Stranger than fiction: Former Beaufort reporter details Murdaugh clan’s ‘backwoods power’
A stranger-than-fiction story of a notorious Lowcountry clan is told in a new book titled “Swamp Kings: The Story of the Murdaugh Family of South Carolina and a Century of Backwoods Power.”
Author Jason Ryan will talk about and sign his latest book at two Beaufort County library branches this week: At 5:30 p.m. Friday in Beaufort, 311 Scott St., and at 11 a.m. Saturday in Bluffton, 120 Palmetto Way.
Ryan was a reporter for the Beaufort Gazette from 2004-06 and later The State in Columbia. Now he’s a nonfiction author and freelance journalist living in Charleston.
The subject of “Swamp Kings” is, of course, the once high-flying and smooth-talking Alex Murdaugh, the now disbarred and disgraced attorney convicted of stealing millions and killing his wife and son on June 7, 2021.
The book, published by Pegasus Crime and distributed by Simon and Schuster, delves deep into the history of the family of Lowcountry lawyers who served as top prosecutor for the 14th judicial circuit for three generations. It explores how Alex Murdaugh’s “evil actions” had precedent “and were only the tip of the iceberg.”
“When it comes to the Murdaugh family of Hampton County, history has a way of repeating itself,” Simon and Schuster says in its promotion of the book. “For every alleged, headline-grabbing crime associated with Alex Murdaugh, mirror-image incidents have played out within his family’s past, including parallel instances of fraud, theft, illicit trafficking of babies and booze, calamitous boat crashes, and even alleged murder. There were some crimes committed by Alex’s kin that even he would not dare mimic.”
Ryan has covered crimes peculiar to the Lowcountry before.
In a 2012 book titled “Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, And The Sting That Launched The War On Drugs,” Ryan tells the story of a freewheeling cadre of Lowcountry ‘gentlemen smugglers’ who forsook college educations to sail drug-laden luxury sailboats across the Mediterranean before they were undone by President Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs.”
This story was originally published April 3, 2024 at 10:50 AM.
