Why true crime isn't real Alex Murdaugh isn’t a compelling killer

As a writer of murder mysteries, I often joke that making these stories believable requires making them profoundly unrealistic — simply because actual crimes and the investigation thereof have a way of being offensively uninspired. Readers want complex murder plots, twisted motives, a tough and passionate detective in dogged pursuit of a killer who is as brilliant as he is depraved. They do not want acts of impulsive violence committed by a guy with a room temperature IQ, one whose misdeeds are the product not of months of detail-oriented planning and plotting, but a single inauspicious moment in which he had a) a really bad idea and b) access to a gun.

We think we want true stories; we don’t. We want good stories that just happen also to be true. This thought occurred to me repeatedly while reading James Lasdun’s The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh, which came out earlier this month. The titular family man is Alex Murdaugh, a lawyer from the South Carolina marshlands known as the low country, and who was convicted in March 2023 of the brutal murder of his wife and son two years previously — as well as various acts of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy which were lesser in severity than felony murder, but comparatively astronomical in number. For his financial crimes, he is currently serving 40 years in federal prison, concurrent with a 27-year sentence handed down by the state of South Carolina. His murder conviction, however, was overturned earlier this year after it was revealed that Becky Hill, who served as county clerk during his trial and who had been planning to write a book about the case, had improperly influenced the jury.

I suspect that this latest development is deeply frustrating to Lasdun, who in addition to being a journalist is also a screenwriter, a memoirist, and the author of several novels. As such, he knows better than most that even the most shocking true story is nothing if it isn’t also told well. For Murdaugh to be granted a new trial adds one twist too many to a case that was convoluted enough as it was, not to mention throwing a wrench in the story’s final chapter. Once, The Family Man would have been a definitive account of the fall of the house of Murdaugh. Now, the ending feels premature, like walking out of a horror film too soon and missing the part where the killer comes back for one last scare — even if Lasdun suspects, as I do, that the second epilogue to this case is unlikely to be any more satisfying than the first.

It’s only in Hollywood that we can engineer such tidy, intentional conclusions to the most horrifying stories, in which the guilty party not only gets his comeuppance but delivers a scenery-chewing monologue explaining exactly how and why he did it. In real life, murder rarely coddles our narrative sensibilities this way. In real life, people are killed horribly and for no reason, and even the murderer himself will often confess bewilderment as to why he did it — that is, if he confesses at all.

But with the limitations of the true crime genre duly acknowledged, the book does succeed on its merits. At its best, The Family Man combines the soul of a satisfying procedural thriller with a Southern Gothic twist, including layered multigenerational intrigue and a haunting, vivid sense of place. No stone is left unturned in this exhaustive exploration of Murdaugh’s various schemes and foibles, which include not only a well-documented opioid addiction and a penchant for financial crimes, but other, much stranger schemes, like a botched suicide-by-hitman plot in which Alex was shot in the head by the ne’er-do-well cousin he’d asked to murder him as a favor.

Early on, Lasdun mentions the aesthetic similarities between the Murdaugh murders and the Netflix series Ozark, which are also the only similarities between them — and yet, there’s something to this, something about how much more captivating a crime becomes if it only takes place in the right setting. We watch as the wind whispers secret pathways through the grasses of the South Carolina marshland, as the sun sets blood-red behind a live oak draped in the gray lace of Spanish moss, and we nod: of course something like that had to happen in a place like this. It didn’t hurt that the cast of characters around Murdaugh all felt like archetypes themselves: the Prodigal Son, the Long-Suffering Wife, the Loyal Housekeeper, the Criminally Adjacent Redneck Cousin.

Strikingly, though, exactly what happened in this incident and why is a question the book doggedly investigates but never quite manages to solve — one of many, alas, which makes The Family Man absolutely terrific to read but somewhat frustrating to have read. Finishing this book feels a bit like spending the day alongside a man who is diligently wandering a massive beach with a metal detector. All that digging, and what is there to show for it? A handful of loose change; a couple of cheap, orphaned earrings; and behind you, a landscape full of holes that went nowhere.

For all this, the fault lies not with the book’s author, but its subject. You’d be forgiven for imagining Alex Murdaugh as a Hollywood-worthy villain, equal parts criminal mastermind and glad-handing good ol’ boy, so deranged by greed, by power, by sheer white-male entitlement, that he capped off a life of white-collar crimes with an act of unspeakable evil. But a conniving, low country King Lear, Alex Murdaugh is not — nor does he contain the gleeful con artistry of a Saul Goodman, the sadistic genius of a Hannibal Lecter, or the murderous greed of Jim Williams from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

The thread that ties all these iconic baddies together, the thing that makes them so compelling, isn’t relatability, exactly — or even humanity — but a sense of internal logic. The difference between a dull villain and a fantastic one is the difference between a character who is evil for no reason, and a character whose reasons for being the way he is are so legible that they practically leap off the page. We may not sympathize, but we get it. (The difference between a fantastic villain and an anti-hero is that we find those reasons sympathetic. Did John Wick really need to kill several dozen people to avenge the death of his beagle? Obviously, yes.)

Alex Murdaugh, by comparison, is so bizarrely depthless that he seems barely there at all. His amoral grasping, his obvious narcissism, the way he spent over a decade robbing his clients blind while barely even trying to cover his tracks: all of this serves to make Alex Murdaugh more inscrutable as a person, and yet, at the same time, almost painfully uninteresting as a character. When it comes to the deaths of his wife and son, he has nothing but denials. But when it comes to the financial crimes of which he is verifiably, undoubtedly guilty, he is all confession and no explanation; he wanted the money, so he stole it, and comes up blank at the expectation that there could be anything more to it than that.

Why did he do this? He seems as bewildered by the question as anyone. “You know one of the saddest parts of this whole thing is they’re people that I still care about, and I did ’em this way,” Alex says, asked at trial about the people he spent two decades defrauding. If he did actually murder his wife and son — though he’s unlikely ever to admit it — one gets the sense that the story behind the slaughter would be not just similarly unsatisfying, but barely worth telling at all. The desire to complicate that narrative is palpable throughout Lasdun’s book. To accept that Alex Murdaugh is a mid-wit who killed his family for no compelling or legible reason feels offensive in its senselessness; how is it possible that a thoughtless impulse on one end can lead to such life-shattering devastation at the other?

And yet, there are sobering reminders everywhere we look that the worst criminals are rarely the worthy adversaries we find in fiction; mostly, they’re just lucky, until they’re not, and they get caught for the stupidest reasons. They forget to pay for parking, like David Berkowitz; they take upskirt photos of women at the grocery store, like Dominique Pelicot. Or, like the BTK Killer Dennis Rader, they taunt police with a message encoded on a disk that also, oops, contains their full name and address in the metadata. The worst part, perhaps, is that these shambolic mistakes don’t make their crimes more comprehensible, only more offensive. This is the guy who robbed a widow of her life savings; a woman of her dignity; a family of their loved one? This guy? This piece of low-rent garbage?

Perhaps this is why, in the end, The Family Man abandons the question of Alex Murdaugh’s possible motivations for killing his family, and instead simply tells us how he might have done it. This final chapter is more of a closing argument than a narrative ending: it paints an entirely persuasive picture of the who, the when, the where, and the what, the horrors of that evening juxtaposed against moments from the trial in which Alex denies having any hand in them. The why, though, remains a mystery: one we will likely never solve, but also, one whose solution would almost certainly prove disappointing. Because while we say we want true stories, what we really want are good stories — and the truth is, a story is only as good, as compelling, as the people in it.

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