I was at the spa at the Four Seasons St. Louis, Missouri, in January 2024 and the therapist asked me where I was visiting from. “Hilton Head, South Carolina,” I replied. To which she said, “Do you know Mandy Matney?”
To say that Matney has become a household name would be an understatement. A small-market newspaper reporter who spoke up when everyone else was afraid to, followed up when her editors told her not to, and went on to wreak havoc on the good ol’ boys of South Carolina. How’s that for a headline?
The Baby Boomer generation remembers where they were when JFK was shot. I’ll never forget looking up into the bright blue cloudless sky after hearing the news that a plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11. And because of Matney’s reporting and her No. 1 in the world ranked Murdaugh Murders Podcast, everyone will remember where they were when Alex Murdaugh was “carjacked and shot,” when the guilty verdict came in, and when Judge Newman read the sentencing (I was sitting in my office, with my team crowded around me and my monitor).
The first time I heard the podcast, I was walking my dog. We had just made the curve onto Rose Hill Drive when I stopped in my tracks. I thought Matney sounded a little nervous but determined. I sensed there was something there and Matney knew it. Week after week, I – and thousands upon thousands of others – tuned in to hear what Matney and her co-host, Liz Farrell, had uncovered. And week after week there was something new. The sheer determination and level of research was unprecedented for our little corner of the world. No fear. No apologies. Just the facts. Pure balls.
Mandy Matney refers to the Hulu show as the bookend – a final chapter to the Murdaugh Murders Podcast saga.
This month, Hulu will release the eight-part series, Murdaugh: A Death in the Family, based on the Murdaugh Murders Podcast and Matney’s relentless pursuit of the truth. I had the opportunity to sit down with Matney and her husband David Moses to hear more about their journey.
This show isn’t just about Matney telling the story; indeed, she became a part of the story. She lived it. Breathed it. Battled it.
Patricia Arquette, who plays Maggie Murdaugh in the Hulu series described the story as, “A sad, rotten American tale.” Matney agrees with that assessment, sharing that personally, she had been very bitter about the Murdaugh experience. “I just had a chip on my shoulder about it. I was angry about how people were treated,” she said. “I was angry about what I found out about the justice system throughout the whole thing, and that the system wasn’t really fixed at the end of it. It was just like they put a Band-Aid on it at the end. That all made me mad.”
On the flip side, being on set in Atlanta (Matney is a producer on the show) let her see the entire experience through a different lens. “The good part of it is that we get to tell that story to the world now in a fun and exciting way,” she said. “And we couldn’t ask for better people to work with.”
Matney shared that some of the actors had listened to the podcast. Johnny Burch, who plays Paul Murdaugh, ran up to her on the first day on set and said, “I was listening to your podcast religiously.” Burch, a brunette, was in full-on “Paul” make-up. “His arm hair, his facial hair, he was fully Paul,” Matney said.
Some of Matney’s comfort in the process came from knowing that the cast was, as she said, “invested before they were invested, they were there for the story.”
Matney has always been a dreamer, but at the same time, very rooted in reality – and at the start of this, her reality was as a small-town journalist. Did she ever daydream about her life being made into a TV show and consider who might play her? No. Matney watched Brittany Snow, who plays her in the series, on TV when she was a kid and a teenager. Snow starred in the TV drama American Dreams in the early 2000s, the Pitch Perfect franchise, and most recently as the star of The Hunting Wives. “I told Brittany, the confidence boost that I got from her just being interested in the show has changed my life in a lot of ways,” Matney said.
A dreamer yes, but Matney also is a curious writer, driven by her mother’s strong moral compass and advice to always do what is right. “My mom is the queen of pesky. She is very good at getting answers,” Matney said.
Matney never gave up on the story that her gut told her was much more than it appeared on the surface. Her idea for the podcast started when she was still writing for The Island Packet, when the boat crash that killed Mallory Beach first happened, and she dug into everything she could find on Paul Murdaugh and his family.
While her editors and seasoned writers at the Packet told her not to pursue the story, she knew there was something there. Matney heard over and over again, “Nothing is going to change. This is how it’s always been here. These people have run everything for a really long time. Stay away from it.” Matney was also very attuned to how the national media was telling the story when Paul and Maggie were murdered. “They were trying to say that the boat crash kids were likely the suspects, and they were trying to blame all the wrong people.”
It was pretty clear to Matney that bigger forces were trying to make the Murdaughs out to be the victims. “I just remember thinking ‘people have to know the truth,’” she said. “It felt like there was a lump in my throat until I got it out. I’m writing, I’m writing, I’m tweeting. But I knew the story needed a podcast for people to fully understand all of the background.”
So, Matney said, as she turned and smiled at Moses, “Sweet David just kind of bucked up and figured out how to teach himself audio. He was like, ‘This podcast has to be done, and you have to tell it, and you have to tell it in a way that you are telling it to me right now.’”
Thus, she followed her gut and her decade of journalism experience in newsrooms across the country and went for it, confident in her ability to tell the story in the way that she wanted to – without getting sued – because she knew what the truth was. But having Moses and Farrell on her team made a profound difference.
From the start, in the Packet newsroom, when everyone was saying “no,” Farrell and Matney would look at one another and say, “But what can we do? What can we get at this point? Every single week, we were told that something can’t happen in one way or another, and we figured out a way into it,” Matney said.
Moses provided a solid glimpse into the show when he spoke about the synergy that the actors who play Farrell (Alicia Kelly) and Matney (Snow) had in telling the story. “You can see it on the screen,” Moses said. “This special talent and skill that Mandy and Liz have – you can see the visible emotion come across the screen. The visceral, emotional truth is there.”
For Matney, she is thrilled that the show is portraying the strength of her relationship with Farrell. Everybody needs a partner. “Co-workers are a huge, huge, huge part of success – Liz and I believed each other, and we believed in each other. Without Liz, I may have just gone back to my desk and said, ‘there’s nothing that can be done.’ But when you have a colleague that shares that peskiness ….”
That peskiness is why Matney gets messages every day from people across the country who are begging for people to look into their family members’ murder. While the Murdaugh Murders Podcast concluded at 93 episodes, it evolved into the True Sunlight podcast, with 114 (and counting) episodes of its own. Matney and Farrell continue to seek the truth, covering stories where crime and corruption meet, amplifying the voices of victims in a system that is broken.
The drama and the trauma that catapulted Matney into a household name is over. Matney refers to the Hulu show as the bookend – a final chapter to the Murdaugh Murders Podcast saga, that turned her bitterness into appreciation.
