‘Murdaugh: Death in the Family’: Why ‘June 7th’ Doesn’t Show Alex as the Shooter

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for Murdaugh: Death in the Family Episode 6, “June 7th.”]

For those who know the saga of the Murdaugh murders well, the title of this episode will read as extremely ominous, as it’s the date that the double homicide at the center of everything in Murdaugh: Death in the Family took place.

Indeed, the episode does recreate the horrific events of that day, but there’s a twist: Instead of showing Alex (Jason Clarke) as the perpetrator of the shootings, we see a version of the story that more aligns with his original alibi. Alex is never shown at the kennels until he arrives to find the bodies and dials 9-1-1. Instead, he’s seen lying down on the couch after dinner as Maggie (Patricia Arquette) and Paul (Johnny Berchtold) head out to check on the dogs; later, he visits his mother to watch a game show and eat ice cream on her couch. When Maggie and Paul are unexpectedly shot in rapid succession by two different guns, we don’t see the shooter. Alex, upon returning home, calls out to them before driving out to find the bodies and calling 9-1-1.

Showing this version of the events was a creative decision made by the episode’s co-writers, Michael D. Fuller and Anna Fishko, and Fuller explained his reasoning for shaping the scene that way to TV Insider.

“There’s one of two ways you can go. If you see him enacting the crimes and the murders, then you’re watching this guy just lie to everybody for [the following] episodes. And there’s certainly a version of that that could have worked,” Fuller said. Instead, though, they wanted to capture, “What does that story truth feel like?” For Fuller, seeing the murders play out in line with Alex Murdaugh’s original accounts also puts the audience in the position that the real-life public was in when it happened back in 2021.

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“Nobody knew. There were some people who had suspicions,” he explained. “The civil suit was dropped. People were pouring out sympathy.” He also teased that the stylistic choice affects the rest of the season as it’s thus “passing the emotional baton to Buster.”

“So it was, ‘We’re not going full whodunnit, but let’s also live in the space of, well, we didn’t see him do it,’ and let the audience kind of come to their own conclusions as quickly or slowly as they do and watch this son come to terms with what he believes,” he added.

Murdaugh series co-creator Erin Lee Carr echoed Fuller’s reasoning for the decision, saying, “[We] basically show what some of the native South Carolinians saw… As we sit here in 2025, people are like, ‘OK, he did it.’ At the time, people were like, ‘There is no way he did this. It was two people. It was two guns. That guy loved his family. It makes no sense. He has no motive.'”

At the same time, though, the episode does amplify the perception of a motive by showing Maggie becoming fully ready to move on. She’s picking out paint swatches for the beach house, calling a divorce attorney, showing up without her ring on, and telling Alex to his face that she has no plans to move back to Moselle with him. Alex is also confronted about the missing Alvarez check by the law firm’s CFO just as he’s already busy filling out financial forms for the upcoming motion hearing in the Mallory Beach case, and his father is now dying. He admits at one point that he literally feels the walls closing in on him.

By contrast, there’s a moment of potential light in view for Paul. We see him decline to take a bunch of shots with a friend at a bar, thriving at work with his uncle (and even receiving a rare bit of praise from him), and admitting that his drinking has been excessive. He also apologizes to Alex for all he’s put the family through and says they both need to “do better.”

Paul even has a bit of a hero moment when, while driving home, he accidentally hits a dog. After rushing the animal to an overnight vet, he’s despondent until he learns it has survived.

“[It was] the cutest dog of all time,” Berchtold said, reflecting on the scene. “It’s an unexpected event that throws a curveball at him, and he’s faced with another life. For me, in that scene, it was really about, ‘I can’t do this again. I can’t be the cause of harm again.’ And so I think he goes into this mode of, ‘I have to fix this.'” Berchtold added that the scene was rewritten a few times, but he was thrilled with the results. “There was always that emotional release of just coming to terms with everything all at once, and I was so grateful to have the opportunity to play that. I think it was crafted so beautifully.”

There’s also a very tender exchange between Paul and Maggie in which they both seem ready to move on, having learned and grown from their mistakes.

“I think those scenes are the most tragic because we know what’s coming, right?” Berchtold said. “They were so devastating to film. Patricia is so wonderful and amazing, and my heart breaks for her in the scene. And there’s something so interesting about these two characters, having gone through these wild stories, coming together in this moment, connecting and almost finding a way forward, which just breaks my heart.”

Disney / Wilford Harewood

Filming the actual deaths of Paul and Maggie was an unsettling experience for the actors involved, Berchtold revealed, but not for the reason you might think. “I had a pit in my stomach leading up to shooting, and what surprised me so much was how at ease I was, especially with Patricia, and I was wondering why I felt so comfortable in that moment. Obviously, the crew [created a] safe environment to do that scene, but then it hit me that Paul and Maggie had no idea what was coming, and so Patricia and I almost didn’t either,” the actor said of the scene. “We had developed such a wonderful relationship up until that point as actors and coworkers, and so there was a sense of ease, which was really, really shocking, and then also just a full level of respect and sensitivity in those nights shooting that sequence.”

For the creatives, there was also a looming sense of responsibility about how to carefully craft this scene to be respectful of the very real people who did die in the way they’re showing it happen.

“It was something we had a hard time talking about in the room, about what it was going to feel like. There’s just something so voyeuristic,” Carr said. “I am a huge consumer and creator of true-crime content. There’s been some pretty graphic stuff in the stuff that I’ve worked on, but there was just something very eerie and uncomfortable [about this one]… I work on documentaries, which deal with crime scene evidence, but here it was, you had to rebuild the scene. You had to rebuild the kennels and the overhang and get all the pieces of equipment. ‘This is where John Marvin’s car was. This is where Alex’s car was.’ … They were these big shooting nights, and the whole crew, which was like 300 people, it was just dead quiet because we just knew what we were there to do.”

Murdaugh: Death in the Family, Wednesdays, Hulu