Netflix’s Murdaugh Murders Team Say They’ve Uncovered New Crimes
ilmmakers Jenner Furst and Jennifer Willoughby Nason are well versed in true crime stories. Their Emmy-nominated documentary series Fyre Fraud delved into the 2017 music festival scam, and 2021’s LulaRich took viewers inside an alleged billion-dollar pyramid scheme. So when they began working on a three-part Netflix docu-series about Alex Murdaugh’s stunning alleged crime saga — set in the same South Carolina territory where his family of prosecutors and lawyers have held sway for more than 100 years — they were uniquely suited to navigate. bizarre subtitles.
In a phone call with Vanity Fair — which briefly took them away from Court TV’s coverage of Murdaugh’s double-murder trial — the filmmakers recalled how they began filming the Murdaugh murders in the fall of 2021. It had been several months since Alex called 911 to report that his wife Maggie and son Paul were brutally murdered – murders for which Alex is currently on trial. (Alex maintains his innocence in killing his wife and son.) The murders occurred shortly after Alex was forced out of his family’s law firm after they claimed he had embezzled millions of dollars. (Alex’s lawyer says much of the money was used to pay for pain medication.) It was also shortly after Alex was allegedly shot in the head by a former client. (The man denied shooting him.) Alex admitted he asked the man to kill him so his son could pick up the insurance. (Murdaugh apologized to his family and friends and entered a drug program.)
“Things were at the height of madness,” Furst recalls, explaining that he and Nason had no intention of trying to chase an “absurd” and relentless news cycle. Instead, they sat down with Paul Murdaugh’s friends and focused the docs on the 2019 boat crash that killed 19-year-old Mallory Beach and injured several others. Paul was charged with drunkenly wrecking a vessel; he was on bail at the time of his death. Alex faces a wrongful death lawsuit for Beach’s death as well.
Documentarians portray the crash and its aftermath as examples of the Murdaugh family’s claim and endemic miscarriages of justice. Paul was not handcuffed or taken to jail after the accident; his cell phone was not taken to be used as evidence. In the documentary, survivors of the crash claim that Alex spent hours after the accident trying to piece together his stories and pin the blame on his son.
“When [Beach] died, the Murdaughs’ behavior was so egregious and the lack of empathy, compassion and responsibility was so glaring that it was a ‘enough is enough’ moment for this community,” says Furst. “We decided [to tell the story] through the lens of these young people who found themselves at a turning point in history—not just for their generation, but for the three generations before that, when this family managed to get away with murder. literally and figuratively.”
The filmmakers use the perspective of these Gen-Z Murdaugh friends and their families to touch on the murders of Maggie and Paul, as well as the 2015 death of Stephen Smith, a former classmate of Alex’s older son Buster, and the 2018 death of Murdaugh’s long-term son.
