Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
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Speaker 2: Good Evening, Power, Privilege and Blood. This is the definitive
Speaker 2: and thrilling true story of Alex Murdau's violent downfall from
Speaker 2: a veteran Wall Street journal reporters become an authority on
Speaker 2: the case. Alex Murdau was a benevolent dictator, resident of
Speaker 2: the South Carolina Trial Lawyers Association, a political boss, a
Speaker 2: part time prosecutor, and a partner in his family's law firm.
Speaker 2: He was always ready with a favor, a drink, and
Speaker 2: an invitation to Mozelle, his family's seventeen hundred acre hunting estate.
Speaker 2: The murder name ignited respect and fear for one hundred miles.
Speaker 2: When he murdered his wife Maggie and son Paul at
Speaker 2: Mozelle on a dark summer night, the fragile facade of
Speaker 2: Alex's world could no longer hold his forefathers had covered
Speaker 2: up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad, crossing, a
Speaker 2: bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder
Speaker 2: of a pregnant lover. Alex, too almost walked away from
Speaker 2: his unspeakable crimes, with his reputation intact, But his downfall
Speaker 2: was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes,
Speaker 2: and a fateful decision by an old friend who'd finally
Speaker 2: seen enough. Why would a man who at everything kill
Speaker 2: his wife and grown son. To unwind the roots of
Speaker 2: Alex's room, Award winning journalist Valerie Borlin reported not just
Speaker 2: from the court house every day, but also along the
Speaker 2: back roads and through the tidal marshes of South Carolina's
Speaker 2: Low Country. When the jurors made their pilgrimage to the
Speaker 2: crime scene, trying to envision Maggie and Paul's last moments,
Speaker 2: she walked right behind them, sensing the ghosts that haunt
Speaker 2: the murdas now shattered legacy. Through masterful research and cinematic writing,
Speaker 2: The Devil at His Elbow is a transporting journey through
Speaker 2: Alex's life, the night of the murders and the investigation
Speaker 2: that culminated in a trial that held tens of millions spellbound.
Speaker 2: With their stunning insights and fearless instinct for the truth.
Speaker 2: Borline uncovers layers of the Murdaw mystery case that have
Speaker 2: not been told. The book that we're featuring this evening
Speaker 2: is The Devil at His Elbow Alex Murda and the
Speaker 2: Fall of a Southern Dynasty, with my special guest, National
Speaker 2: affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal and author Valerie Borline.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much for this interview and welcome to
Speaker 2: the program. Valerie Borline, good morning, Good morning, and thank
Speaker 2: you so much for this interview, and congratulations on this book,
Speaker 2: The Devil at His Elbow.
Speaker 3: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2: Tell us how you came to be involved with this story.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm from the South. I grew up one county
Speaker 3: north of the South Carolina line in North Carolina, and
Speaker 3: so i have followed politics in South Carolina for a
Speaker 3: really long time. I used to work in Colombia and
Speaker 3: the capitol, and so I'm very familiar with kind of
Speaker 3: the collegiate. I guess I could call it collegial would
Speaker 3: be the term of art, but really the good old
Speaker 3: boy system that still is pervasive in South Carolina politics,
Speaker 3: and so I follow I follow South Carolina stories as
Speaker 3: part of my job at the Wall Street Journal, and
Speaker 3: this story was percolating for a couple of years. You know,
Speaker 3: there was the boat crash in twenty nineteen that I
Speaker 3: was aware of, involving the death of Mallory Beach, and
Speaker 3: then when the homicides happened, it was really shocking. So
Speaker 3: it wasn't national news immediately in the rest of the
Speaker 3: country or the rest of the world, but in South
Speaker 3: Carolina it was big news when Maggie and Paul Murdoch
Speaker 3: were killed on June seventh. So I was following along
Speaker 3: and just out of interest, really, and a top at
Speaker 3: of mine at the Journal reached out and said, Hey,
Speaker 3: are you following this case in South Carolina? And I
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, I'm aware of it, but I'm not
Speaker 3: sure what the Wall Street Journal version of this is, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, we care about business and we care about power,
Speaker 3: and it wasn't immediately clear to me, oh, this is
Speaker 3: a Wall Street Journal story. And he's like, Val, you know,
Speaker 3: sometimes a great story is just a freaking great story,
Speaker 3: and he was right, and so I actually it was
Speaker 3: on my radar very early on in June of twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one, and I made my first trip to Hampton
Speaker 3: in July of twenty twenty one, so it came on
Speaker 3: my radar out of interest and then also just because
Speaker 3: it was pretty clear immediately that this was a really
Speaker 3: fascinating story.
Speaker 2: You say your book is based on hundreds of hours
Speaker 2: of interviews and includes scenes witnessed over four months of
Speaker 2: reporting in South Carolina. You were in the courtroom for
Speaker 2: every major moment in Alex's legal saga, from his initial
Speaker 2: bond hearing in October twenty twenty one to his hearing
Speaker 2: on his request for a new trial in January twenty
Speaker 2: and twenty four. In this book project, you found out
Speaker 2: really what the Murdoch family represented in this area in
Speaker 2: South Carolina. Tell us what you found about that family.
Speaker 2: And before we talk about the events preceding the murder,
Speaker 2: you talked about the boat crash in twenty nineteen. And
Speaker 2: we're doing this interview considering that many most people that
Speaker 2: will listen to this story have a certain grasp of
Speaker 2: the story from certain things like the Netflix series and
Speaker 2: various podcasts and just the social media itself and reporting
Speaker 2: well I found.
Speaker 3: You know, it may be surprising to those of us
Speaker 3: that live in cities, but I don't think it's really
Speaker 3: super surprising to people that live in small towns or
Speaker 3: rural areas that it's still common, particularly in the Deep South,
Speaker 3: to have one family or kind of one, you know,
Speaker 3: one political boss maybe that runs things, that's the patron.
Speaker 3: And what I found in Hampton, South Carolina, where this
Speaker 3: story is set, the Murdoch family had been that family
Speaker 3: for more than one hundred years. And you just can't
Speaker 3: overstate the case. Right if you wanted to be not
Speaker 3: just run for sheriff, but if you wanted to be
Speaker 3: a sheriff's deputy, if you wanted to be a county commissioner,
Speaker 3: if you wanted to work for the local road department.
Speaker 3: You know, if you want it, particularly if you want
Speaker 3: to run for judge, you had to have the blessing
Speaker 3: of the Murdochs. And they ran the civil justice side.
Speaker 3: They ran this big, powerful law firm that was by
Speaker 3: far the economic engine of Hampton, but they also ran
Speaker 3: the criminal courts, so they had immense amountpower if you
Speaker 3: were if they could make they could make a dui
Speaker 3: go away, they could make you know they could make
Speaker 3: more serious things go away, and then if you happen
Speaker 3: to be on a jury later, or a family member was,
Speaker 3: you might remember that they did you a favor. So
Speaker 3: what I found was that this family had a huge
Speaker 3: amount of influence and power in the community where they
Speaker 3: operated for one hundred years.
Speaker 2: Tell us about the situation in terms of you said
Speaker 2: he was the law. The Murdoch was the law. But
Speaker 2: tell us about his law firm. And before we talk
Speaker 2: about this boat.
Speaker 3: Crash, well, the law firm Hampton, South Carolina, and really
Speaker 3: the entire kind of five counties where the Murdochs were
Speaker 3: most powerful in the southeastern corner of South Carolina. It's
Speaker 3: very rural, it's very poor, it's predominantly black for the
Speaker 3: most part. And the law firm is a play. It's
Speaker 3: a personal injury firm where you don't necessarily hire a
Speaker 3: law You don't hire our lawyer at the hourly rate, right,
Speaker 3: not like you would think about it. But if there's
Speaker 3: a bad wreck or God forbid a fatality, you would
Speaker 3: hire the Murdoch law firm and pay them forty percent
Speaker 3: of whatever judgment you might get. And in a place
Speaker 3: where the road are really some of the most dangerous
Speaker 3: in the United States, and in this part of of
Speaker 3: the country, in the place where very blue collar, so
Speaker 3: a lot of the jobs are quite dangerous. There is
Speaker 3: an immense amount of personal injury work. And the law
Speaker 3: firm just became this behemoth in our part of the world,
Speaker 3: in the rural south. And you know they if you
Speaker 3: go to Hampton, I can see it in my mind.
Speaker 3: It's this. It's this poor downtown, you know, a couple
Speaker 3: of streets, most of them boarded up, and then you
Speaker 3: have this three million dollar, you know, brick edifice that
Speaker 3: that's built to last forever. And in keeping with their
Speaker 3: history of a one hundred years, they've always said they
Speaker 3: wanted to be so well known. They never have to
Speaker 3: hang a shingle. And there's no sign out front. Everyone
Speaker 3: just knows that's the Mordocoli Firm, you know it for
Speaker 3: one hundred miles. That's where it is.
Speaker 2: Now, let's get to this fast forward for our audience
Speaker 2: that there is a boat crash involving his son. So
Speaker 2: what happens in this boat crash, but also what is
Speaker 2: the reaction and what is the behavior from Alex Murdach.
