When Mandy Matney graduated from journalism college on the University of Kansas in 2012 and her mother and father requested her to decide on a celebratory trip spot, she picked Hilton Head, South Carolina. During that journey, Matney remembers glancing on the native newspaper and considering how good it might be to have a job there. “They’re talking about alligators and all these cool things,” she remembers considering.
“And then it happened!” Matney says, talking from her Hilton Head dwelling. After disappointing reporting stints in Missouri and Illinois, the Kansas native got here to Hilton Head in 2016 as a reporter for The Island Packet. “I think I was drawn to this area for some reason,” she reminisces, including, “I feel like it was kind of the universe telling me to come here.”
Several years later, Matney was overlaying a story rather more predatory than alligators—the trial and conviction of outstanding legal professional Alex Murdaugh for the 2021 killings of his spouse, Maggie, and their 22-year-old son, Paul. She had already been delving into the Murdaugh household’s affect and corruption: In 2019, 19-year-old Mallory Beach was killed in a boating accident in which Paul was driving, inebriated. These crimes opened a floodgate of investigations into Alex Murdaugh’s huge monetary improprieties, and ultimately led Matney to launch “Murdaugh Murders Podcast”—a profession trajectory she recounts in Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and the Fall of the Murdaugh Dynasty.
“You have to be the person to say something when you see that something isn’t right.”
Matney likens the Murdaugh case to a “superstorm that we can’t get out of,” acknowledging, “I kind of do miss my life before it was just constant chaos and absurdity.” After a little bit of a break this summer time, the Murdaugh story has heated up once more, with Murdaugh asking for a new trial and his legal professionals wrangling over whether or not the state or federal authorities ought to management the rest of his belongings. Throughout the myriad developments in the case, Matney has discovered the nationwide press protection to be “eye opening.” While she’s seen “a lot of really great journalism,” she acknowledges that she’s additionally been disillusioned with reporters who “take the easiest, goriest, most salacious angle of the story and roll with it,” which is “the opposite of what I want to do.”
Cognizant of the swirling sea of media being produced concerning the household—books, documentaries and extra—Matney and co-author Carolyn Murnick determined to border their providing as her personal “memoir based on four years of reporting,” a form of story-behind-the-story that gives new materials for even Matney’s most devoted podcast followers. It’s meant to be inspiring to different journalists, and, as Matney notes, “It’s the book that I would have wanted to have 10 years ago when I started my journalism career.”
“It’s kind of a whole new layer of vulnerability for me to tell all these [personal] stories,” she says, evaluating her course of to “taking an ice cream scoop to my insides” and revealing “those deep-down things that you don’t want to talk about and you don’t want to deal with.”
Matney grew up watching “Dateline” and “20/20″ with her mother, and remembers following the O.J. Simpson case when she was a kindergartner “because my mom was so into it.” She writes that though her first two jobs had been soul-sucking (“I cried often”), her saving grace got here in the type of nights spent listening to WBEZ’s “Serial” and watching Netflix’s “Making a Murderer,” whereas dreaming of “doing something as inspiring.”
Unfortunately, Matney’s job at The Island Packet was overshadowed by a misogynistic editor she refers to by the pseudonym “Charles Gardiner” in her memoir. When, for instance, Matney obtained entry to key information associated to the unusual 2015 hit-and-run loss of life of a younger man named Stephen Smith, probably linked to the Murdaughs, Gardiner luridly requested, “What did you do to get that file?” Matney displays, “I don’t think people talk enough about bosses being mentally abusive, and how much that affects your entire life and your work.”
Thankfully, she partnered with a savvy, supportive colleague, Liz Farrell (with whom she nonetheless collaborates) to observe their instincts in the Murdaugh story, whilst their editor tried to discourage them. Matney believes that their outsiders’ views added gas to their reporting—they weren’t used to “this system of good old boys just running amok and doing whatever they wanted.” She provides, “I think a lot of people have a really hard time imagining that a guy who looks like Alex can do these things. But that’s a big point that I think we all need to realize is that there are people like Alex, who are manipulators and narcissists, and we can’t be fooled by them. . . .You have to be the person to say something when you see that something isn’t right, because they will—like Alex did—destroy everyone in their wake.” Just a few days earlier than our dialog, Matney reveals, she stood a few ft away from Murdaugh throughout a federal listening to. “It’s bone-chilling,” she says. “It’s not fun for me to be in his presence.”
“It’s the book that I would have wanted to have 10 years ago when I started my journalism career.”
Matney’s memoir additionally addresses the toll that the case has taken on her psychological well being. “No one really told me when you start digging into stories that are this dark, and communicating often with victims of really horrific crimes, you are carrying a load that is unbearable at times. People need to talk about that.”
On a brighter observe, Blood on Their Hands additionally chronicles how she and David Moses (then her boyfriend, now her husband) started their Murdaugh podcast. “It’s not this easy process where a microphone comes out of nowhere and just magically puts your words into a podcast and it sounds beautiful. It’s very frustrating at the beginning. . . . I’m not ashamed of the fact that our first few episodes sounded very rough. I want other people to know that it’s OK to start something and not be perfect at it. . . . I think that that’s been a big reason why a lot of our fans have been really attached to our podcast.” Matney loves podcasting, particularly as a result of “journalism is so different when you own your own business and you can actually do and say the things that you want.” Five years in the past, she says, “I could never have dreamed of doing this with my husband in my house studio.”
Blood on Their Hands will certainly fulfill true crime followers. And with Matney’s acknowledgment of the grinding work and psychological toll her investigation demanded—to wit, “interviews with over one hundred sources, as well as hundreds of pages of legal filings, police reports, social media posts, and court transcripts”—the guide can also be a highly effective tribute to journalism’s capacity to carry the highly effective to account.
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