Law&Crime Sidebar - ‘I Trusted Him’: Alex Murdaugh’s $1M Theft Victim Speaks Out Against Disgraced Lawyer, Banker

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

When Alania Spohn and her younger sister, Hannah Plyler, were involved in a crash that killed their mother and brother in 2005, they trusted Alex Murdaugh to represent them in a civil suit. They learned years later that he and his friend, Palmetto State Bank CEO Russell Laffitte, had allegedly used their settlement money to loan themselves money. The Law&Crime Network's Angenette Levy talks with Spohn and her lawyer, Eric Bland, about Murdaugh and Laffitte, testifying against Laffitte at his trial, and hearing Alex Murdaugh talk about them from the witness stand at his family murders trial.LAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergWriting & Video Editing - Michael DeiningerGuest Booking - Alyssa FisherSocial Media Management - Vanessa Bein & Kiera BronsonSUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Court JunkieObjectionsThey Walk Among AmericaCoptales and CocktailsThe Disturbing TruthSpeaking FreelyLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Who are the plowlers? They were two young girls from Columbia. They were underage when they became your clients? Yes, sir. Two sisters, Elena and Hannah Plyler, trusted Alec Murdoch when they lost their mom and brother in a car crash. We have the story of how that trust was abused and their money misused.

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If you'd like to try it, good news. You can get 10% off. Just log on to palmpeper spray.com and put in the code law crime 10. Again, that's palmpeper spray.com. The promo code is law crime 10. And remember, as always, if you or someone else is in trouble, always call 911. I'm Ann Jeanette Levy. and welcome to Law and Crime Sidebar podcast. During Alec Murdoch's double murder trial, we heard about

a number of clients that he represented related to lawsuits that he filed on their behalf, particularly during the cross-examination by Assistant Attorney General Creighton Waters. Two of those clients were children when Murdoch met them. Elena Spahn and her younger sister, Hannah Pliler. Who were the Plowler? They were two young girls from Columbia. they were underage when they became your clients yes sir did they suffer a loss in their family as a result on an accident they did who what loss did they suffer who died their mother their mother did joining me to discuss her experience with alec merdock is elena spawn she was just a kid when her mother and her brother were killed in a car accident she was critically injured and her attorney eric bland is with us

as well. Elena, welcome to Sidebar. Thanks for coming on. I'm wondering, first of all, just tell me, take me back to when this happened, the car accident back in 2005, and Alec Murdoch became somebody that befriended you. This is somebody you probably looked to as, you know, a figure that could help you out in life, a father figure maybe. Right. So in 2005, July 16th, I was involved in a car accident with my mom, my brother, my sister, and myself. We were in Hardyville. South Carolina. And we were driving up to Columbia that weekend. So this was on a Friday evening. And coming through Hampton County on I-95, we had a tire blowout. And mom lost control of the vehicle. And that's when we veered off and flipped over, hit several trees. And it was very clear

that my mom, my brother, did not make it. And you almost lost your leg. Tell me a little bit about that what you're comfortable sharing. Sure. So during the accident, I was pinned in the vehicle. And it was almost like an embankment. So I remember telling my sister, because she was the only one that could get out. I told her and instructed her to get out of the vehicle, go to the top of the interstate and try to flag somebody down because I was afraid that, you know, nobody would see our vehicle down in this embankment. So at eight years old, my sisters go into the top of the interstate and flagging someone down. And at that point, there was an 18-wheeler that had pulled over and also some other people that pulled over.

And then when law enforcement and bi-rescue arrived, they used the jaws of life on me to remove me from the vehicle. And I was airlifted to Savannah Hospital. I had crushed my left shoulder, blew my left knee completely out, and broke my right femur in two different places. Those were the majority of the major injuries and, of course, significant loss of blood. Gone through about 15 surgeries in that first three years. So yeah, it was, it was very traumatic. Elena was 12 and Hannah was just eight years old at the time of the crash. Their mother, Angela, and brother, Justin, were killed in that crash. Elena spent a month in the hospital and

then went to live with family, including her father, who was separated from their mother. mother at the time of the crash. He chose to go out just about every night and just kind of me and Hannah there and we felt very out of place. I was bound to a hospital bed for several months. So Hannah took care of me while I was in the hospital bed and because I couldn't move and I couldn't walk. I had, you know, cast on both legs, cast on an arm. So I, for several months, I wasn't, I couldn't do anything on my own. But once I regained movement in my arm, my legs, and did the therapy and everything, and physically I got better, that's when I started realizing, like, Hannah and I weren't

