The Megyn Kelly Show
Alex Murdaugh's Life in Prison and Web of Crimes and Lies - A "True Crime Christmas" Special | Ep. 974
Mon, 30 Dec 2024
The "True Crime Christmas" series continues with Valerie Bauerlein, author of "The Devil at His Elbow," discussing the case of Alex Murdaugh. They talk about Murdaugh's little-known but lengthy family history of crime, how Murdaugh's father was involved in a similar boating incident like Murdaugh's son was, theories about what happened to Murdaugh when he got shot on the side of the road, whether Murdaugh was trying to set it up as a way to take his own life and frame someone else, where all the millions went, the truth about Murdaugh and his drug use, the unbelievable story of Becky Hill and how she almost ended up getting Murdaugh out of prison, how the story of Mallory Beach's tragic death was resolved, the massive web of crimes and lies from Murdaugh, and more.More from Bauerlein: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711848/the-devil-at-his-elbow-by-valerie-bauerlein/Lumen: Visit https://lumen.me/MEGYN for 20% Off Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's true crime Christmas special. Today, we are diving deep into the case of Alec Murdoch, and there are updates in this incredible case, believe it or not.
His story begins much earlier than the crimes that made national headlines over the past few years, and no one has covered the story quite like the Wall Street Journal's Valerie Borlein, who wrote the book, The Devil at His Elbow. We get into everything from Murdoch's family history to the details of his downfall and the new info. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach.
It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. The app shows whether you're burning fat or carbs and provides tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workout, sleep, and stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning to understand your metabolism.
Based on your measurements, Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for the day. You can breathe into it before and after workouts as well, and meals, to get real-time insights, with Lumen providing tips to give you all the latest information about your health game.
Lumen can also track your cycle, adjusting its recommendations to maintain a healthy metabolism through hormonal shifts, helping you keep your energy levels up and stave off cravings. So if you want to stay on track with your health this holiday season, go to lumen.me.com. to get 15% off your Lumen. That's L-U-M-E-N dot M-E slash Megan for 15% off your purchase. Lumen makes a great gift too.
This is probably something they won't be expecting. Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this episode. Valerie, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Okay, so this is all so fascinating. And one of the most eye-opening things I read was about Alec Murdoch's background. He comes from a long line of deeply... ethically problematic people, which I did not know.
All you ever heard about him was that he came from this very storied family. They were lifelong solicitors or like the prosecutors in their town in South Carolina, very well respected. They controlled everything. It was far more nefarious than that. Can you take us back?
Oh, it absolutely was. I mean, I think one of the biggest surprises I had researching this book was that every crime that was eventually convicted of had some echo in the past. And that includes like violence against women or overtures of violence against women.
That includes insurance fraud, like by the side of the road, there was an act of insurance fraud that started the family dynasty, stealing from clients, drug trafficking. There were echoes in the past for every single crime we're talking about, even a boat wreck that caused really a traumatic injury. So that surprised me too. It wasn't just Ellick.
It was the history going back to 1920 of this family.
Yes. I mean, it really does show you, if you have a family, a father, a grandfather who are committing crimes and teaching you either explicitly or implicitly that that's okay, your odds of becoming a criminal are obviously much higher. But hello, women of the world, pay attention. Pay attention to your spouse, the guys you're dating. It can work the other way around too. And
What they come from, who they come from. So his great-grandfather, Randolph Murdoch Sr., basically committed suicide and insurance fraud at the same time? Mm-hmm.
That's right. And I was in Hampton just last week. I actually was standing at the train tracks just south of Almeda, where the home place that Ellick went the night of the homicides. His great grandfather, Randolph Senior, was a very prominent man. I mean, every meal he ate was front page news. Like, where was he now?
He was the district attorney for four counties in the low country of South Carolina. He was very sick. He was 53 years old. He was dying. He was at the end of his life. He had kidney failure at a time when there was no cure, right? There was no dialysis. He was broke. He had been a big investor in a bank, and then the bank failed. And through the depression, he was just...
I found documents down at the courthouse in Hampton where he just would say, there's no chance I can ever pay these people back. So he was broke. He was dying. And he knew how to do one thing incredibly well, which was sue the railroad, which at that time in 1940 was one of the only entities worth suing.
So what happened was he was driving back from a poker game in Yemesee, a little town right on the Hampton County line. At one in the morning, hottest day of the summer, 90-some degrees, he stops short of his home and turns onto a deserted train tracks and is at the base of it.
