troisoiseaux

Finished The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh by James Lasdun, which was true crime— about a 2021 murder case that got a lot of media/national attention, although I didn't follow it at the time and so was getting most of the story for the first time— and therefore depressing. Lasdun spends most of the book insisting that he simply couldn't get his head around how a seemingly loving father and husband could do such a heinous thing, which I kind of read as a strategically selected narrative angle rather than, or at least regardless of, whether he still actually held that opinion at the time of trial (which he covered as a journalist), because otherwise I would have sprained something rolling my eyes every time he brought it up.

Relatedly— and perhaps as the main reason for my cynicism— I found myself thinking a lot about Darcy O'Brien's Murder in Little Egypt, a 1989 true crime paperback about a not dissimilar case which I read a few years ago after, tl;dr, learning that my grandparents had gone to high school with a guy who ended up murdering his own sons for the insurance payout, twice: mostly, I remember that the back cover was like this well-respected doctor was a real-life Jekyll and Hyde! how did he hide his inner darkness for so long??? and the answer was just that he'd openly been an abusive jerk to everyone for years and no one ever called him on it because he was the biggest fish in a very small pond. (You will be shocked— shocked!— to hear that Murdaugh did indeed have a "Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect" and "capacity for eruptive violence" fueled by alcohol and drugs, which Lasdun only bothers to mention in the last 25% of his book; at this point, he also goes into the history of "uncannily specific precedents for Alex {Murdaugh} as a family annihilator" and how these "make it hard to continue arguing that that the case against Alex relies on a psychological improbability too extreme to be entertained seriously" and it's like... yeah?? This is why absolutely no one else had difficulty believing it?? That was literally only you???)

ANYWAY. Lasdun does eventually muse about whether he, "as another middle-aged white man of some privilege, have an unconscious stake in casting doubt on Alex's guilt?", and does ultimately conclude that Alex Murdaugh did in fact murder his wife and son, but like... he took so long to get to the point! If this was an intentionally ragebait-y narrative hook on his part, then call me a fish and hold me up for a photo, I guess.