Podcasts
The Murdaughs: Murders, Money & Mystery
October 2021-present
Edward R. Murrow Award Winner
RTDNA Award Winner
60+ episodes
2.3M Listens (Audio Platforms)
1.6M Views (YouTube)
In June 2021, a South Carolina lawyer brutally murdered his wife and son in what investigators determined was a heinous self-preservation ruse by a drug-addled con man whose greed and malice had backed him into a dark and inescapable corner of reckoning.
Before that horrific night — and for a few months afterward — Alex Murdaugh was by all appearances a wealthy, successful lawyer and family man. He came from a family synonymous for generations with the legal system in South Carolina’s Lowcountry.
There were scandals before, but the Murdaughs in general hadn’t faced much scrutiny in decades. That changed two years before the murders, when a February 2019 boating accident involving Alex Murdaugh’s son, Paul, left a young woman named Mallory Beach dead.
Yet even the boat wreck scandal soon seemed to have faded from public consciousness. That was until the jarring news of two brutal murders rocked the Palmetto State. Paul Murdaugh and his mother, Maggie, had been shot to death at their family’s sprawling estate in Colleton County. Alex Murdaugh reported finding their bullet-riddled bodies.
Police said no suspects had been identified, but all at once the boat crash roared back to the forefront of people’s minds. Were these horrific murders related to that? Each new day thereafter seemed to come with increasingly bizarre twists & turns, and soon it was clear something huge and nefarious was happening in this poor, rural county.
Colleagues Anne Emerson, Dan Michener and I knew this story was not one we could properly tell within the constructs of traditional TV news. It required more time and more room to breathe, and a different style of narrative storytelling. We all agreed: “This is a podcast!”
Problem was, there was no blueprint for launching or selling a podcast within our company at the time. We were on our own, but we knew we couldn’t wait. In August 2021, keeping our plans quiet and working in our free time, we started building a show from scratch.
“Unsolved South Carolina” was born.
We settled on a documentary-style narrative podcast with high production value, each about 25-30 minutes long. I would be in charge of sketching the broader episode outline and the individual episode formats to set a clear through-line on the story we wanted to tell.
Anne and I would work together on the fact-finding, backgrounding, archival research and public records requests to help build out our knowledge base and tell the full story. Anne would then find people to talk on the record about the case, and then, alongside Dan, record interviews and gather original video and audio content for the epsiodes.
Anne’s role was then to write a script for a teaser trailer and each successive episode. From there, Dan would take care of all the editing and sound design for the episodes, including a custom opening montage. Dan would also be tasked with editing weekly TV broadcast packages for Anne that would air as companion pieces to new podcast episodes.
On the backend, I would proof and tweak pre-production episode scripts and make final revisions and quality control tweaks once the episodes were tracked and edited. Once we launched, I would be responsible for posting each new episode to the hosting service and YouTube, then creating posts to promote the episodes on our station’s website and social channels.
We recruited photojournalist Max Harrison to create custom music for the show open, credits and transitions. Our creative services department provided custom graphics. Meanwhile, I took care of finding a hosting service for the show and making sure we had distribution on all the major audio platforms. From there, I created “Unsolved South Carolina” branded pages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The original leg work was all done in our freetime and without our news director’s knowledge. We knew if we could come to her and the station leadership with a proof of concept, publication plan and trailer already in the can, we’d be undeniable. We were correct.
We originally envisioned a limited run podcast on the Murdaugh case, 6-8 episodes at most just to supplement our station’s efforts on TV, social media and YouTube while hopefully creating a new revenue stream. The case wasn’t going anywhere, and we figured we could always produce another episode or two down the road.
61 episodes later …
We had no idea what the Murdaugh case would become. What started as a heavily produced, narrative-style podcast would morph overtime to more of roundtable and talk radio format where we delved deeper into analysis and reaction. It was a necessary evolution, and proved a boon for the success of the series.
Even though “Murdaugh” grew legs beyond our wildest dreams, we know it will someday fizzle. That’s why from the beginning we were thinking beyond Murdaugh. Our original vision was the umbrella brand, “Unsolved South Carolina” — not simply a one-and-done Murdaugh podcast.
We believed there were enough "True Crime” cases every year — and dozens more in archives for our station and other affiliates in South Carolina — that we could repeat the formula for years to come, debuting a new "season” on a single subject every six months with one-offs in between.
It’s a model I still believe in, and one I am confident can be replicated at scale as the TV news industry looks to evolve in the relevancy wars and diversify revenue generation simultaneously.
Finding Brittanee Drexel
October 2022-2023
8 Episodes
185K Listens
When planning for future podcast series under the Unsolved South Carolina banner, we immediately circled the Brittanee Drexel case. Brittanee had vanished on a spring break trip in 2009, and her case remains our state’s most infamous disappearance of the century so far.
Little did we know how soon we’d be shifting our full attention to it. In May of 2022, Unsolved host Anne Emerson received a vague tip of a significant development in the Drexel case. Playing a hunch, I began combing through jail inmate booking records in nearby counties.
One booking stood out to me. A man had been in jail for a week on an obstruction of justice charge with no bond set. Highly unusual, I thought. His name was Raymond Moody. A quick search of our archives showed he was a suspect in Drexel’s case from the very beginning.
We broke the story within minutes. Finally — after 13 years — an arrest in Brittanee’s case. Incredible. I remembered being in my college dorm watching national news coverage of her disappearance. Now here I was the first to tell the world her killer was in handcuffs at last.
But the feeling quickly turned more bitter than sweet. The suspect now in custody was not the same man I had spent six years reporting on after the FBI boldly proclaimed it knew what happened to Brittanee and arrested Timothy Da’Shaun Taylor.
Tim Taylor had no connection to Brittanee Drexel, and knew nothing about her disappearance. That didn’t stop federal authorities from publicly and enthusiastically railroading him based solely on the word of a jailhouse informant and not a shred of evidence.
I was angry at the FBI and I was angry at myself for repeating in my coverage the false narrative they published. The truth of Tim Taylor had to be told with as much enthusiasm and conviction as the lies that had been spread about him.
That meant we had three stories to tell now: Brittanee’s life and legacy, the inexcusable mistreatment of an innocent man by our justice system, and finally the breakthrough in the case resulting in the arrest, confession, sentencing and imprisonment of Drexel’s real murderer.
Finding Brittanee Drexel was workshopped within days of Raymond Moody’s arrest, and we spent the entire summer of 2022 working on the series so we could debut the first episode when Moody went before a judge to face sentencing in October. It’s one of the proudest accomplishments of my career.