Notorious South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh has always been well aware that the bottom has a rocky reputation. He’s being smashed against those rocks now. Trying to take the easy way out didn’t go quite as planned. So, now he’s stuck with his family demons. Just to add a little more misery to the pile, he “now faces nearly 50 counts of breach of trust with fraudulent intent.” His clients will be hounding him in his personal hell as well.
More charges for Murdaugh
The Murdaugh family proves that along with money and power come scandal, misery, and death. Alex’s “wife and son were gunned down six months ago in unsolved killings.” That’s only part of his saga.
On Thursday, December 9, he was dragged back into court so the judge could add “21 more charges that he stole settlement and other money from clients.” That brings the total to “50 counts of breach of trust with fraudulent intent; computer crimes; money laundering and forgery.”
Prosecutors have a pretty good idea that the reason he hired someone to kill him is because he stole “more than $6.2 million” from his clients. He’s also charged with attempting to have himself murdered.
Court documents reveal that between 2016 and 2020 Murdaugh allegedly “told clients their settlements were smaller than expected or they had to pay extra fees for things like accident reconstruction.”
The money he skimmed from his client trust account was funneled off to “a fake account he created.” In the latest charges, associated with the 21 counts was “nearly $1.4 million” in diverted funds. Murdaugh has been a huge name in the community since the Civil War.
Alex’s “father, grandfather and great-grandfather were prosecutors in tiny Hampton County, where every road leading to the county seat is two lanes.” The powerful “giant private law firm with dozens of attorneys” is known far and wide “for suing railroads and getting injury claims for workers.”
Family killings
The whole fraudulent scheme began to collapse around Murdaugh when “his wife, Maggie, 52, and son Paul, 22, were found shot to death at the family’s estate in June.” Alex swears up and down that despite all his other shenanigans, he didn’t have a hand in those killings. To date, nobody has been charged in either murder. Then, there’s the dead housekeeper.
The pillar of the community is being held without bond for his “own safety” because he was earlier charged with gleeping “$3.4 million in insurance money meant for the sons of his housekeeper Gloria Satterfield. She died after a fall at one of the family’s homes in 2018.” He didn’t push her or anything. None of the other family members did either, they all insisted.
Murdaugh knew that things were about to get messy and his fancy lifestyle would soon change to a small gray cell. The best way he could think of to fund his surviving son’s future was with his life insurance.
Alex “also is charged in what investigators said was an attempt to have himself shot and killed so his surviving son could collect a $10 million life insurance policy.” The guy he hired did shoot him, but didn’t kill him. That means no tip. He now faces “hundreds of years in prison.” Then eternity with his underworld family.
His clients won’t be coming to visit him in the pokey. The fresh indictment lists such charming legal representation as telling “the representative of a dead woman’s estate he only recovered $30,000, but since the award was so small, he would waive his lawyer fee.”
Instead, “Murdaugh recovered more than $180,000 and wrote a check to his bank account for the more than $150,000 difference.” In another case, he “told a family friend $85,000 of a settlement had to be set aside for a ‘medical insurance lien’ and then sent that money to himself.” He also took “$125,000 from a settlement for a state trooper injured on duty.”
