RedHanded - FROM THE VAULT – ShortHand: Mandy Matney – A Murdaugh Update

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

In 2024, a year on from RedHanded’s episode on the Murdaugh Family Murders, we had the great pleasure of talking to Mandy Matney, the foremost independent expert on the Murdaugh family and their rampant trail of destruction through South Carolina.Mandy filled us in on everything that happened since we last checked in – including Stephen Smith’s death being re-classified as a murder and the potential for a retrial.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello. Oh, sorry, hi. There's a big loud crash behind us somewhere. So you're in our studio in London and there's Jurassic Park upstairs. People just stomping around. So loud. It is soundproof, they say. But it is a lot of noise going on.

But you don't care about that. Listeners, you care about what is going on today on shorthand. Because we have the immense pleasure this week of talking to a legend of the true crime space. And I think one of the best names of all time. Oh, we've already discussed this. It's true. Mandy Matney is a real person and an award-winning journalist and best-selling author who flew to the top of the Apple podcast charts with her investigative show The Murdoch Murdoch podcast. She is the foremost independent expert on the Murdoch family and the trial of pain, corruption and destruction that they forged across South Carolina. Mandy also also,

also hosts the chart-topping shows, True Sunlight Podcast, and Cup of Justice. And as if that wasn't enough, Mandy is also the author of Blood on Their Hands, a best-selling book on the Murdoch Murders. And she's CEO of her own production company, Lunar Shark Media. Mandy, it's an absolute joy to have you on the show today. We're very excited to get back into the Murdoch Murdoch murders. We covered this a while ago in a one hour and a bit episode. You have done much more than that.

So we're very excited for the update since where we left off. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. And I appreciated y'all's shout out on that show. That was very nice. I had several people message me and say, this is so cool. I love this podcast. They gave you a big shout out.

So thank you. An amazing intro, by the way. Couldn't have said it better myself. Oh, you're welcome. How could we not? I didn't. I think the Murdoch episode for us, I think I even say in the episode, it was just one of those things where I was like, awake at night, being like, I think I can do it.

I think I can get it done in a week. But you've dedicated years to the Murdoch case. So obviously, I'm absolutely desperate to talk to you about some details that I couldn't manage to fit into our episode. But first, for people who don't know, could you give us a very quick summary of the Murdoch family murders, which is a question. I'm sure you've been asked 100,000 times, but once more with feeling, Mandy Manning. Who, once more with feeling. The Murdoch murders, really the story that I started investigating, started in 2019. That's where I came into the picture when a girl named Mallory Beach died in a boat crash.

And Paul Murdoch was the driver of that boat. And Paul Murdoch was the son of a legal dynasty here in South Carolina. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all the same. solicitor of what we call the 14th Circuit. So it's like the DA of our area, which means they had immense connections within the police departments, the prosecution, the courts, everything. And from the second, Mallory's body initially went missing in the boat crash. And I started covering it as a local reporter. And from the second, we heard about it. We heard there's going to be corruption in this case. You guys need to really cover this. Look for the cover up because

this kid is not going to, he's going to get away with it. This family is used to getting away with it. And so it started me on this path that I couldn't, or a rabbit hole that I couldn't get out of, a path I couldn't slow down on. And as you guys said, it's not even a spider web of crimes. it is a, I don't even know. How did you describe it? I forget. It was really good. Like a wool hamper where everything's all tied up in knots and you can't face separating it. So you just put it in the cupboard and ignore it. Yeah. I discovered a wool hamper on accident. So I started digging and started talking to people in the Murdox hometown. And they started saying things like, well, did you hear about their maid, Gloria Satterfield? She fell. And that was a weird death. And there's, Something there. You should look into that. And then there's this kid, Stephen Smith, who was found in the road dead in 2015. And the Murdoch name has come up a lot in that story, too. And that's another murder that took place in the small town. And so Liz and I, my best friend, and she also worked at the packet with me at the time, the newspaper, we just became obsessed. And we started digging and digging and we couldn't stop. And we made one of those murder board things. And we started.

started, and this was back in 2019, and we were like, this could be a documentary. This is way more interesting than the stuff Netflix is covering. Like, this is crazy. And then, so we were, I was really deep into covering the boat crash lawsuit, covering Paul's charges, looking into Stephen's death, looking into glorious death, et cetera, et cetera. In 2021, when Paul and Maggie Murdoch were murdered on their property. In what they call Mosel of South Carolina, it's a 1700-acre hunting lodge. And the first thing I thought of was it has to be somebody within that family because I just know who they are and I know that everybody's terrified of them. Nobody's going to murder the Murdoch family. It's got to be one of them. And then the world kind of descended on this story and it became

well beyond a low country story and well beyond a South Carolina story, media from all over the world came in. And then it just kept getting crazier. We found out Alex stole millions of dollars from his clients and was a real horrible person for a lot of years, way worse than we thought he was, which we always knew he was bad. And then he faked his own suicide on the side of the road in September of 2021. And then And to wrap it all up, he was convicted of murder a year ago this week in March of 2023. And yeah, that's the Murdoch story in a nutshell. Wow. That might have been too long.

