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

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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.

To a casual observer, this glut of coverage might seem excessive. But Will Folks, founding editor of FitsNews, a South Carolina news and politics site that has risen to national attention through its Murdaugh scoops, sees it another way.

“It is one of the most gripping dramas we’ll ever see in the true-crime arena, because no one knows yet how it’s going to end,” he says.

“It’s got every single ingredient you look for in a whodunit. Then you layer on top of that the power, the influence of this family, all these other cases that are tied to them and this perfect backdrop [of South Carolina’s Lowcountry region] – it’s a point of critical mass for a storyteller. You’ll live your whole life and never get another one like this.”

Any effort to summarise this unwieldy saga is likely doomed to fail, but here’s an attempt anyway.

For nearly a century, the Murdaugh family reigned over South Carolina’s Lowcountry, an economically depressed region in the southern corner of the state known for its picturesque salt marshes and legal corruption.

For multiple generations, the Murdaughs served as solicitors – the local equivalent of a prosecutor – while also operating a lucrative private firm specialising in personal-injury lawsuits.

But their fiefdom began to unravel in 2019 when, according to witnesses, younger son Paul, then 19, drunkenly crashed a boat into a bridge.

The crash killed a young woman named Mallory Beach, whose parents brought a lawsuit against Alex. Paul was facing a number of felony charges when, in June 2021, he and his mother were shot dead outside the dog kennels on their family’s 1,700-acre (690-hectare) hunting estate.

A few months later, Murdaugh was forced to resign from his family firm amid allegations he misused funds. A day later, he called 911 to say he’d been shot in the head in a botched roadside assassination attempt.

The story quickly fell apart: Murdaugh eventually admitted he’d hired a distant cousin, Curtis “Eddie” Smith, to kill him in an attempt to secure a life insurance payout for his surviving son, Buster. He also claimed to be struggling with opioid addiction.

In July 2022, Murdaugh was indicted on two counts of murder.

The spotlight has also brought renewed scrutiny to two suspicious deaths with alleged ties to the Murdaughs.

First is Stephen Smith, a gay 19-year-old who was killed in 2015 in what many believe was a hate crime staged to look like a hit and run.

Then there’s Gloria Satterfield, the Murdaugh family’s long-time housekeeper, who died after falling down the steps at the family’s country estate in 2018, leading to a multimillion-dollar settlement that Murdaugh allegedly embezzled from Satterfield’s sons.

Got all that?

“It checks the boxes on all criminality,” says Eric Bland, a malpractice lawyer who represented the Satterfield estate in their proceedings against Murdaugh and co-hosts a podcast about the Murdaughs called Cup of Justice.

At the centre of it all is the ruddy, ginger-haired Alex Murdaugh – a banal villain who, prosecutors argue, killed his wife and son in a desperate bid to deflect attention from his alleged financial crimes.

The evidence against Alex – pronounced “Ellick” by friends and family, in one of many regional quirks that define this case – includes a video on Paul’s mobile phone that places him at the scene of the crime minutes before it likely occurred.

There is also testimony from a family carer who said Alex asked her to lie about the timing of a visit to his mother on the night of the murder.

The trial has been a massive draw for the Law & Crime network, a US-based network that streams legal proceedings online.

As the prosecution’s case has stretched out for weeks, the audience for the network’s live-stream on YouTube has grown, now drawing about 100,000 viewers at any given moment, many of whom share their real-time reactions in a chat sidebar.

“The longer a trial goes,” Russon said, “the more opportunity people have to get really invested in it.”

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FitsNews’ Folks initially decried the “Hollywood feeding frenzy” over this gripping tale of greed and power, but his views have evolved; he took part in the Netflix series.

“There are more than enough clicks for everybody covering the story,” he said. “Nobody cares about credit. People just want to know what’s happened.”