Hutzell: That time Alex Murdaugh showed up at our family reunion

We were at a state park in Kentucky for my wife’s family reunion.

It was the kind of weekend with hot dogs, hamburgers, fun and games. My brother-in-law made up T-shirts, blue-and-gold, that read “Whole Fam Damily Reunion 2012.”

Then the Murdaughs walked in. You know, The Alex Murdaughs.

Now they’re back in the news.

The South Carolina Supreme Court last week overturned Murdaugh’s convictions for the murders of his wife, Maggie, and their younger son, Paul.

Just when it seemed like America was ready to move on from this salacious tale of wealth, greed and murder — the neon glow of scandal magnified by documentaries, docudramas and endless social media detectives connecting endless dots — it’s back.

This has been an inescapable part of the culture for five years, and the possibility of a new trial means it’ll be around for a few more, at least.

I don’t write about murders in South Carolina. I dig into what the mayor of Annapolis is up to, water taxis on the Chesapeake Bay and the Republican congressman who wanted me fired.

You know, important stuff.

But somewhere among the untold stories jumbled inside my head, Alex Murdaugh and the Whole Fam Damily have been waiting to get out. This seems like the right moment to unpack.

If you’ve forgotten — seriously? — Murdaugh was Low Country royalty, part of a powerful family of lawyers that oozed generational entitlement.

If there’s one thing America loves more than a rags-to-riches story, it’s a good comeuppance.

Murdaugh’s life started to spiral because of an addiction to painkillers, but in the shared telling of this morality tale, it was addiction to privilege that did him in.

He stole $12 million from his clients over a decade. He helped shield his son from the consequences of a drunken boating crash that killed a teenage girl.

And when his law firm confronted him in June 2021, police and prosecutors say he shot Maggie, 52, and Paul, 22, in a deluded play for public sympathy as a grieving husband and father.

Over the next two years, the Murdaugh murders captured huge swaths of our collective attention. There was the faked attempt on his life, the death of his housekeeper and the endless unspooling of his dark lack of conscience.

Alex Murdaugh was revealed as a rich sociopath, perfectly timed to fit our growing anger over wealth and privilege as the breeding ground for moral sickness.

All of that was years in the future in July 2012, when my wife’s family arrived at Dale Hollow State Resort Park near the Kentucky-Tennessee state border.

My mother-in-law, Margaret, loved stories of her sprawling family. She was descended from a Revolutionary War general, she said, and her ancestors were among the first settlers in what would become Philadelphia.

Some of that extended clan was at the reunion because they lived nearby. And that’s the connection to Maggie Murdaugh. Her grandparents started their life there, too, getting married while still at Caverna High School in the little town of Horse Cave, Kentucky.

She was a distant cousin’s cousin, not an uncommon relation in Kentucky. It’s a small state, four times the size of Maryland, with just three-quarters of its population.

That made her sons, Paul and Buster, cousins’ cousins once removed. Or maybe a couple of times removed. I can never quite grasp the theory of relativity when it comes to families. Alex was an “outlaw,” like me.

They were unremarkably unremarkable. They talked with the cousins who were familiar to them. I may have been introduced, or maybe not. The thing I remember was Alex’s and his boys’ red hair.

And their boat. Saturday, they offered tours of Dale Hollow Lake, spinning young distant relations, including my kids, out and back for joy rides.

Surely, I think now, it couldn’t have been that boat.

Six years after the reunion in Kentucky, Paul was piloting his father’s boat with several friends aboard when he crashed into a low bridge on the Beaufort River near Parris Island, South Carolina. Mallory Beach, a 19-year-old passenger, was thrown from the boat and died.

Paul was awaiting trial for causing that crash while drunk when he was shot to death with his mother at the family’s home in Islandton. In 2023, Alex testified that he suspected they were killed by someone seeking revenge for Beach’s death.

The jury didn’t buy it and found him guilty.

The South Carolina Supreme Court, however, ruled that a clerk’s comments about Murdaugh’s guilt amounted to jury tampering. He gets another chance to argue his innocence.

I’m not sure who in our family first recognized the connection to the Murdaugh murders. But as word spread, we looked harder at photos taken that weekend.

In one, Alex stands near a cousin. He’s holding a paper cup, saying something. Buster stands next to his dad, face hidden from the camera.

Another shows Alex, Maggie and Buster together in the back row, smiling. Paul is near the front, holding a wriggling younger cousin in his lap.

Paul looks like a normal kid, not someone soon to fall victim to his father’s failings and then, according to prosecutors, become his father’s victim.

Maggie’s smile is just the smile of someone spending time with family. Alex looks like just another guy.

Nothing hints at ruthlessness or tragedy or hidden crimes.

Murdaugh and his banker were already stealing money from his personal-injury clients that summer. One of his first victims was the family of a man paralyzed in a car accident who died because of a nursing home’s negligent care.

He got 40 years for those financial crimes.

These photos now get passed around with rueful exclamations of disbelief. Alex Murdaugh? Really?

I wish there was something profound in the belated realization of proximity to evil. I wish I could say I felt something ominous.

The truth is that this infamous connection was depressingly ordinary.

It was just the Whole Fam Damily.