And as the train is coming, and y'all, if you grew up in a small town near a railroad, you know what time the train comes through. The train is coming north. And you can hear it for miles. It's coming north. It's bearing down on this train tracks. He speeds up onto the tracks themselves and they're blowing the whistle. They're flashing the light. It's a clear moonlit night.
And they see he sees them. And instead of like driving off, he waves at them. And what happens is there's a coroner's jury, and the coroner, of course, was a protege of Randolph Sr. The sheriff was a protege of Randolph Sr. There was an inquest the next morning, and guess what? The local coroner's jury found that in spite of the testimony of the engineer and others, it was an accident.
And it cleared the way for Randolph Murdoch Jr., Alec's grandfather, to sue the railroad for the equivalent of millions of dollars, which is what he did successfully.
Isn't it incredible? Is Randolph Murdoch Jr. Buster?
Randolph Murdoch Jr. is old Buster. And old Buster was a real force to be reckoned with. He was solicitor from 1940, when he was 25 years old, to 1986. So Roosevelt to Reagan. And he even stayed in that office beyond that time. The legislature finally essentially forced him. They created a rule that essentially forced him to retire, but he kept going into the office as a volunteer solicitor.
So Randolph Murdoch Jr., Old Buster, Alec Murdoch idolized him. He told many people that he wished he'd been born in Old Buster's day because in those days, what you said was what the truth was. And Old Buster, he ruled with an iron fist. He was one of those guys that would rather be feared than loved.
And he also continued fraud and potential violence against women.
So Old Buster, I was able to pull 900 pages from the National Archives of the records from his trial, his federal trial. The feds charged him with bootlegging, actually running the largest bootlegging ring in the South. He was the ringleader. They charged two dozen people. Old Buster, Ellick's grandfather, was charged with leading this entire ring in Colleton County.
And he was accused of taking a cash bribe in the hallway of the Colleton County Courthouse, which is the hallway that we went in and out every day of Ellick's Murdoch trial. He was accused of intimidating witnesses, buying off witnesses, and eventually of tampering with the jury by buying off the foreman. And he was one of the only people in that entire weeks-long federal trial that was acquitted.
So there's a history of, you know, Elick Murdoch was convicted of drug trafficking. His grandfather was credibly accused and narrowly escaped being convicted of bootlegging. So again, this echoes in the past.
Tell us about the mistress who got on the wrong side of Alec Murdoch's grandfather.
So there was testimony in Ellick's trial, as you remember. There was testimony that Ellick was somewhat of a philanderer, and that certainly is a history in the family going back generations. His grandfather, Old Buster, had a mistress, several, but one in particular who he was in touch with for many, many years, and her name was Ruth Fox. And Ruth Fox was married to a local, like a northern...
baron who came down and bought a plantation and she was from one of the nation's first families a really impressive woman in her own right and um she was had been uh in in the navy during world war ii like training pilots which is kind of wild to think about what kind of woman was doing that in the 40s and she met buster and asked for his help and getting out of her obligations he's like i know everybody i'll know all u.s senators i'll help you get out of this out of this bind
They got to know each other, and wouldn't you know, a year later, she is pregnant with his child. She goes to, it's just such an incredible story, she goes to the house, and we're talking about the same house that Elick went to the night of the homicides at Moselle.
She goes to the house, knocks on the door, speaks to Elick's grandmother, and says, you know, you have a son, I have a son, these boys should meet, and the grandmother says, you know, don't let my name come out of your mouth ever again, go away. And it was a stunning thing because she had survived essentially when she had told old Buster that she was pregnant. He had tried to have her killed.
He had a fixer, the story goes, he had a fixer of one of many who laid in wait underneath her porch one night and got a little bit too drunk and fell asleep and didn't kill her. So there was just like this incredible, incredible echoes throughout this story. Isn't it amazing? Yeah.
Yes, it is amazing. I mean, I cannot you must have been just slack jawed when you read up about the direct line from which he came. And it's it makes sense of everything. So it didn't stop there. It didn't even skip a generation.
Alex's father also had a history of paying people off to cover up a boat accident, which, of course, would set off Alex's own story with a different boat accident as well.
Well, there was certainly a terrible boat accident in 1998 from the same island, like Murdoch Island, where you'll remember the tragic boat wreck that killed Mallory Beach in 2019. They took the Murdoch family boat from the family compound, which is called Murdoch Island. Back in 1998, Ellick's younger brother was having a party on Murdoch Island. There was a boat there, and it's incredible.
I couldn't believe it when I saw the documents. It had been seized in a drug raid by the solicitor's office, so by Old Buster, and he liked the boat. So he kept it for his own use at the island, and the family used it. So it's late at night. There's some guests there that wanted to take the boat home rather than the roads because they didn't want to get in trouble.
