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Crime Story Episode 13: Mandy Matney

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Please take care while listening.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story. Every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best.

SOUNDCLIP

[dial tone]

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Paul, what bridge is it? What bridge is this?

[phone ringing]

OPERATOR: 911. Where’s your emergency?

[frantic yell]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: A frantic 911 call broke the quiet of an early morning in February 2019.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: We’re in a boat crash on Archer’s Creek.

OPERATOR: Where abouts in Archer’s Creek?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Archer's Creek is in a small town in South Carolina. Six local teens were on a boat that had just crashed into a bridge. Only five were accounted for. The body of 19-year-old Mallory Beach was discovered eight days later. Initially, reporters covered the boat accident for what it was, a tragedy with one key question, who was driving the boat? But a local reporter named Mandy Matney began to ask more questions, and all of them focussed on one family with deep ties to the community, the Murdaughs.

SOUNDCLIP

MANDY MATNEY: I had talked to several of the family members and the victims, and I knew the fear that people felt when they talked about the Murdaughs. And it just kind of clicked in my mind that something is really wrong here and this boat crash is way different than any other crime I've ever looked at in my entire life.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What began as a suspicious accident quickly spiraled into a national sensation involving multiple murders, cover ups and ultimately, the fall of a local dynasty.

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST REPORTER: New developments in the murder mystery surrounding a prominent South Carolina family.

SECOND REPORTER: This morning, the husband in a South Carolina double murder mystery breaking his silence for the first time. Alex Murdaugh, whose wife and son were brutally murdered in June, putting out a statement after he says someone shot him this weekend.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Today, we unpack the Murdaugh case, which Mandy details in her new book, Blood on Their Hands.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Mandy, welcome to Crime Story.

MANDY MATNEY: Thank you for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And congratulations on your new book.

MANDY MATNEY: Thank you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So tell us about the Murdaughs. What kind of influence did they have? Who were they in that community?

MANDY MATNEY: So the Murdaughs were the solicitors in the 14th Circuit, which is where I live in this area of South Carolina called the Lowcountry. And a solicitor is like a district attorney. Do you all have those in Canada? It's a prosecutor, but it's over a five county district. So the Murdaugh family held that position of head prosecutor of this five county district for almost 100 years. And up until 2006 is when Randolph Murdaugh, Alex Murdaugh’s father, stepped down. But they still had this giant law firm. And I say giant. It wasn't necessarily giant. It was just they were so powerful and everyone in the area really feared them. They had a lot of political power. They donated to a lot of campaigns behind the scenes. Everybody in law enforcement knew them because of their deep ties to the solicitor's office. It was that kind of power. So they really weren't like the family making headlines across South Carolina, like the Kennedys, before all of this happened. They were more behind the scenes power. And Hampton is a very small town, so it was kind of in a news desert. And the boat crash happened in Buford, where I was covering the area. And basically, nobody had ever really from the outside covered this family before the boat crash happened.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so yeah, let's talk about that boat crash, because you quickly learned that the son of Alex Murdaugh, Paul Murdaugh, was actually involved in that crash, right? So tell me what happened.

MANDY MATNEY: So it was just a bunch of kids there who are college age. That's very normal to do around here, to go out of a night of drinking on your parents’ boat. And they took Paul Murdaugh’s father's boat. Paul drove and they went to an oyster roast, which is another like Lowcountry tradition that we do a lot of times in the winter. You drink beer and eat oysters and it's a lot of fun. They went to an oyster roast, stopped at a bar, and then the night really took a turn. Paul’s Drinking started getting out of control. He started to get really mean to other kids on the boat, started to say, hey, I don't think you should be driving. And he ended up slapping his girlfriend, and everybody on the boat was terrified at this point and just wanted to get home. So they just kind of let him drive, put their heads down and hoped that they would make it home. And his anger just kept increasing and he ended up accelerating the boat and driving it into a bridge on Archer's Creek, which is a very narrow twisting creek that I am shocked that they made it that far because of how dark it was at night. And it was a very like scary boat ride, to begin with. But then Paul accelerated. They hit the bridge and they all looked around and all of a sudden, they realized that Mallory was missing.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so what are you finding out? You mentioned Paul was quite drunk, that his anger was sort of getting out of control. What do you know and what are you starting to hear about who Paul is?