But no, it's good to give us lots of detail. I think that's the key thing, guys. Like, we're really pushing Mandy here to begin. Give us a brief summary of this entire massive saga of a case and of a family. It spans generations. It's a huge, huge story, hence the Will Hamper comparison. So go listen to Mandy Matney's episodes and also our red-handed episode where we try some it up in an hour and a half or something like that.

The key thing is you've got one family, incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy, running this area, doing whatever they wanted. And there are a series of deaths slash murders surrounding them that look incredibly suspicious. So with that being said, Mandy, there is absolutely no doubt that the Murdox are as a family, a very intimidating lot, if we can put it mildly. Specifically, Randolph Murdoch, the third, who seemed like a pretty terrifying character. Now, what was it like for you, standing up to a group of people like that, knowing that you're trying to dig up their deepest, darkest secrets, and knowing exactly what these people are capable of? How did that feel?

Terrifying. I didn't sleep a lot in 2019. and that was way back when, mostly because of the amount of emails that was getting from strangers that were just saying, and they weren't trying to be threatening and they weren't trying to scare me, but the people were legitimately worried about my safety.

Email after email, pretty much every time I would write about the Murdoch family in any way, shape, or form, people would say, this family is dangerous, you need to be careful. Watch your back. things like that. And, you know, that stuff sticks with you. And I had never been on a story like that in my life. I was kind of, I was always a reporter, but I did a lot of easy stories. I like to write about like

alligators and sharks and business openings and dumb things like that. But I always wanted to be an investigative reporter. And something just, I don't know, inside of me could not let this story go. And I kept meeting people who were telling me how important it was that people finally stood up to this family. And the other thing that helped me, I believe, is that I am not from the low country. I am from Kansas City. I don't have relatives here. I don't have family roots here versus like a lot of journalists in South Carolina do. And a lot of the people I was talking to in those early days said things like, if my grandparents knew I was talking to a journalist about the Murdox, they would kill me. My grandparents are terrified of this family. My parents are terrified of this family.

And then you'd hear things like they know where to hide bodies. And I just, I took it seriously, but I also kept being like, what do they mean by they hide a lot of bodies and how dangerous is this? But it didn't stop. Liz and I talked through it all the time. time. We were both investigating this story from early on. And from early on, we both would have dreams at night. We would call Murd Mares. And they were like nightmares about the Murdoch family. So things like that, we would talk through those things and cope with each other. And also at the end of the day, we knew that we were scared and knew that we were terrified, but we knew that we were on the right path and doing the right thing and what we were doing was important.

Were there any specific moments when you uncovered something so huge that you were just like, this isn't real, this has to be, like, am I secretly in a crime novel and I don't know? Like, were you waiting for the cameras to like swing in? Yeah, several times. So many times actually. My life since I've found out about these people has been that moment after that moment. A big moment was in 2019 when I was digging through court records. Every moment I had, every free moment I had at work, I was just trying to search through

Alex Mardox history and court records and see if I could find anything that was matching all these rumors. I heard all of these rumors. What about the maid? What about Stephen Smith? Blah, blah, blah. And when I found a $500,000 settlement for Gloria Satterfield's death, and I found that Corey Fleming, which is Alex Murdoch's best friend at the time, was representing Gloria

Satterfield's family in the death and that she did die on the property. And I figured out through an obituary that she was their maid, I was like, oh my God, they did have a maid that died a couple years ago. And there's this weird settlement involved in this. It's very sketchy because it was two pages. The details were very odd. And everything about it was completely sketchy. And I remember looking at Liz and saying, oh, my God, like, I think what these people are telling us is real. Look at this. And then it just kept going and it kept getting weirder. And then the other big moment was when I found out Paul and Maggie were murdered.

