While I am not ordinarily attracted to florid tales of family murder, the trial of Alex Murdaugh for the murder of his wife and oldest son held a strange fascination. It may have been the exhaustive article in the New Yorker magazine I read several months ago. The writer painted an over the top picture of a small town in the South dominated by the Murdaugh family for several generations.
Alex, the seeming black sheep of the family, failed to follow in his father's footsteps, instead opting for a supposedly lucrative personal injury practice. It turns out he stole millions from his clients to finance a lifestyle he could not afford otherwise. How all this led to murder was always a tenuous speculation at best, but the prosecution convinced the jury with a mountain of circumstantial evidence. Some columnists felt the electronic evidence was accepted to credulously by the jury.
In the end, it was a gothic tale of family privilege and righteous retribution which captured the nations attention for a few months. I look forward to the movie.
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