Speaker 3: Well, the boat crash is the lynchpin that that changes
Speaker 3: everything for the Murdoch family. The boat crash happened in
Speaker 3: February of twenty nineteen. There were three young couples going
Speaker 3: out and it's called Wright. It's February going out on
Speaker 3: a boat to an oyster roast, which is a big,
Speaker 3: a big party in the low Country. And they took
Speaker 3: the boat to avoid DUI checkpoints, to avoid getting pulled
Speaker 3: over because they were all underage and they knew they
Speaker 3: were going to be drinking. And so Paul Murdoch, who
Speaker 3: was Alex's younger son, he was nineteen at the time,
Speaker 3: was driving his father's boat and they went to the
Speaker 3: six young people went to this this oyster roast. They
Speaker 3: drank a lot of beer over time. The evidence shows
Speaker 3: that Paul had nineteen drinks in the course of you know,
Speaker 3: eight hours or however long it was. And then on
Speaker 3: the way back, Paul and particular was very drunk and
Speaker 3: very belligerent and started getting angry at the other young
Speaker 3: people in the boat. Is driving erratically and eventually even
Speaker 3: confronts his girlfriend who's trying to get him to calm down.
Speaker 3: He slaps her face, he spits on her. This ride
Speaker 3: is going horribly awry at two o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 3: in the dark, in the cold, on the waterways in
Speaker 3: South Carolina, and Paul is angry, the young people later said,
Speaker 3: and sped up the boat to twenty nine miles an
Speaker 3: hour and hit at full force, hit the pilings of
Speaker 3: a bridge and crashed. And three of the young people
Speaker 3: went to the water, and one of them, Mallory Beach,
Speaker 3: who was nineteen, never surfaced and she drowned. And so
Speaker 3: this creates just a catastrophic event, not just for the
Speaker 3: life of her family, who was devastated, but also for
Speaker 3: the Murdocks because by this point Elec Murdoch had a
Speaker 3: lot of secrets, and this boat crash involving his son
Speaker 3: threatened to have them all pouring out into the surface.
Speaker 2: Besides the a ensuing lawsuit that Alec Murdoch fears on
Speaker 2: behalf of his son, what does he do to try
Speaker 2: to cover up the crime?
Speaker 3: Essentially, Yeah, they're kind of two main threats to Elick
Speaker 3: Murdoch at this point. He's a personal injury lawyer, right,
Speaker 3: he knows immediately there's the threat of a civil lawsuit
Speaker 3: he has filed. He has filed himself lawsuits involving boat wrecks.
Speaker 3: He knows the stakes if he isssued, what secrets could
Speaker 3: come out in terms of his financial his financial crimes
Speaker 3: that he's been committee for a decade at this point.
Speaker 3: But even more than that, the more immediate threat the
Speaker 3: night it's you know, two twenty in the morning when
Speaker 3: this happens. Elick Murdoch is at the hospital in Beaufort,
Speaker 3: South Carolina, in a little over an hour. I mean
Speaker 3: it's more than an hour away. He drove hugely fast
Speaker 3: to get to the hospital with his father, Randolph Murdoch,
Speaker 3: the third who is the most recent prosecutor in that area,
Speaker 3: because the snakes are for his son, Paul Murdoch. If
Speaker 3: she dies as a fear and as it turned out
Speaker 3: she did drown, Alec the driver of the boat, would
Speaker 3: be facing a very long prison term, a very long
Speaker 3: prison term, and he knew that right so his family's
Speaker 3: prosecutors they prosecuted those types of cases. So what he
Speaker 3: needs to do immediately after the boat wreck in the
Speaker 3: hospital is talk to the witnesses, meaning the other the
Speaker 3: other end people in the boat and get their story
Speaker 3: straight and so confusion about who's driving. To protect his
Speaker 3: son from a long bid in South Carolina prison, which
Speaker 3: is a place it's very difficult to be It's not
Speaker 3: it's it's it's one of the more it's it's one
Speaker 3: of the more difficult states to be incarcerated in terms
Speaker 3: of just conditions. Right, he was trying to spare him that,
Speaker 3: and then he was also trying to spare all these
Speaker 3: secrets coming out, so you can you can that evening
Speaker 3: he had a lot of doubt to sew and the
Speaker 3: evidence shows he really did that very effectively.
Speaker 2: Actually, you said that he also had secrets regarding the
Speaker 2: financial crimes that he had perpetrated on his clients, and
Speaker 2: we find out his own law firm for over ten years.
Speaker 2: So tell us about that other pressure and where was
Speaker 2: he feeling that pressure from specifically.
Speaker 3: Well, Alec was living two lives at least, But on
Speaker 3: the surface he was a hail fellow, well met he
Speaker 3: was everybody was like, hey bo, which is a Southern thing,
Speaker 3: hey bo, how you doing. He was everybody's best friend.
Speaker 3: He you know, if you look at pictures, he's always
Speaker 3: got his arms slung around the person next to him.
Speaker 3: He is the life of the party and the big
Speaker 3: man in town and really in that part of the world.
Speaker 3: That's the surface, but underneath he has been stealing at
Speaker 3: this point twenty nineteen from his clients for well over
Speaker 3: ten years. He was, you know, this personal injury lawyer,
Speaker 3: and he would meet clients who were at their lowest moment.
Speaker 3: Right they've been through something catastrophic, either they or a
Speaker 3: loved one had been desperately injured or killed. He's meeting
Speaker 3: them at a time where they really need an ally.
Speaker 3: And he is a person with a reputation whose firm
Speaker 3: has a as a stellar reputation for helping people. And
Speaker 3: so what he was doing at that time was taking
Speaker 3: advantage of the poorest of the poor at their most
Speaker 3: vulnerable moment. And for example, he had clients who were
Speaker 3: motherless girls. Their mother had been killed in a terrible
Speaker 3: word explorer wreck on I ninety five going through South Carolina,
Speaker 3: and you know, he was he told them one thing,
Speaker 3: that he got them all this money, and then he
Speaker 3: was taking their money over the course of years, and
Speaker 3: he would tell clients that he got them a million dollars.
Speaker 3: You'll never believe I got you a million dollars. Nobody
Speaker 3: else could have done that for you. And they're thrilled, right,
Speaker 3: they get, you know, sixty percent of a million dollars,
Speaker 3: because what he got three million dollars. Not only did
Speaker 3: he take his forty percent fee, he took the delta
Speaker 3: from what he told them he had. So he was
Speaker 3: robbing his clients at that point and knew it, and
Speaker 3: knew that if anybody started looking into his bank accounts
Speaker 3: and records they would find evidence of that. So he
Speaker 3: had those secrets to keep that night as well.
Speaker 2: You write about Jane Seconder, which is the chief financial
Speaker 2: officer at his law firm, tell us about this rather
Speaker 2: large check discrepancy.
Speaker 3: Sure, So Genie secondary was is a formidable woman. She's
Speaker 3: the chief, the chief financial officer at the law firm.
Speaker 3: And she also has known Alex since high school. You
Speaker 3: can look at their high school in yearbook and she's
Speaker 3: on the home court. He was the prom king, he
Speaker 3: was the quarterback. They've known each other forever and they're
Speaker 3: they're in each other's circle social circles in this small town.
Speaker 3: So Jeannie knows him as a bullshit artist, is what
Speaker 3: she is. What she calls him going way back, but
Speaker 3: he is he's the great grandson of the founder of
Speaker 3: this law firm. He's a partner, his brother's a partner,
Speaker 3: his father's in the law firm.
Speaker 2: You know, she.
Speaker 3: Gives him a certain amount of deference, but his finances
Speaker 3: have always been a little bit hinky within the law firm.
Speaker 2: There.
Speaker 3: He had been fudging expenses on his credit card. So
Speaker 3: she's a little bit got her, you know her, she's
Speaker 3: she's a little bit sensitive to what he's doing to
Speaker 3: start with. And then there's this matter of a big
Speaker 3: missing fee, the seven hundred and ninety two thousand dollars
Speaker 3: fee that was that was due to the law firm
Speaker 3: from a case that Eleck was involved with, and the
Speaker 3: check for the expenses came in, but the check for
Speaker 3: the fee itself didn't come in, and typically at the
Speaker 3: law firm, those two checks would come in together. So
Speaker 3: she's looking for this seven hundred and ninety two thousand
Speaker 3: dollars that's missing. His peer legal had been asking Eleck
Speaker 3: about it for a number of weeks and he's sort
Speaker 3: of been putting her off. And finally on June seventh
Speaker 3: of twenty one, Genie really needs to figure this out.
