Bidden or Not, Masks Come Down

Murdaugh, Soul and the Unexamined Life

Daylight greetings, at this very welcome spring-forward to sunshine.

This newShrink marks first resurfacing to daylight from South Carolina’s murkiest Low Country swamps.

Even digitally from afar it was weeks’-long immersion too long, too deep, on all levels and sides too tragic: The double-murder trial and conviction of disgraced, disbarred, now quite publicly disintegrating Hampton native-son Alex Murdaugh.

Late last week the jury’s lightning-fast guilty verdicts and judge’s concurrent life-without-parole sentences ended the trial. The courtroom’s inherent gravitas stilled for now, the social-media noise and podcaster-glee of journalists-turned-influencers and their rabid followers escalate in a self-feeding loop.

More encouraging are aspects of this case and trial from the newShrink focus on public events, issues and people through lenses of journalism, scholarly and professional expertise such as history and law, and psychology in both its clinical and unconscious/soul aspects.

It’s still a bit of a challenge to collect and articulate in complete sentences my reflections and observations on this man and his story from the numerous psychological perspectives he evokes. Today’s title themes, loosely borrowed from Jung and Socrates, point to these. So, too, will my comments below as time, space and my energy bandwidth allow. Murdaugh will surely resurface in future editions and contexts; I hope not too soon!

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Journalism and the Journalists

The unfolding Murdaugh story has inspired a vast selection of broad, deep and plentiful journalistic, historic-perspective documentary, commentary, contextual coverage and resource materials in print, photo, audio and video forms. Much of it is excellent.

So, too, are many of the professionals providing it and participating. A couple of them I’m proud to have worked with in long-ago Charlotte Observer reporter years — notably John Monk, now of The State in Columbia, and veteran journalist and author Mark Ethridge, who back then was our Observer managing editor.

Several good sources and articles are highlighted and linked below. There’s also a lot of excellent local/regional journalism browsable until you hit paywalls at The State in Columbia, Charleston Post and Courier, Hilton Head Island Packet, Will Folks’ online FITSNews, and Hampton newspaper editor/journalst/historian Michael DeWitt’s contributions anywhere.

Most of all I highly recommend seeing both the Netflix and HBO Max documentary-interview series, each of them in three parts:

November 2022 HBO MAX Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty

The more recent, February 2023, Netflix one is. Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal

These are gripping, revealing, at times devastatingly effective. I valued both series’ use of well-chosen, knowledgeable experts and subjects in understated sober, factfinding interviews. There’s a vast array of some-graphic live, real-time videos — from law enforcement dash-cams and every teenager and interview subject with constant smartphone video. This combination both offsets and allows those to speak for themselves. And they do!

With so much shared video there’s overlap and duplication between the two, but their areas of different emphasis are complementary.

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Meanwhile, podcasts: Most notably the popular Murdaugh Murders podcast by Mandy Matney. I have very dear friends who value it greatly, and I link it here for you to choose, or not. I can’t quite recommend, despite the many good reasons I’d like to. (And by the way, beyond the podcast and all browsable online about her I don’t know Matney, or to my knowledge know anyone who does.) The topic merits newShrink discussion, given immense, evolving and growing popularity and influence with podcasts of all varieties — including but not limited to those identified as journalism or news-related.

The pros on Matney’s work are compelling by all accounts, including some not from her. Described online as a breaking news editor for The Island Packet of Hilton Head back in 2021, the youngish or 30-something journalist from Kansas did the close-probing investigative document dives that cracked open and went beyond the bizarre Alex Murdaugh botched-fake-suicide attempt story. It was the first of what became massive discovery of his stealing of client settlement funds — and the revisiting of previous suspicious settlements and deaths.

Matney clearly has, and applies relentlessly, the best skills of investigative journalist. She has a lively and engaging mind. The content of her now-long-running podcast still reflects that — to the extent that she’s giving the same intense (or any) attention to facts, elements, people in the case and story about which she is not gleefully excited to dish with her followers. (When the title to nearly every episode refers to how “we” are winning or losing or moving the story along, that’s at best a caution flag.) It begins to sound a lot like TV’s Nancy Grace when she first hit 90s broadcast news.

