The Mysterious Mr Murdaugh: James Lasdun on Why a Father Annihilated His Son

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Many of us remember Alex Murdaugh, the lawyer from South Carolina who got accused and sentenced for murdering his wife and son. It was a huge story back in 2021 when the murder happened, and then in 2023 when the trial took place. Although, according to James Lasdun writing in the New Yorker, there's still a lingering mystery about the trial. One thing that isn't mysterious is that there would be a wave of books about this dynastic killer, very controversial figure. And as it happens, one of those books is by my guest today, the New Yorker's James Lasdun, very distinguished British poet, or British, Anglo-American poet, crime writer, novelist, who has a new book out called The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh. And James is joining us from Brooklyn, New York. James, congratulations on the new book. It's out this week.

00:01:43 James Lasdun: Thank you. Thanks so much.

00:01:45 Andrew Keen: So where are you, James? Or where is The Family Man in this wave? Is it early part of the wave, late part of the wave?

00:01:54 James Lasdun: I think it's probably the late — well, who knows what future books will come out? But there've been a few. There've definitely been around five or six, I think. There have been documentaries, there have been dramas, so there's been a lot out there. And I knew of all of those things, or most of them, before I embarked on this book. But you do always sort of wonder, how's that gonna affect your own book? So I guess we'll see.

00:02:27 Andrew Keen: One of the Netflix series was called A Southern Scandal. There's certainly a gothic southern quality to all this. So what are you trying to do in The Family Man? The subtitle of the book is Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh. What are you adding? You said there have already been some books. What's your contribution? What are you trying to contribute?

00:02:51 James Lasdun: I was trying to understand it. I mean, I covered the case, as you said, for the New Yorker. I wrote two pieces and I felt that I had only scratched the surface. We had a verdict, we had a sentence, and we had the bare bones of a supposed motive. But you have to understand, this is a guy who murders not just his wife, which is unfortunately a relatively common occurrence, but he murders his allegedly beloved son. And to me, that was such an enormously awful and such an unusually rare crime. And the motive that we were all given was that this was somehow an attempt to distract from his troubles. He had been embezzling money for a very long time. There was a hearing coming up that was likely to expose him, or might have exposed him, and he had just been confronted that day over some money that he had stolen from his firm. They weren't yet accusing him of stealing it, but he was in a very tight corner on that. So the theory is that, yep, he's in terrible trouble. His world is about to come crashing down. So he murders his wife and his son. And, you know, I could see in some ways how that worked out, but I really couldn't get inside it. I mean, this guy wasn't in any obvious way a paranoid lunatic or anything like that.

00:04:31 Andrew Keen: Right. You write in one of your New Yorker pieces that you tried to fit him into one criminological category or another — the sociopath, narcissist, family annihilator — and you struggled with those categories.

00:04:46 James Lasdun: Yeah. Well, at that time, this concept that was mentioned first at the trial — the family annihilator — was the first time I'd come across that phrase. And other than stating the obvious, as someone who annihilates their family, it sounded like there was perhaps some sort of criminology behind it, or some psychology. There isn't very much, but there is a certain amount. And I looked into that as part of my attempt to really understand why this murder happened, and if it indeed happened the way that we were all told it had happened. It's not that I'm radically questioning the outline of events as presented by the prosecution. It's just that they never went into any real detail. There was no attempt to really get into the why and the how, and what exactly happened in the thirteen minutes of complete mystery when the murders are supposed to have taken place.

00:05:47 Andrew Keen: And, of course, to add to all this, he's from a very distinguished, wealthy family from South Carolina. So, James, not everyone is intimately familiar with the trial or with the murder. We want everyone to read your book, so don't give away all the mysteries. But remind us of what exactly happened. There was a boat, right?