Speaker 3: She's got to reconcile the books, so she she goes
Speaker 3: to Elec's office and he's standing outside the foul cabinet,
Speaker 3: leaning on the foul cabinet, talking to people, you know,
Speaker 3: shooting the breeze. And she walks up to him and
Speaker 3: she's she's about as big as a minute. She's she's
Speaker 3: she's petite, and he's six foot four and he's too,
Speaker 3: sixty five a two hundred and sixty five pounds at
Speaker 3: this point. And she said he gave her a look
Speaker 3: just like a like a look that just told her
Speaker 3: to kiss off, and a dirty look, like the like
Speaker 3: the kind she'd never seen from him, and said, what
Speaker 3: do you want from me now? And she said, I
Speaker 3: need to need, I need to talk to you. And
Speaker 3: so they go into his office and close the door
Speaker 3: and she confronts him. She says, oh, like, you know,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask
Speaker 3: you about this missing money. I've got to get a
Speaker 3: straight answer from you. And when you know, right then
Speaker 3: the phone rings and it's his older brother calling to
Speaker 3: tell them that their father, Randolf Murdock third, is at
Speaker 3: the end. He's been he's been dying over the course
Speaker 3: of months. He's finally close to the end. And they're
Speaker 3: rushing him to the hospital. So there's this there's this
Speaker 3: crisis that afternoon at work where he's finally confronted not
Speaker 3: about the boat rack necessarily in all those finances, but
Speaker 3: about a separate matter of seven hundred and ninety two
Speaker 3: thousand dollars that he is that's missing from the law firm.
Speaker 3: And he narrowly escapes a really difficult conversation because another
Speaker 3: crisis in his life, his father, his protector, is dying.
Speaker 2: You take us to June seventh, and Alex is at
Speaker 2: this property called Moselle and he went out and he
Speaker 2: saw Blanca. Can you tell us what Blanca found regarding
Speaker 2: Randolph Murdoch IID and some of his medication.
Speaker 3: Sure. So, Blanca Simpson is a hugely important person in
Speaker 3: the life of the family. Blanc is sort of the
Speaker 3: glue that holds their home together. She's the housekeeper, but
Speaker 3: she also cooks for them. She runs errand she catches checks.
Speaker 3: She's Maggie's person that helps run Mozelle, which is this massive,
Speaker 3: this massive estate, seventeen hundred acres, so essentially twice the
Speaker 3: size of Central Park in New York. It's a massive Wow.
Speaker 3: The Blanca is at Mozelle as often as the family is,
Speaker 3: or more so. She knows it like the back of
Speaker 3: her hand. And she's worried about Elex. She knows that
Speaker 3: he's been used opioids for a number of years. She
Speaker 3: has a practice of finding She finds, you know, zip
Speaker 3: hot baggies of pills and residue in his pocket when
Speaker 3: she's doing the laundry. There's a little red cup in
Speaker 3: the cabinet over the washing machine where she puts that
Speaker 3: those pills. So she knows he uses pills, and it's
Speaker 3: an open secret within the household that he has been
Speaker 3: using for a number of years. So she's aware of
Speaker 3: the the opioids. She's aware of booze, there's they're a
Speaker 3: heavily drinking family. But what really concerns her is in
Speaker 3: the weeks leading up to June seventh, she found palliative
Speaker 3: care drugs, end of life drugs that were on Elex's
Speaker 3: bedside table, prescribed to his father who'd been dying of
Speaker 3: lung cancer. So she's really worried about that. Right, he's
Speaker 3: staking not just opioids, but she fears that he's also
Speaker 3: taking these very strong, barbituous or sedative drugs that are
Speaker 3: meant to soothe the end of life.
Speaker 2: Now you talk about that. Because his father is in
Speaker 2: dire straits in the hospital, he uses as this as
Speaker 2: a He calls Maggie and wants her to return to
Speaker 2: Moselle and tells her why, and also wants Paul to
Speaker 2: come there as well. Tell us about this conversation, the
Speaker 2: call for these people to return to Moselle and the
Speaker 2: reason why sure.
Speaker 3: Which it's shocking if you look at this incredible eighty
Speaker 3: eight page timeline. That's that sled. It's not kond On
Speaker 3: a law force division to put together. It's shocking if
Speaker 3: you look and you kind of like cross reference alex
Speaker 3: phone records. He's confronted by Genie Seconder right at the
Speaker 3: law firm in the afternoon. Then it gets the call
Speaker 3: that his father is dying. And that's such a crucial moment.
Speaker 3: His father is not just his closest friend and companion.
Speaker 3: His father's his protector, his father when he's his father's
Speaker 3: loaned him a million dollars over the course of time
Speaker 3: just to bail him out of one one financial strait
Speaker 3: or another. His father also is hugely influential. He was
Speaker 3: the he was the prosecutor for decades in that part
Speaker 3: of the world. So his father is is it's not
Speaker 3: just a person he loves, it's a person he needs.
Speaker 3: So within minutes of getting that call that his father's
Speaker 3: at the end. You can see, he calls Maggie. You
Speaker 3: can see he calls her and she doesn't pick up
Speaker 3: right away, and and then you know, but then she does,
Speaker 3: and he asks her to come home, and she calls
Speaker 3: her sister and she's like, I don't know, I really
Speaker 3: don't want to go, and her sister says you should,
Speaker 3: And he calls Paul, and he asked Paul to come
Speaker 3: home to Mozille, and Paul is not planning to he
Speaker 3: comes anyway. So it's it's stunning that he lures them
Speaker 3: both home within minutes of being confronted over this missing money.
Speaker 3: It's it's very the prosecution made a case that's very damning,
Speaker 3: the immediate nature of those those requests who come home
Speaker 3: that night when neither of them have been planning to.
Speaker 2: That Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: So you write that Alex got to Mozelle estate first
Speaker 2: and about six forty three pm, and then Paul arrives,
Speaker 2: So what do they do? Where do they go? Once
Speaker 2: Paul arrives at the Mozelle.
Speaker 3: You know, they ride the property. It's a bucolic night, right,
Speaker 3: it's almost almost spun and amber. It's beautiful at sunset
Speaker 3: or at dusk. In the low country, it's this vast
Speaker 3: expanse of pine trees and swamp, you know, food plots
Speaker 3: for hunting. So they ride the property together. They go
Speaker 3: check on some sunflowers that they'd planted to lord doves.
Speaker 3: They were dying, so they needed to get those in shape.
Speaker 3: So they made a plan for how to replant these sunflowers.
Speaker 3: They went and checked on some fruit trees that were
Speaker 3: kind of Alec's pet project. One of them wouldn't stand
Speaker 3: up straight, so Elk is following with it trying to
Speaker 3: get it to stand up straight. They crossed, you know
Speaker 3: Mozelle road over into the other side of the property
Speaker 3: to go to the target shoot for a couple of rounds,
Speaker 3: and you know, they just they spend time together. And
Speaker 3: Elick has said and many of it Paul's friends say
Speaker 3: Paul was a delightful person to be around at when
Speaker 3: he wasn't drunk, he was he could be kind, he
Speaker 3: could be funny, and so you know, Alex says, they
Speaker 3: are just having a good time. That you would father
Speaker 3: and son writing this beautiful property that you love. And
Speaker 3: all the evidence shows that that Mozelle was Paul's haven.
Speaker 3: It was his perfect place. He wanted to spend the
Speaker 3: rest of his life there. He had a plan to
Speaker 3: start a logging business there with his friend Anthony Cook,
Speaker 3: Mallory Beach's boyfriend. So they were at the place they
Speaker 3: both loved best, having to hang as father and son.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the kennels. And you say that Paul
Speaker 2: was taking care of a puppy for a friend. So
Speaker 2: tell us the role of the kennels in this story.
Speaker 3: Sure, and you know, I had the chance to be
Speaker 3: at Mozille and the kennels are their open air right
Speaker 3: their cover, but they're open air and they house you know,
Speaker 3: there are a dozen of these kennels on a concrete
Speaker 3: pad and they house a number of dogs and including
Speaker 3: the family dogs who are you know, eat twice a
Speaker 3: day and are labs. And then the hunting dogs who
Speaker 3: eat once a day and are more you know, they're
Speaker 3: they're meant to work, the working dogs, and so Paul.
Speaker 3: They had a number of anibals there. They typically had
Speaker 3: about six. And that week Paul was taking care of
Speaker 3: his best friend. His neighbor, Rogan Gibson, had a puppy,
Speaker 3: a chocolate lab puppy named Cash, and he was taking
Speaker 3: care of the puppy forum because Rogan was working out
Speaker 3: of town and they were worried because there was like
Speaker 3: a hot spot on the dog's tail, and so so
Speaker 3: they were taking special care of this puppy because they
Speaker 3: did didn't really know. They knew something was wrong with them,
Speaker 3: but they didn't really know what.
Speaker 2: You take us to nine forty six, three hours or
Speaker 2: so after Alex had arrived at Mozelle, and apparently he
Speaker 2: calls Maggie's phone and there's no answer, and he calls
Speaker 2: Paul's phone nine seven, and then he texts a message
Speaker 2: to Maggie call me babe. And then there was a
Speaker 2: friend that called that nine fifty seven the Paul and
Speaker 2: there was no answer. Then you take us to ten
Speaker 2: o six PM. A dispatcher at the Hampton County Sheriff's
Speaker 2: Office gets a nine on one call.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it gives me chills. I can hear that call
Speaker 3: on my mind. They get a call from a hysterical
Speaker 3: Elec Murdoch. And when you first hear that call, it's
Speaker 3: still a rarshock test for some people. He's either you know,
Speaker 3: he sounds, he sounds, his voice is high, he's he's
Speaker 3: breathing hard, and he says, you know, I'm Elc Murdoch
Speaker 3: at forty one forty seven Mozell Road. I need I
Speaker 3: need help immediately. My wife and child have been shot badly.
