The swift losses of three members of the Murdaugh family have left a community reeling and investigators searching for a motive for why two of them were killed.
For nearly a century, fathers of three generations of the Murdaugh family wielded power as South Carolina's top prosecutor for a cluster of counties in a swampy coastal region known as the Lowcountry.
of Columbia noted in 2019 that they helped to put thousands of people in prison and sent more than a dozen to death row and that"year after year, the family law firm in Hampton has won millions of dollars in civil lawsuits, relentlessly pursuing those at fault in fatal collisions." A home in rural Colleton County, near Islandton, S.C., on June 8. A woman and her son from a prominent South Carolina legal family were shot dead on the family's land.Randolph Murdaugh III served five terms as solicitor, running unopposed, before he retired in 2005 and returned to his law practice, which includes two of his sons.In 2018, Gov. Henry McMaster bestowed one of the state's highest civilian honors, the Order of the Palmetto, on Randolph Murdaugh III.
"I do not know anyone in my life who loved their family more than Randolph Murdaugh," Perry Buckner, a retired 14th Circuit judge, was reported to have said at his funeral. Six people were on a boat owned by Alex Murdaugh, including his son, Paul, who is believed to have been driving at some point, according to police records. The boat slammed into a piling below a bridge, and the passengers, ages 18 to 20, were ejected.
Local reports after the boat crash said that the Murdaugh family did not initially cooperate with law enforcement agencies' investigation and that officers never gave Paul Murdaugh an alcohol breath test, according to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, which led the investigation. Murdaugh pleaded not guilty to three felony counts of boating under the influence. He had been out on a personal recognizance bond of $50,000 at the time of his death.
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