MANDY MATNEY: Yeah. Paul is a person that I will say that in my initial reporting, I didn't understand him. And because I didn't understand him as somebody… as the son of a narcissist and a manipulator, and I viewed him as this spoiled… everybody said he was spoilt, entitled. Nobody ever told him no. Teachers wouldn't even tell him no because his parents were so powerful. He never got in trouble at school, but he got away with everything. These are things I was hearing over and over and over again. But now I look back on Paul and I know who his dad is and I see how he was raised. And I see that he was raised in a family that would never tell him no and how horrible that is to do to a kid, because it was very clear pretty early on that he had some serious problems with drinking and that his parents never corrected. And we started hearing rumours that he was in previous car crashes that his father had covered up. And we started hearing rumours that this wasn't the first time he had been in trouble with law enforcement for drinking. And we started digging into all those things.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You also learned that when the kids from the crash end up at the hospital because some of them are hurt, that right away, Alex Murdaugh is trying to manipulate the situation and make sure that his son doesn't get in trouble for this.

MANDY MATNEY: Yeah. And his father, the former solicitor, and you can see on camera that he was actually… he actually had his solicitor badge, Alex Dick, because he was a volunteer assistant solicitor, which means he had the power of a prosecutor. And so he was using his position as an officer of the court to intimidate kids into not talking to law enforcement. And it just kind of clicked in my mind that something is really wrong here and this boat crash is way different than any other crime I've ever looked at in my entire life.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And despite his efforts, and maybe because of your reporting, Paul was actually arrested. So what happened there? What was he arrested for?

MANDY MATNEY: Paul was arrested for three felonies. We call them BUIs, boating under the influence. Two of those for injuring two of the people on the boat, and then one of those for BUI resulting in death. So he was facing over 25 years in prison. They were very serious charges. However, it took a very long time or it felt like it took forever for those charges to come. And as we were investigating and finding out more and more and hearing the driver's Paul, the driver's Paul, and he's never going to get caught, this is just going to be another cover up, a few of us at the Island Packet realized that we have to keep this going in the news. We have to keep digging into this and keep the story alive and keep the pressure up. And on Mallory Beach's birthday in April of that year, he was charged with three felonies.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you paint quite the scene at the courtroom when he comes in with his dad. Tell us about what happened and especially the way Alex behaved. I mean, it really was shocking to think about the way he walked into that courtroom.

MANDY MATNEY: Yeah. Well, there was so much anticipation. And I thought that this was like the biggest story in the universe at the time, but it just shows how small my world was back then. But I thought that the courtroom was going to be super packed with media everywhere because we were getting huge numbers for our newspaper on every boat crash story that we were covering, but we showed up and no one else was there. I think there was one or two other media outlets, and we were just so highly anticipating, like what are these people going to be like? Like we have heard so much. What are they going to look like in live action? And I remember just being appalled at Alex Murdaugh’s behaviour because he was larger than life. Came in like the mayor of the courtroom, shaking hands, like winking at people. No shame whatsoever. And this is a… this is a serious, serious case. Mallory Beach is dead because of his son and he's just kind of walking around greeting people, patting people on the back. And I was just taken aback by that. And then Paul walked in and I was just blown away at how physically small he was. And it made me realize that like this is a 19-year-old kid that we're talking about here, and he just looked like a child. And that started to make me feel bad about how hard I was going in my reporting. But ultimately, this all was his father's fault. And then the courtroom got… it was even more weird when the bailiff, like every other bailiff and every other bond hearing, went to handcuff Paul, and the prosecutor actually stepped in and said, no, no, that won't be necessary.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The prosecutor, not his defence team.