00:06:13 James Lasdun: Yeah, there are many different parts of this story, and they connect with each other in complicated and sometimes rather mysterious ways, but they do connect. First of all, in 2019, there was a boat crash where the son, Paul Murdaugh, and his friends were on a boat, and they crashed late at night. A lot of drinking on the boat, and a young woman, Mallory Beach, was killed. Then a couple of years later, the murders are announced. It's discovered that Maggie and Paul had been killed at the kennels at Moselle, which is the family property. At that time, their father, Alex, was not a suspect. I mean, he was part of the circle of suspicion, as they call it, but he wasn't being publicly named as a serious suspect. I think in fact, quite early on, the police were suspicious of him in a more than just pro forma way. But to those of us who were coming to the story from the outside, it didn't immediately sound as though he was involved. Three months after that, he gets into a strange situation where he's changing a tire — or he says he's changing a tire — at the side of a rural road, and somebody takes a shot at him. And at that point, it really did look like his story — that there was a vendetta against the family because of his son causing the death of this young woman. It looked as if there was truth in that. And I know that at that point, a lot of the police really did come around to thinking that. But that story fell apart very quickly. It turned out — well, we don't know exactly what happened, but they found out very quickly that it was a setup. No one he didn't know had taken a shot at him. In fact, his cousin Eddie —

00:08:22 Andrew Keen: He has a cousin Eddie. I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up, James.

00:08:25 James Lasdun: No. He's a major piece of it. He is a cousin of the Murdaughs, a distant cousin. And it turned out that he was the person who had met with Alex on the side of the road. Alex claimed that he had asked his cousin to shoot him dead so that his surviving son, Buster, could claim the life insurance — a $10 million life insurance he had on himself. And he claims that somehow cousin Eddie bungled the shooting and the bullet just grazed the back of his head, and he did have an entry and exit wound at the back of his head. Something definitely happened. Eddie vehemently denies this. He says, yes, he met him, but he was stunned when Alex asked him to shoot him. He tried to dissuade him. And the version Eddie most comes back to is that somehow there was a struggle over the gun, and it went off, and he got out. He took the gun with him. I mean, it doesn't really add up. And I think most people would agree that what was really going on there was that this was three months after the murders, and on that day, or the day before, he was confronted with actually stealing from his law firm. And he'd admitted it. So there was no further possibility of getting out. He'd got three months grace after killing Maggie and Paul, but now it was kinda curtains. So he used that to suggest that he was suicidal. But I think what most people believe is that he was actually trying to set up — or reinforce — his original pretense, which was that there was a vendetta against him and his family. And he worked with a sketch artist to produce a likeness of his alleged shooter, who in this sketch looks nothing like cousin Eddie, who has long, shaggy hair. This is a guy with a sort of buzz cut, who looks remarkably like one of the kids on the boat, Anthony Cook —

00:10:58 Andrew Keen: Who's still alive?

00:10:59 James Lasdun: Yeah, he's still alive. He and his cousin Connor — when Paul and Maggie were killed, they were shot with two separate weapons. And it seems like the vendetta scenario that Alex was trying to contrive was supposed to point people to Anthony and Connor Cook, because they were on the boat, and Anthony was Mallory Beach's boyfriend, and he was very angry, very obviously deeply upset about the death of Mallory. So in Alex's head, it would have made sense, I suppose, that people would think that they had shot Paul and Maggie. I'm sorry, this probably sounds incredibly complicated, and that's partly why I wrote the book. It is an enormously complex story.

00:11:48 Andrew Keen: But so far, the way you've described it, James, you haven't even indicated any potential element of innocence on the part of Alex Murdaugh. He's coming up with all these schemes to blame other people for the murders and for this supposed shooting with his cousin Eddie. Where are there even suggestions of innocence?