They've been drinking for many hours. And these young men set off on a boat ride home. And it's tricky. We know from what happened with the wreck that killed Mallory Beach. It's very shallow waters and places. They hit a shoal and stopped and then immediately started back up.
and didn't realize that one of the guests had fallen overboard and had gotten run over by the motor and sustained a traumatic brain injury. And, you know, I've got hundreds of pages of documents from the state that show that the Murdochs were involved in trying to make that wreck go away.
Even some of the same DNR, the natural resources officers, even some of the same officers who were involved in the Mallory Beach wreck, they were working that night as well, So the echoes in the past are just, sometimes I couldn't believe it. I really was gobsmacked many times in a row.
Yes. Same. I'm having the same reaction just sitting here. So then of course we get to Alec and this whole thing that we watched, this double murder trial in which he was found guilty of killing his wife and his own son was set off by that boating accident. The second one, not the one you discussed where the woman was run over. Yeah.
But more recently with the younger generation, while Alec was out on a boat, was drinking and they had an accident and Mallory Beach was thrown from the boat and wasn't found for some time later and she was dead. And that old Murdoch instinct to cover it up
run cover for those involved, or especially for Alec, kicked in and would set off a chain of events that would ultimately destroy the Murdoch family.
And it's so poignant to look at pictures of Mallory. She was 19 years old when she died. She was just full of life. I've gotten to know her family over the course of reporting this story. And it was it was Alex Boat, but it was his son, Paul Murdoch, who was 19 at the time, who was who was who was driving. I mean, I think the facts established that he was driving.
He was criminally charged with it. And so he is incredibly drunk. He drank a lot. I talked with people that knew the family. He had been sneaking beer since he was eight years old. And at a certain point, not even sneaking them. So he was very, very drunk. He had 19 drinks that night. His BAC when he got to the hospital was .286.
But he was a person, even at 19, who'd been drinking for numbers of years and had been driving drunk for numbers of years, according to people I talked to who were involved in wrecks with him before. So he gets angry at his girlfriend, who's one of the passengers on the boat, confronts her. She says, you're too drunk to drive. Give everybody the keys. Slaps her, spits in her face.
goes back to the wheel of the boat and floors it, the equivalent of 28 miles an hour. And they're going through a very narrow, very shallow path and hit a bridge that fast. And Mallory is thrown overboard and never resurfaces. And what all the evidence, I've got thousands of pages of documents, some of them public, many of them public.
that had not been reviewed before that just showed that there was... When Ellick got to the hospital that night where these young people had been on the boat was, he went room to room to room trying to get everyone on the same page. He had his grandfather, Old Buster's badge outside of his pocket, pretending to be a law enforcement officer.
And I have his cell phone records and have tracked his path that night. Do you remember when he testified that he put blue lights and siren on the Suburban that he was driving? Yeah. It was almost physically impossible for him to get from Moselle, where he and Maggie were living at the time, to the hospital unless he was going fabulously fast, 80 or 90 miles an hour.
And I think it stands to reason, and I argue this in the book, that he almost certainly used lights. to get to the hospital before the other families and get everyone on the same page. But it really was his undoing.
The reason that he said he wanted to live in old Buster's time is that, you know, there was so much evidence in the video cameras in the hospital that night, so many statements, there was so much, everything is recorded, right? You know, and he could not outrun modernity. And in the end, that night and his actions, the night of the boat wreck, really was the beginning of the end of the family.
Yeah.
for among other reasons, he was then sued by the Beach family. And that in the course of that lawsuit, he would have to produce discovery, speaking to his economic status, his financial data, and so on. And he was, we know separately now, running a massive fraud, stealing from his law firm, had a massive drug problem, or so he testified, and was very worried this was all gonna come out.
He would be exposed. And at the same time, His law firm. Was this coincidental? Was this coincidental, Valerie, that like the law firm started an investigation of Alec at the same time for possible ethical breaches? Or were those two things related, the lawsuit and the law firm getting interested?
Well, it's all it's all kind of woven together. And what what happened in the immediate aftermath of the boat wreck is that Mallory's family was having a tough time finding a lawyer to represent their interest.
And Renee Beach, Mallory's mom, tells the story of being down at the landing where the boat had come to rest and wanting to go down there and see where her daughter was, where she was the last time she was spotted. And the police were very, very kind but said, I'm sorry, you can't go down there. Here's a case of water for you and your family while you wait.