MANDY MATNEY: Yes. He was supposed to be working for the people and not the Murdaughs. And that was something, again, the two other reporters I was with, Liz, my current reporting partner, and Teresa, we were just in shock of the behaviour and how normalized all of this was. And then there was other things like he didn't have to wear a jumpsuit for his mug shot, which pretty much everybody else does. He got the gentleman’s treatment. It's like they put kid gloves on and it was like play court instead of how they treat a lot of people who have committed a lot less serious crimes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Which then, I guess, I mean, you had lots of reasons to keep investigating, but I think it's interesting to me that you start to look into other things. And I guess like this also kind of buoyed your idea that there probably was more stuff that had been dismissed or not looked at. And you start to look into the death of another young man named Stephen Smith and how that was connected to the Murdaughs. So tell me about that. How did Stephen Smith officially die or what were police saying about what happened to him?

MANDY MATNEY: Well, I'll start with how I started to hear about Stephen Smith's death, which right after Mallory died, I was looking for sources and trying to figure out who the Murdaughs were. Was just poking around and I kept seeing a lot of memes that had photos of Mallory and Stephen next to each other that said justice for Stephen and Mallory. So I started asking around and again and again, people just started saying, if you're investigating the Murdaughs, you should investigate Stephen's death. And I ended up meeting with Sandy like a few weeks after the boat crash. And Sandy is Stephen Smith’s mother.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And who was he?

MANDY MATNEY: Stephen Smith was a 19-year-old who in 2015 was found dead in the middle of a Hampton County road, and most of his wounds were on his head. There was no evidence that he was hit by a car whatsoever, but they ruled his death as a vehicle burst pedestrian incident and that it was a hit and run. And Sandy his sweet mother never believed that it was a hit and run. She said Stephen would not be walking in the middle of the road like that. It doesn't make any sense. They told her that a truck mirror had hit him in the face and that's what killed him. And she just rejected that in her gut and said, I cannot. My son was smart. He was sober when this happened. I just can't understand how that could possibly… something happened. And when I started looking into it, I got the case file of Stephen Smith's investigation, which was investigated by the Highway patrol. And the highway patrol here does not investigate murders. They investigate vehicle crimes. So the guys investigating this were not equipped at all to investigate the kind of crime that they were dealing with, which, you know, looking back on it, could have been by design because it immediately sent the investigation backwards. And I started looking into the case file and all of the interviews that they did. And I keep seeing the name Murdaugh come up over and over again, but it was all hearsay. And what was weird about the investigation is they kept hearing that it was the Murdaugh boys or Buster Murdaugh. And they seemed to be kind of getting closer to the source of where all this was coming from, and then the investigation just ended in 2016.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Buster is Paul's older brother.

MANDY MATNEY: Yes, Buster is Paul's older brother.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Just to add another person to the list of people in this story. You need a family tree. Yeah.

MANDY MATNEY: Exactly.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so why would Buster have done this? What was happening there that you were hearing about?

MANDY MATNEY: So Stephen was gay, and there were rumours in the investigation file that, and Buster has denied this at this point, but back then, there were several rumours that he was in some sort of a relationship with Stephen and they ended up killing Stephen because he was gay. That was the story I heard over and over again. And the real tragedy is that we still don't know what happened to Stephen. But fast forward to 2021, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division reopened Stephen Smith’s case and said that it was due to something that they found during the Murdaugh investigation. And I really hope that Sled makes an arrest in his case ultimately. And I just want his mother, his sweet mother to know what happened to him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I mean, this story really, like one of the things I took away was you did such a nice job in the book showing how the story got bigger for you and understanding how complicated it was and how many places you could go. It really is something, like just… And I think that's what draws people to the story too, is that there's all these places where this family had influence. And then, of course, the thing that kind of blows it out of the stratosphere, which makes it to the point where nobody could ignore the story outside, it becomes international news, is that Paul and his mother, Maggie, are found dead. And we know that Alex calls 911. He's the one that tells the police that this… that he's found them.

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[phone ringing]

OPERATOR: Thanks for calling 911. Where’s your emergency?

