Doubleheader True Crime Review: Valerie Bauerlein’s The Devil at His Elbow and Abbott Kahler’s Eden Undone

Thanks so much to Julie for ordering both of these books for the collection! I was intrigued by both of them when I first heard about them, and they’re excellent reads that are very different from each other but pair well together.

The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty follows the story that people are probably more generally familiar with. It’s more recent and was extensively covered in the media–the notorious and convoluted Murdaugh murders in South Carolina.

If you escaped the ubiquitous coverage of the murders and the trial, the very short version is that wealthy Lowcountry lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who was from a prominent family, murdered his wife and son at their sprawling estate and then pretended that intruders did it while he was visiting his elderly mother. However, as investigators and the public quickly learned, many other bodies lurked in the family’s immediate past. Alex’s oldest son’s high school classmate found dead on a dark isolated road, his youngest son’s friend killed in a reckless boating accident, the family housekeeper fatally injured after falling on the family’s front steps. There was also the matter of Alex’s painkiller addiction; his flagrant fleecing of his many clients–whom he’d stolen millions of dollars of settlement money from; and whispers of his involvement in drug smuggling.

It’s a lot to unpack, and Wall Street Journal reporter Bauerlein, who covered the case and trial extensively, is able to deftly weave together all of the various storylines. What really stood out to me is how convoluted and nefarious Murdaugh’s entire family tree was. The prominent family he was so proud of–4 generations of prestigious lawyers and public servants in rural Hampton County–all had dark secrets reminiscent of Alex’s. They may not have annihilated their families on a dark June evening, but they also robbed clients, dabbled in moonshining, shamelessly cheated on their wives, and were connected to mysterious deaths in the community.

In chronicling the fall of the Murdaugh family, Bauerlein convincingly also argues that Alex and his troubled son Paul, whom he shotgunned to death in the family kennel, was, essentially, the natural result of a family that used the law for its own unlawful purposes, treated Hampton County like their own personal fiefdom, and ran rampant across the state of South Carolina without consequences.

It’s a dark, tragic, strange, and fascinating story.

Equally dark, tragic, strange, and fascinating is Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II. If The Devil at His Elbow is the story of a family that is rotten under the surface and has been for generations, then Eden Undone is the story of a dysfunctional community that also had a dark side from the beginning.

It’s about three separate groups of German and Austrian expats who ended up on the remote Galapagos island of Floreana in the late 1920s and early/mid 1930s. All parties fled what was essentially personal and professional scandals back in Europe for what seemed like an isolated island paradise. They include a troubled couple whose shared dentures and interest in vegetarianism and nudity (the nudity being a more stalwart devotion than the vegetarianism) belie an incredibly toxic dynamic with each other, a stolid and comparatively boring middle class family who arrive with a dream of homesteading and a teenage boy and a baby on the way, and a noblewoman of dubious origin and her revolving harem of emotionally and verbally abused boyfriends.

Each group envision the island as their own utopia, but they don’t like or trust each other and don’t want to work together. Despite the island peaking at a population of roughly 9, relationships deteriorate so badly and so quickly that multiple people disappear and die under questionable and suspicious circumstances.

Luckily for true crime writer Abbott Kahler, many of the participants were avid writers who chronicled their time on the island in journals or retrospectives following the dark events that unfolded. Floreana also saw many visitors, mainly wealthy adventurers intrigued by the strange personalities inhabiting the beautiful island and their tropical pioneer way of life. Like Bauerlein, she does a wonderful job of interweaving all the disparate threads of the story into a coherent and compelling narrative and has clearly extensively researched the topic.

I highly recommend both of these books for anyone who enjoys atmospheric, well-researched, and well-written true crime.

If you’ve already read them and are looking for more resources within our system on both stories, we also have a couple of other books on the Murdaugh case–Jason Ryan’s Swamp Kings: The Story of the Murdaugh Family of South Carolina and a Century of Backwoods Power and Mandy Matney’s Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and the Fall of the Murdaugh Dynasty. Ron Howard has a movie due out this autumn about the same story told in Eden Undone, but in the meantime, we also have a documentary you can watch The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, which features voice actors reading from the same primary sources used for Kahler’s book.

What have you been reading lately? Are you a true crime fan? Have you read any books about these cases? Tell us in the comments! As always, please follow this link to our online library catalog for more information on this book or to place it on hold.