00:12:11 James Lasdun: Well, I don't think there's much of a suggestion of innocence anywhere. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and some of them seem to point to the possible involvement of other people. But even if other people were involved, he's still not innocent in any way, and I'm certainly not suggesting that. But I do think that the way it unfolded remains somewhat mysterious, and I was trying to probe that in every way possible. Because I found it so difficult — okay, there is all this circumstantial evidence that points to him being the shooter. But I still found it very hard to believe that anyone would do that, because — he must have known. I mean, he was from a family of prosecutors, he knew how the police operated. He must have known that he was going to be a suspect, if for no other reason than that he was the person who reported the crime. He found the bodies. He must have, at some level, I believe, known that ultimately it was gonna come to nothing. And why would you do that? Why would you kill the son that you apparently love for no reason really at all?

00:13:41 Andrew Keen: Or even the wife — they seemed happily married. You don't see —

00:13:44 James Lasdun: Yeah, well, yes. I mean, there were rumors of an impending divorce, but —

00:13:50 Andrew Keen: Were there? When you come to these sorts of things, James, the stuff that comes to mind, of course, alongside money — drugs, women. Was there a sexual element, alcohol, drugs? Are they involved in this narrative?

00:14:08 James Lasdun: There's a huge drug element. He had a major opioid addiction. Although, again, like almost everything else, there's a lot of murk around it. We know that he spent an unbelievable amount of money on opioid pills. So much, in fact, that most people think — and he claimed that this was to support his own habit, that he was severely addicted. Most people dispute that anyone could have survived the quantities that he took. I've spoken to someone who was severely opioid addicted, and she said that actually, you do build up tolerance. It's not absolutely impossible. Regardless of that, he had a huge opioid issue, and he was spending millions on that, and that was partly driving his financial crimes. That was partly driving the embezzlements that he went in for. As far as the marriage question, yeah, there were these rumors, but in fact, Maggie's sister took the stand at the trial, and she was not a sympathetic witness to Alex at all. But she did testify that the marriage was fundamentally happy. So that sort of put an end to any kind of serious speculation that a divorce was impending — that Maggie was gonna leave him, that Maggie was going to create issues around money. There probably were issues. She seems to have been partly living at a different house that they own in Edisto, but it doesn't appear that they were about to divorce. And a lot of people actually testified to that.

00:15:48 Andrew Keen: There's no evidence of him having girlfriends around?

00:15:52 James Lasdun: Oh, yeah. There is evidence of that.

00:15:54 Andrew Keen: There is evidence. So clearly he was a drug addict, he was a philanderer. So there are lots of things.

00:16:04 James Lasdun: He was an embezzler. I mean, he was a terrible guy.

00:16:07 Andrew Keen: And a major criminal. When you hear this story, of course, one of the reasons the press got so obsessed with it is because the Murdaugh family is from the so-called Lowcountry region of South Carolina — a powerful family, a wealthy family. If this had been a nineteenth century story, I'm guessing race would have been involved. Maybe he would have accused some Black laborer of the crime, and a white jury would have cleared him. Is there a political element to this, or to the trial?

00:16:43 James Lasdun: Yes, I think there is. You have this oligarchy. You have this family who had run the Fourteenth Circuit, which is what their county is in, as prosecutors and as litigators. So they were making money on both sides of the legal process in the town of Hampton, and had an absolute lock on law enforcement. They apparently were bribing juries. And even in the current generation, the lawyers who got involved in this case were seriously concerned about Alex's ability to bribe a jury or to tamper with the jury. So they had an enormous amount of consolidated power. I think the main way that played out in this story is that it's part of what gave Alex his bizarre, almost surreal sense of entitlement — that he could perpetrate these frauds over and over and over for years and years, and get away with them. And he did get away with them. He got away with them partly because he got people to collaborate with him, other people from that entitled oligarchy. There was a banker called Russell Laffitte who was occupying a similar position in the banking world to the one that Alex Murdaugh occupied in the legal world. There was another lawyer called Cory Fleming. He had collaborators. But also, at his firm — which had begun its life as a family firm and was now this big law firm that did personal injury litigation and things like that — they had had two or three occasions in the past where it should have been obvious to them that he was stealing money from them, and they kind of swept it under the rug each time. He was making a lot of money for them. He was one of their friends. The place was run as a family. His own family wasn't the only family he destroyed. He destroyed the fraternity of his legal colleagues at PMPED. To some extent, it seems very clear that they were not conducting any real oversight, and for a very long time, they sort of let him get away with it.

