Five mysterious deaths occur on four separate dates in the last ten years in the lowcountry region of South Carolina and each one has a connection to a powerful dynastic legal family in the area. First a young gay man, alleged to have had a same-sex relationship with one of the two young sons of the influential Murdaugh family, is found dead late at night lying in an unnatural position on a country road. No arrest is made but the local grapevine points the finger at the oldest of the two sons of multi-millionaire local attorney Alex Murdaugh.
Then, a few years later, the younger Murdaugh son is allegedly drunk at the wheel of a small boat which crashes and sees one of its party of teenage passengers, a 19-year-old girl thrown out into the water and drown.
Next, the Murdaugh's 57-year-old family housekeeper of 20 years dies at their residence after reportedly tripping over the family dog and falling backwards down the brick entrance steps and hitting her head.
Finally and most recently, Alex Murdaugh himself is charged and as of this morning, convicted of the murder by the shooting of his wife and younger son, but not before he has bizarrely botched his own death, paying a third party to shoot him, in order that his surviving son can claim on his life insurance.
Deemed by many as untouchable in the small area where this empowered family resided and presided, Murdaugh was finally brought to book, with all of the above details and more unfolded in not one but two explosive separate TV documentaries, one by HBO, the other by Netflix.
"Oh what a tangled web we weave..." Murdaugh Sr said in his own defence on the stand but seriously, Spiderman himself couldn't have created a bigger or stickier one than we get here. Besides the tragic deaths, we learn that Murdaugh Sr was a serial embezzler, even defrauding the surviving family of his late housekeeper of a multi-million liability pay-out he himself had instigated on his own household policy, set up barely months before. Murdaugh claimed that the money he stole was swallowed up by his opioid addiction though the point was effectively made that even with the high cost of his palliative drug of choice, it could only have amounted to a fraction of the actual amount he took.
Told in Netflix's typical tabloid-style, fast, flashy documentary style, with multiple interviews, usually from multiple angles, together wirh sometimes unnecessarily morbid reconstructions, like the aftermath of the boat crash and especially an unnecessarily tasteless graphic image of the dead housekeeper's trainered feet posed at the top of a set of stairs, this was nevertheless addictive true-crime, only-in-America trash TV, which for all its ugliness and garishness, was compulsive viewing for my wife and I.
By sheer coincidence, we only watched the final episode last night and have woken up this morning to read the headline news that Murdaugh Sr has indeed been convicted of the murder of his wife and son on circumstantial, but obviously to the jury, convincing evidence.
Somehow though, I think there may be a further twist to come in this fantastical tale. Apparently at one point in his father's trial, his surviving son tried to pass his father a John Grisham book, the irony being that even at his most imaginative, the author himself couldn't have concocted a plot as unbelievable and improbable as this.
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