Self-described newlywed with husband her technical producer, Matney is listed as CEO of the podcast with a content production partner — and refers to herself as a mission-focused investigative journalist. It’s not clear if she still works as a journalist for The Island Packet or any other journalistic news organization. (Those generally would, and ought to, have guardrail-prohibitions about first reporting on, then effectively betting or investing in, the proverbial horse-race.)

It’s not as if Matney is asking my opinion or it matters to her thousands of avid followers! But the former journalist in me thinks she needs to pick a lane, and I want her to pick journalist because she has the stuff of a good, even great one.

Meanwhile, I think she’s an influencer, not a journalist, and her self-promotion should say so. The psychologist in me wants to urge Jung’s caution for our thinking and in life, to “hold open the opposite pole and possibility, too" even, most especially, when most carried-away and full-of-ourselves with ego-wins.

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The earlier fine investigative work by Matney, John Monk, Michael DeWitt, Will Folk and others in the Murdaugh story underscore the crucial importance and potential power of strong local journalism — and solidly grounded professional journalists. A state of the press topic I plan to revisit in a future feature, it brings to mind a piece and issue I have been pondering. This was shared awhile back by friend, reader, veteran journalist (and my long-ago newspaper colleague) David Vest:

The demise of local news (The Week)

The U.S. is losing newspapers at the rate of more than two a week, at a steep cost to our communities — and our democracy.

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The Law, the Court, the Lawyers

In this courtroom and broader Murdaugh cases beyond, I’ve found the quality, expertise and performance from judge to fine lawyering on both sides astonishing. (These included women, though ones I observed and experienced in real time at high-profile trial points are men.)

Within newShrink’s defining purpose and my own values, there’s no way to pull for the side of democracy, that ineffable soul of America (and ourselves), without also celebrating, seeking, insisting on the very best legal counsel on both sides — and bench. This is all the more true where the worst, most gnarly, complicated, weak or downright depraved of acts, people, facts and circumstances are at issue.

Here I think it’s paradoxical: Unless we are to surrender the practice of law to the field’s Alex Murdaughs, things like presumption of innocence and right to counsel simply must be more than lip-service slogans.

So, who’s who?

Clifton Newman: Meet the judge presiding over Alex Murdaugh’s murder trial (The State newspaper of Columbia, SC)

Murdaugh Judge Newman no stranger to high-profile SC cases

Meet Creighton Waters, the Murdaugh prosecutor whose investigations toppled an SC dynasty (Post and Courier of Charleston)

Not pictured on the prosecution side is S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson, long assumed to be seeking a run for governor. He was a constant visible presence at the Murdaugh trial and questioned witnesses. If his name doesn’t seem familiar, you might recall his father, U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson. He was the congressman who loudly shouted “liar” at then-President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

That was ages ago, in the days when a single such outburst in the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol was shocking.

Alex Murdaugh’s defense attorneys: Who are Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin? (Post and Courier of Charleston)

An observation I find interesting here, rather consistent across many venues of American public life, is ambivalent regard for psychological dimensions and references. This is even as they are ever-present and often fundamental in a case — as they were in this one.

Here prosecution, defense and judge from the bench each had powerful points to be made from psychological insight and experts. Yet with all three it was a touch, in passing, when a firmly nailed landing would have been stronger.

From prosecutor Waters, during testimony and closing it was passing vague references to Murdaugh as transforming into a family annihilator — as though this were some scientific or esoteric diagnosis from the field. (The term seems to come from just two quite limited-sample studies, one in the UK and one American, by criminal-justice college students. They identify four rather obvious behaviorial patterns of men who murder their wives and at least one of their children.) From Waters it was a colorful rhetorical flourish, but is just a label with little to no psychological heft.

In his closing Waters’s psychological story was far more powerful, and effective: He described exactly how pressured and utterly fragile Murdaugh’s sense of self — his conscious ego — was amid the overwhelming impact of shame when confronting, and confronted by, all of his long-denied (shadow) misdeeds. (In my view this is likely for Murdaugh the first time, ever.)