00:19:16 Andrew Keen: The way you describe it, though — you've obviously given this a great deal of thought, you've written a book about it — it doesn't sound that hard to categorize. He was a big-time criminal on every front. He thought he could get away with everything. And this double murder was one too many. One theory that comes to mind for me is that he clearly was a very cold-blooded character. Is it conceivable that he married — sorry, that's a Freudian error — that he murdered his son because that might convince guys like you that he would never have done anything like that? So he did something so evil, so extraordinary, as to suggest innocence.

00:20:06 James Lasdun: Well, I'm not sure I can follow the logic of that, but maybe. To go back to some of the other things you say — yes, he obviously was very cold-blooded. But this is a guy who people loved, and had loved for decades. He sort of falls under two different categories. There's the family annihilator, who he resembles, because a lot of them are people in his position — men who have actually built a real, solid life, acquired wealth, often done it dishonestly, and their facade is about to crack and they kill their families. In almost every case, they also kill themselves, because what is driving them is principally shame. It's very, very rare that they kill in order to create a scenario that's gonna distract people from their prior crimes. They almost always are flooded with shame. They see their family as an extension of themselves. Usually, the children are very young, and they kill them. That's the normal pattern. He doesn't fall into that. The other criminological category he falls into is the psychopath or the sociopath, and those people are very often embezzlers. They seem to be very drawn to fraud and embezzlement and that kind of intimate treachery of people. But those people, despite what one thinks one knows from Hitchcock and so on, very seldom kill. So he's got a little bit of both, but they're separate categories. One of the things about sociopaths and psychopaths is that they tend to have a slightly robotic affect. At least if you know them over time, people say of them — one of the early definitions was that they are a kind of subtly constructed reflex machine. And Alex was not that. He really had this kind of almost all-too-human affect. He was tremendously emotional. He would tear up very easily. Again, this family idea — everyone who knew him would say, "Well, I thought he was my brother. I felt like he was my brother." And even after they knew the worst of him, they continued to have this kind of wistful fondness, this affection for him. So he's rather more mysterious than just "he's a thief, he's a drug addict, a womanizer, therefore he must be guilty of killing his son." To me, there is a big hole in that argument. And my book was an attempt to get myself across that gap, because I do think he did these crimes. But I needed to understand the internal thought processes that got him there, and the external conditions that further enabled him. I came to this whole project as someone who's spent much more time writing fiction than nonfiction. And if you're writing a novel, you have to understand your characters. You have to be able to go with them from A to B to C with real understanding of what's motivating them. I wasn't doing that with this —

00:23:38 Andrew Keen: It's uncanny. Some of the novels you've written — The Fall Guy, a psychological thriller back in 2016 about a wealthy banker, a book about class, guilt, and betrayal. You wrote another book in 2002, The Horned Man, about an expatriate professor in New York who believes he's being framed for a series of brutal murders. You've written a lot of books, James — don't need me to tell you that. And there's something almost — this narrative could have almost been invented for you, for a writer with your sensibility and interest. Is that fair?

00:24:25 James Lasdun: Well, it attracted me as a story. I don't know if attracted is quite the word, but it drew me as a story. Obviously, there were elements in it that mapped onto things that I've been interested in and approached from the point of view of fiction. I've also written another nonfiction book about a very personal experience of being stalked.

00:24:48 Andrew Keen: Give Me Everything You Have, on being stalked — a very interesting book. So the difference between fact and fiction, again, you don't need me to tell you this, is often very thin.

