♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to this week in South Carolina.

I'm Gavin Jackson.

This week, I speak with South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson about a range of topics, as well as reporter and author Valerie Bauerlein about her new book about the Alex Murdaugh saga.

But first, attorney general, But first, Attorney General Alan Wilson joins me to discuss a range of topics, including domestic violence, human trafficking, and the border.

Attorney General Wilson, welcome back.

Atty Gen Wilson> It is great to be with you.

Thank you for having me on your program.

Gavin> And, General Wilson, I just mentioned you there about that Murdaugh trial.

I know you guys got that double murder conviction with Alex Murdaugh back in 2023, with Creighton Waters leading the prosecutions team.

Just maybe touch on that for a quick moment before we jump into all these other topics in terms of how big of a deal that case was for your office?

Atty Gen Wilson> Well, I mean, the case is incredible for our team because obviously what it represented.

There were so many people in that region of the state and throughout South Carolina who believe that there were two criminal justice systems, one criminal justice system for the rich and powerful and one criminal justice system for those who didn't have those means.

And for me, it was incredibly important for us to get it.

We truly believed that, he murdered his wife and son and tried to cover it up.

And we aggressively pursued that course of action.

And...I'm incredibly proud of the team work.

That was two years of blood, sweat and tears on our part.

And we were so, you know, obviously happy with the results.

Obviously, there's an appeal process still ongoing right now.

We're going to continue to defend the work product that the state put into it.

And I've not read Valerie's book and know you're going to be talking to her, but, enjoyed getting to know her during the six weeks we sat in that courtroom.

So...tell her I said, hello.

Gavin> We'll do, sir.

But let's pivot now to domestic violence.

Every October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

And in South Carolina, the attorney general's office puts on its annual silent witness ceremony, looking back at those that we lost the year before.

This year was, last year, I should say, was 24 women, and six men who died by domestic violence in 2023.

Those 30 deaths did mark a continued decline from 36 the year before and 39 who died in 2021 and 39 in 2020, as well as 42 deaths in 2019.

So, when you look at those numbers, those sad number, sir, does that mean we're making progress in a state that has historically had issues with dealing with domestic violence?

Atty Gen Wilson> Well, absolutely.

I mean, in 23 of the last 25 years, South Carolina has been ranked in the top ten in cases involving women killed by their domestic partners.

Obviously, in 2020 and 2022, the last...22 was the last year that they, we have those stats for.

South Carolina, I believe was ranked 23rd and ranked 11th in 2020.

So we are obviously moving in the right direction.

We don't want to be high on that list and there's a lot more that we can do.

Obviously, we want to educate.

There's a lot of people out there, mostly women, but men as well, who are in abusive relationships, and a lot of them don't feel like they have options.

A lot of them don't feel like, you know, there's any, any course of action, but for them to remain in that abusive situation, and we want them to know, that, you know, that there is a team of people out there, there's a world out there ready to receive you and help you, get out of that role of being a victim and help you become a survivor.

As you just said, we had the 27th annual silent witness ceremony on the statehouse steps, two weeks ago or a week and a half ago, rather.

And it was an amazing, amazing opportunity.

It's the 14th year that I have been, the attorney general in conducting that ceremony.

And, you know, when I'm up there reading off the names of the men and women who died, who lost their lives in that abusive relationship, they walked the silhouettes, out on the steps behind me.

And when I walked back to my seat and turned around, that's the first time that I actually get to see the silhouettes.

So, it really is powerful.

Our goal is to not only remember those who lost their lives, but to raise awareness and to be a beacon of hope and light to those who are still going through it, so that we can avoid them ever being a silhouette on the statehouse steps.

Gavin> Is there more that needs to be done at the legislative level to help combat this scourge in our state?

Atty Gen Wilson> Well, I mean, every time we've gone to the General Assembly, like, for instance, about seven years ago, I went to the legislature and asked them to reform our domestic violence laws, our office helped write the new reforms to the criminal domestic violence statutes, and they were overwhelmingly and in a bipartisan fashion, passed.

