SWAMP KINGS

The tale of a Lowcountry crime dynasty operating with impunity under cover of the law.

In 2023, high-profile lawyer Alex Murdaugh was charged with 99 crimes, including fraud, grand larceny, drug dealing, and the murders of his wife and son. As Charleston-based journalist Ryan, author of Jackpot and Race to Hawaii, shows, these crimes were a chain. Murdaugh became addicted to opioids, stole to fund his habit, and killed to hide his stealing. In doing so, writes the author in this sometimes slow-moving but grimly fascinating story, Murdaugh summed up a long familial legacy, with ancestors who made fortunes and reputations as kingpin lawyers in the swamp country near the Georgia line. They were effectively a law unto themselves, allied with secessionists, segregationists, moonshiners, and corrupt officials who lorded over their less fortunate neighbors, especially those of color. Occasionally, a Murdaugh would spend political capital on a progressive cause. In 1935, Randolph Murdaugh advocated for women to serve on juries because “their presence would have a good influence,” even as he insisted that “the testimony of a single White witness…was preferable to the accounts of six Black men.” Some of that early Murdaugh power was eventually diminished by federal inquiries and prosecutions, but by the time Alex came around, he was untouchable—almost, with the judge noting that Murdaugh, having sentenced plenty of people to death “probably for lesser conduct,” was lucky not to be headed to the electric chair. Ryan’s prose can wax purplish—“True dominion of this isolated swath of the South once belonged to someone as territorial and unyielding as the cottonmouth, as opportunistic and vicious as the alligator”—but his story unfolds with the care of a well-plotted procedural.

A searing, disheartening true-crime study, indicting a legacy of crime stretching out over centuries.