Modern true crime has shifted from the whodunit to the whydunit, searching for psychological explanations that the legal system was never designed to provide.
What happened to the neat little whodunit?
A subgenre has emerged in true crime — call it whydunit — in which the legal answer is almost beside the point. What the writer is really after is something courts deliver only incidentally: character, motive, the slow psychological unspooling of how a person becomes capable of the thing they did.
London Falling follows the parents of a nineteen-year-old who fell from a London balcony after constructing a secret life as the son of a Russian oligarch; Patrick Radden Keefe lays out scenarios but never fully commits to what happened. Chris Kraus circles a series of meth-fueled murders on Minnesota’s Iron Range in The Four Spent the Day Together,and ends up, deliberately, more lost than when it started.
And The Family Man, the most gripping of the three, James Lasdun turns the Murdaugh murders into an extended meditation on a question the guilty verdict doesn’t touch: what kind of man kills his own wife and son, and how do you get to be him?
Because Why?
The modern whydunit does not promise revelation. These books are also, inevitably, about the writers themselves; their obsessions, their blind spots, their inability to accept the verdicts that reason keeps delivering.
Lasdun never quite finds a satisfying explanation for why Alex Murdaugh killed his wife and son. That lingering dissatisfaction gives The Family Man its shape and tension. Lasdun circles motive from every direction: financial desperation, opioid addiction, narcissism, sociopathy, family pressure. None of it fully closes. The facts fit. The psychology does not. How could a parent be joking around with a grown son and then shoot him a short time afterwards? Lasdun found it truly unfathomable. The verdict eventually says it happened; it never entirely answers why.
When Murdaugh’s wife Maggie and youngest son Paul were found shot to death on their thousand-acre Low Country property in June 2021, Lasdun was already at work on a novel whose central character fails to recognize evil in front of her. He began covering the case for The New Yorker, warning his editors not to expect a clean answer. The book that resulted is less a reconstruction of the crime than an account of his own bewilderment: how could a man who had spent years stealing from grieving clients, who had woven a decades-long web of fraud and deception, have also taken a shotgun to his own wife and son?
Lasdun keeps searching the DSM for a key that will unlock Murdaugh, as though the right cluster of symptoms might finally make family annihilation feel narratively coherent. He reads up on sociopathy. He turns the case over and over.
Like every Redditor, podcaster, and true crime obsessive who fell into the case, I eventually developed my own theory. Imposter syndrome. It’s not in the DSM really (classified as a phenomenon, not a diagnosis). Admittedly that phrase feels absurdly small for what followed, but I’m sticking with it. (So far, I’ve refrained researching where he ranked in his law school class.)
The Family Business
Three generations of Murdaughs served as solicitors in South Carolina’s 14th Judicial Circuit (essentially the chief regional prosecutor), holding the office for nearly a century. Alex never became solicitor. When his father Randolph Murdaugh III retired in 2006, he did not pass the torch to Alex. He helped select Duffie Stone to serve out the remainder of his term, then supported Stone for reelection. Lasdun never really explains why Alex was passed over, and the silence around that omission becomes suggestive in itself.
What makes me cringe is what came next. Alex continued working as a volunteer assistant solicitor. He carried the badge in his pocket, in his car. Lasdun quotes him describing the “warming effect” it could have during encounters with police. After the fatal boat crash involving his son Paul, Alex arrived at the hospital with one of the badges dangling visibly from his back pocket. Lasdun lingers: “Alex had one of his volunteer solicitor’s badges dangling, as if by accident, out of his back pocket, on view for anyone who might presume to challenge this ginger-haired giant.” FIX The office itself had gone to someone else. So he kept the badge.
The Art of Bullshit, Basically
Alex Murdaugh may have been less Atticus Finch than regional relationship manager albeit with a prosecutor’s badge in his pocket.
Murdaugh appears to have understood juries, insurers, bankers, and local power structures. Ronnie Crosby, a law partner who had known Murdaugh for over two decades (Murdaugh’s sons called him Uncle Ronnie), elaborated: “Alex was a very good lawyer… very good at understanding people, and very good at making people believe he cared about them and building a rapport and trust with them.”
Within the firm of PMPED, Murdaugh seems to have been the wild card, the pusher of limits, the loudmouth clown who got results and was indulged accordingly (in part because he was the founder’s great-grandson and in part because the results were legit).
In hindsight, Jeanne Seckinger, the firm’s chief financial officer, came to see the chaos as performance: “Looking back, where I thought he was chaotic and didn’t remember things or kind of got bored with details…”
Litigation is details. The details are the job. Yet every law firm has charismatic rainmakers who leave the grinding work to someone else; most of them are not eventually accused of family annihilation. Looking back after the frauds became public, Seckinger reevaluated the persona she had once admired: “He did it through the art of bullshit, basically.”
Murdaugh did not steal impersonally. He stole intimately. From clients who trusted him, from vulnerable people who believed he was protecting them, from people who handed him their grief because they thought he was one of them. The most jarring to me (and the crime that made me think, yeah, Murdaugh is soulless slime ball is what happened in the aftermath of Gloria Satterfield’s death. She had worked for the family for decades (a whooping $10 an hour) and helped raise the Murdaugh children. After she died following a fall at the family property under never fully circumstances, Murdaugh helped steer her sons toward a settlement, then stole the money intended for them. One of the sons was disabled. Murdaugh delivered Satterfield’s eulogy.
What remains genuinely murky (and this is where Lasdun’s dissatisfaction earns its place) is not whether Murdaugh killed his wife and son but why, exactly, those two, at that moment. Was it because his financial malfeasance was days away from exposure and he calculated that the sympathy of a grieving widower might buy him time? Was it because Paul’s fatal boat accident was pulling the entire facade toward ruin, threatening to reveal the Murdaugh name as a fraud? Sure, I go with all of the above.
The Wrong Question
The Murdaugh case generated a cottage industry before Lasdun filed his first piece. Reddit threads ran to thousands of posts. The Murdaugh Murders Podcast hit the Apple top ten and eventually spawned a Hulu series. Cup of Justice debuted at number one its first day. Even the court clerk, Becky Hill, wrote a book about the trial while it was still underway; she later faced misconduct allegations and had to withdraw the book over plagiarism claims. A decision on whether Murdaugh gets a retrial because of Hill’s conduct is expected soon. The case turned even supposedly neutral participants into characters in the story.
Lasdun never got to interview Murdaugh. The lawyers said no. He worked from the outside; court filings, trial transcripts, the sprawling public record; without the intimate access Capote had with Perry Smith, without the corrupted intimacy McGinniss manufactured with MacDonald. What he got instead was the verdict, and his own continuing dissatisfaction with it. Not because he doubts Murdaugh’s guilt. Because the verdict answered the wrong question. It never said why.