Tangled Vines by John Glatt: Featured Excerpt

Prologue

Labor Day Weekend 2021

Alex Murdaugh’s world was falling apart. The highly respected attorney, heir to a powerful legal dynasty that had ruled South Carolina’s Lowcountry for more than a century, had run out of places to hide.

The day before, his family’s illustrious law firm, founded in 1910 by his great-grandfather, Randolph Murdaugh Sr., had ignominiously fired him for stealing millions of dollars of client funds. Now broke and in the throes of opioid addiction, Alex had decided to die.

He called Curtis “Fast Eddie” Smith, a distant cousin and alleged personal drug dealer, arranging to meet him opposite an old church on Old Salkehatchie Road in Hampton. The odd-job man drew up in his battered old truck to where six-foot-three-inch Alex, known as Big Red for his striking red hair, was waiting by his gleaming black Mercedes-Benz.

Then Alex handed Smith a loaded .38-caliber revolver and ordered him to shoot him in the back of the head and get the hell out of there.

Staging his own death was just the latest chapter for Alex in a rollercoaster of murder plots, financial crimes, and drug addiction, straight out of a Southern Gothic novel. It had captured America’s imagination and brought fifty-three-year-old Alex Murdaugh (pronounced Ellick Murdock) and his storied family the unwanted attention they had always avoided.

For more than a century, the Murdaugh family had dominated a huge swathe of South Carolina’s luscious Lowcountry, epitomizing power, justice, and big, big money. Three generations of Murdaughs had served as 14th Circuit solicitors (called district attorneys in all other states), turning it into a family business.

Murdaughs prosecuted every crime committed over a sprawling five-county area, from Colleton’s rural swamps to the ultra-chic Hilton Head Island beaches in Beaufort County. Feared and revered, Murdaugh solicitors had sent hundreds of people to prison and well over a dozen to the electric chair.

Their powers and influence were limitless. They had lorded it over judges, politicians, and top law officials for eighty-six years, before Alex’s father, Randolph Murdaugh III, abruptly retired in 2006, appointing his own hand-picked successor.

The family also ran one of South Carolina’s top law firms, specializing in personal injury cases for the common man, which netted them millions of dollars a year. At that time, it was legal for criminal solicitors to also practice civil law—an anomaly that no longer exists.

Deliberately playing down their wealth and privilege for political reasons, the Murdaugh family quietly enjoyed their huge plantation estates, hunting lodges, and waterfront properties, including one called “Murdaugh Island.”

It was rumored that family members had made fortunes from moonshine over the years, as well as from massive marijuana-smuggling operations in the seventies and eighties. They appeared to be above the law and impervious to any legal consequences.

In February 2019, everything changed. Alex’s nineteen-year-old son Paul drunkenly plowed the family’s seventeen-foot fishing boat into a bridge pylon, killing his teenage friend Mallory Beach. With a blood alcohol content three times over the legal limit, Paul was eventually charged with three felony counts of boating under the influence, despite his family’s attempts to cast the blame elsewhere.

Then late one night in June 2021, after visiting his dying father in the hospital, Alex returned to Moselle, his 1,770-acre hunting estate, to discover his wife, Maggie, and Paul brutally murdered by the dog kennels. As he stood over their bullet-ridden bodies he tearfully called 911, saying they’d been “hurt bad.”

Within hours, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) had reassured the public there was no danger, naming Alex “a person of interest” in the murders. Three days later, his father Randolph III died of cancer after a long illness.

In the wake of the double homicide, SLED reopened a 2015 unsolved killing of gay nursing student Stephen Smith, which Alex’s oldest son Buster had been linked to. Soon afterward, SLED opened a criminal investigation into the strange February 2018 “trip-and-fall” death of the Murdaughs’ longtime housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, amidst gossip that Paul had been involved.

The collapse of the Murdaugh house of cards was now well underway.

Exactly what happened after Alex ordered Fast Eddie to shoot him remains unclear.

Initially Alex, who survived the shooting, claimed to have been changing a flat tire by the side of the road when a driver in a truck pulled up, asking if he was having car trouble before shooting him in the head.

Investigators were immediately suspicious. Though his tires were later found to have been slashed, his Mercedes had state-of-the-art run-flat tires and could have been driven another fifty miles. They also found that the knife used to do it belonged to Alex.

A week after the shooting, Big Red fessed up. He admitted to hiring Curtis Smith to murder him, so his surviving son Buster could collect his $10 million life insurance.

