This is a great article about it.
https://news.yahoo.com/just-keeps-coming-alex-murdaugh-010224837.html
**** Goes Downright Faulknerian
As Pat Conroy always said, “The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it?” But in this case, he was wrong, wrong, wrong. On September 14th, news broke: Murdaugh had been at the end of his rope. In a “massive depression,” and withdrawal from opioid addiction, he hired Curtis Edward Smith, 61, of Walterboro, SC, to kill him. This, Alex Murdaugh mistakenly believed, would ensure that his surviving son, 25-year-old Richard “Buster” Murdaugh, would collect his 10 million dollar life insurance policy — he thought the policy had a suicide exclusion.
Smith botched the shooting spectacularly, not only spending at least seven rounds with the gun Murdaugh provided him, but also actually failing to kill Murdaugh. He says he “got rid of the gun” after the shooting. While Murdaugh served as Smith’s lawyer in a personal-injury case a decade ago, a police source says that he was Murdaugh’s “personal drug dealer.”