COLUMBIA — In the swamps of Hampton County, Cyprus trees stand tall, moss drapes low from branches and creatures lurk in the murky water.
Author Jason Ryan noticed parallels between the landscapes of South Carolina’s lowcountry and the injustices tied to the Murdaugh family that flew under the radar for so long.
“Swamp Kings” is a new book from Charleston-based author Jason Ryan. It plots the lore of the Murdaugh Family in Hampton County over the years.
“(There’s a) metaphor of the swamp being a dark place and how light doesn't really pierce the canopy that often or not consistently, and that's a problem,” Ryan said.
Ryan leaned into the metaphor, and what resulted was a stranger-than-fiction Southern gothic tale.
His new book, "Swamp Kings: The Murdaugh Family of South Carolina and a Century of Backwoods Power" (Pegasus Crime – April 2, 2024), dives deep into the Murdaugh family lore that stole the nation’s attention when Alex Murdaugh went on trial in 2023. He was ultimately found guilty of murdering his wife and son, among more than 100 other charges.
Pegasus Books took on the book partly because of its irregular theme, compared to the more mainstream true crime that saturates podcast apps. Instead of your typical “whodunit,” this story identified its perpetrator from the start. It was the “how and why” that drew in Ryan’s editor, Jessica Case.
And “as crazy as it is, the story doesn’t start with Alex, it just goes generations back,” Case said. “Everything is built on this insane foundation of crime.”
Making a clear timeline of this history took Ryan countless eight-hour days in the library going through archives of the Hampton County Guardian, the area’s weekly paper that has existed for a century. There he discovered sources listed in obituaries, quirks about the county and a skeleton of everything that went down in Hampton County over the years – or at least, everything on the record.
Jason Ryan is an author and journalist based in Charleston, SC.
"I compare it to panning for gold and that there's certain places where you just collect a little bit, but they add up to something valuable,” he said.
It was a lot of research, but it was nothing new for the Charleston-based former journalist at The State Newspaper, who has penned other books. He is the author of "Jackpot: High Times, High Seas and the Sting that Launched the War on Drugs," "Hell-Bent: One Man’s Crusade to Crush the Hawaiian Mob" and "Race to Hawaii: The 1927 Dole Derby and the Thrilling First Flights that Opened the Pacific."
The story of the Murdaugh murders gripped the nation, but Ryan also saw a deeper lesson within his research and writing: we need to do a better job of calling out wrong behavior.
Much of what went uncovered for so long can be attributed to shrinking local newsrooms with few resources, especially in rural Hampton County, he said.
“For way too long there was a tolerance among locals to keep the Murdaugh family in power,” Ryan said. “There is an aspect of fear, I suppose, or helplessness that develops when it seems like even if you do call out wrong things that nothing changes and you just suffer because of it.”
But when the swamp’s tree canopy is pulled back, the alligators and snakes no longer have a place to hide – and the twisted, dark ecosystem is revealed in its entirety.
Ryan will be at Columbia's All Good Book in Five Points on May 11 at 3 p.m. to promote "Swamp Kings." More information at allgoodbooks.com
