Alex Murdaugh Smiling during Buster’s testimony
I’ve been watching snippets of the Alex Murdaugh trial the last couple of days. He is a very skilled liar who can lie without any stress, which is very rare. Not that he hasn’t expressed stressed, don’t get me wrong. He clearly has. When he gets in his head and his mind starts racing at the reality facing him, he truly stresses out and shows a bit of an unraveling, but only he freaks out at his own pain, sadly! Not when he lies. That doesn’t bother him one iota.
I was scanning through Alex’s son Buster’s testimony briefly this morning when I encountered his smile expression on Alex that was rather chilling to me.
Does he look like a man on trial for the murder of his wife and son when you see that smile?
He was so content in this moment when his son Buster testifies it is mind blowing, but certainly fits the criteria of someone who suffers from a serious pathology and a person who is capable of doing such a horrific crime.
Do I believe Alex Murdaugh? I do not. If you were falsely accused of murdering your wife or husband, and your child, could you ever sit so content and relaxed before being cleared? Most people could not!
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Do you find his expression jarring?
I would love to believe he didn’t kill his wife and child. What’s worse is his motivation. Any person that would kill there own wife and child would do it with mad rage and passion. PAlex’s motive was to take eyes off his financial crimes, simply appearances. I don’t want to believe that could be in the human genome. For if true, Alex would be a monster on par with no one. Serial killers don’t kill there wives and children, this guy would be a monster in his own classification, a new low for someone considered to be a human being.
I don’t agree with you that he is a class of his own. There are others, but his caliber is more rare. I will agree with that.
Give me an example where a man kills his wife and child and it’s not a crime of passion or mad rage about some perceived slight that’s real or imagined. I can’t think of a case where the motive was simply to change the narrative of the local newspapers.
I know that’s what some have suggested, but I didn’t hear Eyes say that his motive was to change the narrative of the local newspapers.
Were you responding to Eyes as though she had said this in her analysis?
Paul’s boating accident resulted in lawsuits aginast Alex, that threatened to expose him, his financial thefts, lies, and the ruining of his 100 year family legacy. The divorce threats from his wife similarily threatened his finances and his drug use. I heard that of the 4 types of family annihilators, Alex was the Anomic Type: he saw “family” as part of the status of success. With the impending financial ruin, and the gig being up, his “love”/value for his family was now rendered moot.
It wasn’t to change the narrative. It was to get out of the trouble he was in. He’d been getting away with stealing for SO long. He was confident he could get away with it again. He had 2 obstacles: Maggie who wouldn’t agree to have their properties appraised, who appeared to be living separate from him, who was interfering with his drug use. Who would probably divorce him as soon as she found out he was stealing, fired, and disbarred. Alex needed HER money to get himself out of it. He’d always gotten the money to keep his shell game going in the past. Steal here, borrow there, replace what he stole, steal more to cover the loan, rinse and repeat. The other obstacle was Paul, who got blind drunk and killed a girl, and had been indicted for 1 count of boating under the influence resulting in death, and 2 counts of BUI causing catastrophic injury (two of the passengers had to have major surgeries).
He thought he’d get out of it. First, he used his father’s terminal cancer to put off and redirect his coworkers. It worked! Then it was the murder. No one was going to talk about some missing money to a man who found the massacred bodies of his wife and child. But, he had Mark Tinsley (lawyer for the Beach family) on his tail, and that man is like a pit bull. He clamps down on your neck and he never loosens his grip unless he’s dead. He was going to get allll of Alex’s financials admitted into evidence. Every slimy trick he’d pulled would be a matter of public record. No friendly professional courtesy or letting anything slide like he’d experienced all his life, and his father and father’s father before him. All the stuff he was hiding from Maggie, whose money he was going to need. Whose signature he was going to need to take out loans against her properties. Another complication: his father, who’d probably covered for him and cleaned up after him all his life had only weeks to live. Alex was going to be on his own for the first time in his life at 60 years old.
