they're like, this is bogus. They got nothing. We're calling their bluff. They called for I was in the courtroom. I can remember this in June of twenty twenty two. They called for a speedy trial. They're like, we need a speedy trial so slig can do their jobs and go out and find the real killers. So they asked for it, and Dick Carputlin later said
he should have been careful what he wished for. The state gave it to him. All of a sudden, we went from not knowing anything about homicides to having a speedy trial that began barely six months after he was charged, that began in January twenty twenty three.
You say the prosecutor was a person named Creighton Waters, and you say you write that he had spent two years becoming the world's foremost student of Alex Murda ever since he heard the phrase the boat case.
You know, Creighton. I was fortunate that Creighton talked to me extensively for this book. And yes, there's no doubt in my mind that Creighton Waters is the world's foremost student of Elec Murdock. I think Creighton Waters knows more about Elic Murdock than Elc Murdoch does. And he is their contemporaries the same age. They were at the University of Sale Carolina at the same time. They didn't know each other and their polar opposites. You know, Creighton is
is five to eight. He's he's he's a head shorter than Elk, but he is he's energetic, he's tough, minded, and he is he has made it his life's mission to prosecute corrupt officials, corrupt people, and he and Elick offended him to his core. So he made he made all the financial case against ELC Murdoch, all the you know, the millions and millions of dollars he stole, which is really Creyton's wheelhouse, the financial corruption. But he also made the murder case, and he built it on the financials.
He built the case, the theory of the case by saying, look, Elick Murdoch had a decade's worth of secrets. He was a mirage, he had his family's name on his shoulder. He couldn't risk it. Everything was at risk that night of June the seventh, twenty twenty one. That's why he did what he did. So I think I think Creighton Waters was I mean, in some respects from central casting. He was the right person to He's the polar opposite
of Elek. He was the right person to decode him and call him out in the courtroom.
What's dramatic is when a defendant, especially like Alec Murda, decides to take the stand, and we haven't described that in this turmoil, this two hundred and sixty five pound person six foot four had lost considerable weight due to the tension and pressure of all of this.
He did. He lost more than sixty pounds over the course of from the time of the homicides to the time he was in the courtroom. So he looked like a different He looked like a different person in many regards.
Tell us as you do as you write some of the mannerisms that he exhibited during taking the stand and some of the more profound moments in that testimony.
Gosh, you know, and I spend I spent quite a bit of time on the trial in the book. It was what I wanted to do. I had the benefit of sitting in there every day for six weeks before court started, and then after we wrapped in the evening and I was in the hallways, I was hearing conversations. I tried to give a bird's eye view of what
it felt like to be in there. What Dacka Reputelin would come back and say to me or to other people in the press corps, trying to spin us what's happening in the elevator when members of the Murdoch family are riding up things of that nature. It was just so dramatic, every minute of it. And Elic Murdoch is He's a creature of intense fascination. And all of a sudden he
was in the room. You're in the room with him every day for six weeks, and you got to my eyes either or on Elick or on the jurors, because I could watch their expressions and how what he was saying was landing. But no, he had a number of very very telling mannerisms over time, and y'all saw it. I mean he he moves his jaw in a really peculiar way back and forth, he shakes forward. He has a habit of kind of moving his body like saying yes when his mouth is saying no. Has his body
is telling us a story? And I tried to describe what I saw him doing both at the defense table and particularly on the stand, because that's what the jurors were watching as well. What I should say about the courtroom, it's tiny. It is tiny. It was designed in the eighteen hundreds and it seats two hundred people, but one hundred people every day were set, right, the jurors, the judge, the lawyers, the witnesses, the family, the press, and you know,
just very law enforcement. So a hundred people were kind of set and then one hundred people in the very back of the public who were waiting a line from four o'clock in the morning to get in. But you know, the jurors in particular, I sat in the jury box and then I went and sat in the witness chair with a you can reach out and it practically touched the jury rail from where he was sitting. So they
watched him up close. They watched him. There was you know, snot pouring out of his nose as he was talking, but there are no tears coming out of his eyes. That's what the jurists told me, that there were no tears coming out of his eyes from their vantage point. So his body was telling a story even as he was saying something else.
In the end, in the closing arguments, Creyton Waters just summarizes the motive, the means, the opportunity, and the consciousness of guilt. Tell us just briefly how we summed everything up and why Alec Murdach had murdered.
Yeah, he said that Alec Murdoch. It was the perfect storm and if you think about the extraordinary, it just still to this day gives me chills. June seventh of twenty twenty one, everything was happening at once delC Murdoc, right, I mean, his dad was dying. Genie confronted him and
we also we didn't mention but I should. On June tenth, he was facing this hearing in the boat Wreck where Mark Tinsley, who was the Mallory Beach's family's lawyer, was finally going to force him to turn over his financials. So all that was happening on June seven. So what Creighton Waters argued in his closing argument was that you know, it was a perfect storm and Elec had had to
do something to change the subject. And as a personal injury lawyer, whose main what personal injury lawyers deal with is emotion, the emotion the loss the blood money that is due to someone who lost something of value their life or their limb or their loved one. So he understands emotion and he said this was an ultimate play to change the subject and pray on people's emotion and go from a person who was facing ruin to a
grieving father and widow. And that's what he did. That's what Creighton argued, that's what he did on the night of June seventh, and it almost worked. Right the course of the summer, he got the money back for the seven ninety two he was he put off. You put off detection for a number of months until that magical check, you know, feel like a feather to the ground.
Absolutely. You talk about the means that they had never found the weapons, and yet they had found. You write a raincoat that had bullet residue or that it seemed to be had been used to carry one of the weapons.
