Alex Murdaugh: A Closer Look at the Ultimate Cost of White-Collar Crime
The prosecution team in the Alex Murdaugh double murder trial didn’t have a lot of hard evidence to gain a conviction against AM and even appeared to guess at much of what happened the night Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were shot to death, and why. But the chief prosecuting attorney in the case, Creighton Waters, had overwhelming evidence that Alex Murdaugh “had everyone fooled,” leaving members of his family and long-time colleagues feeling as if they never really knew who AM was. As a white-collar innocent spouse advocate this was a vindication of sorts in that the public generally assumes that spouses are complicit in their husband’s crimes, when in fact, the majority of spouses (and children) are actually victims of their spouse’s crimes. After all, the hallmark of any “successful” white-collar criminal is the ability to fool those closest to them (and even themselves) while perpetuating their financial schemes.
Alex Murdaugh is not only a career white-collar criminal, but is now a convicted cold blooded murderer who committed familicide in a psychopathic ploy to cover his criminal tracts. The details that have come to light in the Murdaugh trial have caused some white-collar wives and ex-wives in my private support group to ask me if they need restraining orders against their partner/former partner out of fear for theirs and their children’s physical safety as their own husband’s crimes come to light. During my many years working in the field of domestic violence, assessing lethality was part of my job AFTER previously reported acts of physical or emotional aggression had occurred, but as a white-collar innocent spouse advocate, how can I assess the lethality of “nice guys” who by all appearances are family loving, hard working, and community serving with the exception of being highly manipulative financial scammers? In the nearly ten years of being an innocent spouse advocate I have never heard of a white-collar perp killing anyone but themselves.
The prosecutor referred to AM as a “family annihilator” but that could be said of any white-collar perp with a family because by definition annihilation means to “crush, decimate, demolish, eradicate, liquidate, negate, obliterate, wipe out, and erase.” Ask any white-collar wife or child who is old enough to understand what happened to their lives as a result of a white-collar crime and they would all agree that this event is experienced as the death of the lives they have known at the hands of someone they trusted. While we all know that desperate people can do desperate things, the Murdaugh case begs the question of why Maggie and Paul had to be killed and points to the fact that there is much more to this case than we will likely ever know. Hopefully the Murdaugh case is an aberration rather than a portent of a sea change in how white-collar criminals respond to their impending doom and that murdering one’s family will not become a means to spare the family from the downfall of their reputation, finances, and the end of the lives they spent years building, nor as a measure to protect the perp from their familial fall from grace and the ire of their “loved ones.”
Regarding Murdaugh’s alleged drug addiction, there are plenty of white-collar perps who have substance abuse issues, but Alex Murdaugh’s claim of having a $50,000 dollar a week opioid addiction seems highly unlikely. First, that’s a hell of a lot of opioids and even with a high tolerance, it’s too much for the body to handle, especially over a long period of time, let alone allow Murdaugh to operate as a litigating attorney. Second, with the median price for opioids being $60 per pill, AM would have been taking 119 pills per day (at a cost of $7,140 dollars per day), seven days a week at a cost of $200,000 per month. That adds up to $2.4 million dollars a year! And if this was true, why was his alleged drug dealer, Curtis Allen Smith, living in squalor if he was the middle man selling Murdaugh $200,000 of drugs per month? Even at 10 percent, Smith would have been making $240,000 per year. Over the course of the Murdaugh trial it had come to light that between 2013 and 2021 Smith allegedly received over 400 checks totaling $2.4 million from Murdaugh. Those numbers certainly add up to AM’s account of how much he spent on his opioid addiction annually, but it is a more believable scenario that rather than having a $2.4 million dollar drug addiction, Murdaugh laundered this money through Smith and there is documentation that supports this. It would have been helpful to have Smith as a witness, but neither the prosecution nor the defense felt that he could withstand examination on either end. And what about the other millions of stolen funds that are not accounted for as by all appearances, the Murdaugh family lived within their means. During the murder trial, AM copped to all of his financial misdeeds so rather than going to trial on all 99 cases, he will likely plead guilty and be done with it so the public will never have the opportunity to gain more insight into his financial crimes, nor bring to light others that may have been accomplices in his criminal actions.
As AM’s brother Randy stated, “Even if Alex (Alec) didn’t pull the triggers that shot his wife and son, he knows who did and why.” There is no doubt that families of white-collar criminals suffer in the extreme, but Maggie and Paul Murdaugh paid the ultimate price for AM’s financial crimes and his hidden life, and Alex will spend the rest of his life in prison regretting the choices he made, knowing that none of this ever had to happen. White-collar and corporate crimes will certainly continue as long as society is hell bent on equating financial status as the ultimate measure of success. We must all ask ourselves the same question that prosecutor Creighton Waters posed to AM regarding his lies and deceit… “Where does it end?”
AM got one thing right when he quoted Sir Walter Scott - “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!"
The White-Collar Wives Project has been featured in the New York Times, The American Bar Association Journal, Forbes, Market Watch, Bravo/Oxygen, the ACFE, and numerous esteemed national podcasts
