Meet the Raleigh reporter who chronicled the downfall of the Murdaugh dynasty
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Valerie Bauerlein, a Raleigh-based reporter who covers the Southeast for The Wall Street Journal, spent nearly three years traipsing around South Carolina's Lowcountry to document the fall of the Murdaugh family dynasty.
Why it matters: When Alex Murdaugh, the scion of a legal and political institution in South Carolina, was accused of murdering his wife and son in 2021 it captured the nation's attention.
- Bauerlein dug deep into thousands of pages of historical records to document the Murdaugh's family penchant for existing out the law and interviewed hundreds of sources about the killings and the events leading up to them.
Driving the news: Bauerlein's effort at tackling the saga, a book called "The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty," is out today.
- "I was never going to be the first to tell it, but can I be the best? Can I write the definitive book about it," Bauerlein, a Duke graduate as well as a former News & Observer reporter, told Axios of her aims.
Axios spoke with Bauerlein about the book. Responses have been edited for Smart Brevity.
Why do you think this family from a small town captured international attention?
I didn't consider myself a true crime fan, and I've never really gotten into shows like "Law & Order," but, one of the smartest analyses of the Murdoch case was by the showrunner for "Law & Order."
- People are interested in the most extreme part of human nature. And they're also interested in watching procedurals, like how did they figure it out? How does it end?
- And then mostly we are satisfied with justice, and the fact that Alex Murdaugh was convicted against many people's predictions, including mine, was gratifying to people.
But also, something people are familiar with is how privilege ultimately gets corrupted from the inside.
- I was able to study dynasties, and they typically fail in the fourth or fifth generation. That privilege, no accountability and having everything given to you, rots them from the inside, and that's what happened.
What did you know about tiny Hampton County, S.C., before covering the Murdaugh trials?
I had been to Hampton County [when I was a reporter for the South Carolina newspaper The State from 2000-2004] on a reporting trip. It was desperately poor even at that time. I remember asking someone, "Hey, where's a good place to eat?"
- They responded, "Well, the hospital has the best fried chicken." That was my enduring memory of the place; that it was so bereft of vibrancy that the hospital was the place to eat.
You spend a lot of time telling the history of the place and multiple generations of the family. Why?
Every point you make about the history of the family has to tell us something about why we're here today.
- You know that Alex committed insurance fraud, but did you know that the family fortune actually came from an insurance fraud that happened 100 years ago?
- You know that Alex is convicted of killing his wife and son, but did you know that his grandfather bragged about trying to have his mistress killed? There are echoes of everything that happened.
Does it feel different down in Hampton County without the Murdaughs around?
I'm fortunate to have gotten to spend quite a bit of time down there, and there is a different feeling in Hampton now. Part of the tragedy of a family being in leadership that long is then when they are no longer in leadership, there's a vacuum and there's chaos.
- There has been a lot of chaos in the local government there. There's millions of dollars in missing money and they're suing each other over very scant resources. It feels like there hasn't been another generation of leadership to step up.