And he said it himself many times: Paul was killed because of the boat case. Well, he killed Paul, so of course he knew WHY Paul was killed. Paul was going to go to jail for 25 years, and Alex couldn’t stop it. Tinsley was suing Alex on behalf of Mallory Beach for 30 million dollars. And he was going to get it, too. Alex would have NOTHING. His boys would have NOTHING. And being disbarred, he’d have no ability to ever earn any more money.
No Paul, no case. Tinsley said himself, if Alex fixed a jury (like he’d heard Alex had done) and avoided having to pay a huge settlement, he’d file suit against Paul and Maggie “the next day” and get the money that way. Tinsley was going to get that money for the Beach family. He was not charmed by Alex and Alex could not “work” him like he worked literally everyone else. Tinsley said no jury would make a grieving father pay a big settlement. He was going to win the lawsuit because people had sympathy for Mallory’s family not for Alex or certainly for Paul. If Paul and Maggie were killed by some vigilante, the lawsuit was dead. The sympathy would shift to Alex. So, Alex killed them. Probably told himself they *made* him do it by *their* choices. Maybe thought Paul was better off dead than in jail. Thought Maggie was better off dead than surviving Paul. And Alex thought he’d get out of the rest of it. That people would choose not to come after him for stealing some money that in his mind he’d “paid back” or was going to pay back, and people would pity him because of the tragic, unsolved, vigilante murder of his wife and son.
And then he got on the stand and talked his way into two consecutive life sentences in prison.
It’s awful, but you have to understand that there are people who are born with certain brain functions dimmed or shut off. If you didn’t care about your wife and son it would be logical to make use of them to try and save yourself. First you build a family to look good or something, then you dispose of it when and if it suits you. In both cases you serve your own purposes.
I don’t hate psychopaths, they are healthy in every way except for their obvious shortcomings. You and I’d be the same if someone were to bash us over the head and shut off certain parts of the brain for good, with the only exception that we’d have memories and a better understanding of feelings to help guide us.
He did say that he wouldn’t ever kill them intentionally, and maybe that was true. It might have been a spur of the moment thing, or maybe it was planned and he’s spewing lies.
Very unnerving. That ain’t right. There’s something missing inside of him.
Sometimes people simply ain’t sorry, sad, guilty or embarrassed for what they did. Worse yet and they show a smug grin like this – while on trial for the murder of their wife & son!
He’s content that ONE of his sons is toeing the line and lying for Daddy. Narcissists can only love their children as extensions of themselves. He’s content because all he cares about is his name and his self-importance. Buster is lying for him and being an obedient little soldier for Daddy. And that clearly pleases him.
Renee, I was curious about your take on Alex’s face when the judge said to him during sentencing, “Maybe it wasn’t you.” To me, he looked excited and relieved for a second like, “Yes! That’s exactly what I’ve been saying! Maybe it wasn’t me! You get it!” but then the judge added, “maybe it was the monster you became when you took…oxycodone pills.” And the excitement vanished from his eyes even though his face didn’t move. When the judge started that thought with “maybe it wasn’t you” his face reminded me of a child’s. He looked very young for a second. Then the hardened coldness came back. I can see why he’s been so successful as a thief, because for a millisecond, I felt sorry for him. The whole situation is SO sad.
Also, on an unrelated note, Alex got one thing he wanted. It’s hard to hate Paul now because Paul was brutally murdered. Paul is the victim now. Very few people would be willing to say Paul is a little entitled psycho anymore, because instead of the pictures and videos of drunk belligerent “Timmy” (Paul’s drunken alter ego name coined by his friends) from the mini series we all have the images of his body face down on the ground with his brain at his own feet. The testimony from a couple witnesses was that Alex’s main goal was to “clear Paul’s name.” He did so, but in a weird Monkey’s Paw wish kind of way.
p.s. sorry for the incredibly long comments. I watched every minute of this trial for 6 weeks on YouTube when I came home from work, and I feel like *I* was on the jury.