necessarily as welcome in the home as the rest of the family was. And when they ended up moving out of my grandparents' house, Hannah and I started getting shipped to different family members throughout our lives for several years, just because pretty much we felt like whatever family member needed that social security check that month, that's who we lived with. So Hannah and I lived out of bag, slept on couches for several years that people never knew about. But, I mean, we just, we did what we had to do, you know, to stay together. Elena and Hannah's father got an attorney who then brought on another lawyer to help represent them. That was Alec Murdoch. He's really good with talking with people. He was very convincing,

very, very friendly, but also very adamant. Like, you know, what they did was wrong and we're going to make this right. I assure you of this and you're going to get all this money. You're never going to have to work another day in your life. I'm going to make this right. I mean, I trusted him and I felt like this is the guy to go to for sure. He was just good with his words. He was very convincing that we were going to be okay financially.

and so I talked to him several times on the phone and then eventually those led up to depositions for the case so I met him at depositions and so but it was like meeting a friend it was just like seeing a friend that I hadn't seen in a while we had talked on the phone so many times so by the time we actually met each other in person it wasn't it wasn't stranger anything I remember him hugging me and and there was a lot of people in the room and he my nickname was laney growing up so he So he would call me Lainey, and he would say, Lainey, we're going to make this right. We're going to make this right. And even at the deposition, I remember him telling me that he had a son, but he only mentioned Buster.

I didn't even know he had two sons until later on. And so he put himself in a position where he would explain, like, you know, I'm a father. I've got a son. I've got a wife. And so making it almost like he could connect to the case. And like he couldn't imagine going through that. So, yeah, that was the first time I met him in person. But the conversations continued on the phone through several years.

He would call me, letting me know that they're moving in the case and things are looking good. He'd ask how my dad was doing. So did the case actually take years for you to get money? I mean, or was this a case where the money was there and you just didn't know about it? No, it took years. It did take years. Okay.

Yeah, Ronnie Crosby of Alex's firm. was really the hard worker, he's their go-to products liability guy on rollover cases and tire separation, tread separation cases. And so Alex was the point man that got the case from Arnold Beecham, but the guy that actually worked it and made them, you know, the value in it was Ronnie Crosby. So, Eric, come into this now and tell me where the wrongdoing occurred between Alec Murdoch and Russell Lafitte. In her case, Elanians and Hannes, they appointed Russ Lafitte as the conservator. And so the initial filing was wrong.

They were not residents of Hampton County, so it never could have gone in there. And then once he was appointed a conservator, he got 5% of the settlement amounts. Hannah's settlement was like a little under $3 million. or about $3 million, and Alainia's settlement was $4.5 million because she had much more injuries than permanent injuries than Hannah did. And so he received, just by the virtue of being named conservator, 5% of their money. And then going forward, he received a 5% annual fee to manage their money. Eric Blan said that Russell Lafitte then started loaning money to himself and Alec Murdoch from the accounts belonging to Hannah and Elena? He decided that he was going to loan conservatorship funds,

which is an absolute no-no. The job of a conservator is, as the word says, to conserve, to preserve their funds. But he decided, instead of putting him in an FDIC-backed CD that would be backed by the financial government, you know, these girls were not looking to get, you know, 20, percent on their money. They wanted their money to be preserved. They were young and they wanted it to make sure it would, when they turned 18, it would last. And so Russell became a father figure to them, didn't tell them that he was loaning money to Alex, didn't tell them that he was loaning money to himself, to the point that he had an existing loan with South State Bank, Alex Russell did, for seven and a quarter percent on a line of

equity that he had and he took Hannah's money and paid off that loan but then signed a promissory note to Hannah where he only agreed to pay her two and a half percent so he lowered his interest amount that he was obligated and of course it wasn't secured yeah he's using it as his personal piggy bank their money I mean it's so ridiculous and then he started loaning money to Alex and Alex, he knew, was an extreme credit risk with the bank because you heard in the murder trial that he was overdrafted at any given time, anywhere between $50,000 and $350,000. So he starts loaning Alex money, unsecured, and again, Alex was always late. Alex wasn't paying interest on time.

and so he never enforced those obligations. And at the same time that he's doing this very liberal loaning of the money of the girls, he's acting like he's Sergeant Schultz over their money when they needed money for school, for a band uniform, or to go on a school trip, or to Disney World to go with the school, he would oftentimes say no. He would say, unless you produce receipts, I'm not going to give it to you. He did go to the court to get permission to give them up to $200 a month that he wouldn't have to go back to court. It could be up to $200 a month. But he's turned them down for cell phones. He turned Elania down for a car loan. She needed a car when she was 16 years old

to take Hannah to school, to take herself to school. She was in the band. One of them was a major ed or something like that. He denied him a car. It was ridiculous to see they had to write these notes and beg him for their own cash. And he didn't need to give them a car loan at 18% because they had their money, at least $600,000 worth that was. sitting in the bank. They could have paid cash.