That was like the whole world shifted. I literally couldn't believe it. It was people that I spent my days and nights obsessing over, looking through their Facebook pages, getting to know who all their friends were, getting to know everything about them. And Maggie actually blocked me on Facebook years ago. But I never clicked on anything. I was like, how does she know that I'm anyways? Wow.

I knew who these people were and I knew everything about them. And when I realized that they were both murdered, I was not saddened by the tragedy, but was like, oh, my God, this is going to be the craziest murder story, not only in the history of South Carolina, but likely in the United States because of how crazy the boat crash story was leading up to that point. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's so wild to think that, you know, as you rightly say, a lot of the world's attention, even within the true crime space, only came onto the Murdoch murder scene after Maggie and Paul were murdered. But you were there for years prior to that looking into this. Yeah. And in 2021 is when it was announced that SLED

we're going to re-examine the deaths of Stephen Smith and Gloria Satterfield, as you just talked about there. Now, Stephen's death has since been classified as a murder, and his body has been exhumed in 2003, and I believe you were actually there at the exhumation of Stephen's body. For those of you who can't see, Mandy is nodding. Yes, those are things are correct. Now, we know that you are also personally putting quite a lot of effort into looking into Stephen Smith's murder. Can you tell us, Mandy, have there been any developments in the case of Stephen Smith since his body was exhumed? And also, I know bad interviewing technique, but also any developments are they likely to happen in Gloria Satterfield's case as well?

These are hard questions because Stephen's case is extremely frustrating. We are doing everything that we can right now to talk to every person who knew Stephen, who to talk to every person who was talking to him around the time of his death. We recently got thousands of photos from his phone from a download, and we're going through those. And I'm frustrated because I feel like our team might be putting in more work than the actual police are at this point. And we don't know, I mean, hopefully they're close,

but we're not hearing anything. We're not hearing of the grand jury meeting on this case. Sandy's not getting updates from SLED. Sandy is Stephen's mother. And it's frustrating because the main problem with Steven Smith's death was in 2015. The police just didn't investigate it. They did not care to investigate it. They did little to nothing. I was looking at some things that they did this morning. And I was like, I think elementary school kids would have done a better job just following their curiosity and asking questions in this case. And some of the Highway Patrol members who have that case are now saying that they

weren't allowed to ask certain questions, but they're not saying why. And it's like there's this big elephant in the room with Stephen's story. And it's a thing where everyone in Hampton claims that they know the kids who did it, but nobody will go to police and say who they think did it and like where the root of this rumor is coming from. And it's, It is the most frustrating case I've ever been a part of. Gloria Satterfield's death, I don't know, honestly, if we're ever going to get answers because the two people that were there at the house on the day that she died are on the day that she fell are murdered now.

And then there's Alex is the only third person who would know anything and he's beyond not trustworthy. these. So it's very frustrating, but I did look at her medical records and a lot of things just didn't add up with how she fell and her injuries. And they said that the dogs did it. Then Alex said, no, the dogs did it. And then especially when you look back on that case and you're like, there's a psychotic murderer in the middle of this store. Like, it is not that far-fetched of a thing to think that Alex could have killed her and he got millions of dollars for her death. but will we ever completely get there?

Unfortunately, I don't think so. And that's frustrating. I'm absolutely desperate to get your opinion on this. I think one of the most frustrating things that's happened recently is that there might be a retrial, which I absolutely could not believe. So our understanding is that there is a motion for retrial because of Rebecca Hill. Is that correct? Actually, that has all been, thank goodness, we're past that.

That motion for retrial has been denied in late January it was. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. So I haven't, so that part of the story, last March, we were all like, yes, Alex finally, Ehrlich has finally been convicted. I say Alex and Ehrlich because I find his name extremely annoying at this point. We agree. So annoyed.

At the beginning, I'm like, I said it. We'll just call him Alex to piss him off. Yeah. Let's just call. Yeah. Who cares? Alex, we thought everything was good. He was convicted.

That was amazing. We can move on to solving Stephen's death and getting into these other stories. And a few months later in August, his attorneys who are just the most unlikable human beings, one could possibly imagine. They are like super villains, Dick Rputtlian and Jim Griffin. They made this huge big deal about how jury tampering took place in the trial with the clerk of court Rebecca Hill. And Rebecca Hill had a book out that summer, which was weird for a clerk of court to have a book out after a murder trial. But everything in the story has been weird.