00:25:01 James Lasdun: To me, it's absolute. I didn't want to make anything up in this. If you're writing nonfiction, it seems to me, you write nonfiction, and you're answerable to the truth. If you're writing fiction, you're answerable to your own imaginative truth. It's a different thing. I don't like books that blur the two together myself. But as you say, sometimes you encounter a story that just seems more like fiction than fact because it's so weird, it's so bizarre, it's got so many twists and turns. And certainly this had that. It had these deep mysteries at its core. That's what drew me in. I was really interested. You asked earlier about what distinguishes my book from other books on the subject. I was very single-mindedly trying to understand Alex Murdaugh himself, and what made him tick, and how his mind worked. I'm not saying that the other books don't look at that, but I don't think they're quite as single-minded in their pursuit of that particular piece of the story.

00:26:18 Andrew Keen: Did you try and interview him?

00:26:21 James Lasdun: Yes, I did, more than once. He had talked briefly to, I think it was Fox News, or to a Fox documentary maker or something like that. And he got into a lot of trouble at prison, and he wasn't giving any more interviews. But also, while his case was under appeal, his lawyers were not going to help anyone.

00:26:49 Andrew Keen: So if you did have the opportunity, if he said yes and you got the chance to interview him, what would you ask him?

00:26:56 James Lasdun: Well, that's a good question. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with an alternate theory of what happened that would have to be consistent with all the facts that we knew. It would have to be consistent with what we understand about him as a personality, and it would have to be consistent with the fact that he lied about what he was doing that night. And it would have to be consistent with the fact that when he came onto the stand to apparently explain that lie, he lied again. So it had to be consistent with a lot of things. And I finally came up with a scenario that, to me, satisfied all those criteria. I went and talked to his defense attorney, Jim Griffin. I said, "Look, I've got a theory. It doesn't get Alex off the hook, but it's a little bit different from what the prosecutors are saying. And I would like to put it to him and see how he reacts." They refused. But that's what I would've —

00:28:09 Andrew Keen: So, very briefly, James, what's the theory?

00:28:12 James Lasdun: Well, it's hard to put it very briefly, but I'll just say one thing about it. One thing we know about him is that he went in for these elaborately staged scenarios. And another thing we know about him is that shortly after the murders happened, he met with his cousin Eddie, who asked him what happened at Moselle that night, and Alex said, "It all got fucked up." As I was thinking about that phrase — it all got fucked up — I found myself asking, well, what got fucked up? Was there something that was supposed to have gone differently? It went terribly wrong in some way. That opened up a possibility to me that made sense, that was consistent with this staging. This guy who tried to stage the killing to look as if vigilantes had done it. He staged this weird event on the side of the Old Salkehatchie Road. His ancestors had been staging things. It seemed to run a little bit in the family. So I did come up with something. Do I think it's what happened? Probably not. But a lot of people I spoke to after the trial, I asked, "Do you think they got it right?" Most of them would say yes — about 95 or 96 percent — but a small percentage was not sure, was unconvinced. And even some of the people at the trial who had every reason to detest Alex weren't quite ready to accept this version of events. His colleague Mark Ball, for instance, who testified — he didn't testify against him, he was actually a defense witness, but he wasn't trying to defend him. He wasn't trying to say he wasn't a terrible guy. But he did stop short of embracing the theory of Alex as the killer of the son, and why. So, you know, three or four percent of doubt. In my case, I go to that other theory and say, well, maybe that's what happened.

00:30:27 Andrew Keen: How much time did you spend in South Carolina, in Murdaugh land? You're a poet, an Anglo-American poet living in Brooklyn, teaching at The New School. There's almost a story in that. How were you treated? Did you wander around? Did you familiarize yourself with the scene of the crime?