Speaker 3: He's in shock, he's crying, he's running around that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that call comes in and starts everything rolling to this
Speaker 3: incredible you know, this incredible chronology of that night.
Speaker 2: You write that a sergeant Daniel Green arrives and he
Speaker 2: parks near those kennels and he saw a shotgun leaning
Speaker 2: against the suv. Then he asked Alec Murda for his story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, we talked a little bit about
Speaker 3: how remote Mozille is. This will give you a sense
Speaker 3: for it. So Daniel Green is in downtown Walterborough, which
Speaker 3: is in Collington County, and as is Mozille. He knows
Speaker 3: it's going to take him twenty minutes to get from
Speaker 3: Walterborough where he is, to Mozelle. And he beats feet right.
Speaker 3: He runs lights and siren to get out there, still
Speaker 3: takes him twenty minutes, and it's so dark and so isolated.
Speaker 3: Even though he has GPS and he knows where he's going,
Speaker 3: he misses the term, so by the time he gets there,
Speaker 3: it's twenty minutes after the nine one one call comes in.
Speaker 3: And he rolls up on this quiet, quiet scene and
Speaker 3: he sees he parks near the kennels, and he sees
Speaker 3: he sees a young man lying face down on the
Speaker 3: kennel concrete pad. He sees a woman face down, you know,
Speaker 3: a few steps away, and then he sees this tall, redheaded,
Speaker 3: sobbing six foot four to sixty pounds man pacing, and
Speaker 3: he sees a shotgun leaning up against a suburban with
Speaker 3: a you know, big suv with the flashing lights on.
Speaker 3: So he's just up on this very quiet place, in
Speaker 3: this very chaotic, tiny crime scene, in the middle of
Speaker 3: the night, in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 2: He tests Alec for GCR gun shot residue, and he
Speaker 2: also notes that when he asks him for anything that
Speaker 2: Alec is not shaking at all, not really nervous.
Speaker 3: That's right. He sees the shotgun leaning up against the
Speaker 3: you know, the tire of the suburban. He's questioning Alec
Speaker 3: and he realizes, you know, he takes the gun this
Speaker 3: officer and puts it in his car. And he's talking
Speaker 3: to Alec and another deputy comes up and they need
Speaker 3: to test his hands for GSR for gunshot residue, and
Speaker 3: they do and test positive because he had been holding
Speaker 3: He said he'd been holding that shotgun. He later said,
Speaker 3: told about the target shooting that he supposedly did with Paul.
Speaker 3: So it's not surprising the GSR on there. But what
Speaker 3: might have been surprising as the deputy who tested his
Speaker 3: hands said they were not shaking at all. He seemed
Speaker 3: relatively calm and aware of what of everything that was
Speaker 3: happening around him, very aware of his surroundings for someone
Speaker 3: who'd been to such trauma so shortly ago.
Speaker 2: Tell us how Deputy Rutland gets involved from the Sheriff's office,
Speaker 2: but also how the you mentioned this acronym SLED SLED agents,
Speaker 2: So what does that stand for and how do they
Speaker 2: become involved and what is their role in this investigation?
Speaker 3: Sure so SLED sounds for South Carolina Law Enforcement Division,
Speaker 3: State Law Enforcement Supportman Division, and what that means is
Speaker 3: like the state f BI and state wide agency that
Speaker 3: comes in and helps with complex crimes or white collar crimes,
Speaker 3: corruption involving law enforcement or political figures. But most commonly
Speaker 3: in a state like South Carolina that's quite rural, you'll
Speaker 3: have small police departments, small sheriff's offices that just don't
Speaker 3: have the equipment or the expertise to handle homicides or things.
Speaker 3: So it's very common for SLED agents as they're known
Speaker 3: to be the assistant agent's assistant, the assisting agency on
Speaker 3: complex crimes in rural areas. So what happens at night
Speaker 3: is the sheriff's office comes in Collington County, which is
Speaker 3: the slice of Mozille where this happened was in coll
Speaker 3: Itton County as opposed to Hampton County, the adjacent county.
Speaker 3: It's kind of split between the two. So coll Itton
Speaker 3: County is the first arrived. Deputy Green's part of that.
Speaker 3: His detective Rutland, who is Laura Rutland, is she's good
Speaker 3: with words, and so they send her to get the
Speaker 3: search warrant and to get it signed by magistrates. So
Speaker 3: she kind of rolls up on the scene later than
Speaker 3: the other deputies and by that time they had realized,
Speaker 3: oh my gosh, this is Alec Murdoch. This is not
Speaker 3: just the boat wreck. This is this family that you know,
Speaker 3: everybody knows, including most of the deputies that are there.
Speaker 3: And so her captain asked, are you familiar with the
Speaker 3: Murdock family? And she's not from around there. She grew
Speaker 3: up a little bit away, and she has not been
Speaker 3: with the department very long. And she had been just
Speaker 3: three young children at this point, so she had not
Speaker 3: been back at work very long. She's like, no, that
Speaker 3: name doesn't mean anything to me. They some, well, congratulations,
Speaker 3: that makes you the lead detective on this. So she catches,
Speaker 3: you know, the hot potato there, you know, an hour
Speaker 3: or so after the call comes in. But then pretty
Speaker 3: soon after that, you know, an hour, hour and ten
Speaker 3: minutes sled realizes that the SLED is on the scene.
Speaker 3: It takes them a while to get there. They're on
Speaker 3: the scene. They can't say to Collington County, oh, we
Speaker 3: know what we know, which is that they are investigating
Speaker 3: the boat wreck. They're investigating Alex's They're investigating Alex's actions
Speaker 3: the night of the boat rack. Trying to so disinformation
Speaker 3: about who is driving and they can't say that it's
Speaker 3: a secret investigation, but they have to make the call
Speaker 3: that they need to take over because of the potential.
Speaker 3: Elk is already on their radar's as he's a person
Speaker 3: they have a reason to be suspicious of to start with.
Speaker 3: So they just say, hey, look we is it okay,
Speaker 3: we're the lead on this. We have reasons that we
Speaker 3: need to be So SLED takes over the investigation two
Speaker 3: hours into it roughly, and an agent named David Owen
Speaker 3: arrives just after a little after midnight, and David is
Speaker 3: coming up from Charleston, which is pretty good ways away.
Speaker 3: So you know, the lead agent is is Laura Rutland
Speaker 3: for a hot minute, and then it becomes David Owen,
Speaker 3: so pretty you know, and your your listeners are pretty
Speaker 3: pretty savvy. It's not it's not it's not ideal to
Speaker 3: take over a case where a key decisions have already
Speaker 3: been made. But that was the that was the situation.
Speaker 3: Rural area, rainy night, far from anywhere this. You know,
Speaker 3: SLED is based all over the state. It takes a
Speaker 3: while to get rolling. So by the time the lead
Speaker 3: case agent is on the scene and taking over, it's
Speaker 3: about roughly two hours after the call comes in.
Speaker 2: You say, David Owen takes over as a lead investigator.
Speaker 2: So he gets a chance to speak to Alec Murda
Speaker 2: and have Alec Murdoch explain this incredible situation where these
Speaker 2: people were killed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, lucky, lucky David Owen. David was a key voice
Speaker 3: in this book and has not really spoken extensively about
Speaker 3: the case. So I felt very fortunate about that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So David Owen gets woken up, you know, and said,
Speaker 3: and it's just like any any homicide detective rotation. He
Speaker 3: was up, it was his case. Doesn't know what he's
Speaker 3: getting to. He gets there and then he's briefed not
Speaker 3: only is this a double homicide in the middle of
Speaker 3: nowhere and it's not clear what happened, but Elic Murdoch
Speaker 3: is somebody that they're already on the sea for. So
Speaker 3: then he sits down with Elick. It's rainy, it's hot,
Speaker 3: it's so I cannot tell you what it feels like
Speaker 3: when it's you know, almost ninety degrees, ninety percent humidity
Speaker 3: and kind of misting rain in a hot, humid summer
Speaker 3: in South Carolina. So he and detective Rutland, who's his
Speaker 3: new partner. He's just met meet up with Elec Murdoch.
Speaker 3: Elck's personal lawyer, a lawyer named Danny Henderson, wants to
Speaker 3: sit and agrees to let Elec talk, but only if
Speaker 3: he's in the interview. So he guides them out. There's
Speaker 3: so many cars out there by now they he had
Speaker 3: to park out on Mozelle Road. He takes them out
Speaker 3: to his you know, his Bronco and I'm sorry, it's
Speaker 3: not Bronco. He takes them out to his car and
Speaker 3: closes the door. It's one in the morning, you know,
Speaker 3: puts the puts his little his his body cam, clips
Speaker 3: it to the rear view mirror and starts this kind
Speaker 3: of epic interview that becomes you know, critical there in
Speaker 3: the middle of nowhere, not knowing but what this case
Speaker 3: is going to become. It's a just fairly incredible moment
Speaker 3: when you watch it. Now knowing what we know.
