Before Mandy Matney was the award-winning host of the #1 Murdaugh Murders Podcast, she was a local Hilton Head reporter practiced in viral stories about sharks and tornados. Was she up to the task of reporting on the crimes surrounding a powerful South Carolina family with generations of influence? In this exclusive excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Blood On Their Hands, Mandy shares a key moment from her early Murdaugh reporting in 2019 that caused her to question everything.
I had seen Olivia’s Facebook photos already, so I knew that she was very pretty, but I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of her eyes. They were a striking light blue that sparkled against her olive skin, but that afternoon they were watery with sadness. She had a septum piercing and tattoos on her arms and an Australian shepherd who sat at her feet. Olivia was just twenty years old, and I knew it was no small thing for her to be talking to me. I could feel determination vibrating off her body, as well as fear.
“Thank you so much for meeting me,” I said as I sat down. On the phone, I assured her that we would just be talking on background, which meant I wouldn’t quote her directly. In my entire career, I had never had an instance of a source being mad at me because I quoted them out of turn. I wasn’t about to break that streak.
I wasn’t interested in writing about underage kids drinking or about everyone on the boat being at fault. I was there to learn about Mallory, and to hear her story, and to learn more about the corruption and rot attached to the Murdaughs. Both of us knew this boat crash was just the tip of the iceberg.
“Mallory was my friend,” Olivia said. And then she started to tear up.
I held her gaze, and my shoulders went soft. It was impossible not to feel Olivia’s pain. I could almost see myself in her, and I remembered the way it felt to be just at the start of adulthood. You were young and invincible and deeply vulnerable at the same time. So many new experiences were ahead of you, and your friends were your entire world. It was supposed to be a time of discovery and possibility, not tragedy and disillusionment.
Olivia picked up her dog and stroked her fur.
I was careful to speak quietly, as I knew that Olivia might have been self-conscious of someone overhearing us. I also chose to leave my laptop in the car. I had a notebook and jotted down a few things every once in a while, but I wanted to do my best to relate to Olivia almost like a friend rather than as a journalist. I’ve found that typing or lots of note-taking can sometimes become a barrier in interviews; it almost reinforces a power structure or makes a person feel like an animal being observed or like they’re at the doctor’s office. I wanted to make sure Olivia saw me as a human being, not as someone out to take her story and run.
I never questioned Olivia’s sincerity for a second. When meeting a new source, I always asked myself: What did they have to gain here? If I was speaking to a political strategist, the answer was clear: talking to the press was about spin, and it was purely transactional. But with Olivia, there was nothing in it for her. In fact, she was going against her family to be here in the first place. She didn’t want her name used at the time; she was grieving, and she was scared. She was here for no other reason than because she cared.
After we had been talking for a while, I tentatively asked Olivia about the Snapchat.
“Do you still have it?”
Olivia pulled out her iPhone and passed it across the table. By that point, I had looked up all the kids involved on Facebook, so I recognized everyone immediately. The Snapchat was sent from Anthony Cook, Mallory’s boyfriend. The video was clearly shot at night, but it was impossible to tell what time. The sky was black in the background, and the camera moved to show everyone laughing and sitting around. How long before everything would turn into chaos? Was it just another hour? Just a few minutes? There was no way to know, and the effect was chilling.
But one thing was perfectly clear: Paul Murdaugh was at the wheel of the boat. He was ginger-haired and cocky in a plaid button-down, chewing gum and staring straight ahead, while Connor Cook bopped his head next to him and cranked the radio on the dashboard. The camera panned next to Mallory, the bubbly blonde sitting in the front of the boat. She beamed as she locked eyes with her boyfriend while the wind blew through her hair.
The entire clip was short and not particularly sinister. There was even a silly GIF overlaid across the bottom of the screen: night out with a crescent moon and twinkling stars. But as I looked at it, know- ing what would happen next, it was hard not to view the video as a devastating artifact from another time—a great dividing line between the before and the after. In just a short while, everyone on-screen would have their lives forever altered. Tons of kids must have seen it.
Were any of them watching it over and over again on repeat like I was now? What were they feeling? What did they see? Was it too painful to glimpse the moments before everything changed, or was it like an open wound they couldn’t stop picking at?
Since there was no timestamp, the Snapchat didn’t exactly prove Paul was driving the boat at the moment of the crash, but it did prove that he was driving the boat at some point that night. I took a deep breath. Replayed it again. Olivia stared at me.
“I promise you,” she said. “Paul was driving that boat. I’ve been on his boat so many times, and he never lets anyone else drive it. He was always saying, ‘Don’t touch my fucking boat.’ ”
Somehow with that last line it all clicked for me. I could picture Paul and arrogant, asshole guys just like him—I had known plenty over the years. I knew what it looked like when they drank and got nasty, jealous, and possessive. It was upsetting just to think about.
Olivia painted a sickening portrait of Paul Murdaugh. He seemed to be the epitome of the entitled, aggressive rich kid who lacked all empathy, maybe even a sociopath. “I promise you that he doesn’t feel bad about what happened to Mallory,” Olivia said. “If he’s worried about anyone right now, it’s himself.”
She said he regularly drank to excess and got into fights and shouting matches. He became belligerent and abusive when drunk, and most of the people he surrounded himself with could rarely muster the courage to tell him no. He was just too scary.
“He gets away with everything and brags about it,” Olivia said.