And there was a moment where Randolph Murdoch III, Alec's dad, and Maggie, his wife, came down in their boat. pickup truck and he waves at the officer and waves him through and renee beach realized then oh my gosh this is not a vigil i thought i was at a vigil mourning my daughter this is a crime scene and The family that's been the law in this area for 100 years is in charge of it.
I need a lawyer. And she made a critical decision, which is to hire a lawyer to represent the family's interest. And that lawyer was a key player and a big character in this book. And his name is Mark Tinsley. And there's no enemy like your former friend. He was very close to Ellick. He knew the playbook. He had a he had a card key to get in and out of the Murdoch law firm at will.
And he recognized those relationships. He's like, oh, I know he knows these particular officers because of my own personal information. And once he decided to take the case, take the Beaches case, he was relentless in showing that. that Ellick and potentially the officers who were involved in protecting the scene were really, really protecting Paul from charges.
And so he filed a lawsuit in very short order. And that lawsuit sought, like you said, all of Ellick's financial records. It's just a standard part of a civil lawsuit to say, how much insurance do you have? What resources could you potentially pay if there was a judgment?
And Ellick knew more than anyone else that he had been robbing his personal injury clients, the poorest of the poor, for more than a decade. And he knew what any serious inquiry would do. And so he had to stave that off. And in the end, it was his undoing.
So he killed his own wife and his son, Paul, who had been at the helm for that boating accident. And it was an attempt to garner sympathy, like to make him a sympathetic character so that his law firm would...
move away, would stop investigating him so that the lawsuit involving Paul would be less strong because, you know, the main culprit would be gone and who would put this poor man now through the torture of seeing a civil lawsuit through. It was an effort to just change his own financial and reputational fortunes.
No, I think the prosecution argued that very effectively. And one of the things that I think that Mark Tinsley said on the stand is personal injury lawyers don't think like other people. Their gift, their understanding of a successful one is understanding emotion, like what might motivate a jury to pay blood money and a lot of it in a case. They understand what makes people tick.
And he knew that, you know, the day of the homicides, June 7th of 2021, and I'm sure we'll talk about this, he had been confronted over some of that missing money that he had been stealing. $792,000, not a small amount. He knew that the law firm was on to him. And he...
knew also that his father was dying, the patriarch of this family, who had also loaned him a million dollars over time, and who he had just been texting with his buddy at the bank, oh, I'm going to get another loan from my dad for some money he was short. He knew his dad was dying. He knew this lawsuit was pending about his financials. He had been confronted over the missing money.
And he also knew that Paul was a mess. I mean, sadly, and may he rest in peace, Paul's actions Drunken actions did not cease with the boat wreck. There's testimony that even just 10 days before he was killed, he was on a boat drinking, taking some people out, and he had to call his father to get out of it. So Paul's behavior was not de-escalating. If anything, his behavior is getting worse.
So yes, I think that the state made a really effective argument that he needed to do something to become, instead of the object of suspicion, an object of sympathy. And what more would do that except becoming, instead of somebody, a potential thief, a grieving father, a grieving husband, someone who was the victim of a horrible crime. And for months, he was right.
It completely changed the subject.
And he had, prior to getting arrested... done what I guess it was his great grandfather did, which was attempt to create a suicide situation that would lead to an insurance payout. I mean, now it's like kind of all connecting.
It's all connecting and it really is extraordinary. So over the course of the summer of 2021, he did almost get away with the murder of Maggie and Paul. He really did. And he almost got away with the thefts that he's now admitted to dozens and dozens of people, millions and millions of dollars.
By, you know, getting, borrowing more money, borrowing money from his best friend, Chris Wilson, borrowing money from the bank, getting fronted money and trying to repay the $792,000 back to the law firm, which he did. And they stopped, they kind of let it go.
And that goes in July and in August until the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, his paralegal is in his office looking for some paperwork, which she knows he doesn't like, but she really needed it. She lifts up this folder, finds the check that was missing that proved that he had been stealing. So what happens then is the gig is up.
Alex, confronted by his brother, his law partner, and many other law partners, and they say, we've got evidence you've been stealing from the firm, you have to go. So he gets fired that Friday of Labor Day weekend, and what happens the next morning? Saturday morning, he tries to fake his own death on the side of the road.
And what he said was an insurance fraud attempt to get money for his surviving son, Buster. But what really looks like another way to change the subject, just like he had done back June 7th with the homicides of his wife and son.
I'm Megyn Kelly, host of The Megyn Kelly Show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today. You can catch The Megyn Kelly Show on Triumph, a Sirius XM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love. Great people like Dr. Laura. I'm back.
Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey, and yours truly, Megyn Kelly. You can stream The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM at home or anywhere you are. No car required. I do it all the time. I love the SiriusXM app. It has ad-free music coverage of every major sport, comedy, talk, podcast, and more. Subscribe now. Get your first three months for free.
Go to SiriusXM.com slash MKShow to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MKShow and get three months free. Offer details apply.
Do we think he did not intend to die then when that that guy who was next to homeless? I mean, that guy seemed, you know, not like a sophisticated character when he got him to, quote, shoot him. But it just grazed his head. That was always so confusing to me. And I'm like, was this some sort of a sharpshooter?
How did the guy manage to actually barely connect with him to the point where it looked like he actually had been shot at, but not so much that he actually killed him?
No, there are many theories about what happened, actually, at the side of the road. But the man you're talking about, Curtis Eddie Smith, will tell you. And he said it. He's like, if I'd shot him, he'd have been dead. So what he believes happened is there was a struggle over the gun.
And he has said he thinks that Ellick was trying to frame him, that they were struggling over the gun and maybe Ellick was bigger than him. Elick's 6'4", 200 pounds. I mean, can he overpower this? And Curtis Eddie Smith, his cousin Eddie, is a smaller guy. He's been out on disability for a number of years. Elick was his disability lawyer. And then frame him.
And you remember when Dick Harpoolian and Jim Griffin, Elick's lawyers, They said in court filings, they're like, you know, the real killer is Eddie Smith. He was the one who killed Maggie and Paul. And so one of the theories is that Alec may have been trying to kill Eddie and then say, see, he was coming after me to kill me the same way that he killed my wife and son.
And it's strange, I don't know if you remember, but he was paying, Eddie was cashing a lot of checks for Ellick over a number of years. And the checks accelerated that summer, the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Ellick was effectively paying Eddie in a way. So was he going to say, he was blackmailing me, look at these payments? There are multiple ways to look at what actually happened there.
But one of them is that if you look at the photos and the defense released the photos, they signed a HIPAA release and released all the photos. There are people locally that say that's not a cut in his head. He fell and that's the gravel on the side of the road that caused him to be cut. But one thing I should add about Cousin Eddie is that he's actually a cousin. I could not believe it.
But if you go back more than 100 years to the Civil War, Alec's great-great-grandfather, so Randolph Sr. 's father, was an officer in the... in the Southern army. And so was Eddie's great, great grandfather. And they were brothers. His great, great grandfather was named Lazarus Murdoch. He was, he was what they call a fire eater. So he was an especially virulent, um, anti he was anti-union.
He made these, these, these incredible speeches, um, that got picked up by national media and actually were read by Abraham Lincoln. So Eddie is, he, he says, he's like, I'm half Murdoch and he's right there. He's, he's, partner. Wow.
Do we know, do we ever figure out, and by the way, just for the audience, I'm talking today to Valerie Borlein. She wrote the book, The Devil at His Elbow, Alex Murdoch and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty. Do we know where all the money went? This is one of the mysteries, right? It just seemed like Alec was taking in so much money via fraud from the law firm, the clients and so on. Yeah. And
Where did it go? Like, it seemed like he claimed he just spent it on drugs. But the conclusion by many was always how many drugs could that could he possibly have taken? He took in more than he could ever have spent was the layperson conclusion on the on the funding.
No, and I think one of the key voices in the book is Blanca Simpson, who was the housekeeper at Moselle for many years. And I think the evidence establishes that Ellick was using drugs. But I think there's no evidence that he was using the amount of drugs and opioids in particular that he says he was. And I had the benefit of 10 years of spending. I could see his through some federal exhibits.
I could see what he and Maggie spent over the course of 10 years down to like when they when they would go to the Honey Baked Ham store at Thanksgiving. You could see what that expenditure was and what was so shocking about it. And I think we probably know people like this in our own lives is as soon as money came in the door, it went out.
He was overdrawn tens of thousands of dollars multiple times in a year. Maggie would have to call him and say, can you call the bank? I need to be able to, I'm at the grocery store. I need to be able to cash this chain and be able to pay for my groceries. What was he spending it on? You know, it's extraordinary. They would take a private plane to a USC bowl game instead of flying first class.
Blanca told me, and there's farm equipment out on Moselle, which is 1,700 acres, a huge, huge property, twice the size of Central Park. And rather than fix a big piece of heavy equipment, they would just put gallons of oil in it every day. So he was spending hundreds of dollars on oil. It's hard to even understand where the money was going. But there is missing money.