ALEX MURDAUGH: This is Alex Murdaugh. I’m on 147 Moselle Road, and I need the police immediately.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What does he say happened? What's his story? What does he say on the 911 call when the police show up?

MANDY MATNEY: On the 911 call, and it's always, I'm sure you know this, it's always really hard to tell, to assume guilt from a911 call just because it is such a horrifying situation and you never know how anybody would react to it. But he is almost hyperventilating and saying, I just found my son Paul and my wife Maggie. I think he said that they were shot and send help immediately and he's panting. And I have listened to this phone call a million times. And one of the first things that I noticed is that when you call 911, they record like the first few seconds before you actually answer. And there are a few seconds where he is not panting at all. He's not doing the hyperventilating thing and he's just on the line. And then it's like a flip switches and he starts to go, [pants] my wife and child have been shot. And so that was one of the first things that I started to be like, ha! He started seeing through his lawyers early on. He had a rock solid alibi but never would actually say what the alibi was when Maggie and Paul were shot, but he claimed that he just came home, found them shot and called 911. And the other big thing that ultimately was his undoing was that they were found on Moselle, their 1700 acre property and very rural South Carolina, and they were found by the dog kennels, which is pretty far away from the house and a lot of land, a lot of trees. But the key here is that he claimed to police immediately that he was never at the kennels that night. And then later, he was caught in a video moments before they were murdered with his wife and son. And that was his undoing.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I mean, it's interesting that you say that too about, you know, for those of us outside of the story and what we finally did hear about it and hear the 911 call, and this was before he had been arrested, it didn't occur to me that he would have killed his family. Like that’s how… but it's interesting that you who have been through and living in this story heard something so different, and I saw that in your book, is like right away, you were like, I don't know if I believe Alex. And I was like, oh, only somebody living in the story would have not believed him because on the surface, the rest of us are like he sounded distraught. Who would imagine that he would kill his wife in this case? And it just felt like, oh my God, one more crazy thing happening to this family. Who did Alex say might have wanted them dead? Like it's one thing for him to say he didn't do it. But why did he think or tell the police that they had been killed?

MANDY MATNEY: He immediately started in saying that my son has been in a boat crash, and I think that this has something to do with it.

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX MURDAUGH: He's been being threatened by… my son had a boat crash. He’s been being threatened for months.

MANDY MATNEY: So insinuating that it had to do with revenge for Mallory Beach's death in some way, whether it be one of the other kids on the boat or one of their family members. And he started hammering in on that theory immediately. And we were hearing that theory being floated around Hampton a lot. And from my investigation up until that point, I just knew that that was completely bogus. I had talked to several of the family members and the victims, and I knew the fear that people felt when they talked about the Murdaughs. And I could not imagine any scenario of anyone actually sneaking on to their property. And we knew pretty early on too that at least one of their own guns was used in the crime. So that was another thing that I was like, who in their right… how could anybody sneak onto their property and kill these very powerful people with their weapons? That doesn't make any sense. And the narrative was starting to really spin because it doesn't make sense to people that don't understand the story. And a lot of media were framing the story as like prosecutors son murdered, like it was a revenge for something he did with the prosecution. And that's really why I started my podcast was because I felt horrible for the victims that were being kind of blamed in some way, shape or form for this horrible crime. And I just knew that nobody was really understanding this, and I had to tell the story in a way that people understood it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I think the first time that I started to think maybe something was off was the story of all of a sudden, Alex is out changing a flat tire on the side of the road, and the news is he got shot. And then the news got very complicated around it because, well, tell us what happened there.