Alex Murdoch brought in his friend, the CEO of Palmetto State Bank, Russell Lafitte, to serve as a conservator for both Elena and her younger sister, Hannah. Elena talked to me about what happened when that conservatorship ended when she turned 18. It was a quick 10-minute meeting. Like here's all these binders inside here will be all the documents throughout the years of being a conservator. Basically, good luck. Didn't give any kind of. kind of like direction, didn't give any recommendations on what to do with this lump sum of money that was about to be wired to me. Explain nothing to me. It was literally like I'm checking out, you know, and here's your, here's your paperwork. Have good luck. And so what did you do then?

So took the paperwork, you know, and at this point, I'm 18 years old. I'm getting told that I'll have $600,000 in my account in a couple days. So I'm excited. You know, I, I should have been grabbed by the reins and come back down to life and like, look, this is a lot of money. Let me help you invest it. Like, let's talk about investing it. I mean, there was none of that. They literally, Russell just was like, you'll get some money in your account soon, $600,000. And that was it. So when she was 17, she was tired of getting shuttled. back and forth to different homes. So she goes to Russell and says, I want to buy a house.

I need stability. I mean, can you imagine a 17-year-old girl saying this? And so they went and looked at some homes and Russell kept vetoing a lot of the homes that she liked and actually made her buy a home that he liked more than she did because the kitchen was small and it didn't fit her knees. But she was so desperate at the time to get a house. so he buys her the house he doesn't tell her you got to get homeowners insurance you got to get insurance to protect yourself against casualty of flooding fire whatever so she turns 18 years old

when she turns 18 years old the conservorship ends russell literally came and met her and just hands her for a box a banker's box full of four or five notebooks Because annually every year, he would have to file some type of rudimentary accounting with the probate court. But he never disclosed in those filings that he was loaning himself money or Alex money. It just said loans. It didn't say loans to whom, loans for what repayment or anything. It just said loans. And he handser these box of documents in a 10-minute meeting and says,

basically have a good life. In the meantime, Elena's house burned down, so she lost all of the records and financial documents related to her settlement. She says she kept calling Russell Lafitte to get those documents, but her calls were not being returned. Then came Labor Day weekend of 2021 when Alec Murdoch was involved in that so-called roadside shooting with his cousin, Curtis Eddie Smith. Russell and I had talked, you know, occasionally here and there.

He'd normally call me if he had a question about how to get in touch with Hannah or something. It wasn't like, hey, how are you doing? It was a, hey, what's Hannah's phone number or what's Hannah's address or what's your address? And it was very short tweet to the point. But he, so it was kind of a coincidence because he had called me in the fall of 2021. to let me know that SLED had contacted him and wanted all of our documents that he had during the time of our conservatorship. Several weeks later, I got a phone call from SLED, and I remember just recently,

Russell told me that Slead wanted our documents, so I was put in two to two together then, and that's when SLED was explaining to me like, no, we're investigating these things with Alec and Russell, and obviously that's not what russell told me it was just the check in the box sort of thing Alex was in trouble but russell was not but um it was it was very clear that uh sled was explaining like no we're investigating things on both you know with with Alex and um and Russell and so I called Russell about it and I was like hey so I just got a phone call from sled and he's like what did they say and I was like they were just asking if like I was like I was Elena Plyler, that that was my maiden name, where I lived, where my phone number was,

if those were good contact numbers, things like that. And he's like, well, well, did they say anything else? And I was like, well, no. And then he's like, are you still in law enforcement? And, like, he had never asked me, like, personal questions like that. That was the first time that Russell and I actually had, like, a, a kind of like a personal conversation like normally it was just very business like like hey russell can i get some you know can i get the might yeah i'll i'll see what the judge says and then that would be that like it was very short but

