On a warm June evening in 2021, the wife and 22-year-old son of prominent South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh were shot to death on the family’s sprawling 1,700-acre estate, unleashing a media frenzy.
Wall Street Journal national reporter Valerie Bauerlein ’93 was following the story from her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, when her editor asked about it. “What’s the Wall Street Journal version of the story?” Bauerlein asked him. “What larger thing does it tell us?” His reply: “It’s just a good story.” Bauerlein would become an expert on that story as it turned increasingly bizarre in the months that followed. When Murdaugh was charged with the murders more than a year later and convicted in 2023 after a six-week trial, Bauerlein was on the case. She attended every day of the trial and was the only journalist to accompany the jury on a visit to the crime scene. Her deep dive into the Murdaugh family history is now a richly detailed bestselling book, “The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty,” published by Ballantine.
DukeMag: The Murdaugh story is such a dark one. How did it feel to immerse yourself in that world for three years?
Valerie Bauerlein: One of my sources asked me how it felt to spend so much time thinking about a deeply bad person – did it feel dark or sad. It was quite the opposite. When I was pitching the book to publishers, they all said, “He’s such a bad person. Who will the reader pull for?” So it was in my mind from the beginning to look for people who were trying to unwind the system – who saw Alex for what he was. Many people took significant risks to take on this machine. So I really do think there is hope in the story. Plus, my faith, my belief, is a core part of my life. I have covered all manner of terrible things: Natural evil – more than a dozen hurricanes – and human evil – 14 mass shootings. After one of those big stories, I remember my editor saying, “Well, at least you can plug into the mothership this weekend at church.”
DM: Tell us about your title, “The Devil at His Elbow.”
VB: I wanted a title that was epic, like the epic story I believe it to be. So I was going through Shakespeare, but a lot of the Shakespearean titles – like “Fatal Vision” – are taken. I couldn’t find what I was looking for about fathers and sons in the Old Testament. Because Cormac McCarthy had just died, I was rereading “Blood Meridian” and the title just leapt out at me: “You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything.” I chose it because it felt so fitting. And the publisher liked it.
DM: How did your family – your husband and two children – cope with your many absences covering this story?
VB: I built a spreadsheet of the trips I made to Hampton to show my fact-checker, and I said to my husband, “Would you believe I was in South Carolina for 130 days – four months?” And he goes, “I would have said six.” It was definitely hard on the life of the family. There were some fall- and spring-break trips where I was in the hotel room working. There were a lot of sacrifices, but it was so important to me, once I agreed to do the book, that I do it well. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, and I wanted to show my daughter that it was possible to have a career and be a mom.
DM: This story is like a Southern Gothic saga. You grew up in the South, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and have written about the region for more than 20 years. What is it about the South that produces such “interesting” stories?
VB: Somebody said this to me: The South is the only place in the country that evokes an image in your mind. Not just Atlanta South or Raleigh South, but the rural South, the real South. I think part of it is that, in some respects, we didn’t go through industrialization. We went from agrarian to now. I think the legacy of the Civil War is so present in a place like Hampton. It’s not even below the surface. And there’s also our understanding of the original sin of this country: South Carolina was the place that fired on the federal government.
DM: This is your first book, and it debuted in the top 10 of the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list. How did that feel?
VB: The day we made it on the list, my editor called me as I was driving my son home from school. I just burst into tears. I couldn’t believe it. My husband was out of town, and my daughter was at drama practice, so we stopped at a convenience store. I got some ginger ale and some convenience store champagne, and we came home and had a toast.
DM: How did you come to attend Duke?
VB: My parents had three girls in four years, so we were all going to college at the same time. Duke was not in reach financially for us. But there was this scholarship to encourage more students from North and South Carolina, the B.N. Duke Scholars. It was based on leadership and community involvement. I won that scholarship, and it made Duke possible. It was life-changing for me.