Here Waters sounded quite relatably Jungian, which is hard to do! While he got the verdict he sought, I’d have liked to hear more of this insight throughout the trial. A note of thoughtful compassion would balance his relentlessly outraged-bombardment style in making a case.

From the bench Judge Clifton Newman’s entire, searing admonitions to Murdaugh as part of his sentencing merits a browse of You Tube or elsewhere. He articulated aloud his grasp of the realm of soul and the whole, vs fragmented/alienated, self. Newman’s ultimate delivered message was devastating:

“… or maybe it wasn’t you, maybe it was the monster you became…”

Of this Black S.C. native judge poised for retirement, I would like to ask: Given all he has seen and knows, does he really believe, as he implied, that all of these Murdaughs — and this firm full of lawyers preying on misfortunes of poor, many Black, people over generations — are all such fine and lovely people out in their community and legal circles… except for the shocking, shocking anomaly who is Alex? (Really?)

Through trial and in closing too, defense attorney Jim Griffin perhaps best conveyed a knowledgeable, relatable grasp of his client’s psychology and particularly of addiction. It’s a factor so enormous and ubiqitous I wanted him to have fleshed it out more throughout:

“He lied because that’s what addicts do. Addicts lie. He lied because he had a closet full of skeletons.”

The courtroom figure most compelling for me was this burly, balding bear of a defense attorney Griffin (who’s interviewed in the documentary series, too.) His solid, methodical, utterly respectful and no-gimmicks mastery made him the one with whom I’d most like to have an open-ended unfiltered conversation about all of this. (Now, if he’d only quit populating my dreams with still-another-thing-about-the-case — not in any salacious way, mind you! The Murdaugh story’s just exhausting enough in daytime.)

Here’s a sampling of a few stories during and concluding the trial.

Alex Murdaugh Admits Lying and Stealing, but Denies Murders (NYT)

On the stand, Alex Murdaugh denies the murders as prosecutors press him on his lies (NPR)

Jury Finds Murdaugh Guilty of Killing Wife and Son (New York Times)

The verdict came more than 20 months after the June 2021 fatal shootings. On the stand, the prominent South Carolina lawyer admitted to lying and stealing but tearfully denied the murders.

Alex Murdaugh is sentenced to 2 life terms for the double murder of his wife and son (NPR station WFAE)

These two provide good highlights of the whole trial.

Murdaugh’s fall from grace ends in life sentence for murder (Associated Press)

Here are 8 big revelations from the Alex Murdaugh murder trial (NPR)

Overall take on the court case, along with one of several misgivings I share about the deliberations and verdict.

OPINION/Why Alex Murdaugh’s Quick Conviction Worries Me (New York Times Columnist Farhad Manjoo)

This concerns me too, and for reasons besides Manjoo’s focus on risks of relying/over-relying on data from all of our digital devices. (The prosecution’s experts and case facts were at times downright loopy on this.)

More generally the jury’s not reviewing or discussing mounds of documents and evidence, from some 70 witnesses in a six-week trial, is pretty much a lack of any jury deliberation at all. Which points to a graver concern I have about the Murdaugh case — one that may be unsolvable even on appeal, a bell that can’t be unrung. That is, the admission — and admissibility door the judge ruled the defense had opened — of all of Murdaugh’s financial and other misdeeds, with the enormity of their impacts.

With either outcome of appeal, it brings to mind the larger question: Is the fundamental presumption of innocence in any way even possible for Alex Murdaugh? And if so, how?

Meanwhile, and for what it’s worth, I believe Alex Murdaugh is at enormous risk for both suicide and homicide in prison.

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Here the focus shifts to setting and community.

The Law Firm and its Dynasty

Providing context in the HBO documentary is Bill Nettles, an Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney who has since returned to his long-time criminal defense practice in Charleston:

“It’s important to understand how isolated that part of the world is. It’s insanely poor. There is no industry, aside from suing people.”

Pictured at left column in tiny Hampton, S.C., is the city-block sized, now Parker Law Group informally dubbed “the firm that CSX built” (with train-injury lawsuit settlement money). At center and top right is the neighboring Colleton County courthouse in Walterboro, where the trial was held. At bottom right the faint shadow to left of the door on the courtroom wall is where one of the Murdaugh solicitor-ancestral portraits usually hangs. Judge Clifton Newman ordered them removed for the duration of the Alex Murdaugh trial.

