As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Valerie Bauerlein had a front-row seat to the most captivating murder trial since OJ Simpson.
But Bauerlein did more than file dispatches to her newspaper during Alex Murdaugh's trial: She wrote the definitive narrative of not just the Murdaugh story, but the roots of the generational power the Murdaugh family wielded in Hampton County for more than a century as they made problems go away by making lies look like the truth.
In The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty, Bauerlein delivers a masterpiece of reporting, organization and storytelling.
Bauerlein, a national reporter who writes about small-town America and Southern politics, economics and culture, joins The Dubcast to reflect not just on her process of writing the book but also some fascinating parts of the backstory that didn't make the final edit -- including an early-1900s march on the Horseshoe in Columbia by Randolph Murdaugh Sr. to bring back football after it was banned.
Bauerlein also explores some questions that remain unanswered even as Alex is in prison for the murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul:
Did Alex have help in carrying out the murders?
How close was Alex to averting a guilty verdict?
Where is all the money he stole from people who most needed it, including the family of Gloria Satterfield?
Bauerlein lives in the Raleigh area with her husband and two children.
Before joining the Journal in 2005, she worked as a congressional correspondent for the News & Observer in Raleigh, a legislative reporter at The State in Columbia, and a cops reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal.
Bauerlein interview
And here are the previous two in case you missed them:
Otis Pickett
Mike Noonan
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