So like, I didn't think that that was that big of a deal. and they make this huge deal in, I believe it was September of this year, September, had a press conference saying, we have this, we have all this proof of jury tampering, blah, blah, blah. And of course, media just goes wild and doesn't look through it and immediately puts all these headlines like, there's going to be a retrial in the Alex Murdoch. It's a done deal. Jury tampering took place. But you go through the stack of papers that they call evidence, and it's just,

a load of crap. Just a load of crap. And I say this over and over, they muddy the waters to make it look deep. And these guys do this over and over again. And Liz and I, unfortunately, seem to be some of the only journalists covering this that, like, have been on to their, their bullshit. So we saw that and we were like, I don't think there's going to be a retrial. And we were the only ones. Everybody else in the media seemed to be, oh, there's going to be a retrial this year and it's a done deal, blah, blah, blah. And finally, in January, they had a hearing and it was extremely dramatic. And at the end of the day, a justice toll, who is a former Supreme Court Justice in South Carolina, and basically a woman hero here in South Carolina, she said, no, you guys have

no evidence of jury tampering. This is ridiculous. We're done here. And so now Alex, finally, like, he's hit a lot of walls. He's, of course, going to do appeals, but everybody does appeals. It's extremely hard in the United States to get a murder conviction overturned, and I don't think a lot of people really understand how difficult that is in how you can't just cry jury tampering in front of the whole media and then get a new trial. That's not how it works. as I'm sure you all know, privilege and money and power play a huge role in the Murdoch story. And that was just so apparent that these guys really thought that they could get away with getting a whole new trial. And the trial cost us taxpayers in South Carolina like $500,000.

So I didn't want it. That's absurd. Wow. I mean, it is just the case that keeps on giving in the most. horrible way. But I think, you know, I speak for all of us when I say how thankful we are that there is not going to be a retrial. So that is very good news. Mandy, what's your next move? Are you going to keep focusing on the murderer of Stephen Smith? Is that going to be your focus looking into the Murdox continuously? What's kind of next for you in this case or other than this

case? Yeah. There's still a lot of loosens with corruption in this case. We are focusing not only on Stephen Smith, but also looking back at the boat crash and the boat crash that started at all and the most frustrating part is that we know obstruction of justice took place in the investigation of that boat crash. And that's a huge problem. There are a lot of public officials that did a lot of dirty work for the Murdoch family. And they're still in office and they still have jobs, and in fact, some of them have been promoted and awarded since they've been caught doing some of these things. So we are still shining the light on corruption here in South Carolina and beyond. We just very, very recently are starting looking into a new case called the Kalucci

case, and that trial is going to take place in May of this year. It's another story of privilege, a guy says that his wife hung herself with a garden hose, and the evidence does not match up with that whatsoever. The murder took place in 2015, so in the first time that he was tried, it was a hung jury because he had a really, really expensive lawyer, and the prosecution just didn't do a great job. And also, this man has all sorts connections with the law enforcement and the justice system. And then there's other family murders in the Kaluchi family. It's a whole thing. So that has been something that has been kind of exciting just to, I really like complicated true crime stories that are way beyond like whodunit. I like stories of corruption. I like stories that's spider web. So this one has been really good. Amazing. Mandy Matney, queen of the wall hamper cases. That's what we'll have to call you. Mandy, thank you. much. Where can people find you? What should they be reading that you've written? What should they be

listening to tell the people where you are? Well, thank you all so much for having me. And congratulations on y'all's awards. I saw British Choice Awards. That's amazing. Amazon Music, that's amazing. And y'all have been doing this for a really long time. I really respect people that, like, you were in the true crime podcast world before it really blew up. I feel like you were at 2017 was like on the, yes, we're at the beginning. So great job. I know it's hard. You all can find me on my podcast, True Sunlight and Cup of Justice.

Also, Facebook, Manny Matney investigates. I'm on Instagram at Manny Matney. I'm on Twitter. I don't really like it, but I'm there. That's everyone on Twitter. Yeah, we hate it. And let's keep calling it Twitter. Yeah, like Alex.

Yeah. Exactly. But thank you all so much for having me. Thank you so much, Mandy. It was an absolute pleasure. And come back and talk to us once you've blown the Kalucci case wide open. We'd love to have you back. I hope so. I'm thinking this one's going to be really big. I'll keep you all updated. Good luck. Good luck. Thank you all for listening.

If you are like, what the hell I can't remember any of this, again, please go listen to Mandy's fabulous work. And also check out our episode on the Murdoch, which is hiding somewhere in the archives. I can't remember which episode it is. looked up the number. We didn't. But you can find it. I believe in you. And we'll see you next week for another episode of Shorthand. Bye. Goodbye.

Thank y'all. That was wonderful.