And so we have already reformed a lot of our laws.

You know, and it's not just, you know, you can pass laws all day long and you can enforce them, but honestly, you need to break the cycle of violence in a lot of these homes.

You've also got to identify those men and women who are victims of domestic abuse, and get, you know, educate them that there are opportunities for them to escape that lifestyle.

A lot of them don't know it.

A lot of them are afraid of the unknown.

Some people stay in a bad relationship, because it's easier to stay in a bad relationship and they're more fearful.

Others are completely and financially and totally dependent on their abuser.

And so we're just, we're trying to get the word out, trying to raise awareness.

We don't want any South Carolina citizen to ever be a victim of a domestic abuse, let alone killed by their partner.

So that's what the whole point of these ceremonies are for...are for.

Gavin> I'm going to pivot now to the border and talk about human trafficking, as well.

You like several other elected officials in our state, including the governor, Senators Graham and Scott, have visited the southern border.

What was the purpose of this trip that you took last month as it relates to your job as attorney general?

Atty Gen Wilson> Well, the, January 2nd of this year, I had a press conference, and that was the devil in disguise, the state grand jury drug trafficking case that we busted.

We basically indicted 64 people, six of them for murder, using fentanyl and their drugs.

And...we worked with the local, state and federal folks across the upstate of South Carolina, we realized as we have with other drug trafficking cases that literally every drug, especially the fentanyl that's coming into this state, is coming from south of the, southern border with Mexico.

And it's in conjunction with the Chinese government and Mexican drug cartels, with fentanyl labs, and they're manufacturing the fentanyl, and they're shipping into the southern border.

And it's going to the, it's going into the interior states within the U.S. We are one of those endpoints.

And so I'm, at the receiving end of this.

I wanted to go to where it began.

And to understand I mean, we litigate about the southern border.

We try to sue the government to make them do their jobs.

But I wanted to actually say that I had been there.

We went there, last month with two other state attorneys general.

We met with the Texas border czar.

We met with the Texas Department of Public Safety leadership and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

What we learned is that over the last 3 or 4 years, there's been a 445% increase in the number of illegal crossings at the southern border.

It has...the number of people dying who were trying to enter the border, across the border and died has more than doubled.

And so we also learned that, there are 32,000 unaccompanied minors that the federal government cannot find, and over 320,000 who have yet to be summoned to determine if we can even find them.

So there's a lot of unaccompanied minors who are being used as drug mules or possibly human trafficking victims that we can't locate.

And the last thing that we learned is, you know, in addition to, you know, the open ports border, is that the incentive structure that the federal government has created, for, for, at the southern, that the policy at the southern border is creating a human trafficking and drug trafficking crisis in our country that's landing on the front doorstep of South Carolina, namely in the upstate, where it's coming in from I-85 and Atlanta.

Gavin> Yeah.

And I guess that maybe we can talk about human trafficking there, too, when we see this increase, in this annual report that your office also, deals with, when we look at 2023's data slide, opened 357 cases that included nearly 500 potential victims, most of which were minors.

That's up from 416 victims from the year prior.

So do you think it is the border that's fueling this crisis?

What do you think is leading to these increases when we see human trafficking in the state?

Atty Gen Wilson> Well, first off, the vast majority of human trafficking cases I've been acquainted with, are local in nature, meaning that, you know, you don't want to stereotype.

And it's not like all unaccompanied minors from the southern border.

It could be, you know, in fact one of the top relationships between a trafficking victim and the trafficker is a familial or a personal relationship.

So it's not like, you know what you see in a movie where someone's kidnapped with someone in a ski mask and sold into sex slavery.

It usually happens with a family or a friend or someone in the community, and it happens here on Main Street.

So I don't want to stereotype the crime, but I will say that we do know and I don't have statistics, but anecdotally, we know that a lot of the unaccompanied minors coming across the southern border are easily exploitable because they're not with their parents.

