In 2021, following the double murders of Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh and her son, Paul, journalist Mandy Matney launched a true-crime podcast delving into the case and their well-connected South Carolina family. Her “Murdaugh Murders Podcast” chronicled not just the investigation into the double homicide—including the trial and conviction of prominent lawyer Alex Murdaugh for killing his wife and son—but also the family’s legacy, criminal investigations into fraud and obstruction of justice, and connections to several mysterious deaths.
Now, the podcast is the inspiration for a Hulu limited series, in which Matney is both an executive producer and a character in the fictionalized story. Murdaugh: Death in the Family explores the case and what Mandy’s reporting uncovered, starring Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) as Alex Murdaugh, Patricia Arquette (Severance) as Maggie, and Brittany Snow (The Hunting Wives) as Matney.
Read on to learn more about Matney and her reporting, including why she was already investigating the Murdaughs years before the murders, how involved she was with the true-crime TV adaptation, and what she’s doing now.
Brittany Snow portrays Mandy Matney as she investigates the Murdaugh case in Murdaugh: Death in the Family.
Who is Mandy Matney?
Mandy Matney is an investigative journalist originally from Kansas City, Kansas, who’s now based in South Carolina. A graduate of the journalism school at the University of Kansas, she held reporting jobs in Missouri and Illinois before heading to South Carolina to work for The Island Packet in Hilton Head Island, which is where she first began looking into the Murdaughs following a deadly 2019 boat crash that involved an allegedly intoxicated Paul.
After Maggie and Paul were killed in 2021, she launched the “Murdaugh Murders Podcast” to further delve into the family. Initially recording episodes from her kitchen table, she wasn’t recapping a finished case—she was covering the investigation in real time. The podcast quickly became a hit and eventually spanned 94 episodes.
“All of a sudden, it seemed like the whole world was watching the Murdaugh case, and we were the go-to podcast for it,” Matney told Kansas Alumni magazine in 2024. “Because I had been working on the case for so long and had a lot of sources on the ground who knew what was going on, the episode we put out after the shooting incident was questioning it—was saying, ‘This is why this is suspicious.’ It was way different from what the rest of the world was reporting. I was leading my audience in the correct direction, and because of that, I think people realized how good our sources were and that we were a voice they could trust in this, and they got really immersed in the story.”
How did Mandy Matney begin investigating the Murdaughs?
In 2019, authorities reported that 19-year-old Mallory Packet was killed after Paul Murdaugh drunkenly crashed his family’s boat in Beaufort County, South Carolina. Matney, then at The Island Packet, began investigating the case with her colleague Liz Farrell, marking her first exposure to the Murdaugh family.
“The boat crash happened when I was the breaking news editor there, and it changed everything,” she told Common Good in a recent interview.
Their story “absolutely consumed my life” from that time onward, even more so after the murders in 2021. “The Murdaughs were such a hard egg to crack, because at first—and a lot of people forget this—very, very few people would talk at all about the Murdaughs in 2019, and getting somebody to talk on the record was even harder,” she said in that same interview. “People were just very scared.”
What else did Mandy Matney uncover about the Murdaughs?
As detailed on the podcast and portrayed in Murdaugh: Death in the Family, Matney doesn’t stop digging. That unflinching work leads her to questions surrounding the investigation into the boat crash; years of Alex’s financial misdeeds; the still-unsolved death of another young man, Stephen Smith; and a fall suffered by the family’s longtime housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, at the Murdaugh home.
One creative liberty the show took was having Paul’s boat crash occur before Gloria’s fall. In reality, the fall happened a year earlier, in 2018. “It was more helpful, emotionally, to see what does she mean to this family, what roles does she play, specifically with Paul,” series showrunner Michael D. Fuller explained to TV Insider of the change.
The real Mandy Matney and Snow attend the premiere for Murdaugh: Death in the Family.
Where is Mandy Matney now?
Matney still lives in Hilton Head and continues to pursue investigative journalism through her production company, Lunashark Media. She also published a 2023 book, Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and the Fall of the Murdaugh Dynasty, which detailed her work reporting on the case.
Matney concluded the “Murdaugh Murders” podcast in 2023 and relaunched it as “True Sunlight,” where she continues to cover Murdaugh updates while also exploring other cases. She also co-hosts the “Cup of Justice” podcast, which was spun off from bonus episodes of “Murdaugh Murders” and dives deeper into legal analysis. She’s also teaming up with Brittany Snow for a companion podcast for Death in the Family that will go behind the scenes with the cast and crew.