This story about “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” first appeared in The Race Begins issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
The trial of Alex Murdaugh, the former South Carolina attorney now convicted of murdering his wife, Maggie, and youngest son, Paul, wowed real-time true crime audiences as it unfolded in early 2023, with no less than four documentary series. popping up in recent months, all looking to unravel how a prominent southern family could fall from grace in such brutal fashion. Among them is Netflix’s “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal,” a three-part documentary series that chose to guide its story not with the double murder of 2021, but with a mysterious boating accident that took place two years earlier.
“Looking at the story as a whole, the more you got into it, the crazier it got,” said executive producer and showrunner Michael Gasparro. “Each time, the boat was the moment that shed light on all these other crimes. So without the boat, would we have known about Alex?
In the accident in question, Paul Murdaugh, then 19 years old and heavily intoxicated, crashed his family’s boat into a bridge, injuring several of his friends on board and killing fellow passenger Mallory Beach. Immediately after the accident, the actions of Alex and the large Murdaugh family began to raise questions in the small town of Hampton, South Carolina about the undue influence the family appeared to have in legal proceedings.
The docuseries is filled with accounts of people reporting shady behavior they witnessed firsthand, including the de Beach family. But perhaps no voice is as vital to the grand “Murdaugh Murders” narrative as that of Morgan Doughty, Paul’s ex-girlfriend, who had spent a lot of time with the Murdaughs and could speak candidly about her behavior.
“Morgan is an amazing character and was the glue of our series,” Gasparro said. “It’s a funny story: you’re reaching out to these people at a very vulnerable time, and I reached out in a number of ways and ended up going to a lawyer. But initially, I sent an Instagram DM to (Morgan) and the first thing he said to me was ‘Fuck you. That was the introduction to Morgan. He’s a tough cookie, but a very soft type of person.”
After the boat accident, scrutiny of the Murdaugh family increased, bringing to light several suspicious deaths and rampant drug use by Alex, as well as allegations that he had embezzled $8 million from the 100-year-old family law firm of antiquity that was an institution in the low country of South Carolina. “The story of these four generations of lawyers had shocking elements because of their level of power and control,” said director and executive producer Julia Willoughy Nason. (Jenner Furst also directed.) “They had a civil law firm and they were criminal prosecutors, so they controlled crime and civil law in many counties for all those years.”
With “Murdaugh Murders” debuting on Netflix on February 22, 2023, just over a week before Alex was convicted, the creators found themselves in a unique situation. “Julie and I watched, I think, probably the entire trial,” Gasparro said. “It’s surreal that you’re living with these characters while you’re doing this and then you’re seeing all these people that you just told the story about. We would text each other and see him. I don’t think we knew how big the trial was going to be, but then you have OJ tweeting about it. And it’s like, this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime things. It was wild.”
Read more of The Race Begins issue here.
