SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Festival Saturday, February 8, 2025

1:00 PM – 1:55 PM

Lutheran Church of the Ascension Sanctuary

120 Bull St.

Valerie Bauerlein

BOOK INFO:

Alex Murdaugh was a benevolent dictator — the president of the South Carolina trial lawyers’ association, a political boss, a part-time prosecutor and a partner in his family’s law firm — always ready with a favor, a drink and an invitation to Moselle, his family’s 1,700-acre hunting estate. The Murdaugh name ignited respect—and fear—for a hundred miles.

When he murdered his wife Maggie and son Paul at Moselle on a dark summer night, the fragile façade of Alex’s world could no longer hold. Like generations of Murdaugh men before him, he had mastered the art of bending justice to his will. His forefathers had covered up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad crossing, a bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder of a pregnant lover. Alex almost walked away from his unspeakable crimes with his reputation intact, but his downfall was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes and a fateful decision by an old friend who’d finally seen enough.

Why would a man who had everything kill his wife and grown son? To unwind the roots of Alex’s ruin, award-winning journalist Valerie Bauerlein reported not just from the courthouse every day but also along the backroads and through the tidal marshes of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. When the jurors made their pilgrimage to the crime scene, trying to envision Maggie and Paul’s last moments, she walked right behind them, sensing the ghosts that haunt the Murdaughs’ now-shattered legacy.

BIO:

Valerie Bauerlein is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal who writes about small-town America and Southern politics, economics, and culture. She has covered the South her entire career, including nineteen years at the Journal and four years at The State in Columbia, South Carolina. Ms. Bauerlein graduated from Duke University. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband and their two children.

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