Speaker 2: Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: So now you say that they have a statement to
Speaker 2: establish the events that happened, so that boxes them in
Speaker 2: later potentially, but you right will fast forward that regardless
Speaker 2: of those charges. By the end of the summer, Alex
Speaker 2: was staying in Hampton at a guesthouse behind his law partner,
Speaker 2: Johnny Parker's house. And then we get to he wants
Speaker 2: to have a conversation with Blanca Simpson.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well I remember, I mean Blanca, Blanca knows all.
Speaker 3: It's it's summer, it's in August. He has by that
Speaker 3: point he had the interview with David Owen that night,
Speaker 3: early morning of June the eighth, one in the morning.
Speaker 3: He speaks again with David Owen a few days later
Speaker 3: or a follow up interview when things have you know,
Speaker 3: jailed to get his his and his up to date memories.
Speaker 3: And then they have one this one other critical, this
Speaker 3: critical interview in early August, to sit down interview, which
Speaker 3: is when David Owen it's very it's It starts out
Speaker 3: fairly friendly. They talk about the weather, they talk about
Speaker 3: the fact that David Owen's air conditioning is on the blitz.
Speaker 3: But in the in the end, David confronts Alec and says,
Speaker 3: did you did you kill your wife and son? And
Speaker 3: so all of a sudden, Elick has gone from a
Speaker 3: grieving father who has all this sympathy to the main
Speaker 3: and only suspect in the killing of his wife and son.
Speaker 3: So very shortly thereafter, he calls Blanca that the housekeeper
Speaker 3: who knows everything, and asks her to come over, and
Speaker 3: he's staying at this guest house and is Bloc is
Speaker 3: commonly at the guest house. She told me that she
Speaker 3: kept stocked with his favorite you know, she would have
Speaker 3: Amazon deliver his cases of his favorite Caprice sons there
Speaker 3: and his his his favorite snacks. So she goes to
Speaker 3: the guest house and he rarely asked her to because
Speaker 3: he doesn't he's constant, He's a whirling dervish. He doesn't
Speaker 3: commonly sit and have a conversation, so it was rare
Speaker 3: for her to be called over there, to sit down
Speaker 3: on the couch and have him ask her questions. And
Speaker 3: what he asked her is you know what I was
Speaker 3: You know what I was wearing that day. I was
Speaker 3: wearing this Vinnie Vine shirt, meaning this kind of button
Speaker 3: up Columbia shirt that he was wearing in the video
Speaker 3: that Paul, a video that Paul had taken when they
Speaker 3: were playing with a tree that night at Moselle, and
Speaker 3: he wanted he needed her to say, I remember, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: you wore that shirt to work, because that would mean
Speaker 3: she could vouch for his what he was wearing. There
Speaker 3: was a conflict that came up in that third interview
Speaker 3: about what he was wearing. She was like, no, that's
Speaker 3: that wasn't what you were wearing. No, I don't, I
Speaker 3: don't remember it that way, And it really set off,
Speaker 3: you know, the hair on the back of her neck.
Speaker 3: She's like, why is he asking me about what he's wearing?
Speaker 3: And she also knew. She does all the laundry at
Speaker 3: the house. She can tell tell you exactly when she
Speaker 3: puts in the fabric softener. They like certain and they
Speaker 3: like certain detergent at certain stages of the wash cycle.
Speaker 3: She irons his t shirts. She when she she talks
Speaker 3: about putting things away, her hands moved because she knows
Speaker 3: where they go in the drawer. She knew what he
Speaker 3: was wearing and she hadn't seen those clothes since. So yeah,
Speaker 3: So that was a very very strange conversation conversation for
Speaker 3: Blanca and uh and set off her her hackles about
Speaker 3: what is going on here?
Speaker 2: Tell us about Connor Cook and his attorney and their
Speaker 2: relationship to the boat crash well.
Speaker 3: Connor Cook. Connor Cook is a person who can't even
Speaker 3: tell you when he met Palmer, not because they've known
Speaker 3: each other their whole lives. He can't remember when they
Speaker 3: met because it's been forever. And Connor's father, Marty Cook,
Speaker 3: was a classmate of Elis. He was actually on the
Speaker 3: football team. It was this key like key key receiver
Speaker 3: or a key, you know, key partner on the football team.
Speaker 3: So the families go way back. And Connor was on
Speaker 3: the boat and Connor was the person that Paul was
Speaker 3: Paul said was driving and that that Elick wanted to
Speaker 3: create confusion over whether it was Paul or Connor driving.
Speaker 3: And Connor has said he felt trapped. He felt like
Speaker 3: he was going to take the fall for Paul in
Speaker 3: that boat wreck. So and his lawyer was is a
Speaker 3: lawyer named Joe McCulloch who's very savvy, it's been around
Speaker 3: a long time, a very well regarded defense lawyer. And
Speaker 3: he was on He and Connor and his and his
Speaker 3: lawyer were on the offense that summer. They were trying
Speaker 3: to to use the opportunity of the scrutinial on this
Speaker 3: homicide to bring attention to the boat wreck, and so
Speaker 3: they were they were, they were filing key documents over
Speaker 3: the course of that summer to try and get more
Speaker 3: information out about the boat wreck.
Speaker 2: You say that dn R released hundreds of pages of
Speaker 2: documents and several videos from the boat crash investig gation,
Speaker 2: and internet sluice scoured it all of it, posting their
Speaker 2: theories online. So Alex, all these revelations about the family
Speaker 2: and the way they hid their secrets, everything was piling
Speaker 2: up on Alex Murdoch, wasn't it.
Speaker 3: There was, yes, exactly, There was a huge amount of
Speaker 3: information coming out of the course of the summer of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one. Homicides happened on June seventh, and Paul
Speaker 3: had ultimately been charged in the death of Mallory Beach
Speaker 3: in spite of Elex's best effort. He was charged with
Speaker 3: her death, and he was also charged in the serious
Speaker 3: injuries to Connor Cook and to Morgandoti, another young woman
Speaker 3: on the boats girlfriend. But with his death the charges
Speaker 3: go away right there. And so with the charges drop
Speaker 3: the investigation by DNR, which is the State Natural Resources Division,
Speaker 3: it's over. So they released thousands of pages of documents
Speaker 3: in the investigation online and by this point, their subreddits,
Speaker 3: their Facebook pages, they're all these people who are just
Speaker 3: really interested in this case, in this family, in the history,
Speaker 3: and people are just pouring through these documents, finding all
Speaker 3: sorts of interesting facts and nuggets and putting them together.
Speaker 3: And and Connor's lawsuit that were his legal filing in
Speaker 3: that summer, is of the piece with that. He wanted
Speaker 3: more information to come out about the boat wreck, to
Speaker 3: make it clear, hey, not only was I not driving,
Speaker 3: but they were trying to make it look like I
Speaker 3: was driving. That's what he wanted to show.
Speaker 2: Back at the law firm, Jane Seconder opened an envelope
Speaker 2: and a check flew out. So tell us about her
Speaker 2: experience and what she concludes as a result of finding
Speaker 2: this check.
Speaker 3: Sure, so, so all this is happening over the course
Speaker 3: of the summer, right, you know, June seventh is a homicide.
Speaker 3: The month of July, all these documents are released by
Speaker 3: dn R. There's there. It's you know, people magazine in
Speaker 3: all of the big true crime shows are doing episodes
Speaker 3: about the murdox. It's a it's a huge story. And
Speaker 3: then in August he's confronted by sled He talks to
Speaker 3: Blanca Simpson about what he's wearing. And then you get
Speaker 3: into September, Labor Day weekend, that first weekend in September,
Speaker 3: and Elick's pueri legal is they're still fretting over this
Speaker 3: missing fee even though he's you know, Eleck was able
Speaker 3: to cobble together some money and say that he found it.
Speaker 3: They don't quite believe him. He had enough time over
Speaker 3: the summer to put together some enough money to throw
Speaker 3: him off the case, but it doesn't quite make sense.
Speaker 3: They still had their suspicions. His peer Leegal goes into
Speaker 3: his office, which is a no no. She typically doesn't,
Speaker 3: he is so territorial, but she needs a document and
Speaker 3: he's not there. He's the grieving father still. She goes
Speaker 3: into his office and it's just like this black hole
Speaker 3: of paper and folders and mess and legal text and
Speaker 3: she picks up a folder on his desk looking for something,
Speaker 3: and out floats a check and she just rib it.
Speaker 3: She's like it fell. It was like out of something
Speaker 3: out of a movie, like a feather falling to the ground,
Speaker 3: and it was the missing feed check. And she takes
Speaker 3: it to Genie Seconder and they're like, oh no. In
Speaker 3: some respects, they're relieved that they were right, and in
Speaker 3: other respects they're horrified because their worst fears are realized.
