Alex Murdaugh Charged With Swindling Sons of Dead Housekeeper
The New York Times
Mr. Murdaugh, the scion of a legal dynasty in South Carolina, is accused of pocketing about $2.8 million in settlement money that was supposed to go to the housekeeper’s family.
Alex Murdaugh, the South Carolina lawyer who has endured a dramatic downfall since his wife and son were shot in an unsolved killing in June, was arrested on Thursday and charged with swindling millions of dollars from the sons of his former housekeeper.
Mr. Murdaugh, 53, was taken into custody at a drug detox center in Orlando, Fla., and charged with two counts of obtaining property by false pretenses, a felony with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. He was booked into a jail in Orlando.
The charges stem from a settlement that Mr. Murdaugh and his insurers reached with the sons of the housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, who died in 2018 after falling on the front steps of the Murdaugh family’s rural home in Islandton, S.C. Following Ms. Satterfield’s death, Mr. Murdaugh referred her two sons to a lawyer he promised would help them, the sons claimed in a recent lawsuit, but he did not disclose that the lawyer, Cory Fleming, was a close friend and former college roommate.
