On June 7, 2021, 9-1-1 dispatchers near Islandon, South Carolina got a panicked phone call.

It was from Alec Murdoch, the 53-year-old 6-4-4 local celebrity, who everybody in that neck of the woods called Big Red.

Alec told the dispatcher that he came back to his family's sprawling 1,700-acre hunting lodge called Mozel

and found the bodies of his wife Maggie and his son Paul in the kennels.

Hamstowning now in a one-witcher emergency.

This is Alec Murdoch.

If I only 147, Moselle Road. I think the police just passes immediately

my white man, Tom, just stopped average.

Okay, you said 40 on 47 Moselle.

In Islandon, and in the nearby tiny town of Hampton, South Carolina, population 2,560, everybody knew Alec Murdoch. He was a personal

injury lawyer, but he was also part of a very powerful family that had been a legal dynasty

for over 100 years. Police said that Maggie and Paul had been fatally shot, but they did not

release many more details about the investigation.

They said there had been a double homicide at the residence, but they made a sort of cryptic statement.

They said there was no threat to the public, which, in my experience, is often code for,

we know who did it, it was a personal or family matter, which means there's not someone out there in the community shooting randomly.

The state law enforcement division would later state that Alec was a person of interest in the case,

but months later, that case was still unsolved.

This story was big news locally, but it was Labor Day, September 4, 2021, when the scandal involving Alec Murdoch

and his family really exploded. That's when the story went from a few local papers in the

South Carolina Swampland to making international headlines. This story has been everywhere.

It's been in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and many podcasts.

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