I was recently scrolling through Libby looking for an audiobook to enjoy while I worked on a crochet project. I ran across The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty by Valerie Bauerlein. The synopsis caught my attention. Particularly the part that inferred a long family history of malfeasance:
When he murdered his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at Moselle on a dark summer night, the fragile façade of Alex’s world could no longer hold. His forefathers had covered up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad crossing, a bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder of a pregnant lover. Alex, too, almost walked away from his unspeakable crimes with his reputation intact, but his downfall was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes, and a fateful decision by an old friend who’d finally seen enough.
I'm not generally interested in violent true crime stories but the corruption angle, and its heredity through the Murdaugh family intrigued me.
I remembered the Murdaugh saga being in the news, but I hadn't paid it much attention. I knew Alex Murdaugh had been arrested for a murder and that there were some other suspicious deaths within the family's orbit and that's about it.
I got more than I expected from the author's meticulous account. The book was exceptionally well-written by Valerie Bauerlein and capably narrated by Maggi-Meg Reed. (I usually struggle a bit getting used to a narrator but my acclimation to Reed was noticeably brief.) The southern small town atmosphere is woven throughout the book with all those stage-setting details one expects from a veteran writer and journalist. Bauerlein's experience at the Wall Street Journal covering small town southern politics, economics, and culture shows.
Opening with Alex Murdaugh on trial for his wife and son's murders, Bauerlein smoothly introduces us to Murdaugh, his ancestors, his crimes, and with great sympathy, his victims. There is time travel throughout the narration as Bauerlein introduces us, one-by-one, to each of the Murdaugh men who shaped the law and built the family dynasty in their rural corner of the South Carolina Lowcountry.
Much of the first half of the book is spent on the wrongdoing of Alex Murdaugh, especially his financial crimes and manipulative behavior after suspicious deaths occur that are connected to his family. The second half is explores the homicides of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh and Alex Murdaugh's trial for their murders.
Bauerlein treats each Murdaugh transgression carefully and thoroughly. She shows great deference to the vicims. I came away from their stories infuriated and heartbroken.
My only complaint, such that it is, was how thin the coverage of ancestral wrongdoing was. There was still plenty, don't get me wrong, and I suspect much was lost to time or was never documented in a way that could be responsibily reported on.
Has anyone else read this book? What were your thoughts? Did you follow any other reporting on the family?
by RemarkablePuzzle257