5 Murdaugh Family Bombshells from Their Former Housekeeper (Including Why She Thinks Alex Didn't Act Alone) By Emily Blackwood

More details about the Murdaugh murders came to light thanks to a memoir published by their longtime housekeeper.

In Within the House of Murdaugh: Amid a Unique Friendship — Blanca and Maggie, Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson recounted her 14 years of working for the wealthy South Carolina family and the lingering questions surrounding the double homicide that shattered it.

In June 2021, 52-year-old Maggie Murdaugh and her 22-year-old son, Paul Murdaugh, were shot to death on the family’s 1,770-acre hunting estate. Their patriarch, Alex Murdaugh, was found guilty of their murders and has been serving two consecutive life sentences since 2023.

Simpson’s 2025 memoir, which she co-authored with Mary Frances Weaver, detailed the oddities she claimed to have witnessed at the family’s estate after the murders and how police allegedly never questioned her during the investigation.

She also suggested that the multimillion-dollar lawsuits the Murdaughs faced after Paul’s role in the 2019 boat crash that killed 19-year-old Mallory Beach turned the disgraced attorney — who also had an expensive, secret drug habit — into a desperate man.

“The secrets he carried got to be too much,” Simpson told PEOPLE in November 2025. “In the end, the Murdaugh name meant more. Maggie and Paul were just collateral.”

From what she recalled about the day Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were killed to her own theories about what happened, here are the five biggest bombshells from Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson’s book.

Simpson called Alex the “life of the party”

Prior to the murders, Simpson had no complaints about working for the Murdaughs. She described her employers as caring, easy-going and protective, even telling PEOPLE that Alex was “always the life of the party.”

“Everybody liked him,” the housekeeper said. “He was good to the people around him, including me … He could talk to anybody.”

Simpson started working part-time for Alex in 2002 to assist him with his Spanish-speaking clients. Five years later, she agreed to be one of the family’s housekeepers, which she said was “the best decision” she ever made.

“Their caring nature made me feel a part of their family,” she told PEOPLE. “Maggie and Alex’s carefree and no-worries mottos were their best attributes.”

She suggested Alex staged the crime scene a certain way

In her memoir, Simpson recounted the day she found out that Maggie and Paul had died, and told PEOPLE that Alex called her early in the morning with the news. “They’re gone, B,” she recalled him saying. “They’re gone!” 

She claimed he later asked her to come clean the interior of the home as Maggie’s family would be coming over. Upon arrival, she noticed that the matriarch’s Mercedes SUV wasn’t parked in her usual spot and that her pajamas and underwear were laid out on the laundry room floor in a way Maggie had never done before. However, her purse, makeup bag and luggage were still inside the SUV.

“I knew automatically that wasn’t her,” Simpson told PEOPLE, noting that Maggie never wore underwear to bed.

Those little odd details didn’t sit right with her at the time, and after Alex was convicted, she wondered if those were signs that he had staged the crime scene.

Simpson speculated that Alex didn’t act alone in the murders

Simpson alleged in Within the House of Murdaugh that Alex wasn’t alone on the night he killed Maggie and Paul. She believed he worked with an accomplice who helped him clean up the crime scene, stage Maggie’s pajamas and drive her car back to the house.

In a scathing letter addressed to Alex that she included in her book, the housekeeper claimed that she saw an unnamed woman walking around the family’s estate after Maggie and Paul’s funerals.

“I especially remember an unfamiliar woman wandering around the house as if she owned the place, almost as if announcing to the world, ‘This will be mine,’ ” she wrote, without providing any more details.

She was allegedly never interviewed by police

Despite her knowledge about the family’s habits, Simpson said that “nobody” from law enforcement asked her “anything” about the murders. She claimed that she even tried reaching out herself, but was dismissed.

“To them, I was just the Mexican housekeeper,” she told PEOPLE, noting that the details she had witnessed could have helped the investigation.

Simpson was, however, called to testify in Alex’s trial in February 2023.

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Another one of those details emerged during Alex’s trial in January 2023. While watching from home, Simpson noticed a beach towel in police body cam footage of the lawyer’s Suburban — a towel she knows she washed on the day of the murders.

“I looked at the towel and I said, ‘Oh my God. He did it,’ ” she recalled.

The housekeeper claimed she had cleaned the towel and set it high on a shelf in the laundry room. Alex told police that he was sleeping at the property’s main house when Maggie and Paul were murdered and left to visit his 81-year-old father. He claimed that when he returned around 10 p.m., he discovered his wife and son dead and called 911.

Simpson believed the towel being in Alex’s car meant he had used it to clean up after the murders. However, it — and any potential DNA evidence it contained — disappeared after the murders, just like the shirt he had been wearing earlier in the day.

Simpson included a scathing letter to Alex in the book’s epilogue

At the end of her book, Simpson penned a cutting letter to Alex, asking him what had to go so wrong for him to take the lives of his wife and son.

“I often ask myself, at what point did greed, ambition, and lack of empathy overpower you?” she wrote. “You had love, family, friendship, respect, and privilege — you had it all, and you decimated everything when you decided nobody deserved to be better off than your family.”

She continued, “What happened to you? What happened to the man who was always entertaining by cracking jokes; what happened to the man who nurtured and cared for his family? At what point did you become so unhappy in your life that you decided to kill your wife and son?”

“I may never find the answers that bring me full closure, but for now, I am releasing the emotional burden of your betrayal and focusing on my own healing. Praying for you, Blanca,” Simpson concluded.