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As the South Carolina supreme court reminded us this month, the saga of convicted killer Alex Murdaugh is far from over. While few doubt Murdaugh’s guilt as it relates to the 2021 murders of his wife and younger son, recently exposed jury tampering during his 2023 double murder trial has thrown the verdicts against him into serious jeopardy.
Also, the tampering we know about could wind up being just the beginning of the story…
While we await the next chapter in the Murdaugh saga – which is laden with all sorts of loose ends – the first chapters of this peerless southern gothic drama have, at last, received their definitive treatment. Valerie Bauerlein of The Wall Street Journal has penned the indispensable narrative of this story – a tale which plumbs the depths of generational criminality and the increasingly specious battle to hold it accountable.
Along with Jason Ryan‘s Swamp Kings, if you are going to shell out your hard-earned on a book about this story… this is the book to buy.
Expansively researched, meticulously organized and masterfully articulated, The Devil At His Elbow manages to wrestle the chaotic, multi-layered Murdaugh madness into a storyline that is both parsable and poignant, evocative and illuminating – or “saying and telling” as we southerners like to say.
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Bauerlein unearths and unwraps the Murdaughs from the very beginning – effortlessly interweaving their complicated history, the confounding corruption that built them and the chilling violence associated with their downfall after a century in power. She structures her symphonic treatment of the empire and its collapse like a master musician intimately attuned to the tension and release of sounds and syllables – and storylines and subplots.
“As the jury lingered, the air cooled and the wind picked up, billowing skirts and mussing hair,” Bauerlein wrote in describing a jury field trip to Moselle, the site of the graphic homicides Murdaugh was convicted of committing. “A dominant impression, shared by many, was that Moselle felt like a place where the barrier between the living and the dead was very thin.”
Poetic…
In reading this book, I often recalled the tone of the late William Manchester, who wrote definitive account of the assassination of president John F. Kennedy… before Oliver Stone showed the world who really shot him, anyway.
My only criticism of Bauerlein’s book? At times, it labors too hard to create heroes – characters inconveniently injected into an otherwise even-flowing, blackwater stream of ever-widening darkness. Bauerlein presumably dropped these “white knights” into her narrative to give readers someone to root for as they confronted the depth of Alex Murdaugh’s deception and depravity.
The problem with this approach? As someone who has covered this story from the very beginning, it has become painfully clear to me there are no white knights associated with it. No heroes. As the aftermath of the Murdaugh trial continues to reveal, it is all blackwater – all darkness.
Just how deep do those waters go? Deep enough for Bauerlein to hopefully start working on a sequel to her first Murdaugh volume.
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THE BOOK…
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Will Folks is the owner and founding editor of FITSNews. Prior to founding his own news outlet, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina, bass guitarist in an alternative rock band and bouncer at a Columbia, S.C. dive bar. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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