Did Alex Murdaugh try to silence witnesses to his son Paul Murdaugh’s boating crash?
After a night of partying, Paul Murdaugh was drinking in the early hours of February 24, 2019, when the boat he was driving, carrying his girlfriend Morgan Doty, Mallory Beach, Anthony Cook, Connor Cook, and Miley Altman, crashed into the Archers Creek Bridge.
Mallory was thrown overboard and died, while the others were injured.
Two months later, Paul was charged with one count of drunk driving causing death and two counts of drunk driving causing serious bodily injury. He was awaiting trial in a felony case when his father, Alex Murdaugh, was shot and killed by him and his mother, Maggie Murdaugh, in their home in Islandton, South Carolina.
In Hulu’s Murdaugh: A Death in the Family, Alex (Jason Clarke) and his father Randolph Murdaugh III (Gerald McCraney) go to the hospital and encourage their children not to talk to authorities, which, according to multiple theories, is what happened.
Although Alex later denied in a legal application that he tried to influence Connor, the young man said in the 2023 Netflix documentary Murdaugh Murder that Paul’s father approached him in a hospital hallway and whispered, “Don’t say anything, it’ll all take care of itself.”
Paul had just begun making statements to police when his grandfather, Randolph, came in and said, “I’m going to be his attorney from now on. He hasn’t made any statements,” according to law enforcement records.
