In the series of fatal accidents, unexplained deaths, and deliberate killings gouged into the dark landscape of the Murdaugh story, there are few uncontested facts. Almost every claim concerning the deaths of Stephen Smith in 2015, Gloria Satterfield in 2018, Mallory Beach in 2019, and Paul and Maggie Murdaugh in 2021 is countered by at least one credible alternate claim. As a result, an element of thick murk pervades these episodes, and the thirteen-minute interval in which Maggie and Paul were almost certainly killed is among the murkiest of them all.
But here and there, thanks largely to the surveillance devices we now all keep in our pockets and vehicles, there are also stretches of verifiable fact that can be laid out in detail, and one of these stretches follows a few minutes after that interval. The facts may not tell an unequivocal story, but in themselves they are unarguable.
At 9:06 that Monday evening, Alex started up his Chevy Suburban and headed from Moselle to Almeda, the home of his elderly parents. His father, who was battling cancer, had been admitted to the hospital earlier that day. His mother, Libby (known also as Em), had dementia and tended to become agitated when her husband was absent. Alex checked on his parents frequently, so on the face of it there was nothing out of the ordinary about this visit, except perhaps the lateness of the hour.
In the minutes before leaving Moselle, and during the twelve-mile drive itself, Alex made several calls. One was to his older son, Buster, then living ninety miles away in Columbia. “We just talked about Hey, how you doing,” Buster recalled at the trial, “and he was just letting me know that he was going out to Almeda to check on Em.”
Family members phoned or texted one another many times a day, and it was very common, according to Buster, for his father to call him when he was driving to Almeda. He sounded normal, Buster remembered, no different than he had when they’d spoken earlier that day.
Another call was to Alex’s closest friend, Chris Wilson, a personal injury lawyer like himself. The two families socialized frequently and had been together at a baseball game that weekend.
“My wife and I were sitting on the back porch,” Wilson remembered at the trial (all quotations have been edited for relevance and clarity).
We have a TV on the back porch and we were sitting there, talking, watching The Bachelor. I can’t believe I was watching that. I had actually stepped off the porch. I was trying to mess with something on the pool pump, and the phone rang and it was Alex. He said, “Hey, Bo”—that’s normally how he would greet you, “Hey, Bo,” and I don’t remember if he said “What you doing” or what, but I pretty quickly told him, “I’ve got my hands in the middle of the pool pump, can I call you right back?” He sounded normal, said, “That’s fine, no problem.” I finished with the pump and called him back. I generally say “Hey, Bo” too. I said, “Hey, Bo, calling you back,” and he said, “Hey, I’m about to get to my mom’s house, can we talk a little bit later?” I told him sure.
Another call was to his younger brother, John Marvin Murdaugh, who ran a heavy-equipment business. John Marvin was close to his nephew Paul, who worked for him every summer and had been with his family in Bluffton earlier that day, before driving to Moselle.
John Marvin described the call from Alex: “Liz and I have three young kids, so we don’t have a lot of free time to ourselves but that night we were watching television. He called, you know, just checking on me. It was a brief conversation and I hate to say it but I kind of said, ‘Listen, man, I finally have a few minutes, can we talk tomorrow?'” By John Marvin’s account there was no indication of anything amiss in his brother’s voice. He sounded “the same as always, just…normal.”
There were also several calls to Maggie—all of them unanswered—as well as a text: “Going to check on Em be rite back.” Maggie had been up at the kennels with Paul when Alex left the house, so again, on the face of it, the text made sense, as did the unanswered calls (cell service was spotty at the kennels).
Passing through the twilit farmland around the small town of Varnville, Alex came to the turnoff for Almeda, where he crossed the old rail tracks and pulled in at the back of his parents’ white clapboard home, cutting the Suburban’s engine at 9:22.
Two minutes later he called the landline asking to be let in. His mother’s caregiver, Shelley Smith, who was sitting in a recliner next to Libby, watching America Says, testified that it took her about five minutes to come to the door. Assuming her estimate to be accurate, Alex would have been outside the house for about seven minutes before entering.
It was Shelley who first told investigators that it was unusual for Alex to visit this late. She also said he was “fidgety,” though she added that this was normal (other witnesses commented on Alex’s hyperactive manner).
Inside the house, as Shelley recalled, Alex told his mother he’d come to check up on her “because Handsome was in the hospital” (“Handsome” was the family nickname for Randolph III). Shelley remembered that he was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and canvas Sperry-type shoes with no socks, and that he held Miss Libby’s hand before lying down on the old four-poster bed across from her invalid bed, watching TV and looking at his phone. After about twenty minutes, he left.
Heading back to Moselle, he called Paul’s phone, connecting for eighteen seconds, and texted Maggie again: “Call me babe.” At 9:52, still driving, he texted Chris Wilson: “Call me if u up.”
“I called him back,” Wilson remembered, drawling wistfully. “Said, ‘Hey, Alex, how’s your mama?’ And he said, ‘She’s doing about like normal, I think.'” The two discussed a case they were working on (Wilson had his own law firm but he and Alex often partnered up). “I said, ‘Hey, we need to get this squared away, and I need to talk to you about some motions I’ve got upcoming,’ and he said, ‘Hey, that’s cool, but I’m about to get back home, can we talk tomorrow,’ and I said sure, fine.”
At 10 p.m. Alex arrived back at Moselle. Finding the house empty, he restarted the Suburban at 10:05 and drove to the kennels, a quarter mile away. As he pulled across the grassy area where the outbuildings stood, his headlight beams swung across the bodies of his wife and son. Maggie was lying just outside the overhang of a large shed known as the hangar, which stood perpendicular to the row of kennels. Paul was face down outside the doorway of the little feed room at the top of the row.
At 10:06 Alex called 911, sounding anything but normal. “This is Alex Murdaugh at 4147 Moselle Road,” he tells the dispatcher between high-pitched sounds that appear to be indicative of shock. “I need the police and an ambulance immediately. My wife and child have been shot badly.”
Thereafter, hard fact gives way to uncertainty again. Police descended on the scene, followed by the Colleton County coroner, Richard Harvey, who arrived at around 11 p.m. Harvey estimated the time of death for both victims as approximately 9 p.m. Later, at the trial, he allowed that it could have been as early as 8 or as late as 10.
White-haired and white-bearded, with sunken cheeks and a dark cord looping from his glasses, the elderly coroner testified that in addition to noting the absence of rigor, he had formed his estimate by feeling under the victims’ armpits. “The only other choice is a rectal thermometer,” he told the court, “and in most cases when you have that many people around, I’m not going to pull somebody’s pants down to utilize a rectal thermometer, so I stick my hands in their armpit and I can get an idea how warm they are.”
There is no sure way to get an exact time of death, but as another pathologist testified, you need an accurate idea of the victim’s temperature to provide even the roughest estimate, and armpit heat tells you precisely nothing. Harvey himself acknowledged under further questioning that he really had no idea when the victims were killed.
His old-fashioned propriety may have cost investigators crucial information. A properly obtained estimate of the victims’ time of death would have helped ascertain whether Alex’s trip to Almeda was the blameless act of a dutiful son, undertaken while the unknown killers of his family went about their business, or an elaborate attempt by the killer himself to create an alibi and perhaps hide the murder weapons (which have never been found).
Without it, the drive to Almeda took on the peculiar double-faceted quality shared by so much of the evidence in this case: on the one hand appearing to support Alex’s insistence on his innocence; on the other, making his crime—if he was indeed the killer—all the more chillingly calculated.
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Excerpted from The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh. By James Lasdun. Copyright 2026. Published by W.W. Norton & Co. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
