SECRETS AND SCANDAL
The breaking news out of the South Carolina Lowcountry on Labor Day weekend was like an impossibly cruel joke: Alex Murdaugh, the moneyed and influential lawyer who discovered the bodies of his wife and son – shot dead in an unsolved murder mystery – outside the family’s hunting lodge on June 7, was a gunshot victim himself. He was ambushed on a rural Hampton County road, “shot in the head while he was changing a tyre,” his attorney Jim Griffin told People magazine on that Saturday, September 4. “He is conscious and talking, which is a very good sign.”
But within days all the signs turned bad. Though Alex survived the gunshot, he announced a two-decade addiction to opioids and entered rehab at an undisclosed location out of state. By the time he was back in South Carolina on September 16 – shackled at the wrists and ankles and sobbing in court – the 53-year-old, nicknamed Big Red as much for his 193cm tall frame