They are being used to basically obfuscate or obscure the fact that people coming across are members of the cartels or members of other terrorist organizations, and they're using the children as a, as a front to get into the interior of the United States.

We also know that a lot of these kids do end up in trafficking situations.

How many?

We don't know because there's tens of thousands we can't locate.

They could be with their families.

They could be somewhere, but they're not appearing for their court hearings.

So that is a concern to me.

And I do think it is fueling human trafficking, but I'm just as concerned about the trafficking here in South Carolina.

Gavin> ...a lot of that is also labor based, too, and a lot of those unaccompanied minors had been found working in, factories across the country, too, but I want to pivot really quickly, since we have less than five minutes left to election integrity and security.

Are you concerned about the integrity of South Carolina's elections as we approach November 5th?

Any concerns that you may have, or are you in contact with the State Election Commission when it comes to providing security and making sure there are no credible threats facing poll workers and the like?

Atty Gen Wilson> Oh, absolutely.

I'm always, you know, election integrity is always something I'm going to be concerned about.

We had a meeting today with our team, and with also election officials regarding, you know, whether or not there are, adequate....mechanisms in place to purge the rolls of those who were illegally here in South Carolina and who may have registered to vote.

I don't have any data yet, but what I do know is there is an attempt to seek from the federal government people that they know to be here illegally and then cross-reference that with South Carolina voter rolls, and we are trying to support those efforts to make sure that the federal government supports the rights of states to purge their voter rolls of illegal voters or people who are not here lawfully.

With that being said, it has been my experience that the federal government is not very helpful.

They're not very, responsive to our requests to help us in that endeavor.

So we're exploring all of our legal options at this time.

In the intermediate period of time though, we certainly want to be supportive of the Election Commission and election officials around the state, if a need arises for us to engage in some lawsuits to protect the integrity of South Carolina's elections.

We stand ready to do that upon request.

Gavin> Is there any evidence or any concerns that we are actually seeing illegals, registered to vote in this state?

I know there were some hubbub around that earlier in the year in the State House.

Folks talk about, you know, immigrants registering to vote because they're provided forms, which is standard operating procedure.

But have we actually seen people registered to vote in South Carolina who are not legally allowed to, which is obviously an offense?

Atty Gen Wilson> Well, the short answer is I don't know the answer to that question, but I, it's like if you were boarding a plane and I could not commit to you that the plane was safe to fly, would you just get on the plane?

I cannot commit to you today that our elections are completely and 100%, secure in the sense that there aren't ways for people to get on the voter rolls who should not be on the voter rolls.

I do believe the voting machines obviously have been vetted.

But other people have concerns about those as well.

With that being said, our goal would be to do everything that we can to ensure that only people who are entitled to vote in the state of South Carolina and vote only one time and aren't dual registered, are allowed to vote.

Anyone who is not lawfully here or lawfully, able to register should not be on the voter rolls, and we want to support those efforts.

So that is what we're, we're looking at in that capacity.

Again, we do not have a very good partner with the federal government.

That is what concerns me.

Gavin> But again, you're still looking into this matter.

There's no claims at this time, and we have seen no evidence yet to substantiate any of that?

Atty Gen Wilson> Well, I would say I speak to AGs in other states.

They have recognized that they have identified that there are illegals that are registered to vote in their states.

We have not yet identified individuals in our state.

But again, until I'm able to have the the data available to me to verify that they have not been registered, I'm still going to be very concerned.

Gavin> And AG Wilson, we have less than a minute left.

I will ask you quickly about executions because on September 20th, the state upheld the convicted murderer, Freddie Owens' death sentence by lethal injection.

That was the first execution in the state in 13 years.

Due to the passage of a shield law, they could obtain that drug to kill him with it.

The state Supreme Court has now said November 1st is the execution date for Richard Moore.

How frequently will we be seeing these executions take place now that the process has restarted, and there are some 31 inmates on death row in South Carolina?

Atty Gen Wilson> I believe November 1st was the next execution that was scheduled by the court.