Millions of dollars, the feds say, that's still missing. So he spent a lot of it. He spent some of it on drugs. I do subscribe to the idea that he buried some of it at Moselle in PVC pipes. I've talked with people who've been there when those pipes had been dug up. Cash is tough. It's tough to bury millions of dollars in dirt over time.
There is a theory, and I think the feds have been pursuing it, that some of the money is offshore. And was he going to run that summer is one of the ideas. But there's there's there's the feds say about six million dollars that's still missing.
So that that makes more sense that that we've got millions missing than that. He spent it all on the drugs. All right. So then we go to trial. He does wind up arrested. This all comes out. There is the moment he is found guilty. Actually, we have that. Let's just watch that. So 51.
The state of South Carolina, County of Colleton, in the Court of General Sessions, the July term of 2022. The state versus Richard Alexander Murdoch, defendant. Indictment for murder, SC Code 16-3-0010, CDR Code 0116. Verdict, guilty. Signed by the Four Lady.
Okay, and that's interesting for a few reasons. One, he was found guilty. Two, old Becky Hill reading the verdict. would come to play a major role in this story, which no one knew at the time. But Becky almost got this verdict thrown out because of her behavior behind the scenes with the jurors. And could it still her behavior get this verdict thrown out? Is that totally settled?
I know that we had a hearing in which a different judge said, no, I'm not throwing out the verdict. But could that be reversed on appeal? I imagine Alex lawyers are taking that up.
No, it's it's incredible to watch that footage. I was sitting there that night and I was leaning forward on the edge of my seat just listening to it because I remember that emotion and all of the docket numbers and numbers were like, but what's the answer? So spit it out. But we had been in that courtroom. It's very tight corners.
These soaring ceilings, it was designed in the 1820s, but very tight quarters. And we had been in there every day for six weeks. And by we, I mean the lawyers, the law enforcement officers, the jury. The Murdochs, they were across the aisle from me. I could, you know, exchange pleasantries every day.
And so it was an extraordinary result to be there that night and listen to the verdict read by Becky. And Becky was really like the den mother of the courtroom because the clerk of court makes sure the jury has lunch, makes sure that the press has the credentials. Or, you know, there's so many people and downtown Walterboro didn't have places to eat.
What about food trucks, which they ultimately bought? And she was sort of the principal of an elementary school is what it felt like a little bit. So it's surreal for Becky to be the center of so much scrutiny. But what that scrutiny is about is her relationships and potential talking out of school with members of the jury, many of whom she knew beforehand. And many of the jurors knew each other.
It's a small town. I'm from a relatively small town myself in the South. And if you had 100 people in church the day before jury selection, you know, five of them would have gotten a jury summons. So, you know, people knew each other and the jury wasn't sequestered. Everybody in town knew who they were. And Becky, you know, knew a lot of them personally.
And so the question was, did she talk to them out of school? And did she say things that would prejudice them against Ellick, particularly when he took the stand? And I'll write this in the book.
And the jurors come forward to say, yes, at least one of them said she influenced my verdict.
And it is a small town. And we talked a little bit about the bootlegging case involving old Buster. You know, it's extraordinary, but Becky's grandmother and grandfather and her uncle, who was a teenager, were charged, federally charged with felonies in that bootlegging ring. They were on Buster's payroll. Oh, boy. Everything is connected. Everything's connected there.
But to your question, Megan, I think that we did have a first answer. There was a hearing back in January where the former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Jean Toll, was asked by her former colleagues in the Supreme Court to take a listen to this request for a new trial. She denied it, but the defense is appealing it back to the Supreme Court.
They've agreed to hear it, even though it seems unlikely they will overturn their own special request. the person that they trusted with this decision. And then also they're very close allies with Judge Newman, who presided over the initial proceeding. He's very tight with the Chief Justice Don Beatty. So I spoke with Dick. I saw him recently in Columbia, Dick Harpootlian, and they see their best
chance at a new trial at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, just a little bit further removed from South Carolina, which is such a small state, and getting fresh years at this idea of not just did Becky Hill say things to the jurors that were prejudicial, but also did the state apply the wrong standard? And it was a degree, it's a measure of degrees.
Like, yes, we acknowledge that she talked with a jury, but did it did it move the needle? And so what they hope is that the federal court will apply a different standard.
Yeah, that they they're going to argue they were held to to too high a burden of proof to prove jury tampering and that a lower standard should have been applied, which would have allowed them to prove jury tampering, which would allow him to get a new trial. The justice told was great when she came in and held that hearing over Becky Hill. The allegations against Becky Hill just got weirder.