MANDY MATNEY: Yeah, it was a big national story at the time. But as soon as he got shot on the side of the road, it was making so many international headlines around the world and it just sent the story into another universe of craziness. But September 3rd, I started hearing that Alex Murdaugh was shot. And immediately, talk started coming in, something's fishy, something's off with this. And again, I went back to thinking, who in their right mind would shoot Alex Murdaugh on the side of the road while he was changing a tire? That does not make any sense whatsoever. And my sources who were very close in the investigation were saying like, you're right with your questioning. Just hang tight. And fast forward, his story again started to fall apart very quickly. We realized early on he was driving a car that had run flat tires, and so he wouldn't have been changing his tire. He said he was on his way to Charleston, but he was on a road that is not on the route to Charleston. He said he was at one hospital, but he was actually at another. And then all of a sudden, it comes out in The New York Times that he was embezzling money from his law firm and he had stolen over a million dollars from them. And then he puts out a press release that he was going into rehab. And I heard that Alex Murdaugh did like some recreational drugs, cocaine, etc., etc., but I never heard that he had an opioid addiction per se. But he puts out this press release couple days after he was shot that he was going into rehab and he quit his law firm. And I was just like, what person after you get shot, why are you putting out a press release about quitting your law firm and going into rehab? That doesn't make any sense. And it just kept getting crazier and crazier. And very soon, his financial crimes started to unravel. And we realized just what he… the disaster that he had created that had led up to the murders, and that was all of his financial crimes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you spent a lot of time explaining the financial crimes. And I appreciated the plain language, but I still found it confusing. But can you try to explain what he was doing with these financial crimes? Because it was… the thing that I took away was the premeditation and the amount of work and the conspiracy that he had to have in place to make these things work was really stunning and quite diabolical, really.

MANDY MATNEY: Horrible. So I'll rewind. And in 2019, when I was investigating this family, something that I heard over and over again was that look into… after they told me to look into Stephen, people started saying, look into Gloria Satterfield. Look into the death of their maid.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And Gloria was there maid.

MANDY MATNEY: And Gloria was their maid. And I was searching around the public index, which is like our online court document website, and I see a wrongful death settlement from Alex Murdaugh about Gloria Satterfield. And I was just taken aback like, oh my God, this is really crazy, because I had heard that the Murdaughs had something to do with her death. And how did they settle this? But I look at the settlement and I see all of these things that are very weird with it. I see that Gloria’s family was being represented by Corey Fleming, who was Alex Murdaugh’s well-known best friend. And I started to write about that in 2019 and 2020, and it was always just a part of this story that just itched at me. Like what was going on with that settlement after Alex was shot? And when things really started to fall apart from him and everything just exploded immediately, I started to hear that Gloria’s family was looking for a lawyer because they hadn't received any of the settlement money. And this was a $500,000 settlement that I knew of. And the Satterfield family ends up hiring a lawyer named Eric Bland. In my book, I talk about my struggle to get Eric Bland to talk to me, and now he's a co-host on my show, Cup Of Justice. But Eric busted the thing wide open and figured out not only that he stole the $500,000 settlement from the family and did not tell them, but he stole over $4 million from the settlement. And he stole all of it. There was a multimillion dollar settlement and he stole every penny, did not tell the family. And through that, Eric figured out that he had actually set up a fake account called Forge where he was telling people to direct the money to and stole millions of dollars from this family after Gloria's death, which Gloria's death, this was still ruled as suspicious. She died on the Murdaughs’ property in 2018. The lawsuit claimed that she fell due to the Murdaughs’ dogs tripping her. But she was a 56-year-old woman, seemed pretty healthy. Her death still does not make sense to me to this day. She again had a wound on her head, and I believe rib fractures too from falling on these steps. And it just doesn't make any sense to me at all.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So just like all too coincidental is what you're saying.

MANDY MATNEY: With everything that we found out through the Satterfield settlement and how he set up this fake account, Forge, Eric and I looked at each other and we were like, no way that this guy did this. This is not his first rodeo. He probably was doing this to other clients. And time went on and we figured out he was doing this to a lot of clients. But he did it in the worst way with the Satterfields because with everybody else, he at least given them some of the money and pretended like that was all the money and then he took it. But with the Satterfields, he took every single penny, which is absolutely disgusting. And Gloria Satterfield’s sons were struggling during that time. One of her sons was actually… couldn't make rent for his trailer, so he was kicked out of living in his trailer. And Alex Murdaugh knew this and didn't give them a penny and still pretended to these boys that they had no money in the bank when really they were millionaires. It was horrific.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you say that there were other victims. Who were they and what did Alex do?

