As Alex Murdaugh Netflix series hits screens, the story behind America’s latest true-crime obsession and the frenzy surrounding it

Netflix’s ‘Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal’ was released last week, joining HBO Max, Discovery+ and a bevy of podcasts covering the murder case

‘It’s got every single ingredient …You’ll live your whole life and never get another one like this,’ says the editor of a South Carolina news and politics site

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Alex Murdaugh (right) with his wife Maggie and sons Buster (left) and Paul in an old family photo. Photo: Facebook

Published: 11:15am, 26 Feb 2023

Pat Conroy. Truman Capote. John Grisham. Shakespeare.

The epic downfall of Alex Murdaugh, the once-mighty lawyer in the US state of South Carolina currently on trial for the brutal double murder of his wife and son, and implicated in numerous other crimes, has prompted a slew of literary comparisons – none of which quite capture the full scope of this twisted saga.

A Southern Gothic tale of greed and deceit, it has also become America’s latest true-crime obsession. Hundreds of thousands of people tune in to daily live-streams of the trial, being held in the small town of Walterboro, South Carolina.

The televised proceedings have helped fuel an already thriving Murdaugh cottage industry.

There’s a top-rated podcast, Murdaugh Murders, created by Mandy Matney, a tenacious local reporter who broke many of the crucial stories in the case.

There are docuseries from HBO Max (Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty) and Discovery+ (Murdaugh Murders: Deadly Dynasty). Last week, as the trial stretched into its second month with the outcome far from certain, Netflix entered the fray with Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, a three-part docuseries.