Speaker 3: Elick is stealing from the law firm that his great
Speaker 3: grandfather found and this is they find this out on
Speaker 3: the eve of a Labor Day.
Speaker 2: Weekend and they realize they have to fire him, and
Speaker 2: he is told he has to be fired and he understands.
Speaker 3: Corract So Geenie takes her her evidence to the partners
Speaker 3: and she's very well regarded. She's known all these guys.
Speaker 3: They went to high school together. And they say, oh no,
Speaker 3: we got to fire him. And they do that Friday
Speaker 3: before Labor Day. His brother says, you gotta go, and
Speaker 3: he typically Elick tries to negotiate. He said, well, can
Speaker 3: I just you just put me on leave so I
Speaker 3: can have my health care, so I can get the
Speaker 3: help I need for my drug addiction. They said, no,
Speaker 3: you need to go, so they fired him, and this
Speaker 3: it's just a huge crisis. It's Friday of Labor Day weekend,
Speaker 3: which is incredibly everything goes dark for several days and
Speaker 3: he but he the one thing he says that's so amazing.
Speaker 3: He's like, I'm just surprised it took you this long
Speaker 3: to find out. So they fire him on that Friday,
Speaker 3: and then that Saturday is a day we're all familiar with,
Speaker 3: the Saturday of Labor Day weekend is the day he
Speaker 3: calls nine one one yet again about another crisis, another shooting.
Speaker 3: This time he said, someone's tried to kill him on
Speaker 3: the side of the road on Old Sacahatchee Road in
Speaker 3: Hampton County.
Speaker 2: And the description you say is strikingly striking resemblance to
Speaker 2: Anthony Cook.
Speaker 3: Coincidentally, Yes, Anthony's mother, Beverly Cook told me that when
Speaker 3: she saw, you know, he goes to the hospital and
Speaker 3: and sled is suspicious. By this point, he's the he's
Speaker 3: the main suspect the side of the road shooting. I
Speaker 3: sat on that side of the road for half an hour,
Speaker 3: I said exactly that where he was. No cars came
Speaker 3: by in either direction for half an hour, in the
Speaker 3: middle of the afternoon. It's the middle of nowhere. They
Speaker 3: knew his story to na up, but they you know,
Speaker 3: they play kated em or they took it seriously, and
Speaker 3: they sent a sketch artist to the hospital there in
Speaker 3: Savannah where he was being treated for a head wound
Speaker 3: in this shooting, and he describes as young man. And
Speaker 3: Beverly Cook told me she's like her jaw drop when
Speaker 3: she saw it because it looked just it had a
Speaker 3: striking resemblance to Anthony Cook, who was the boyfriend of
Speaker 3: Malory Beach it was, you know, killed in the boat
Speaker 3: rag in twenty nineteen. She felt like she felt for
Speaker 3: sure that he was trying to frame Anthony in his
Speaker 3: attempted suicide and also make it look like somebody who'd
Speaker 3: been involved or somebody had vengeance from the boat wreck
Speaker 3: had been involved in Mozille as well. That was her fear.
Speaker 2: Slave investigators find out about the person cousin Eddie and
Speaker 2: the extent of Alec Murdau's opiate addiction and the money
Speaker 2: used for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean and Elick in some respects. Elick led
Speaker 3: them directly to Cousinetti, who literally is his cousin that
Speaker 3: you can trace their their I've got the family tree.
Speaker 3: Cousin cousin Eddie's great great great grandfather, Lazarus Murdoch was
Speaker 3: was brothers to Elex's great great grandfather Josiah Murdock, So
Speaker 3: they really are cousins distant cousins. But yeah, he's from
Speaker 3: the hospital. He is trying, I mean, he's Elec Murdoch.
Speaker 3: He does this later in jail, he's he's he's getting
Speaker 3: somebody to make phone calls for him, begging to borrow
Speaker 3: a phone, and he's trying to pay cash to get
Speaker 3: somebody to learn him his phone. And finally he makes
Speaker 3: some phone calls from somebody else's phone and calls his
Speaker 3: drug dealer, his cousin Edti. But you know, unfortunately, by
Speaker 3: this point, his brother tells Led book Eleck's up to something.
Speaker 3: He's making calls from somebody else's phone, and they find
Speaker 3: out the person he's calling his Cousinetti. So they go
Speaker 3: interview him and and and guess what, you know, immediately
Speaker 3: becomes clear that he's been writing a bunhundreds of thousands
Speaker 3: of dollars of checks over the course of the summer
Speaker 3: to this cousin for many reasons. So in some respects
Speaker 3: he was he led them directly to the person he
Speaker 3: was who was involved in the shooting on the side
Speaker 3: of the road.
Speaker 2: Let's get to somewhat to the evidence and the breaks
Speaker 2: and the events that lead to finally Sled making an
Speaker 2: arrest of Alex Murdoch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, finally, it's probably the operative word, right.
Speaker 3: The homicides were June seventh, twenty twenty one, and it
Speaker 3: took him until mid July of twenty twenty two for
Speaker 3: him to be charged. So it took a very long time,
Speaker 3: and the investigation was laborious and David everyone talks a
Speaker 3: lot about this. I think you know in David's background,
Speaker 3: he's a career officer recently retired actually that he made
Speaker 3: his start in evidence gathering, right, and footprints and fingerprints,
Speaker 3: and the scene was chaotic. It was also disorganized because
Speaker 3: it was staged, so it was difficult. It was a
Speaker 3: difficult investigation from the beginning. You know, they caught the
Speaker 3: case late. They did not they did not seal off
Speaker 3: the house. Everyone roamed around the main house at Moselle,
Speaker 3: so they lost key, potentially key evidence up at the
Speaker 3: house because it was it was there were people everywhere,
Speaker 3: and then the crime scene itself was not what it
Speaker 3: seemed to be. It didn't make sense. So the investigation
Speaker 3: was was slow and laborious, and there weren't a lot
Speaker 3: of breaks for many many months, and there were red herrings.
Speaker 3: The key one was sled thought incorrectly, as it turns
Speaker 3: out that there was blood on Elick Murdoch's white T
Speaker 3: shirt that he was wearing the night of the murdocks,
Speaker 3: and they chased the night of the murders. They chased
Speaker 3: that false flag for months, to the point where they
Speaker 3: tested the shirt so many times it was actually destroyed.
Speaker 3: It was it was, it was, it was, you know,
Speaker 3: in pieces and turned black, so that the bloody shirt
Speaker 3: was was something a key piece of evidence they thought
Speaker 3: helped them know it was it did not have blood
Speaker 3: on and after all it was false and then they
Speaker 3: just they couldn't They couldn't really make a case and
Speaker 3: they couldn't get down Palmardock's phone, this key piece of evidence.
Speaker 3: Paul was a very private kid in some respects, and
Speaker 3: his dad said, nobody knew the code of his phone.
Speaker 3: There's absolutely nobody knew the code of his phone. He
Speaker 3: didn't back it up to the iCloud. It was it
Speaker 3: was his life. He was on it all day and
Speaker 3: he was down to two percent every night because he
Speaker 3: used it all day. But nobody could get into it.
Speaker 3: And they David, no one said, why don't he try
Speaker 3: his birthday? It's you know, we're creatures of a habit.
Speaker 3: Try forty one forty seven is his his birthday at
Speaker 3: or try you know, it's the address of Mozilla. Tried
Speaker 3: his birthday in April, but they were scared. We all,
Speaker 3: you know, those of us have iPhones know that you
Speaker 3: try too many codes, it's going to lock forever and
Speaker 3: eventually wipe the phone. So finally, in March of twenty two,
Speaker 3: the phone gets turned over to you know, another law
Speaker 3: enforcement agent's agency to try and put it through a
Speaker 3: series of protocols to unlock it. And they want to
Speaker 3: put in some key dates. Is kind of like, you know,
Speaker 3: to prime the pump for this computer program. They said, well,
Speaker 3: is anybody tried his birthday? They try his birthday and
Speaker 3: March twenty twenty two, you know, almost you know what,
Speaker 3: ten months after the homicides. Guess what, It opens wide
Speaker 3: right away and the first thing they find, almost it's
Speaker 3: the last thing he recorded, which is a video of
Speaker 3: Cash the dog with injured tail, at you know, eight
Speaker 3: forty five pm, the night of the homicides. And when
Speaker 3: they play it, you hear three things. You hear Paul
Speaker 3: talking to the dog. You hear Maggie saying oh, there's
Speaker 3: a there's a he's got a burd in his mouth.
Speaker 3: It's a guinea. And you can hear Paul say it's
Speaker 3: a chicken. And then you can hear Paul call that
Speaker 3: other dog bubba, come here, baba baba. And what it
Speaker 3: shows is the thing that ELC Murdoch has been denying
Speaker 3: for almost a year, that he was at the kennels
Speaker 3: minutes before his wife and son were brutally murdered. It
Speaker 3: is the lone piece of evidence that cracks the case.
Speaker 3: And but for that piece of evidence, Sled would not
Speaker 3: have been able to bring charges against Elig Murdock.