Olivia described Paul’s father, Alex, in much the same way. She said Alex loved to flaunt his power and family connections. He was known to drive through town with portable police lights blazing on the roof of his car; he thought it was funny to roll up to parties with them on. Olivia also said Alex sometimes showed up to their high school as a show of force. One time when some rumors about Paul were going around, Alex visited Paul’s class and flashed a badge from the solicitor’s office in front of all the kids. “Don’t mess with my son,” he warned.
“Paul’s never gonna come clean,” Olivia said. She was certain that the Murdaughs would never allow him to confess to driving the boat, even though they knew it was the truth and no matter how much pain Mallory’s parents were in.
“I’m so angry!” she said, stroking her dog’s fur again. Olivia talked of Mallory’s sister, Savannah; her mom, Renee; her father, Phillip; her stepmom, Robin; and her sister, Morgan.
“Can you imagine being them right now?” she asked.
Actually, I could.
My brother, Michael, died suddenly when I was seven and he was nine. It was from complications of the flu, just ten days after getting sick he was gone.
We were so close as kids. I was the shy, quiet one, and Michael was almost like my translator. He would speak for me whenever we were out in the neighborhood. I would tag along to whatever he was doing and he never seemed to mind. He was a funny, popular kid at school— always making everyone laugh.
When he died it was as if all the color drained out of our house. My parents were Baby Boomer Catholics, so they didn’t talk about their feelings. But at night I could hear my mother crying herself to sleep through my bedroom wall. At school, I got some help from a counselor, but it would take me decades to truly process the depths of my grief. I grew up trying to be the best at everything—I had to be both kids for my parents. It was an enormous amount of pressure.
I knew what it felt like when tragedy descended on a family. I knew that each member dealt with it in different ways, but it was impossible to avoid the fact that it shaped the rest of your life.
I sometimes shared a bit about Michael with sources. I knew what it felt like to be raw with grief, and when I was interviewing someone who was suffering, I didn’t always like to keep myself at such a distance. But at that moment, I didn’t rush to fill in the pause. I let Olivia process her emotions on her own, and I held space for whatever came up for her.
“This shit is so crazy,” Olivia said, beginning to cry again. “Mallory didn’t deserve this—and neither did Stephen.”
Stephen.
This was a name I recognized.
After days spent researching Mallory and the Murdaughs, it was impossible to avoid mention of someone called Stephen Smith. There was an image that was going viral: a split-screen picture of Mallory next to a handsome young blond guy with the hashtag #justiceforstephenandmallory.
When I looked around online, it didn’t take long to come across another theory of Murdaugh-involved violence and intimidation. Stephen Smith was a gay nineteen-year-old nursing student who was found dead on the side of a road in Hampton County in 2015. According to unsubstantiated rumors, Stephen had been romantically linked to Buster Murdaugh, Paul’s older brother. Some folks seemed to think that Stephen’s death was homophobic hate crime, not an accidental hit-and-run as it had been reported. When I mentioned the rumors to Liz back in the newsroom, she reminded me that she had told me about Stephen two months before. She had a law enforcement source who told her that we should look into it because the circumstances surrounding the investigation were suspicious.
Why didn’t we do more then? Ask McClatchy; ask the leaderboard. Ask our overworked and underfunded colleagues who were barely making their quotas. In that kind of climate, leads unfortunately fell through the cracks all the time; we had the resources to pursue only so much. All I could do was shake my head at the missed opportunity.
I was eager to ask Olivia about Stephen.
“Stephen was really funny—and really smart,” she said. Olivia and Stephen grew up together in Hampton, and they bonded over feeling like outsiders in a small town.
Olivia then shared some of the same rumors about Buster’s involvement in Stephen’s death that I’d seen online. All I could do was nod. My heart was pounding. I tried to appear professional, jotting down a few notes as if this was just more information to process. But inside, I was buzzing. Whether the Murdaughs were involved or not, how had this case remained unsolved and unquestioned for so long? Why were people like Stephen forgotten? Was the system stacked against them or was law enforcement that incompetent?
I felt like I was in a movie, but it was too early to tell whether my character would make it to the next act.
I was almost relieved when Olivia looked at her phone and said she had to go. Her shift was starting in a few minutes, and she couldn’t be late. I thanked her profusely and promised to stay in touch. After Olivia left, I raced back to my car and grabbed my laptop to get down everything I could remember. Olivia’s words echoed in my head as I typed furiously—I felt like I was dreaming. Only a few years earlier, I had sat in my lonely apartment in Danville wondering if I’d ever work on something as consequential as the true crime docs I watched on Netflix, and here I was confronted with the possibility that I might help a grieving family gain some closure over a case that had been ignored for far too long. I was vibrating—I felt more alive than I had in years.
But I was also terrified. Could I really take this on? This was a story about power and corruption, but at its core there were real people who had been lost. I typed notes about Stephen, and Mallory, and about the way Olivia looked when she talked about her. The gentle way she stroked her dog when she was trying to steady herself; the anger in her voice when she thought of the town’s inaction.
At the top of the page, I had written a few questions I prepared before I went in to meet Olivia. Looking at them again, I felt awash in grief.
What kind of friend was Mallory?
What did she love?
What did she want to do?
They were the same questions I would ask anyone who had lost someone—a friend, a relative, someone I met at a funeral. They were the questions at the core of all my reporting when I spoke to a victim’s friends and family. Who was this person you loved? How do you want them to be remembered? I know I can’t bring them back, but can I help you tell their story?
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