Justice Toll, I will say, was – I'm sorry. She's just such an extraordinary figure in South Carolina history. I used to cover South Carolina politics when I was a reporter at the state newspaper in Columbia, and she was the chief justice at the time, former speaker of the House. She's been in public life there for 60 years.
And came, was a young lawyer, and this is so extraordinary to me, was a young lawyer in a time when women weren't even allowed to serve in a jury until 1968. Wow. And so she was, yeah, she was talking to all male juries.
When she was up there, I say this lovingly, she seemed like a tough old broad in the best sense, you know, like she wasn't going to tolerate any nonsense.
She would love to hear you say that. And she knew the Murdoch. She knew the Murdoch. And she had actually, both in the legislature, I talked with her about this, both in the legislature and on the bench, had pushed for laws that would kind of... claw back some of the power that they were using, you know, inappropriately in her view. So she knew the Murdochs quite well over the course of decades.
She made the comment about Becky Hill that would become very well known. Here it is, Zot 52.
I find that the clerk of court is not completely credible as a witness. Ms. Hill was attracted by the siren call of celebrity. She wanted to write a book about the trial and expressed that as early as November 2022, long before the trial began.
And that led to bad behavior by Becky Hill, which got this whole thing mucked up. But do you remember, it's been a while since we've covered this, but she also has a son who worked in the courthouse and there was an allegation about him wiping his phone and wiping her phone on the day that they were supposed to turn them over for an internal ethics investigation. It smelled to high heaven.
You know, it is. I think it's if you're not from a small town in the rural south, maybe it just it it boggles the mind. But her son was the information technology director for the county. And that was, you know, it's a. She's an elected official, but she's also politically powerful, and some of those jobs are patronage jobs.
And he was in that role and is accused of tapping the phone of an county administrator that was communicating with the state ethics board to try to find out what was going on in the investigation with his mother. There were all sorts of wiping the phone, which the lawyers will tell you is a fairly standard procedure. move in some defense cases, but it looked highly irregular to a lay person.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because it's such a big case. It captivated so much attention that the center ring of the circus is really Elick Murdoch and the trial, but there's so many outer rings. With the Mallory Beach case, for example, there's another case that's ongoing
about whether the convenience store where Paul bought beer, whether the owner of that convenience store has been trying to harass the Beach family over the years. That's been going on for several years. Becky is facing an investigation into her behavior, and that's been going on. So we're in multiple layers of drama with this story, and it's just incredible, like the layers –
I remember sitting in court and watching Ellick during a break. He was six feet away from me. And he's the eye of this hurricane, and there's so much swirling around him. That one person could stir up so much chaos is really amazing.
So now here we are where he's appealing. He's going to argue Becky Hill mucked up the trial to the point where he gets another trial. We don't love the chances, but one never knows. And in the meantime, the wrongful death lawsuit that Mallory Beach's family brought against Alec, is that totally resolved?
That was, the remnants of that were resolved this week with a $500,000 payment from her, from Alex Insurer that had been tied up. And that was paid to the lawyers this past, the paper was filed this past Monday. So that case is pretty well wrapped up. Did the family, did the family get a payment too? No. The family did. Not this past summer, but summer of 22. I'm sorry, summer of 23.
They received a payment largely from Parker's convenience store, this convenience store where Paul bought beer, on the order of $14 million. So it was a significant civil judgment. And I learned a lot about personal injury law in the course of reporting this book. what is, what was Mallory's life worth? It is blood money.
And so it was, it's a, it's a, it's a difficult fact of personal injury law that the more money that you get paid is a reflection of, of what, you know, a jury might think your, your, your loved one's life is worth.
I'm sure it's a, it's a special form of sentencing for you because every time you get into a
the car that money bought or the bed that money paid for it's got to make you feel awful and they will tell you and they will and they will tell you mrs you know pamela pinckney hakeem pinckney's mother hakeem was the the paraplegic teenager who um who died in a nursing home and was robbed by alec murdoch twice she would tell you she would give back all of it for for time with her son
It's the proxy we have in our judicial system to make a family as whole as possible, knowing that nothing really ever will.
So what, if anything, is happening with the other piece of this story, which is the possible outcome? There's only one other piece by by Buster, Paul's older brother of a young gay classmate who was killed on the road. But there's just only speculation that it was Buster Murdoch, not actual proof. And they were going to reopen that investigation in the wake of all of this. Where does that stand?
Well, you know, you mentioned the missing money. There's also the question of the missing guns and the homicide. But the biggest unanswered question is what happened to Stephen Smith? He was the he was a 19 year old young man who was found in the middle of a road in the summer of 2015. In the course of the investigation, the Murdoch name came up 40 different times.