00:30:53 James Lasdun: Yeah, I did all those things. And, yes, you're right. I come from a very different world. I'm not just living in the Northeast of this country — very, very different world from the South. I'm from the UK. I've been living here for forty years, but I really did not know the South, and I don't pretend that I have any kind of expertise on the South. But I did end up spending quite a bit of time there. I traveled down several times for my New Yorker pieces. And then when I decided to go ahead and write the book, I moved down there for a month in Beaufort and traveled around all the places that were involved in the story, and flew down a number of other times as well to attend hearings and things. It was very important to me to get a physical sense of the geography, to meet as many of the people, to talk to as many of the people who were willing to talk. And it was enormously useful to do that.

00:32:03 Andrew Keen: Is there a racial element? When you talked about these very prominent, powerful white families — did you discover any racial element, given the history of South Carolina and the centrality of race and racial conflict, the history of slavery and of Jim Crow?

00:32:21 James Lasdun: Yeah, it's hard to say for sure. A lot of his victims were Black. They weren't all —

00:32:31 Andrew Keen: You mean his financial victims?

00:32:34 James Lasdun: Yeah, his financial victims. But I think it was more their vulnerability that drew him than strictly the fact that they were African American. Who knows? I think he was a sort of equal-opportunity embezzler — he would have stolen money from anyone of any sort of racial background. For what it's worth, the family seems to, in his generation, have been giving more money to Democrats than Republicans. But it's southern Democrats. He was beloved by — one of his victims was a man called Jordan Jinks, who was African American, and he had been very, very close to Alex, by both of their accounts, at a hearing where the victims got to speak. So I don't think there's a kind of crass racism anywhere in the picture. I think the social reality of South Carolina is that there were more African Americans who were vulnerable to him.

00:33:49 Andrew Keen: But he must have ruined a lot of people's lives. He sounds to me like a brilliant salesman. Everyone thought he was their best friend even after he ripped them off. Isn't that a classic kind of criminal in a way?

00:34:03 James Lasdun: Yeah, he is. He's absolutely a classic sociopath. He's a classic con man. Those kinds of con men very rarely kill. What they normally do —

00:34:18 Andrew Keen: They get other people to kill, do they?

00:34:20 James Lasdun: They don't, no. They usually just get caught. That's what happens. Most of them are operating on a much pettier level. They don't have these enormous support systems. What Murdaugh had — he's someone with that mentality, the mentality of the kind of petty embezzler who just keeps doing it. Normally, they keep doing it and they get caught. They get thrown into prison. He had law enforcement protecting him, basically. He had his family around him. So what they tend to do is take bigger and bigger risks, feel more and more impunity, and keep going. One of the foundational texts on psychopaths, The Mask of Sanity — the theory there is that at some unconscious level, what is really driving them is a weird kind of attraction to disaster. And usually, they get that disaster pretty early on, because they get caught pretty early on. In the case of somebody like Alex Murdaugh, or the French guy who was also living a double life, Jean-Claude Romand — who I talk about in the book, who also ended up killing his family — if they're not caught, their embezzlements, their deceits get more and more wild, and you can sort of feel them —

00:35:45 Andrew Keen: You even wrote a book — a 2005 novel about a man who comes to America fabricating a new life. So all this comes rather naturally, James. If I didn't know more, I would suspect you of being involved in the crime. Do you think you had any involvement?

00:36:02 James Lasdun: Very much. Yeah.

00:36:05 Andrew Keen: Can you claim — what were you doing that night?

00:36:09 James Lasdun: Yeah, that's a good question. Do I have an alibi? I was certainly several thousand miles away. You know what? It was just at the end of COVID. So yeah.

00:36:22 Andrew Keen: So you had your mask on?

00:36:24 James Lasdun: I had my mask on.

00:36:25 Andrew Keen: You mentioned being an Englishman in Brooklyn, a distinguished poet as well. You wrote an interesting review of a book by Caroline Fraser, Murderland, about America in the age of serial killers. The review was called American Berserk. If you pull the lens out a bit and look at America rather than South Carolina, what does this story tell us? Of course, Alex Murdaugh is not a conventional American, although that salesman-like quality is quite American. Does this story tell us anything about the state of America in the twenty-twenties?