this conversation in 2021 was very different um and he was just asking me these odd questions but again i didn't think a whole lot of it elena is a sheriff's deputy for lexington county south carolina so she could tell something wasn't quite right then alec murdox started getting charged with a bunch of financial crimes, Russell Lafitte was then charged by the feds with a number of crimes, including wire fraud. She testified against Lafitte at his federal trial last year. I would say it was a lot different being put on as a victim on the stand. I've testified in court so many times, but it was different being on the other side. It was, but I knew it needed to be done. It was really, hard. I had a lot of emotions just seeing Russell there. I mean, I almost felt guilty in a way just

because this is a guy that, like I said, like the best way to explain him, he was a father figure to me, you know, and now I see him and he's got the ankle monitors on. Like he's not really making eye contact with me, but his family behind him was definitely making some facial remarks at us and his bond no contrition nothing i let these girls down they needed me they didn't have a father figure I should have done more

I should have given them a good transition when I gave them their files so that they could understand who to hire they need she didn't even know we needed an accountant she didn't even know you know about tax returns at 18 years old and different things like that she's getting income

so elania definitely walked out of that courtroom saying to herself, not only did I did the right thing, do the right thing and did the right thing, but I'm glad I did it. So, Eric, were you able to get all of the money that Hannah and Elena were due through? Yes. Okay. And then some. Is that like, would that be kind of punitive damages, you know, that type of thing? Yeah, it's just how we, you know, we got as creative as we could to put damages on the table. You know, the spread in the interest rates, but, you know, he charged her 18% on a car loan, which she had the cash to buy. And then litigation loans that

were borrowed during the time that the original case was pending were between 24 and 29% interest, Angenet, and they're six-month loans. So they constantly roll over. So, Elena, how are you doing now, you and your sister? I mean, you've gotten the money you're due and then some, but obviously you've been through something very traumatic. It's, you know, it's not, you know, it's the car wreck losing your mother and your brother and then this on top of it. How are you doing now? Yeah, I will say, I didn't think that it was going to be as emotional and, and I'll say traumatizing as what it ended up being. You know, I was like, you know, this is going to be fine.

This happened, you know, 15 plus years ago. Like, let's just get this out of the way and be done. But as we're moving through this case over the past year and a half, it, Hannah and I both realized, like, it opened up a lot of wounds. And a lot of trauma and emotions that, we thought were, you know, were dealt with 15 years ago, started resurfacing. And I'll tell you, it definitely has taken and has continued to take a mental toll on both Hannah and I. Not to mention, we also lost our father in September, this past September. So we've just

had a lot going on, having to relive the death of our mom and our brother. And then the death of the death of our father happening and then just reliving the worst days of our life. Russell Lafitte was convicted at that trial last year, and he is awaiting sentencing. Then came the double murder trial of Alec Murdoch for the deaths of his wife Maggie and son Paul. Murdoch was asked by Creighton Waters about Elena and her sister. Who were the plowlers? They were two young girls from Columbia.

They were underage when they became your clients? Yes, sir. Did they suffer a loss in their family as a result in an accident? They did. What loss did they suffer? Who died? Their mother did. It was so disconnected.

And I remember looking at my husband and I was like, did he forget that there was a 14-year-old boy that also died in that car wreck? That was my brother. Like, did he forget that? I was airlifted to the hospital because I nearly lost my life too, the same hospital he was airlifted in that roadside shooting. Did he forget about all of the other traumas? I mean, yes, of course, we lost our mom, but there was so much more than that that I would have, so I found it pretty disrespectful that he made millions of dollars off of not only my deceased mother, but my deceased 14-year-old brother and you didn't have the audacity to remember him, but you say that

you're a good guy and that, you know, that you would, you cared about your clients, but you forgot to mention about the 14-year-old little boy that didn't stand a chance, but you made, again, millions off of him. So that just really, that really bothered me. Russell Lafitte was convicted at that trial last year, as I mentioned, and he is awaiting sentencing. He will be sentenced at a later date. Right now, he is requesting a new trial.

the victims will be able to speak at his sentence and I'm pretty certain that Eleni is going to have choice words I don't think Hannah will probably speak she'll have me do it but Eleni will have some pretty choice words all right well Elena Spahn and Eric Blan thanks so much for coming on today we really appreciate it and I'm sorry for everything you've been through but hopefully the future holds only good things thank you so much. And that's it for this edition of Law and Crime Sidebar podcast. You can listen to and download Sidebar on Apple, Spotify, Google, and wherever else you get your podcast. And of course, you can always watch it on Law and Crimes YouTube channel. I'm Ann Janette Levy, and we will see you next time.

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