Her death became a footnote in the sensational Alex Murdaugh murder case. These filmmakers are rectifying that

On 23 February 2019, 19-year-old Mallory Beach attended an oyster roast on an island in Beaufort County, South Carolina. She, her boyfriend, and a group of friends, arrived by boat on the Beaufort River. Among them was Paul Murdaugh, the 19-year-old heir of a prominent local family. The group left the party a few hours later, around midnight. Paul decided to stop at a bar on the way back, according to surviving members of the group interviewed in a new documentary. He ended up drunk, but insisted on driving the boat back himself.

“The way Paul was driving was honestly terrifying,” Morgan Doughty, Paul’s then-girlfriend, says in Netflix’s Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, a three-part documentary premiering on Netflix on 22 February. On board with Paul were Morgan, Mallory, Mallory’s boyfriend Anthony Cook, Anthony’s cousin Connor Cook, and Connor’s girlfriend Miley Altman. When the boat crashed, only five people could be located: Paul, Morgan, Anthony, Connor, and Miley. Mallory was missing.

She was found dead a week later, leaving her parents, her boyfriend, her friends, and other loved ones devastated. “My world crumbled,” her father Phillip Beach says in the Netflix documentary. He and Mallory’s mother Renee Beach retained an attorney. Paul was eventually charged with multiple felonies in relation to the boat crash and Mallory’s death, to which he pleaded not guilty. He was still awaiting trial when he and his mother Maggie Murdaugh were found shot to death in Islandton, South Carolina, at the family’s hunting property, on 7 June 2021.

Alex Murdaugh, Paul’s father and Maggie’s husband, was charged with both murders on 14 July 2022. His trial – which is currently ongoing – has become one of the highest-profile legal cases of the year, generating daily headlines. While Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal is airing during these proceedings, it isn’t a retelling of the case as told in court filings. Instead, the documentary takes one of the leading true-crime sagas of our time and strips it down to reveal a deeper, much more gripping story of human loss and suffering.

Alex’s trial has consumed so much oxygen that, in recent tellings of the saga, Mallory’s death has become almost a prologue to the wider story of the Murdaugh family. Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal brings the focus back to Mallory in a significant manner; almost half of the three-part series centres around her death. We hear from her parents, as well as all five surviving passengers of the boat crash that killed her. Alex Murdaugh is mentioned, but doesn’t become the focus of the show until much later.

“I think we always knew that Mallory’s story was the springboard for this narrative,” Jenner Furst, who co-directed the documentary with Julia Willoughby Nason, says in a phone call with The Independent ahead of its release. “If you don’t have that accident, and you don’t have the way the community responded to that accident, and the way it ripped the community apart … [then] you don’t have a double homicide.”

Furst says Mallory’s death led to increased scrutiny on the Murdaugh family and their alleged dealings, which in turn created a “pressure cooker” of a situation. By the time Alex Murdaugh was charged with Paul and Maggie’s murders, he was already facing a litany of other fraud and financial counts.

“The way that you see it transpire in our series is the way it was told to us by anyone who knew anything about this story: that if it wasn’t for this boat accident, you wouldn’t even have the double homicides,” Furst says.

Mallory’s death is treated as more than an inciting incident in the series. The chaos and distress of that night comes through in interviews with her loved ones, audio tapes of phone calls placed after the boat crash, archive video footage, and effective reenactments.

“The true crime space focuses a lot on the criminal,” Nason says in the same phone call. “We wanted to understand who the victims are here, and the heart of their stories. … In a true crime, there’s so much detective work, but at the end of the day, these are real people whose lives were overturned. Their whole small community was infiltrated with news cameras, and their privacy disappeared overnight. I feel very grateful that they trusted us to film with them in that landscape.”

The timing of the documentary also explains its focus on Mallory’s death, and on allegations that predate Paul and Maggie’s deaths. Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal wrapped after Alex was charged with his son and wife’s murders, but before his trial began. Nason and Furst did not know the show would air at the same time the proceedings would take place, nor did they know Alex’s trial would air live on television.

“We spent about a year in the community, and it was incredible to see this non-stop barrage of additional criminal charges, more news, more insights, more rumors, more gossip, and ultimately this impending story of justice that is unfolding now,” Furst tells The Independent. “You couldn’t have asked for timing like this. To have the trial itself be a live televised event happening right as the series comes out, it’s one of the most fortuitous moments you could ever ask for as a documentary filmmaker.”

When Nason and Furst discuss the documentary’s participants, they do so with empathy and a sense of responsibility. They’ve both been in this line of work for around two decades, but sitting down with people and asking them to share some of the most traumatic, defining moments of their lives is “still new,” Nason says.

“Every time I sit down with a subject, I get nervous,” she says.  “... But it’s a chemistry between us, me and the subjects, that makes them feel comfortable and [gives them] the space to air out their answers to these questions and relive some things. A lot of times, subjects put things together in real time that they haven’t thought about.”

Interviews with Morgan, Anthony, Miley, Connor, and their parents bring into focus the waves of disruption and trauma experienced by the community. As Alex’s trial keeps making headlines, they are often stuck between the need for answers and the need to keep existing. Morgan’s testimony, especially, offers an element of catharsis as she unpacks the story of her relationship with Paul, and of her life following his and Mallory’s deaths.

In Beaufort County, Morgan can easily be seen as an outsider. Her parents, Bill and Diane Doughty, are from Long Island, meaning she’s sometimes not considered a “full Southerner”, according to Furst. Diane works as a nurse in a prison, Bill as a landscape architect and designer.

“We keep to ourselves,” Diane says in the documentary. “We all work and just do our thing.”

Morgan’s vantage point – “as the girlfriend, as the outsider” – seemed new to Furst and Nason. “There was a feeling while we were doing the interview with Morgan, that this whole story was unfolding in front of us,” Furst says.

Both documentarians would consider giving the show a second season given the breadth of what they’ve gathered.  “We have more than enough now with the trial itself and what is unfolding in the community as we speak,” Furst says. For now, they hope the series compels viewers to look at the individual stories of upended lives that make up the truth of every true crime saga.

“What I hope viewers can take from this documentary is that behind the adrenaline-junkie aspect of true crime in this case, there are people who have an intimate and nuanced perspective about community, about growing up, about dreams that were lost,” Nason says.

Furst is uplifted by the idea that even in a story as painful as this one, “people persevere. People continue to live, they try to live their best life in a community that’s been turned upside down.” He points to Mal’s Palz, an animal shelter founded in Mallory’s memory, to reflect her love for animals.

“As silly as some people may think it is, we find great importance in these small things,” Furst says. “If thousands of animals could one day be saved in an organisation called Mal’s Palz, we want to be part of that, because there’s no better way to honour Mallory. She was an incredibly benevolent, loving, charismatic person. She loved animals, she loved people, and it’s up to us to keep her alive.”

Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal streams on Netflix from 22 February in the US and in the UK