The Low Country, South Carolina, is a place of winding creeks, muddy swamps and cotton fields with tumbledown shacks. Pirates used to sail off the coast, moonshiners and bootleggers used to smuggle liquor. More recently it has been known as a place where people hunt, fish, drink and take drugs — but now a prominent family has made the area notorious for a series of crimes and unsolved murders.
Five dead bodies have turned up, four directly associated with the wealthy Murdaugh family. Nobody is in jail for these deaths, or not yet. The Murdaughs — pronounced “Murdock”, not “murder” — are well known in rural Hampton County. For generations they have been what passes for the “law”, acting as the area’s leading prosecutors and attorneys. They are one of the grandest families in the Southern lowlands.
