“Justice may have been served, but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” — James Lasdun

In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh — wealthy scion of a South Carolina prosecutorial dynasty — was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul at their family estate. With its opioid addiction, fatal boat crash, staged suicide, and a cousin called Eddie, the case could have been invented for our true crime age. And who better to tell the story of the mysterious Mr Murdaugh than the literary crime writer James Lasdun whose 2023 New Yorker piece about the trial became the magazine’s most-read story of the year.

Lasdun’s new book, The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh, tries to answer the one question the trial never answered. Why would a father annihilate his son?

The prosecution claimed that Alex killed Maggie and Paul to distract from a web of financial crimes about to be exposed. While this is theoretically possible, Lasdun acknowledges, it is totally implausible psychologically. Coming from a family of prosecutors, Murdaugh would have known he would be the prime suspect. And this family annihilator, as the prosecutor described him, murdered not just his wife, but his boy. Who would annihilate their beloved child to muddy a prosaic embezzlement?

The Southern gothic case isn’t over. The court clerk who managed the Murdaugh trial resigned in disgrace after it emerged she had interfered with the jury — fabricating a Facebook post to remove a juror who was bending toward acquittal. Murdaugh has appealed to the South Carolina Supreme Court. A retrial isn’t inconceivable. But even if the murder conviction is overturned, Murdaugh faces forty years inside for his financial crimes. So he’s never going free. But James Lasdun’s core question remains unanswered. Why?

“Justice may have been served,” Lasdun concludes, “but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” Mr Murdaugh remains a mystery, perhaps even to himself.

Five Takeaways

• The Family Annihilator. Not a well-developed criminological category. What the research shows: most family annihilators are men who kill their families when they believe everything is being taken from them — not out of hatred, but a grotesque form of ownership. The family is theirs. If their world ends, the family ends with it.

• The Thirteen Minutes of Mystery. In thirteen minutes, Alex was supposed to have shot his wife with a shotgun and his son with a rifle, staged the scene, called 911, and appeared on a video call showing no distress. Lasdun doesn’t say the jury was wrong. He says the how and why remain genuinely mysterious.

• Cousin Eddie and the Staged Shooting. Three months after the murders, Alex emerged from a rural road meeting with his cousin with an entry and exit wound in his head. He claimed he’d asked Eddie to shoot him. Eddie denies it. Lasdun’s reading: Alex was trying to reinforce a vendetta narrative pointing to the young men on the boat.

• The Court Clerk and the Removed Juror. One juror was leaning toward acquittal. She was removed after the court clerk produced a fabricated Facebook post. The clerk resigned in disgrace. The South Carolina Supreme Court has taken the appeal seriously. A retrial is not inconceivable.

• Murdaugh as an American Story. Like Capote’s In Cold Blood, The Family Man is not ultimately about a crime. It’s about a society. The corruption was systemic. The opioids were everywhere. The insularity of the Lowcountry ruling class created the conditions for twenty years of embezzlement without exposure. The murders are a symptom. The disease is American.

About the Guest

James Lasdun is a poet, novelist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh (W. W. Norton, May 5, 2026).

References

The Family Man by James Lasdun (W. W. Norton, May 5, 2026)
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: The Family Man and the wave of Murdaugh books
00:02:51 The motive the prosecution gave — and its limits
00:05:47 The boat crash: Mallory Beach and the 2019 prologue
00:07:20 The murders at Moselle: the kennel, the weapons, the timeline
00:08:22 Cousin Eddie and the staged shooting
00:11:48 Is there any element of innocence? The unanswered questions
00:13:41 Drugs, women, opioids: the addiction thread
00:16:00 The opioid epidemic in South Carolina and Murdaugh’s addiction
00:20:00 The embezzlement: twenty years of stealing from clients
00:24:00 The Murdaugh dynasty: three generations of prosecutors
00:28:00 The trial: the prosecution’s case
00:32:00 The juror who was removed: the court clerk’s fabrication
00:36:00 The appeal: what the South Carolina Supreme Court must decide
00:38:17 Buster: the surviving son who still believes
00:39:32 The Capote comparison: In Cold Blood and The Family Man
00:40:21 Will Alex Murdaugh ever be free?
00:41:24 The broader American story: systemic corruption in the Lowcountry