Speaker 2: Let's esses as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: You say, this was the break that they needed. So
Speaker 2: on top of the charges, the grand jury indicted him
Speaker 2: on twenty three counts for stealing two point two seven million,
Speaker 2: and there was all this press attention. Now we have
Speaker 2: a press and media frenzy, don't we we do?
Speaker 3: I mean, and throughout the case it has been there's
Speaker 3: just something about this case that captured people's attention. It
Speaker 3: was so shocking. There were so many layers, there were
Speaker 3: so many dead bodies. I mean, we talked about Mallory Beach.
Speaker 3: But there was also the death of Gloria Sadderfield, the
Speaker 3: housekeeper before Blanca, who fell downstairs under mysterious circumstances. There
Speaker 3: was the death of Stephen Smith, the young man was
Speaker 3: found on the middle of the road in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: a classmate of Buster Murdock's. The older son case had
Speaker 3: never been shock, so this case was. It was just
Speaker 3: like a huge part of national and international news. And
Speaker 3: when the anniversary of the homicides came and went June seventh,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two, people were wondering, well, will anybody ever
Speaker 3: be charged? And finally he was in July. So yeah,
Speaker 3: once he was finally charged, that had off a whole
Speaker 3: nother cycle. Oh okay, so now we see things in
Speaker 3: different contexts. But you know, what is the evidence that
Speaker 3: the state has. You know, Elick, to his credit, hired
Speaker 3: too of the most well known and well regarded defense
Speaker 3: lawyers in the state. And they're like, this is bogus.
Speaker 3: They got nothing. We're calling their bluff. They called for
Speaker 3: I was in the courtroom. I can remember this in
Speaker 3: June of twenty twenty two. They called for a speedy trial.
Speaker 3: They're like, we need a speedy trial so slig can
Speaker 3: do their jobs and go out and find the real killers.
Speaker 3: So they asked for it, and Dick Carputlin later said
Speaker 3: he should have been careful what he wished for. The
Speaker 3: state gave it to him. All of a sudden, we
Speaker 3: went from not knowing anything about homicides to having a
Speaker 3: speedy trial that began barely six months after he was charged,
Speaker 3: that began in January twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: You say the prosecutor was a person named Creighton Waters,
Speaker 2: and you say you write that he had spent two
Speaker 2: years becoming the world's foremost student of Alex Murda ever
Speaker 2: since he heard the phrase the boat case.
Speaker 3: You know, Creighton. I was fortunate that Creighton talked to
Speaker 3: me extensively for this book. And yes, there's no doubt
Speaker 3: in my mind that Creighton Waters is the world's foremost
Speaker 3: student of Elec Murdock. I think Creighton Waters knows more
Speaker 3: about Elic Murdock than Elc Murdoch does. And he is
Speaker 3: their contemporaries the same age. They were at the University
Speaker 3: of Sale Carolina at the same time. They didn't know
Speaker 3: each other and their polar opposites. You know, Creighton is
Speaker 3: is five to eight. He's he's he's a head shorter
Speaker 3: than Elk, but he is he's energetic, he's tough, minded,
Speaker 3: and he is he has made it his life's mission to
Speaker 3: prosecute corrupt officials, corrupt people, and he and Elick offended
Speaker 3: him to his core. So he made he made all
Speaker 3: the financial case against ELC Murdoch, all the you know,
Speaker 3: the millions and millions of dollars he stole, which is
Speaker 3: really Creyton's wheelhouse, the financial corruption. But he also made
Speaker 3: the murder case, and he built it on the financials.
Speaker 3: He built the case, the theory of the case by saying, look,
Speaker 3: Elick Murdoch had a decade's worth of secrets. He was
Speaker 3: a mirage, he had his family's name on his shoulder.
Speaker 3: He couldn't risk it. Everything was at risk that night
Speaker 3: of June the seventh, twenty twenty one. That's why he
Speaker 3: did what he did. So I think I think Creighton
Speaker 3: Waters was I mean, in some respects from central casting.
Speaker 3: He was the right person to He's the polar opposite
Speaker 3: of Elek. He was the right person to decode him
Speaker 3: and call him out in the courtroom.
Speaker 2: What's dramatic is when a defendant, especially like Alec Murda,
Speaker 2: decides to take the stand, and we haven't described that
Speaker 2: in this turmoil, this two hundred and sixty five pound
Speaker 2: person six foot four had lost considerable weight due to
Speaker 2: the tension and pressure of all of this.
Speaker 3: He did. He lost more than sixty pounds over the
Speaker 3: course of from the time of the homicides to the
Speaker 3: time he was in the courtroom. So he looked like
Speaker 3: a different He looked like a different person in many regards.
Speaker 2: Tell us as you do as you write some of
Speaker 2: the mannerisms that he exhibited during taking the stand and
Speaker 2: some of the more profound moments in that testimony.
Speaker 3: Gosh, you know, and I spend I spent quite a
Speaker 3: bit of time on the trial in the book. It
Speaker 3: was what I wanted to do. I had the benefit
Speaker 3: of sitting in there every day for six weeks before
Speaker 3: court started, and then after we wrapped in the evening
Speaker 3: and I was in the hallways, I was hearing conversations.
Speaker 3: I tried to give a bird's eye view of what
Speaker 3: it felt like to be in there. What Dacka Reputelin
Speaker 3: would come back and say to me or to other
Speaker 3: people in the press corps, trying to spin us what's
Speaker 3: happening in the elevator when members of the Murdoch family are
Speaker 3: riding up things of that nature. It was just so dramatic,
Speaker 3: every minute of it. And Elic Murdoch is He's a
Speaker 3: creature of intense fascination. And all of a sudden he
Speaker 3: was in the room. You're in the room with him
Speaker 3: every day for six weeks, and you got to my
Speaker 3: eyes either or on Elick or on the jurors, because
Speaker 3: I could watch their expressions and how what he was
Speaker 3: saying was landing. But no, he had a number of
Speaker 3: very very telling mannerisms over time, and y'all saw it.
Speaker 3: I mean he he moves his jaw in a really
Speaker 3: peculiar way back and forth, he shakes forward. He has
Speaker 3: a habit of kind of moving his body like saying
Speaker 3: yes when his mouth is saying no. Has his body
Speaker 3: is telling us a story? And I tried to describe
Speaker 3: what I saw him doing both at the defense table
Speaker 3: and particularly on the stand, because that's what the jurors
Speaker 3: were watching as well. What I should say about the courtroom,
Speaker 3: it's tiny. It is tiny. It was designed in the
Speaker 3: eighteen hundreds and it seats two hundred people, but one
Speaker 3: hundred people every day were set, right, the jurors, the judge,
Speaker 3: the lawyers, the witnesses, the family, the press, and you know,
Speaker 3: just very law enforcement. So a hundred people were kind
Speaker 3: of set and then one hundred people in the very
Speaker 3: back of the public who were waiting a line from
Speaker 3: four o'clock in the morning to get in. But you know,
Speaker 3: the jurors in particular, I sat in the jury box
Speaker 3: and then I went and sat in the witness chair
Speaker 3: with a you can reach out and it practically touched
Speaker 3: the jury rail from where he was sitting. So they
Speaker 3: watched him up close. They watched him. There was you know,
Speaker 3: snot pouring out of his nose as he was talking,
Speaker 3: but there are no tears coming out of his eyes.
Speaker 3: That's what the jurists told me, that there were no
Speaker 3: tears coming out of his eyes from their vantage point.
Speaker 3: So his body was telling a story even as he
Speaker 3: was saying something else.
Speaker 2: In the end, in the closing arguments, Creyton Waters just
Speaker 2: summarizes the motive, the means, the opportunity, and the consciousness
Speaker 2: of guilt. Tell us just briefly how we summed everything
Speaker 2: up and why Alec Murdach had murdered.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he said that Alec Murdoch. It was the perfect
Speaker 3: storm and if you think about the extraordinary, it just
Speaker 3: still to this day gives me chills. June seventh of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, everything was happening at once delC Murdoc, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, his dad was dying. Genie confronted him and
Speaker 3: we also we didn't mention but I should. On June tenth,
Speaker 3: he was facing this hearing in the boat Wreck where
Speaker 3: Mark Tinsley, who was the Mallory Beach's family's lawyer, was
Speaker 3: finally going to force him to turn over his financials.
Speaker 3: So all that was happening on June seven. So what
Speaker 3: Creighton Waters argued in his closing argument was that you know,
Speaker 3: it was a perfect storm and Elec had had to
Speaker 3: do something to change the subject. And as a personal
Speaker 3: injury lawyer, whose main what personal injury lawyers deal with
Speaker 3: is emotion, the emotion the loss the blood money that
Speaker 3: is due to someone who lost something of value their
Speaker 3: life or their limb or their loved one. So he
Speaker 3: understands emotion and he said this was an ultimate play
Speaker 3: to change the subject and pray on people's emotion and
Speaker 3: go from a person who was facing ruin to a
Speaker 3: grieving father and widow. And that's what he did. That's
Speaker 3: what Creighton argued, that's what he did on the night
Speaker 3: of June seventh, and it almost worked. Right the course
Speaker 3: of the summer, he got the money back for the
Speaker 3: seven ninety two he was he put off. You put
Speaker 3: off detection for a number of months until that magical check,
Speaker 3: you know, feel like a feather to the ground.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. You talk about the means that they had never
Speaker 2: found the weapons, and yet they had found. You write
Speaker 2: a raincoat that had bullet residue or that it seemed
Speaker 2: to be had been used to carry one of the weapons.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what I what I try to do in the book.