00:37:09 James Lasdun: Oh, I think it does. Yes. Not — I mean, the serial murderers are a class unto themselves. But the con men, the entitled con men, these big golden men who have a lot of power and money —

00:37:25 Andrew Keen: They don't get dressed in orange, but they often have orange hair, don't they?

00:37:28 James Lasdun: Exactly. And if they don't get caught, they start doing worse and worse things. They cause bigger and bigger potential disasters to happen. And you can feel that we're all kind of being —

00:37:41 Andrew Keen: We're all in it.

00:37:41 James Lasdun: — pulled into the scenario.

00:37:43 Andrew Keen: We're all on the bus, aren't we?

00:37:47 James Lasdun: That's how it seems to me. I find that analogy uncannily close, especially at the moment.

00:37:55 Andrew Keen: And finally, my understanding is that Murdaugh has asked the South Carolina high court for a new trial. What's the legal situation? I would have assumed, if he'd been found guilty, that they would have executed him. Or do they not execute people in South Carolina?

00:38:17 James Lasdun: Oh, they do. They do execute people, and his family had a lot of people executed in their capacity as prosecutors. The prosecution in this case did not ask for the death penalty. It wasn't a death penalty case.

00:38:30 Andrew Keen: Why? After he killed his wife and his son?

00:38:33 James Lasdun: I think it was a reflection of the fact that they were dealing with a very murky case. It wasn't at all clear. I was surprised that there were not any holdouts on the jury, because there were a lot of unanswered questions. In fact, we know that there was one juror, and it only takes one to hang a jury, who was very on the fence and was inclining to acquit. And that juror was removed from the jury on the last day of the trial. It turns out the reason this juror was removed was because the clerk of the court had almost certainly fabricated a Facebook posting by this juror that was supposed to have shown that this juror was being indiscreet about the trial. The clerk of the court, it turns out, was systematically interfering with the jury. She had to resign in disgrace after the trial.

00:39:32 Andrew Keen: In a way, this is a kind of indictment of the American legal system, or certainly of the South Carolina legal system.

00:39:39 James Lasdun: There's a lot of systemic dysfunction in South Carolina around the legal system, and that's why the case was appealed. That was the main reason for the appeal, and we're still waiting to hear what the Supreme Court in South Carolina is going to say. I think they took this quite seriously. It would have been hard not to. It was so egregious, this interference with the jury. So it's not absolutely inconceivable that there'll have to be a retrial. I'm sure they'll try him again if they declare it a mistrial.

00:40:21 Andrew Keen: And there's still one son alive — Buster. What's his take on all this?

00:40:33 James Lasdun: Last I heard, he acknowledges that his father is a psychopath of some kind, but still believed that he had not committed the murders. So whether he's evolved since then, I don't know. But most of his family have stayed pretty loyal.

00:40:59 Andrew Keen: Is it conceivable that he'll eventually become a free man? He'll do a Houdini and —

00:41:08 James Lasdun: Well, he's looking at forty years for the embezzlements.

00:41:12 Andrew Keen: Oh, so he can't get out of jail.

00:41:14 James Lasdun: He's not gonna get out. Even if they turn over the murder conviction, which I highly doubt, he's not getting out of jail.

00:41:24 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. You've made me, and I think all our audience, James, want to read the book. It's The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh — and it's spelled M-U-R-D-A-U-G-H. Couldn't make this stuff up, because it sounds like murder as well. James, if there is a god, he or she must be enjoying this one.

00:41:53 James Lasdun: I guess so.

00:41:54 Andrew Keen: Well, James, thank you so much. That was a fascinating conversation. This is certainly not the end of hearing about Alex Murdaugh, and one of our great authorities on crime, James Lasdun, has turned his attention to it. The new book, The Family Man, is out this week. Thank you so much, James.

00:42:17 James Lasdun: Thank you. Thank you for having me on the podcast.