Blood on Their Hands by Mandy Matney

Author:Mandy Matney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

11.

A Slap in the Face

It took David and me sixty hours of recording—spread out over a week—to make our first, twelve-minute episode.

David became our taskmaster: he scheduled a standing nightly appointment after dinner for us to record and work on the script. He set up a recording station at our high table in the kitchen, which our dog, Luna, hated because it didn’t allow her to participate. She kept barking and trying to jump in my lap as I struggled through my words, sentence by sentence.

Looking back now, I can see our process was incredibly convoluted and painstaking: we recorded each sentence once. Then we listened to it, and then we tried the same sentence again. And again. And again until we found one we could live with that didn’t have a dog barking in the background or my throat catching on a word or my phone buzzing across the room.

And then we moved onto the next sentence.

We did that about nine hundred thousand times.

“I don’t know who killed Paul Murdaugh,” I said over and over again. I hated the sound of my voice, and I still wasn’t comfortable with the idea that this podcast would be just me talking for the entire episode. Even though David and I had recorded our test episode together, we both agreed that the real thing should be me on my own.

“No one needs to hear another white guy interrupting people,” he said.

When I had to play back recorded interviews with sources for my reporting, I always fast-forwarded through the parts where I was speaking. I thought I sounded so awkward and nasally—it was painful to hear myself. It felt like looking at your pores in a magnifying mirror or trying on bathing suits under fluorescent light.

Speaking into a microphone and imagining how hundreds—maybe thousands?—of people might eventually hear what we were recording got me stuck in my head. I didn’t know how I was supposed to sound. Was I too serious? Not serious enough? Occasionally I’d have a drink to try to calm my nerves, which often turned into more, and then my enunciation would get sloppy. Sometimes we’d rerecord a single word and attempt to patch it back into a bumpy sentence. Eventually we’d get so groggy we’d have to quit for the night.

During the day, I was on the phone with sources for hours trying to learn as much as I could about Maggie and Paul Murdaugh’s deaths. There seemed to be four main theories floating around online. The first was that Alex was behind it—he either killed them himself or had them killed. Others thought Paul killed Maggie and then Alex killed Paul. That theory had some legs for me; I had long assumed Paul was a truly troubled kid, perhaps even a sociopath. We knew from the boat crash reporting that he had a horrible temper. But had something set him off so viciously that he’d succumb to matricide?

Still other people thought the boat crash kids or their families

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