People would say one of the boys or another was involved somehow. But I should be clear, there is no evidence that Buster or Paul, there's no proof that either one of them had anything to do with the death of this young man. Buster has gone so far to say that he had nothing to do with it. He wasn't close to it. He wasn't there that evening.
And he's even sued some of the documentary filmmakers who he alleges have said that he had a role in some way, shape, or form.
They certainly have played those birds. breadcrumbs.
But it is, you can go through, it's 90 some pages of a police report where the name comes up over and over again in very strange ways. So there's always been a rumor that the Murdochs were involved somehow in his death or in making it impossible to find out who killed him. But I can tell you that the state grand jury has still been meeting over this case and is eager to figure it out.
It is one that still haunts Hampton County. So we may never know, but it won't be for lack of interviews and lack of trying because they're actively working the case from what I understand.
So in the time we have left, what's life like right now for Buster Murdoch, the son whose entire family is... has been killed or is now in jail. And for Alec Murdoch, who was living this life of excess and now is convicted of double homicide, not to mention all the fraud charges that were brought against him separately, which he was also found guilty on.
No, it's very poignant. I've mentioned I was in Hampton last week and went by the cemetery and I saw, it took a while, but Maggie and Paul's gravestones have been put up and people will leave flowers there. There's a ceramic dog that looks like Bubba, the yellow lab that belonged to the family that's there. And most poignant of all, it's on Maggie's headstone, it says Margaret Branstad or Murdoch.
And on Paul's, it says, Paul, Terry, Murdoch, son. And it's incredible that that is how you'd be defined. But the person I was with said, what happens to Alec? You know, where is he in this picture? So will he be remembered as father? Will he be remembered as the person that killed him? But he's in prison in the upstate. He has acclimated to prison life well, according to what I'm told.
And by that, I mean he has... Alec Murdoch is the type of a person who works the system, and he has relationships. He's a disbarred lawyer, but he knows the law, and he helps other inmates with their questions. He's using his notoriety to... to his benefit.
He was accused by the system of prisons found that he had been essentially bribing other inmates to let him use their PIN number to make phone calls. He's figuring things out on the inside. But he will never, ever see the light of day, even if there's another trial in the homicide case. The state has effectively got an insurance policy.
You remember back in November when he pled guilty to those dozens of financial crimes, and they got a sentence that will keep him in prison until he's roughly 80 years old, regardless of whether the homicide is overturned. As for Buster, my understanding is he's living in Bluffton, a community just adjacent to Beaufort.
His fiancee is a woman who was in court with him every day, his girlfriend from law school who is a lawyer. He got a substantial settlement from his mother's estate, roughly $500,000. There's a payment, I document in the book, where he participated in a documentary and got several hundred thousand dollars from that. So he has a significant amount of money to pay.
to start a life, although it is difficult to see how he does so separate from his family because his last name is Murdoch and he's got that red hair. It would be hard with that name and that hair to make a new life.
Mm-hmm. You'd have to go someplace else. I mean, there's a brother. Alex's brother seemed non-sociopathic. Perhaps there's some hope there. I don't know. Raised by that man with that family lineage.
Well, and you're right about his brothers. His older brother, Randy, and his younger brother, John Marvin, are still in the community as well. I went by the law firm the other day, and his older brother, Randy, is a partner there and is actively working cases. His younger brother, John Marvin, runs a heavy equipment business.
And as you go down the main drag from Lincoln, Hampton, and Varnville, you see Murdoch Rentals right there. So they're still in the community. And And, you know, well-regarded to a degree. But I think that everything's changed with the downfall.
Is anyone living at the estate where it happened?
So Moselle is the state where it happened. It actually has been sold, and it's been sold in two pieces. The house itself was sold, along with roughly 20 acres, to an out-of-state buyer whose name was not revealed. And the Delta, the other acreage, was sold to a neighboring landowner who wanted the land. You know, it is, I went by there the other day too, just to, to take a look.
I had been onto the property during the trial. I accompanied the jury on their, their visit to see the place. It still feels, it still seems like a, there's a heaviness in the air out there. It is still a haunted place, really. Dick Harpootlian said so. And, and I, you know, and I felt it as well. Always will be.
Wow, great reporting, Valerie. Thank you. Her name is Valerie Borlein. And the book, again, is The Devil at His Elbow, Alex Murdoch and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty. Google it, check it out, Devil at His Elbow. Thank you so much for coming on and telling us the story and the updates. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for joining us today and have a very happy new year.
We will be back later this week with some major updates in the Scott Peterson case. See you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.