A hospital employee heard him repeatedly warn Connor Cook not to say anything. Numerous witnesses observed him going in and out of the survivors’ rooms. “He isn’t giving any statements.” While Randolph stood watch, Alex Murdaugh began wandering around the hospital, in an apparent effort, as one witness put it, “to orchestrate something.”Ī towering ginger-haired man, Alex was hard to miss. “I am his lawyer starting now,” the grandfather, Randolph Murdaugh III, told the officer, according to law-enforcement records. Paul was just starting when his father and his grandfather barged in. The solicitorship passed out of the family in 2005, but Paul’s father, Alex, served as a volunteer in the office and apparently retained close ties to local law enforcement.įour of the survivors of the boat accident were brought to the hospital, where an officer entered Paul’s room to take a statement. Since 1920, three generations of Murdaughs had presided as solicitors-prosecutors-over the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit, while also amassing a small fortune from private litigation through the family firm. The surname, pronounced “Murdock,” was a potent charm in the state’s southernmost region, known as the Lowcountry. But there was a significant disparity of power and privilege: Connor was a construction worker, and Paul was a Murdaugh. Whoever was steering faced dire consequences if found responsible for the accident. However, Paul’s friend Connor Cook had sometimes taken over while Paul stepped away to argue with his girlfriend, eventually hitting her. We got to go.’ ” The boat belonged to Paul’s family, and he was behind the wheel for most of the evening. One of the passengers later testified, “When they can tell he’s drunk, somebody will say, ‘All right. He had slipped into an aggressive alter ego, nicknamed Timmy by his friends. Both had consumed alcohol, though the survivors reported that one of them, a nineteen-year-old named Paul Murdaugh, was more inebriated than the other. There was some uncertainty at first about who was steering the boat at the moment of impact, but it was known to be one of two young men. Her body was found a week later, in a marsh a few miles away. Two resurfaced, but there was no sign of the third, a nineteen-year-old named Mallory Beach. Three of the six people on board, all young adults, were thrown into the icy water. At around 2:30 A.M., a bridge loomed up in the dark, and the boat hit pilings before running up the nearest bank, with a gashed hull.

It was foggy, the passengers were navigating with a flashlight, and they had been drinking all evening. In the early hours of February 24, 2019, a seventeen-foot-long fishing boat entered a narrow coastal inlet near Beaufort, South Carolina.

Mandy last man standing