Demographically the town of Hampton population is 2,791 and Hampton County, 18,180 — 52% Black, 45% white. For size comparison neighboring Walterboro population is 5,463 and Colleton County, 38,462.

Even just observing from afar and digitally you might notice around there (as elsewere in South Carolina) that a lot of things, locations and people are named Wade, Hampton, or both. (Just a couple of examples in this story are not only the law firm’s county and town but the street address corner for the Colleton County Courthouse.) Still revered by some South Carolinians as the state’s “savior”, Wade Hampton was a S.C. plantation owner and Confederate general whose opposition to Reconstruction and his 1877 election as governor effectively ended it in the state.

In effect if not in fact the Murdaugh law practice, then solicitorship dynasty, became a Jim Crow-era fiefdom. The U.S. Naval Academy and law graduate Randolph Murdaugh Sr. founded the law firm in 1910, and by 1920 began the continuous elections of Murdaughs to the district solicitor office (like a DA, but over several counties in the district).

Today’s renamed Parker Law Group, still personal injury and accident focused, has 13 lawyers, all white, three of them women, and nearly all Low Country-native alums of USC Law.

Here’s a can’t-make-this-stuff-up piece shared by reader, friend and long-ago newspaper colleague Phil Whitesell:

A Murdaugh family death in 1940 was also suspicious — and eerily similar (Washington Post)

The founder of the Murdaugh legal dynasty, Randolph Murdaugh Sr., was killed in a suspicious train crash, from which his son benefited, in 1940. [The story includes another likely staged suicide, one not botched or fake, and alcohol abuse indicated.]

In 2021 stories reported in The Island Packet of Hilton Head and vigorous online local news outlet FITSNews, Alex Murdaugh’s longtime solicitor grandfather — one of the ancestors for whom his son Buster is named — in 1956 was indicted, along with the sheriff of neighboring Colleton County. They faced multiple federal charges of conspiring and abetting illegal bootlegging operations over a period of years. “Old Buster” Murdaugh resigned his post before standing trial, in which he was readily acquitted after several instances of apparent jury-interference noted by the federal judge from Virginia.

That Murdaugh immediately ran unopposed to regain his solicitor seat, which he held until his son (Alex’s father Randolph) filled it.

On Murdaugh, again from former U.S. Attorney Bill Nettles:

“It took the deus ex-machina event of a drunken boat crash [February 24, 2019] or Alex’s finances to come under the scrutiny of local reporters. The scope of Murdaugh’s depravity is without precedent in Western jurisprudence… [Murdaugh’s stealing of millions in client settlement money is] the act of someone living in a trance of entitlement.”

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“There is no house like the house of belonging”

This line from the title poem and book by Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte is speaking not of real estate, but of the most deeply authentic original (unconscious) soul-Self in each of us. Home or house is one of the most universal archetypal symbols of Self appearing imaginally in dreams and art. This Self is the one beneath the persona masks we wear in the ego-roles we perform.

From psychological perspective perhaps the most pervasive of Murdaugh patterns is paradox. Privilege, power and wealth are relative. In Murdaugh’s world theirs was — by long and rigid tradition required to be — enormous, though these pictures are not of an exorbitant or palatial lifestyle by many standards.

(And just where did all of that nearly $10 million go? Nobody takes that much oxy or fentanyl, and survives. Unlike a decade ago, cartels, not so much shady prescribers, run the opioid and fentanyl contaminant trade. Are these Moselle-estate area tidal rivers trafficking routes, and for what? What about this family’s widely videotaped, staggeringly casual relationshiip with arsenals of unsecured guns? One can only imagine what’s in the nearly half of 1700 acres that is swamp. Which, by the way, is designated a nature preserve easement — a nice potential tax shelter — according to the real estate information for the $3.9 million property listing. It’s shown as under contract since December, with sale and details sealed and frozen until victim-proceeds from the Maggie Murdaugh estate are first allocated and resolved.)