Smith had a totally different story. He claimed that after Alex’s order, he wrestled the gun away, and during the struggle, it had gone off without any bullet hitting Alex. He’d then panicked and driven off, dumping the firearm on his way home.

Through his team of high-powered attorneys, Alex insisted that Smith had shot him in the head, leaving entry and exit wounds and fracturing his skull. Nevertheless, he was still able to call 911 for help, before being helicoptered to Savannah, Georgia, for emergency treatment. Days later, he checked himself into an Atlanta drug rehabilitation clinic.

“Things were moving really quickly and really negatively,” Alex later explained. “My world was caving in. . . . I was in a very bad place.”

Chapter 1

Early Days

The Murdaugh family has deep, deep roots in South Carolina’s fabled Lowcountry. The nonstop drama and colorful exploits of the early members of the Murdaugh family would echo through the generations to come, until the family’s tragic fall like a classic Greek tragedy.

Alex’s great-great-great-grandfather Josiah Putnam Murdaugh I was born on Christmas Day 1793, in Islandton, South Carolina, just a few miles away from the Moselle hunting lodge where Paul and Maggie Murdaugh would be murdered 228 years later.

Josiah’s wife, Mary Ursula Varn, bore him two sons: Josiah Putnam II, in 1830, and Alonzo, in 1857. Two of her relatives, James G. Varn, and his younger brother, the Reverend Little Berry Varn, owned a sawmill in the tiny village of Dixie. In 1872, they sold the right-of-way to the Port Royal and Augusta Railroad for train tracks to go through their land and made their fortune.

The Varn brothers then founded their own town, Varnville, on the north side of the tracks. Over the next 150 years, the booming railroad would play a commanding role in the Murdaugh family saga in so many different ways.

Soon after Varnville was established, Josiah Putnam II married Annie Marvin Davis, the first cousin of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States. Josiah was appointed Varnville’s official moneylender, before making his first fortune in phosphate mining and commercial fertilizer.

He later branched out into real estate, buying up land in neighboring Almeda.

“They ended up with a lot of land after the Civil War,” said local historian Sam Crews III, whose family settled in Hampton County around the same time as the Murdaughs. “They were good farmers and sharecroppers but they really believed in education. That was a big thing.”

Josiah and Annie had five children; their youngest, Randolph Murdaugh Sr., was born in Varnville on February 28, 1887.

The boisterous young boy was raised on the thriving Murdaugh family farm and educated by private tutors, as were his siblings.

After leaving school, Randolph attended the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. He was all set for a naval career until doctors discovered a heart ailment, rendering him unfit for service.

Randolph then returned to South Carolina to pursue his second choice of going into law. He enrolled at the University of South Carolina (USC), where he was captain of the football team.

He graduated in 1908 with a bachelor’s degree, before spending two years at USC’s School of Law to get his law degree.

In 1910, the handsome twenty-three-year-old set up his one-man law practice, directly across from the Hampton County Courthouse. His son Randolph Jr. would later boast that even by that point the Murdaugh name was so well-known in Hampton that their law offices never needed a sign outside.

By the time Josiah Putnam Murdaugh II died in August 1912, his youngest son was fast establishing himself as one of South Carolina’s most gifted young lawyers.

In 1914, Randolph Sr. married twenty-four-year-old Etta Lavinia Harvey. They had two sons, Randolph Jr., in January 1915, and John Glenn, in August 1918. But three weeks after giving birth to John, Etta caught influenza and tragically died at just twenty-nine.

“Old Mr. Randolph was devastated,” said Crews. “[Their son] was just three years old when his mother died so he was a little spoiled.”

Several years later, Randolph Sr. would remarry a local woman named Estelle Marvin. Although he was mostly an absentee father, employing nannies to raise his two young sons, he often brought his sons to the courthouse.

While running his thriving law office, Randolph Sr. also started his own short-lived newspaper, The Hampton Herald, with a capital of $3,000. He also served as Varnville’s official town attorney for a salary of $25 a year, while his brother Mortimer Murdaugh was the tax collector.

In 1920, Randolph Sr. entered the race for the elected 14th Judicial Circuit, encompassing Hampton, Allendale, Beaufort, Colleton, and Jasper counties. Four years earlier, the 14th Judicial District had been severed from the Charleston court system to become South Carolina’s only circuit to have five counties, the others just having two or three.

