By Anna Kaplan -
TODAY
The astonishing fall from grace of Alex Murdaugh, the prominent South Carolina lawyer and convicted murderer, came to an end last Friday when he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his wife and youngest son.
For weeks his eldest son,
Buster Murdaugh, stood silently behind his father
as dozens of witnesses testified in his trial, and on March 2, he buried his head in his hands as the jury read the guilty verdict.
["We Didn't Believe Her Crying": Jurors Who Convicted Alex Murdaugh Explain Why They Did]
Buster not only appeared as a witness in the trial against his father, but also appears in the documentary
Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal
on the Netflix
streaming
platform .
The three-episode series tells the story of Murdaugh, who rose from being the heir to a prominent South Carolina legal dynasty to facing nearly 100 criminal charges.
Before Murdaugh was disbarred from practice by the South Carolina Supreme Court in July 2022, he was working as a personal injury attorney.
The state Attorney General's office alleges that, over 11 years,
he stole nearly $8.5 million from his clients,
representing an additional 99 counts on top of a dozen other indictments.
During the trial, Murdaugh admitted to committing this fraud.
A family photo of the Murdaughs.
From left to right: Buster, Paul, Maggie and Alex, convicted of the murder of his wife and youngest son. Andrew J. Whitaker / AP
Murdaugh's father, grandfather and great-grandfather served as high-ranking prosecutors in the South, giving his family power over several South Carolina counties for nearly a century.
Although Buster is not involved in the documentary and declined to comment, viewers of the series and the trial may be curious about
Murdaugh's only living son.
Expelled from university for alleged plagiarism
Buster Murdaugh graduated from Wofford College in 2018, according to his Instagram bio, and appeared to be following in his family's footsteps by enrolling in the University of South Carolina School of Law.
However,
in the spring of 2021 he was expelled for plagiarism,
according to court documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
[Influential lawyer Alex Murdaugh is found guilty of murdering his wife and youngest son in South Carolina]
The Post and Courier, a local South Carolina newspaper, obtained phone calls from his father from prison, saying the Murdaugh family paid $60,000 to a well-connected lawyer to get Buster reinstated.
In a phone call published by local media The State, Buster talks to his father about the role of the lawyer, Butch Bowers: "He was supposed to contact (William) Hubbard (dean of the University of Law School of South Carolina), and Hubbard had to consult with (the office of) admissions in order to set the record straight.”
Buster Murdaugh listens to a recorded interview of his father, Alex Murdaugh, at the double murder trial, on February 16, 2023. Joshua Boucher / AP
“You have to get ready for law school, okay?” Murdaugh insisted to his son in another recorded call from jail published by The Post and Courier.
“You have to really put in the effort and take it as a job.
You will have to read these cases two and three times if you don't fully understand them, because you know there won't be another chance,” she asserted.
In September 2022, Jim Griffin, Murdaugh's attorney, told The Post and Courier that
the university and Buster reached an agreement that Murdaugh would not return to college.
“For now, he has put his desire to go to law school on hold,” Griffin said.
“There is no plan for me to start studying either in the fall or in the spring,” he added.
Suspicious deaths linked to the family
As he recounts in the documentary, before being murdered by his father, the youngest son, Paul, was facing three felony charges for driving a boat under the influence of alcohol and causing a fatal accident on February 23, 2019.
The night of the crash, Paul, then 19, took his family's boat to party with friends on the Beaufort River.
Before boarding, he used his older brother's ID to buy alcohol, recounts the first episode of
Murdaugh Murders
.
[“I did not shoot my wife or my son.” Lawyer Alex Murdaugh testifies tearfully at his double murder trial]
In the documentary, survivors of the accident recount that
Paul was driving the boat when it crashed into a bridge
.
The impact knocked 19-year-old Mallory Beach out of the boat, who died after falling into the water.
It took authorities eight days to find the girl's body, an episode of the Dateline program reported in 2022.
Lawyer Alex Murdaugh sentenced to life in prison accused of killing his wife and son
March 3, 202300:34
The charges against Paul were dropped in August 2021 after the South Carolina Attorney General's Office received his death certificate, NBC News affiliate WSAV reported.
In January 2023, two of Murdaugh's relatives, Beach's parents and two other survivors of the crash, settled out of court, according to court documents released by WTOC, another NBC affiliate.
Murdaugh Murders
also mentions
the mysterious unsolved death of Stephen Smith, a friend Buster had in high school
.
Investigators reopened this 2015 case following the 2021 murders of Maggie and Paul, said Tommy Crosby, a spokesman for the South Carolina Division of Law Enforcement.
A failed assassination plan
Just months after the murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul, Murdaugh made national headlines after being found with a gunshot wound to the head in Hampton County, South Carolina on September 4, 2021.
Murdaugh's attorney, Jim Griffin, testified at the time that his client pulled over to the side of a road after a flat tire on the vehicle hit him.
Shortly after, the driver of a pickup truck opened fire on him, he said.
[What hides the "fall from grace" of the lawyer who paid a hit man to kill him]
Authorities described Murdaugh's injury as a "superficial" head wound and said he would recover.
Nearly 10 days later, investigators offered another version: Murdaugh allegedly arranged for Curtis Edward Smith, a former client, to kill him so his son, Buster, would claim his $10 million life insurance policy.
Buster Murdaugh listens to the charges against his father in the double murder trial on Thursday, March 2, 2023. Andrew J. Whitaker / AP
Dick Harpootlian, one of Murdaugh's attorneys, claimed on the TODAY show Sept. 15 that his client's addiction to opioids led him to create the plot to have Curtis kill him so Buster could collect on his life insurance policy
.
Murdaugh turned himself in to authorities on September 16 after being indicted for insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud and filing a false police report, NBC News reported.
testified on behalf of his father
Buster was the first witness the defense called to the stand, testifying on February 21 that his father was barely able to speak the first time he saw him after the murders.
"He was devastated, heartbroken,"
Buster told jurors.
[A South Carolina lawyer is shot three months after his wife and son were killed]
He also talked about his loving and “close-knit” family, which caused his father to cry several times during the testimony.
Murdaugh was found guilty of the murder of Maggie and Paul on March 2 and sentenced the next day to the maximum sentence: two consecutive life sentences.
Buster buried his head in his hands after the jury's verdict was read and was seen hugging people in the courtroom after Judge Clifton Newman announced his father's life sentence.