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Paradoxes of Privilege

In the HBO Low Country series Mark Ethridge describes Alex Murdaugh as:

“The product of decades of entitlement, of privilege. Murdaugh is part of a club, a club of white people — powerful white people who got to run things. [These tragedies are] the culmination of years of no accountability.”

Accountability is when our masks come down, and need to, little by little over a lifetime. When that has never happened, maintaining the ego-self’s mask and cover to deny the shadow makes us increasingly, desperately fragile and weak — not that all- powerful, inflated ego-self.

As shows up in the videotaped drunken acting-out of Murdaugh son Paul, when exposed or challenged this desperation can grow violent, acted-out or unconsciously projected onto others. The transformations in Paul, down to bizarre hand gestures and a well-known alter-ego-when-drunk name “Timmy” among friends, is a vivid and chilling illustration of just how such a psychological flip occurs.

This is why and how, the from all accounts limitlessly indulgent, consequence-free, lying and coverup parenting by both Maggie and Alex Murdaugh does not protect or strengthen. It cripples — both us and the adults the kids behind us will be.

This, I believe, is the great paradox of privilege. It makes me think of the idea behind the old-fashioned, somewhat corny-knights-of-old noblesse oblige: With great privilege and gifts must come great responsibility. (Which makes one stronger, more, not less deeply powerful.) The Biblical “from everyone given much, much more will be asked” makes sense in this context, too.

As I watched Alex Murdaugh constantly through his defense testimony on the witness stand, somewhat like sitting with someone in therapy, he had this newly hatched, rawly uninitiated quality, as if still rubbing his eyes in too-bright light. It seemed like his first-ever real accountability and full reckoning with his own shadow. It’s as though at 54 he never once had had what Jung termed our “confrontations with the unconscious.”

On the clinical side there’s a generations-long family legacy of substance addiction, most notably the alcohol abuses of both Paul and earlier Murdoch men, and Alex’s opioids most recently. Both documentaries illustrate, through video at the Moselle lodge and factual interviews, how Maggie and Alex’s popular designated stocked refrigerators were a constant flow of accessible alcohol to Paul’s group of teens back when they were as young as 15.

Paul’s longtime former girlfriend (from 2015 until 2019 when he drove the boat that killed one of her best friends), Morgan Doughty describes expressing to Maggie her own concern about Paul’s heavy drinking as young as 15, to which Maggie laughed. Paul’s widely mentioned nickname of “little detective” by his parents came from his constant searches for his dad’s hidden pills to “get him to detox.”

Unconscious denial is a common factor in addictions of all kinds. But it’s mind-boggling how vast numbers of people close to and within this family, from Maggie to siblings to law firm partners and associates, claimed to be “shocked, shocked” not only by his massive thefts but by his enormous, long-out of control addiction to opioids.

The man’s Pillsbury doughboy-puffy type of overweight and unhealthy teeth even in photos would be clues. Also not secret are the family’s drinking habits and long tradition of lying and coverups. Pushing against denial when loved ones and livelihood are at risk takes courage. It’s also necessary, at times even life-saving.

To both my professional and personal eyes, after 18-months’ incarceration following rehab, the strawberry blond/platinum-haired Alex Murdaugh at trial simply looked: Clean at last, wow. And, what a terrible, tragic waste of a promising life.

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Postscript

At the end of one of the documentaries is a heartbreaking taped prison phone call from incarcerated Alex sometime last year to his surviving son Buster. At the time Buster’s in Greenville and tells his dad he’s watching the (South) Carolina ballgame. When Alex asks about girlfriend Brooklynn, Buster says she is upstairs, hungover. To this, Alex chuckles and exclaims he’s so glad they must have had a big time last night. Then he asks if Buster remembers how they could always tell when Mom (Maggie) had a little buzz.

They reminisce together on how cutely Mom smiled, when she was a little drunk.

It’s a sad, bizarrely fitting closing, to one of the many sadly bizarre stories of Alex Murdaugh.

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On a needed lighter note, I leave you the week’s favorite chuckle with a dash of heart (especially for those of us born in the Chinese zodiac year of the dragon):

And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.

🦋💙 tish

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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

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