We have six people right now who have been teed up, meaning that they, they have exhausted all of their appeals, and we were just waiting for this process to be implemented.

The court has given us 35 day buffers between executions before they can be those can be filed.

And so I would expect probably about every month to month and a half for at least the foreseeable future.

You're going to see an execution in South Carolina.

There's at least five more people who are ready, for that sentence to be carried out.

And there could be several more added by early 2025.

Gavin> Gotcha.

We'll have to leave it there.

That's Attorney General Alan Wilson.

Thank you very much, sir.

Atty Gen Wilson>Thank you for having me on your program.

Gavin> Joining me now is Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein to discuss her new best selling book, The Devil at His Elbow Alex Murdaugh and the fall of the Southern Dynasty.

Valerie, welcome.

Valerie> Thank you for having me.

Gavin> So, Valerie, you spent three years on the Murdaugh story, including covering every day of this six week trial, back there in 2023 with Alex Murdaugh, that double murder trial.

You note in the acknowledgments of your book, a top editor of yours in 2021 asked you if you're following that Murdaugh case, which you were.

And they wanted more of it because it was so captivating.

So, before we get into the book, tell us what really... when you were kind of immersed into all this, what really, maybe was the light bulb moment when you said, this has to be a book.

There's just so much here.

Valerie> There's so much here.

And, you know, I should say I had the privilege... of working in Columbia for four years and covering state politics out of the statehouse.

And I kind of tasked myself with going to all 46 counties, because South Carolina is such a fascinating place.

And I had been to Hampton.

And so I keep I cover the South, still for the journal, and I keep close tabs on South Carolina because, you know, I live in North Carolina, but but South Carolina, y'all are just way more interesting.

(laughing) I was following...I was following the Murdaugh case from the time of the boat wreck in 2019 when, when Mallory Beach was tragically killed.

And so when the homicides happened, it was just jaw dropping, right?

It really was.

It wasn't immediately clear to me what the Wall Street Journal version was.

But like you mentioned, my top editor, a guy named Matt Murray, asked me whether I was following it, and I was like, yeah.

And I said to him, what's the Journal version of this?

And he's like, Val, sometimes a good story is just a good story.

And he was right, but it also ended up being a classic Journal story of money and power in a place that's just inherently interesting.

So I came down for the first time in July of 21 and spent the better part of a four months on the ground in three years working on this book.

And it became clear very early on that there was a much larger story here, and a lot to say about South Carolina history through the lens of this family.

Gavin> And we'll get into a little bit more of the, the soap opera feeling of it all.

And I remember reading your work during this time too, because you would give a very solid overview.

I feel like a lot of times during the case the ongoing ins and outs, back from the boat crash up and through the trial, it was hard to maybe get a grasp because there's so much coming out, bit by bit.

and then big pieces would come out.

But you'd give that overall national perspective, which really clarified a lot of things.

You did the same in your book, which is a captivating read.

and early in the book you talked about, you looked at the generations of Murdaughs because there have been so many of them and so influential there in Hampton County, you know, talking about how they, essentially used the law to commit fraud to prop up this image of wealth and privilege and success and power in their fiefdom, that was Hampton County, and then Alex and his uncontrollable son, Paul, seemed...seemed to bring it all down, essentially is what the book shows.

Trace for us this family lineage and how we got to this point.

Valerie> Yeah.

You know, I think, it is just such a rich, rich tapestry to work with.

And I think you have to understand that in South Carolina, especially in that part of the Low country, the Civil War really hits different.

I mean, in a place like Hampton County where Sherman marched through with, you know, 60,000 troops in 1865,... the economy was destroyed for a generation.

And Reconstruction... Reconstruction in that part of the world just did not...it failed.

It fell apart, right.

And so, the Murdaugh family story really starts in the 1880s, when Hampton County was founded, named after white... Wade Hampton, when the local, you know, upcountry Whites decided to found a White county.