Randolph Sr. won easily, and a Murdaugh would go on to occupy the solicitor’s chair for the next eighty-six years.

“He was very well-liked and very smart,” said historian Sam Crews, whose great-grandfather, Eugene Peeples, was Hampton County coroner and had worked closely with the new solicitor. “And he believed in doing the right thing.”

Over the next few years, Randolph Sr. became a fixture in the Hampton County newspapers, which faithfully chronicled his many legal victories and charity work. He and Estelle regularly made the society pages, showing up at garden parties and judging flower shows.

Randolph Sr. relished high-profile court cases that established him as a statewide figure. He once prosecuted a state governor and made him stand in the prisoner’s block while he read out the indictment.

Courtrooms were packed for his colorful murder trials, and no one was off limits as he indicted preachers, police officers, bankers, and corrupt politicians.

His son Randolph Jr.’s earliest memory was following his father to the courthouse. The little boy would often watch the trials and dreamed of becoming a lawyer when he grew up.

Little Randolph attended Varnville High School and then the University of South Carolina, where he played football for the Gamecocks. It was there that he was dubbed “Buster” by USC head coach Bill Laval, because he always “busted the opponent.” He would be known as Buster Murdaugh for the rest of his life.

On February 20, 1937, Buster’s stepmother Estelle died with her husband at her bedside. She had been in the hospital since the previous September. Randolph Sr. was heartbroken and started drinking heavily.

A few months later, Buster Murdaugh, now at the University of South Carolina’s School of Law, married twenty-one-year-old Gladys Marvin of Yemassee, who had recently graduated college.

The couple settled in Varnville, and Buster joined his father’s fast-growing law practice, now renamed Murdaugh and Murdaugh. On October 25, 1939, Gladys bore Buster a baby boy whom they named Randolph Murdaugh III, but it would be another ten years before the couple had another child together.

By early 1940, Randolph Sr. was running unopposed for his sixth term as the 14th Circuit solicitor. His twenty-five-year-old son, Buster, often deputized for him while he was in the hospital for various ailments.

“Young Murdaugh Acts as Solicitor in the Absence of His Father,” was the front-page story in The Hampton County Guardian’s February 21, 1940, edition.

The following week’s Guardian carried the headline, “Grand Jury Lauds Solicitor Murdaugh in Term Presentment. Endorses him for ReElection in Coming Election.”

But then tragedy struck.

On July 19, 1940, Randolph Sr. spent the night drinking heavily at a friend’s poker party in Yemassee and set out to drive home alone.

At around 1:00 a.m., he was four miles east of Varnville when he stopped by the side of the train track. A few minutes later a westbound Charleston and Western Carolina freight train came hurtling toward him at full speed. As it approached the Camp Branch crossing, Solicitor Murdaugh calmly turned on his engine and drove straight into the middle of the track, stopping directly in the train’s path.

Engineer W. W. Bartlett would later testify that by the time he saw Murdaugh’s car it was too late to stop. To his horror, he said, he’d seen the solicitor smile and then wave to the crew seconds before impact.

Randolph Sr.’s body was found fifty yards away from the crossing, and his car was three hundred yards down the track.

A Hampton County Coroner’s jury later ruled it an accidental death.

But there was also much speculation the fifty-three-year-old solicitor had committed suicide, as he had been in ill health and depressed since Estelle’s death.

About Tangled Vines by John Glatt:

In Tangled Vines, bestselling true crime author John Glatt reconstructs the rise of the prestigious Murdaugh family and the shocking double murder that led to the downfall of its patriarch, Alex Murdaugh.

Among the lush, tree-lined waterways of South Carolina low country, the Murdaugh name means power. A century-old, multimillion-dollar law practice has catapulted the family into incredible wealth and local celebrity—but it was an unimaginable tragedy that would thrust them into the national spotlight. On June 7th, 2021, prominent attorney Alex Murdaugh discovered the bodies of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, on the grounds of their thousand-acre hunting lodge. The mystery deepened only months later when Alex himself was discovered shot in the head on a local roadside.

But as authorities scrambled for clues and the community reeled from the loss and media attention, dark secrets about this Southern legal dynasty came to light. As bombshells of financial fraud were revealed and more suspicious deaths were linked to the Murdaughs, a new portrait of Alex Murdaugh emerged: a desperate man on the brink of ruin who would do anything, even plan his own death, to save his family’s reputation.