MANDY MATNEY: We figured out that basically, he profited off of people's tragedies. He was a personal injury attorney and would go to people who had loved ones who were lost in car accidents and things that involved lawsuits, and he would sue usually an insurance company and take a majority of the money. And these were grieving families who not only needed that money, but it was theirs and they deserved it. And I don't know how he slept at night knowing that he was so greedy. And these people were in so much pain at the time due to their loved ones being lost. But now they have to look back and realize that the guy who they thought was helping them through this process and through this time was really stealing from them. So it was really an evil crime.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do prosecutors look at the financial crimes, the crumbling of his personal life, everything that was going on, the boat crash? How do they wrap all that up into some kind of explanation as to why Alex killed his family?

MANDY MATNEY: Well, this is why the trial took six weeks and it was a very long process. But prosecutors wrapped it all up into basically saying that Alex had never been held accountable for anything his entire life. And for the first time in his life, he was starting to get confronted about this money that he was stealing from his clients. And we found out sometime after the murders that he was actually confronted by the CFO of his law firm on the day of the murders that where is all this money? So pressure from all different angles. Also, his father was dying. And at that time, which is a huge thing that a lot of people, including myself, overlook some time, but his father was the real fixer of that dynasty. And his father was really the one who could call all of the cops and say, do this. Don't do that. Hold off on this. You owe me one. And Alex knew his father was not going to be able to get him out of this mess for the first time in his life. And we see this a lot of times with murder. The incentive is just men trying to clean up their messes and trying to get out of their messes. And it doesn't make any sense. Murder never makes any sense as to why a person would resort to that as the solution to their problems. But the way prosecutors framed it and the way that I believed happen is he believed that he would get sympathy, and he believed that everyone would get off of his back and stop asking him questions if his wife and son were murdered, and he believed that the lawsuit was going to go away. And also, you see later on that that was the whole point of the suicide for hire thing. He wanted sympathy. He wanted people to get off of his back.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So that really was what it came down to, you think, is a distraction from his other problems.

MANDY MATNEY: Right. Which is crazy. I mean, it's a crazy…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Horrendous.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I mean, wow!

MANDY MATNEY: Right. But like we are people that are used to being held accountable for our actions. And we would not expect to ever get away with something based off of that. But this is a man who is used to being feared and is used to having a dad that makes everything go away. And it's absolutely horrendous. And I think the other thing about this crime that I understand, everybody kind of wants to reject the theory that Alex did it because it's just a human. You don't want to see this guy, he’s in glowing pictures with his family wrapped around him at football games and the life of the party and this man who is a powerful lawyer. You don't want to see that person as a monster who is capable of killing their own family, and it is hard to wrap your head around. But when you see the ginormous mess that Alex Murdaugh was facing at the time and you look at his life and see how he has always gotten out of everything, then it makes a lot more sense.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. And I really felt like his arrogance came through and his sense of entitlement came through by the fact that he actually took the stand in his own defence.

MANDY MATNEY: Absolutely, it did. And it was funny because a lot of the people watching were just absolutely shocked that he would take the stand. Traditionally, that's a bad move for the defence, but I always knew he was going to take the stand. He's a classic narcissist. And it ended up just absolutely crushing him because the jury rejected it and the jury could see through his fake tears. The jury could see that he was being very manipulative with his answers and just that he didn't come across as a genuine human being. The way that he talked about Maggie, his wife, was so robotic and so detached, it was bizarre. He's looked at a lot of juries throughout his entire career and been able to convince them to give him the verdict that he wanted, but it did not happen this time.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And the other thing it did for you gave you some insight into who Paul was and why Paul was like he was.