They literally did, and that was Hampton County and the Murdaughs were some of the founding families that moved there.

It was the Confederate aristocracy.

Alex's great, great grandfather was a Confederate officer.

So they moved there and started a new government, a new place where they ruled, really.

And when Randolph Murdaugh Sr., Alex's grandfather, went to law school at Columbia and came home and started working and started this family law firm in 1910, It really started the iron hold on this, this fiefdom, as you say, to run it.

It was...it's extraordinary.

Gavin> I know one of the passages, I think, is what made it more disturbing, parts of the family history was Buster, Alex's grandfather, who was almost put away by the feds that this whole family has this way of getting close to the law and then not getting caught.

And I think a lot of people fear that, too, with Alex there at the end.

But that wasn't the case, obviously.

But, he was almost put away by the feds back in 1956 where he lied, stole, and cheated folks to avoid prison time for a bootlegging case.

And you closed out his chapter by saying Buster had proved that the Murdaughs could fix juries, corrupt sheriffs and judges, cheat on their taxes, steal from their clients, play both sides of the law and define justice however they chose.

And that's because, he was also solicitor at the time, like all the Murdaughs were, besides Alex.

So, a really disturbing precedent where you saw some similarities between that case and maybe what we saw, with the future family when it came to trying to fix controversies, like that boat crash in 2019 with Paul.

Valerie> Well, no, it's true.

And old Buster, Buster Murdaugh was the solicitor from 1940 to 1986.

And think about that.

That is Roosevelt to Reagan.

And then he kept working beyond.

They changed the law to make you retire at 72.

He kept working anyway as a volunteer solicitor so he could stay in power and hand over power to the third generation.

But he was just...Alex also, he said often, you know, I was born at the wrong time.

I was born too late.

Gavin> Disturbing, right?

when you think about how this works, right?

Valerie> Yeah.

I mean, there was the printed word, and your word against my word and your thumb wasn't, wasn't keeping you honest at every step.

And so I think, you know, you were talking earlier about, like, Alex and Paul, who was really, really a troubled, dangerous young man.

And so you're talking about the nature of dynasties... is to collapse.

I mean, I think if you look at Chinese dynasties, the royal family, like American dynasties, like the Ford family, they collapsed on the fourth and fifth generation under their own weight and privilege, and I really think and I try to show in the book that weight of wrongdoing and, and, and just barely skating along for 100 years collapse from the inside, generational rot, really with Alex and then with Paul from the fifth generation.

Gavin> Yeah.

And that was, definitely illustrated very well in the book because you do, you know, obviously looking back in those earlier generations, you were using a lot of, you know, accounts different accounts from newspapers and the like and property records and details here and there.

But, you know, 2019, 2021, those details were so fresh.

There were so many people still alive to contribute to your book, which you talked to some 200 folks, of course.

But kind of walk us through how this really kind of came down to that generation with Paul.

Alex's troubled son who had that deadly boat crash in 2019, which really started the ball rolling faster and faster down this hill.

Valerie> Yeah.

So.

So Paul was, like I said, a very troubled young man.

And I tried to document in the book the drunken boat wreck, where his blood alcohol level was 0.286, three times the legal limit, and it's 19 years old.

You know, it wasn't his first drunken wreck that, that really caused major damage.

He was, he was displaying a pattern of behavior up until the time he died, really.

There was a, there was another drunken boating incident ten days before he died.

But the, what happened with the boat wreck is in the 14th circuit, those five counties, the population in each county was 20,000 people from 1920 until today, with the exception of Beaufort County.

And so when you see in Beaufort, with the, with the bridge to Hilton Head in the 70s and 80s, that population goes from 20, 50, 200 thousand.

And the Murdaugh name did not mean the same thing there.

So the wreck happened in Beaufort County.

There were... there was each of those young people in the boat.

There were six of them.

They all had a phone in their hand.

There was documentation.

They go to the hospital, their cameras following every move they make.

So even though Alex testified he had his grandfather old Buster's badge bent over his pocket, going room to room in his official capacity, talking to witnesses.

