Jason Ryan on his book, Swamp Kings: The Murdaugh Family of South Carolina and a Century of Backwoods Power

Impact of Influence: The Murdaugh Family Murders and Other Cases

The most famous man in South Carolina lives in prison. He stands convicted of a staggering amount of wrongdoing—more than 100 crimes and counting. Once a high-flying, smooth-talking, pedigreed Southern lawyer, Alex Murdaugh is now disbarred and disgraced. For more than a decade, prosecutors asserted that Alex was secretly a fraud, a thief, a drug trafficker, and an all-around phony. On the night of June 7, 2021, they claimed, he also became a killer, shooting dead his wife and son in a desperate bid to escape accountability.

The many crimes of Alex Murdaugh, exposed piecemeal over the last two years, have appalled the general public. Yet his implosion—the spectacular manner in which he has turned his vaunted family name to mud—has also proved mesmerizing. With every revelation, Alex Murdaugh has been shown to be a man without bottom, though he insists he never harmed his family.

Remarkably, all of his misdeeds have precedent. In Swamp Kings, Jason Ryan reveals Alex’s evil actions are only the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to the Murdaugh family of Hampton County, history has a way of repeating itself. For every alleged, headline-grabbing crime associated with Alex Murdaugh, mirror-image incidents have played out within his family’s past, including parallel instances of fraud, theft, illicit trafficking of babies and booze, calamitous boat crashes, and even alleged murder. There were some crimes committed by Alex’s kin that even he would not dare mimic.

Covering a century of depravity in an impoverished and isolated stretch of the Deep South, Swamp Kings weaves together the jaw-dropping narratives of generations of Murdaughs before culminating in the telling of a murder trial for the ages. Page after page the family’s legacy is laid bare as a spotlight is finally trained on the Murdaugh men who have long lorded over the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Jason Ryan is an author and journalist based in Charleston, South Carolina. He is a former reporter for The State and The Beaufort Gazette and has written for The Daily Beast and Agence-France Presse, including coverage of the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and the ensuing trial of killer Dylann Roof. He is the author of Jackpot: High Times, High Seas and the Sting that Launched the War on Drugs; Hell-Bent: One Man's Crusade to Crush the Hawaiian Mob(currently under option to HBOMax), and Race to Hawaii: The 1927 Dole Derby and the Thrilling First Flights that Opened the Pacific.

Impact of Influence is part of the Evergreen Podcasting Network

Seton Tucker and Matt Harris began the Impact of Influence podcast shortly after the murders of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. Now they cover true crime past and present from the southeast region of the U.S.

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