MANDY MATNEY: Yeah, absolutely. A big thing that I found during the crimes that gave me the most insight, my co-worker, Liz Farrell, thought of the idea to file a Freedom of Information Act to request for Alex Murdaugh’s jailhouse phone calls when he was in jail for the financial crimes. And that was my first real insight of how Alex works and how he convinced his family to do things for him, to still support him. It was just appalling to sit there and listen to hundreds of phone calls of him. And he had a routine. He would kind of suck up at the beginning and then make small talk. And then at the very end of almost every single phone call he had with different family members, he would ask for something. And listening to that and listening to Alex on the stand, I really felt sympathy for Paul. I don't think Paul got a chance to live a normal life ever because he was raised by people who would not correct his behaviour. And as I watched Alex be so manipulative and so conniving to his family members, it just all kind of hit me that it would have been impossible for Paul to be normal. And even if Paul wanted to be held accountable for the boat crash, I don't think his parents would have let him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You know, I always find this so interesting. Like I've talked to so many people who have covered crimes indepthly, and I've done a few myself. And what it always does is it just shows you that nobody lives in a vacuum. Nobody ends up to be who they are, bad or good, all on their own. I mean, of course, there's that 1% of people that are just bad and whatever, but, you know, it does… it's so important to do these kind of investigations because, like you said, you started out seeing Paul as this spoiled dick, which he was. But there, you know, it's important to know that he got that way and it's generations of stuff and how dangerous it can be to just ignore the nuance and the grays and really try to get behind why things are the way they are.

MANDY MATNEY: Yeah, absolutely. And my book is called Blood on Their Hands because it's not just about Alex having blood on their hands. It's about everybody that didn't correct the Murdaughs in their behaviour. And it's about everybody that didn't step up and say that something's wrong here. And it's about people that enabled Alex Murdaugh and let him get away with thing after thing after thing and just helped create this monster. And that's a big important lesson for all of us. If you know that somebody is headed down a destructive path, you have got to do something. And if you don't, then you're enabling them.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And sadly, the accountability only came after his wife and son were dead and Mallory was dead. So what happens to Alex? What does the jury decide?

MANDY MATNEY: The jury within three hours came back with a verdict, which is very, very quick traditionally, and the jury unanimously and very quickly decided that he was guilty. And the next day, he was sentenced to two life sentences by Judge Clifton Newman. And that was just a very… a huge moment for those of us in the Lowcountry. There was a lot, a lot of people who believed there was no way a Murdaugh would ever be held accountable for a crime in the 14th Circuit and for him to be convicted in the same courtroom where his grandfather's portrait hung before the trials was going on. And they had to take it down, but his grandfather was this legend and his whole family were these legends in this area. And for him to be convicted of murder in that courtroom was a huge, huge deal and a big sign that the system is turning and people can't get away with these things just because they have a powerful family.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So Alex is in jail. We’ve figured out what happened to Paul and Maggie, but the story is not over for you. So where is your focus now?

MANDY MATNEY: The story is nowhere near over. Our justice system in South Carolina, we have realized so many things that are wrong with it and that could be fixed. But people aren’t fixing them because they are profiting off of this very bad system. And so my focus is really just to keep the spotlight on that and to advocate for change. There have been judges who have been accused of horrible things throughout this saga that they have not been held accountable. And I'm still asking the questions of why. And I do not want to or plan on stopping until so many others are actually held to account for this, because I believe there are a lot more people with blood on their hands, so to speak.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And what are your hopes for Stephen and Gloria’s case?

MANDY MATNEY: I hope that their families get answers. I hope that Sandy gets the day that she has always imagined. Since I first started talking to her in 2019, she says she closes her eyes and pictures cops knocking on her door and saying and telling them like we've made the arrest. And I want that more than anything. And I hope with Gloria’s case that they find answers for the family. And with all the financial crimes and all of the victims associated with that, I hope that authorities keep digging further into how many people allowed this to happen for so long and how many people allowed this disaster to build up to what it was. I hope all of those people are held to account, and I hope that the system realizes that we can make big changes from this horrific crime. And we can actually come out a lot stronger from this, but we have to keep pushing and we have to keep focus on the story where it matters and not keep getting distracted.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, keep up the good fight because you've done some great work. So thank you.

MANDY MATNEY: Thank you so much.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound Design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 13

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