Yeah, what I what I try to do in the book. The prosecution was limited in the dots they could connect, right, they can introduce this raincoat that is massive blue raincoat that's covered in gunshot residue on the inside, covered so much they stopped counting the particles they are too many. And the testimony was from the night nurse at Eleck's parents' house where he you know, he was the night he went for his alibi the night of the killings.
The testimony was he showed up with that blue raincoat in his arms, wrapped around something, seemingly wrapped around something, and hid it in a part of the house nobody went to upstairs because they didn't use the upstairs nobody was mobile anymore. But the prosecution couldn't really tie a bow.
They couldn't say, Okay, our theory is that he did X, and then he did Y, and then he did D. They could give you the piece of Z, which is the gun shot resnue code, but they couldn't say, we think he wrapped the guns in it and then he got rid of the guns. And you know, so I tried to do that a little bit more for the reader, a lot more actually in the book. But no, he's but it is, you know, the in terms of the means, the guns still are missing. Nobody they never showed up.
Nobody knows where they are. And that was a key hole and for one jear in particular, the juror who was disqualified the last day of the trial. But yeah, but the means were, you know, they had to kind of build the case around the missing murder weapons, which in the end, you know, enough of the jury believed they did effectively.
And you he writes about the opportunity, the opportunity that they were at those kennels that night, and he had an opportunity in his mind to create time for himself and cover up things for a time.
Correct. I think he you know, the evidence showed he lured them there. He lured them there. That was the opportunity. And you know, Elex said something funny to Maggie's sister, Marian Proctor. She testified to this. He had said, you know, whoever did this had been thinking about it a long time. And Creighton Waters argued that this had been sort of in the back of his mind. This is I think that this is it was an escape patch. If the worse comes to worse, maybe this would be what happened.
I think, you know. And Kenny Kinzie, who was the evidence specialist, told me he also thinks he snapped. He thinks two things are true. He thinks it had been in the back of his mind. Maybe he's a possibility, but something snapped that night. We know and as you mentioned about the drugs that Blanca found on the bedside
for his father, the cancer drugs. But we also know that she had found and she told told me this is in the book that there she had found baggies of empty baggies of drugs in Maggie and Eleck's bathroom trash can. She'd meant to take him out, she forgot. She fears that Maggie found them that night. And he, you know, because he had been withdrawing the Sunday before the Monday of the homicides. He'd been withdrawing that afternoon in Colombia a baseball tournament. So you know, the opportunity
was there. And whether he planned it or snapped or both, I think those things are both possible and likely.
You're right. In the epilogue that November twenty eight, twenty twenty three, nearly nine months after he was convicted of the murders, Alex Murdoch stood in front of Judge Newman one more time to be sentenced for his financial crimes. Why was it important for them to get a significant sentence in these financial crimes.
Well, it was critical in the eyes of create Waters in the Attorney General's office to get a huge sentence in the financial crimes as an insurance policy because in recently the State Supreme Court has agreed to hear a key a key argument in his appeal for a new trial on the homicide charges. So in the event that the homicide charges there's ever a new trial, or there's ever an overturning of that verdict, the state wanted an insurance policy that said Elik Murdock would never see the
light of day. So they negotiated a plea and all of the financials that the state brought to ensure that Elik would go away to prison for a very very long time until he's a very very old man, regardless of what happens with any problems, any individualities in the homicide trial.
You're right that agent Owen still had years of work ahead done, tangled the remaining loose ends of the mess Alex had left behind. What were they still searching for after all of this time?
Where's the money? Right? I mean where's the money? The FEDS, who had their own cases against Elc Murdoch say there's at least four million dollars in missing money. I think that's a very conservative estimate. There's money out there and they would like to find it. But also there is concern, there is concern that somebody helped Elic Murdoch clean the scene that night. There were multiple tire tracks out there
in wet grass. They were testimony that effect, the guns are gone, evidence is gone, the scene was sanitized in some respect. So I think there is also still some sense that if somebody in fact helped Elec Murdoch that night, they would like to find him.
And you say they were still trying to find to prove who had killed Stephen Smith and what if anything the murders had to do with his death, and also still investigating the death of Gloria Sadderfield, like you had mentioned, and they had exhumed her body and conducted a second autopsy.
Well, I think, and we still don't know about the death of Steven Smith, and we and we may never know. But what we do know is that there are people of interest, and none of them is Buster Murdock. And Buster has been the elder son who was who is Stephen's classmate, has been adamant that he had absolutely nothing to do with Stephen's death, and has actually brought defamation lawsuits against some of the documentary makers for implying that he did. So we don't know who killed Stephen Smith.
We may never know. Unfortunately I hope we will, and I know the family desperately hopes we will, and with Laurie Sadderfield, I think her family is satisfied, sadly that her death was tragic but accidental, and she may may have had some sort of health event that led to her fall potentially, But what's not in dispute is that he robbed her children, took million three million dollars that belonged to them, and never gave them a penny. That's
that's not dispute. So yes, there is. There are a number of unresolved questions and we're not sure when will know the answers.
You also right in the end, there is still controversy over the defense attorney Jim Griffith and his behavior regarding Alex Murda, but we'll leave that for the readers to discover. I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about your book, The Devil at His Elbow, Alex Murdau and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty. I want to thank you very much for this interview for people that might want to check out further about this story. Do you have a website or do you do any social media?
Well, thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed this conversation. If enjoys the right word about such a such a tragic case. Yes, please find me on Twitter at v Boreline at v b a U E R L E I N or on Instagram at Valerie dot Borline. And I do have a website which is also creatively my nameborline dot com, and it'll give you information about the book and kind words that people have said about
it so far. And I hope that your listeners will get a chance to read it and let me know what they think.
Thank you so much, Valorie Borline, The Devil at his Elbow, Alex Murdaut and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night.
Thank you, thank you,