Speaker 3: The prosecution was limited in the dots they could connect, right,
Speaker 3: they can introduce this raincoat that is massive blue raincoat
Speaker 3: that's covered in gunshot residue on the inside, covered so
Speaker 3: much they stopped counting the particles they are too many.
Speaker 3: And the testimony was from the night nurse at Eleck's
Speaker 3: parents' house where he you know, he was the night
Speaker 3: he went for his alibi the night of the killings.
Speaker 3: The testimony was he showed up with that blue raincoat
Speaker 3: in his arms, wrapped around something, seemingly wrapped around something,
Speaker 3: and hid it in a part of the house nobody
Speaker 3: went to upstairs because they didn't use the upstairs nobody
Speaker 3: was mobile anymore. But the prosecution couldn't really tie a bow.
Speaker 3: They couldn't say, Okay, our theory is that he did X,
Speaker 3: and then he did Y, and then he did D.
Speaker 3: They could give you the piece of Z, which is
Speaker 3: the gun shot resnue code, but they couldn't say, we
Speaker 3: think he wrapped the guns in it and then he
Speaker 3: got rid of the guns. And you know, so I
Speaker 3: tried to do that a little bit more for the reader,
Speaker 3: a lot more actually in the book. But no, he's
Speaker 3: but it is, you know, the in terms of the means,
Speaker 3: the guns still are missing. Nobody they never showed up.
Speaker 3: Nobody knows where they are. And that was a key
Speaker 3: hole and for one jear in particular, the juror who
Speaker 3: was disqualified the last day of the trial. But yeah,
Speaker 3: but the means were, you know, they had to kind
Speaker 3: of build the case around the missing murder weapons, which
Speaker 3: in the end, you know, enough of the jury believed
Speaker 3: they did effectively.
Speaker 2: And you he writes about the opportunity, the opportunity that
Speaker 2: they were at those kennels that night, and he had
Speaker 2: an opportunity in his mind to create time for himself
Speaker 2: and cover up things for a time.
Speaker 3: Correct. I think he you know, the evidence showed he
Speaker 3: lured them there. He lured them there. That was the opportunity.
Speaker 3: And you know, Elex said something funny to Maggie's sister,
Speaker 3: Marian Proctor. She testified to this. He had said, you know,
Speaker 3: whoever did this had been thinking about it a long time.
Speaker 3: And Creighton Waters argued that this had been sort of
Speaker 3: in the back of his mind. This is I think
Speaker 3: that this is it was an escape patch. If the
Speaker 3: worse comes to worse, maybe this would be what happened.
Speaker 3: I think, you know. And Kenny Kinzie, who was the
Speaker 3: evidence specialist, told me he also thinks he snapped. He
Speaker 3: thinks two things are true. He thinks it had been
Speaker 3: in the back of his mind. Maybe he's a possibility,
Speaker 3: but something snapped that night. We know and as you
Speaker 3: mentioned about the drugs that Blanca found on the bedside
Speaker 3: for his father, the cancer drugs. But we also know
Speaker 3: that she had found and she told told me this
Speaker 3: is in the book that there she had found baggies
Speaker 3: of empty baggies of drugs in Maggie and Eleck's bathroom
Speaker 3: trash can. She'd meant to take him out, she forgot.
Speaker 3: She fears that Maggie found them that night. And he,
Speaker 3: you know, because he had been withdrawing the Sunday before
Speaker 3: the Monday of the homicides. He'd been withdrawing that afternoon
Speaker 3: in Colombia a baseball tournament. So you know, the opportunity
Speaker 3: was there. And whether he planned it or snapped or both,
Speaker 3: I think those things are both possible and likely.
Speaker 2: You're right. In the epilogue that November twenty eight, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, nearly nine months after he was convicted of
Speaker 2: the murders, Alex Murdoch stood in front of Judge Newman
Speaker 2: one more time to be sentenced for his financial crimes.
Speaker 2: Why was it important for them to get a significant
Speaker 2: sentence in these financial crimes.
Speaker 3: Well, it was critical in the eyes of create Waters
Speaker 3: in the Attorney General's office to get a huge sentence
Speaker 3: in the financial crimes as an insurance policy because in
Speaker 3: recently the State Supreme Court has agreed to hear a
Speaker 3: key a key argument in his appeal for a new
Speaker 3: trial on the homicide charges. So in the event that
Speaker 3: the homicide charges there's ever a new trial, or there's
Speaker 3: ever an overturning of that verdict, the state wanted an
Speaker 3: insurance policy that said Elik Murdock would never see the
Speaker 3: light of day. So they negotiated a plea and all
Speaker 3: of the financials that the state brought to ensure that
Speaker 3: Elik would go away to prison for a very very
Speaker 3: long time until he's a very very old man, regardless
Speaker 3: of what happens with any problems, any individualities in the
Speaker 3: homicide trial.
Speaker 2: You're right that agent Owen still had years of work
Speaker 2: ahead done, tangled the remaining loose ends of the mess
Speaker 2: Alex had left behind. What were they still searching for
Speaker 2: after all of this time?
Speaker 3: Where's the money? Right? I mean where's the money? The FEDS,
Speaker 3: who had their own cases against Elc Murdoch say there's
Speaker 3: at least four million dollars in missing money. I think
Speaker 3: that's a very conservative estimate. There's money out there and
Speaker 3: they would like to find it. But also there is concern,
Speaker 3: there is concern that somebody helped Elic Murdoch clean the
Speaker 3: scene that night. There were multiple tire tracks out there
Speaker 3: in wet grass. They were testimony that effect, the guns
Speaker 3: are gone, evidence is gone, the scene was sanitized in
Speaker 3: some respect. So I think there is also still some
Speaker 3: sense that if somebody in fact helped Elec Murdoch that night,
Speaker 3: they would like to find him.
Speaker 2: And you say they were still trying to find to
Speaker 2: prove who had killed Stephen Smith and what if anything
Speaker 2: the murders had to do with his death, and also
Speaker 2: still investigating the death of Gloria Sadderfield, like you had mentioned,
Speaker 2: and they had exhumed her body and conducted a second autopsy.
Speaker 3: Well, I think, and we still don't know about the
Speaker 3: death of Steven Smith, and we and we may never know.
Speaker 3: But what we do know is that there are people
Speaker 3: of interest, and none of them is Buster Murdock. And
Speaker 3: Buster has been the elder son who was who is
Speaker 3: Stephen's classmate, has been adamant that he had absolutely nothing
Speaker 3: to do with Stephen's death, and has actually brought defamation
Speaker 3: lawsuits against some of the documentary makers for implying that
Speaker 3: he did. So we don't know who killed Stephen Smith.
Speaker 3: We may never know. Unfortunately I hope we will, and
Speaker 3: I know the family desperately hopes we will, and with
Speaker 3: Laurie Sadderfield, I think her family is satisfied, sadly that
Speaker 3: her death was tragic but accidental, and she may may
Speaker 3: have had some sort of health event that led to
Speaker 3: her fall potentially, But what's not in dispute is that
Speaker 3: he robbed her children, took million three million dollars that
Speaker 3: belonged to them, and never gave them a penny. That's
Speaker 3: that's not dispute. So yes, there is. There are a
Speaker 3: number of unresolved questions and we're not sure when will
Speaker 3: know the answers.
Speaker 2: You also right in the end, there is still controversy
Speaker 2: over the defense attorney Jim Griffith and his behavior regarding
Speaker 2: Alex Murda, but we'll leave that for the readers to discover.
Speaker 2: I want to thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: and talking about your book, The Devil at His Elbow,
Speaker 2: Alex Murdau and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty. I
Speaker 2: want to thank you very much for this interview for
Speaker 2: people that might want to check out further about this story.
Speaker 2: Do you have a website or do you do any
Speaker 2: social media?
Speaker 3: Well, thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed
Speaker 3: this conversation. If enjoys the right word about such a
Speaker 3: such a tragic case. Yes, please find me on Twitter
Speaker 3: at v Boreline at v b a U E R
Speaker 3: L E I N or on Instagram at Valerie dot Borline.
Speaker 3: And I do have a website which is also creatively
Speaker 3: my nameborline dot com, and it'll give you information about
Speaker 3: the book and kind words that people have said about
Speaker 3: it so far. And I hope that your listeners will
Speaker 3: get a chance to read it and let me know
Speaker 3: what they think.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Valorie Borline, The Devil at his Elbow,
Speaker 2: Alex Murdaut and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much for this interview, and you have a
Speaker 2: great evening and good night.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you,