It seems, even then he couldn't hold back the tide of all that change, and they could not...

The Murdaughs, ultimately could not fight off modernity.

Gavin> And then it came to a head, really, in 2021, in June, with that wrongful death lawsuit coming to a head with them, looking into Alex and his financial his statements, his history.

And of course, you document how over the past ten years, he had stole about $11 million from his poorest clients, from his law firm partners, from anyone he could get money out of.

And that was the reason why the murders took place, essentially.

Valerie> Well, I mean, you can't and I try to show there's there's no dialog or no events or scenes that are that are invented.

You don't have to, this...this case is just stranger than fiction.

And if you think about the afternoon of June 7th in 2021, just that crisp chronology where Alex is confronted by Jeanne Seckinger, the CFO of the law firm that his family runs, and she is sheepishly saying, there's a $792,000 check, we believe you cashed yourself.

Think through that.

Then his father is taken, who has been who has been ill for a number of years.

His brother calls at that moment and says, dad's going to the hospital.

This is the end.

He's dying.

And in fact, he was dying.

He died three days later.

And on top of that, he's staying late to prepare his financials in the wrongful death suit bought by Mark Tinsley, who was a friend turned foe.

There's no one that knows us better than our former allies.

And he was preparing his financials, and he knew what that was going to show.

And you see, in those just that couple of hours you see him call Maggie.

You see him reach out to Paul and ask him, neither of them scheduled to come home to come home.

And we know what happens just a few hours later, when he makes that 911 call from 4147 Moselle Road.

Gavin> So much there, in the book there.

too, when we talk about the court case, of course, we can walk through all that.

A lot of chapters, a lot of details there that you document, but I want to just end with this.

Like you did say, they did, it did sound stranger than fiction.

Do you think that's why this was so captivating to folks?

Obviously we're still kind of going through pandemic era stuff.

There were a lot of podcasts going on.

There's a lot of reporting on this.

I think folks felt like they were playing along with this murder mystery.

What do you think...?

Maybe it was also just people thinking, okay, this actually does exist.

This reads like a Hollywood movie here.

I mean, what do you think really captivated folks?

Valerie> There are so many elements to that.

And it really was it was by far the most streamed court case ever on Court TV.

Double the numbers of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, Some of the documentaries were the biggest programs of 2023.

We were collectively captivated by it.

I think, you know, we're fascinated by true crime and always have been fascinated by detectives and procedurals and things of that nature.

But it just kept changing, right?

You remember we're like, wait, the, he... the maid, he, the housekeeper.

He stole money from her children.

What...just happened on the side of the road over Labor Day?

Every twist just got stranger and stranger.

And the people he stole from...

I really tried to, tell their stories pretty completely, because he, he stole, he committed over a course of a decade, stealing from motherless children and paraplegic teenager...

I mean...the least of these.

And I think it...inured him to human feeling over time.

So I really think it was all of that, just the fantastical nature of it.

And really where it was set, the South, I mean, it is the only place in this country that just evokes an image in your mind.

And it was all of that, that captivated us.

And I hope with the book what you were saying earlier, Gavin, just, you know, we we followed it every minute and every minute.

And I tried to really widen the frame and say, this is the movie.

This is the way it all fits together, beginning, middle to end.

Gavin> And will it become a movie?

And we'll see...(laughs) Valerie>...I think it's inherently cinematic, the great South Carolinian, Craig Melvin, from Columbia, Craig likes to call it the "yellow...redneck Yellowstone".

So I do think it is.

Yeah it is.

There is a history there.

That's, that's fantastic.

Gavin>Well, we'll leave it at that, with Wall Street Journal and author Valerie Bauerlein of the book, The Devil at His Elbow, a very fascinating read.

Valerie, thank you so much.

Valerie> Thank you for having me.

Gavin> And that's it for us this week.

For South Carolina ETV.

I'm Gavin Jackson.

Be well, South Carolina.

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