Inside Alex Murdaugh's Former Housekeeper's Bombshell Book About What She Saw: 'I Knew He Did It' (Exclusive) By KC Baker

From the moment Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson drove onto the Murdaugh family’s 1,770-acre hunting estate in Islandton, S.C., on June 8, 2021, troubling details stood out to her.

At about 8:50 p.m. the night before, her longtime employer and dear friend Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and her son Paul, 22, were shot to death outside of the kennels on the edge of the sprawling property. At 6 a.m., Maggie’s husband, Alex, called Simpson to relay the shocking news. “They’re gone, B,’” she remembers him telling her. “They’re gone!” 

Later that morning, Alex asked Simpson, one of the family’s loyal housekeepers since 2007, to clean the house at Moselle because Maggie’s parents and others were coming later.

When Simpson, a US Navy veteran and former corrections officer, reached the house at the end of the long driveway, she saw Maggie’s Mercedes SUV parked on the right. That seemed odd, she tells PEOPLE, because in all the years she had known Maggie, she’d always parked on the left.

Inside, she found something else that didn’t sit right with her: Maggie’s pajamas and a pair of her underwear artfully laid out on the laundry room floor, as though Maggie planned to wear them that night. Maggie never wore underwear to bed, Simpson says. Maggie’s purse, makeup bag and luggage were still inside the SUV because she was planning to return that night to the family’s beach house in Edisto, S.C., where she had been staying. “I knew automatically that wasn’t her,” she says. 

Simpson opens up about what she saw on the morning after the shocking June 7, 2021, murders and during the 14 years she worked for the Murdaughs in her new tell-all, Within the House of Murdaugh: Amid a Unique Friendship — Blanca and Maggie. Out this month and co-authored with Mary Frances Weaver, Simpson fills in many blanks about the sensational case that captivated the nation.

Simpson didn’t know it at the time, but seeing those oddities at Moselle was the beginning of her painful realization that Alex, the amiable boss she remembers as being so devoted to his family, just might be responsible for the violent shooting deaths of his wife and youngest son. 

Her suspicions proved correct. In March 2023, Alex, now 57, was convicted of murdering Maggie and Paul, and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in prison without the possibility of parole. He was later found guilty of a slew of financial crimes and is appealing the murder conviction. 

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Simpson, who caused a commotion when she testified at Alex’s murder trial about the money woes Maggie allegedly suffered because of her husband’s financial misdeeds, still can’t believe he killed his wife and son. “In the end the Murdaugh name meant more,” says Simpson. “Maggie and Paul were just collateral.”

In the book, Simpson details how the family’s happy, carefree existence and vast influence as “Lowcountry royalty,” as Weaver put it, began to erode when Paul drunkenly crashed his boat in 2019 killing Mallory Beach, 19. Facing multi-million dollar lawsuits, Alex turned increasingly to drugs, becoming desperate when his financial woes and misdeeds were about to surface. To him, says Simpson, killing Maggie and Paul became his only option. “The secrets he carried got to be too much,” Simpson tells PEOPLE. 

Knowing as much as she does about the family and its habits, Simpson has her own theories about what happened that horrific night, which she explores in detail in the book. While she says no one except Alex knows the truth, she speculates that he worked with an accomplice who helped him clean up, drive Maggie’s SUV back to the house and stage the crime scene by leaving her pajamas on the floor. 

For more about Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson and the Murdaugh family, subscribe now to PEOPLE or pick up this week’s issue, on newsstands Friday.

When law enforcement began investigating the high-profile murders, “nobody asked me anything,” she says.

Information she had could have helped the investigation further, she says. 

When she tried to reach out about telling observations she witnessed, she says she was dismissed. “To them, I was just the Mexican housekeeper,” she says.

For Simpson, her big “aha” moment about Alex’s guilt came after the trial began in January 2023, when she was watching from home and she saw police body cam footage of a beach towel in Alex’s Suburban. Alex had told police he was sleeping in the main house at Moselle when Maggie and Paul were shot. He said he went to his parents’ house to check on father, Randolph Murdaugh, 81, who died three days after the murders. When he returned to Moselle at 10:07 p.m., he said he found the bodies of his wife and son and called 911.

Simpson had washed that towel, placing it high on a shelf in the laundry room on the day of the murders. “I looked at the towel and I said, ‘Oh my God. He did it,’” she recalls.

She thinks he used the towel to clean up after the murders and that it had possible DNA evidence on it. Like the shirt he had on the day of the murders, the towel vanished after the night of June 7. “What happened to that towel?” she asks. 

Honoring the Life of a Treasured Friend

Besides giving readers an insider’s perspective of life with the once-powerful family, the book details the close friendship Simpson developed with Maggie.

“I have so many fond memories of her,” says Simpson. “She was thoughtful, generous – and a lot of fun.” 

Simpson’s ties to the Murdaughs began in 2002 when she worked part-time for Alex, helping him with his Spanish-speaking clients. In 2007, when he mentioned he was looking for extra help at home for his wife, Simpson said she could do it. 

On her first day, however, she wasn’t sure what to expect. “We were on different rungs of the social ladder,” she writes. But Maggie greeted her warmly at the door of the family’s house on Holly St. Ext. in Hampton, putting her instantly at ease. Over time, the two developed a close friendship, especially when people began shunning Maggie and the rest of her family because of anger over their alleged efforts as one of the area’s most powerful legal dynasties, to influence the investigation.

“She would call me on the phone and say, ‘Girl, I got something to tell you,’” Simpson tells PEOPLE. 

The two laughed about comical scrapes they sometimes found themselves in, including when Maggie pulled Simpson from under a bed by her feet when she was putting bricks under the headboard.

“They were like Lucy and Ethel,” says Weaver. “You wouldn’t believe what these two got into.”

Love for Bubba

Simpson hopes the book helps readers to get to know the real Maggie.

“She was so full of life,” she says. “She always looked out for me. I want to honor her legacy.”

After the murders, she adopted Bubba, the Labrador retriever who was Maggie’s favorite among the family dogs, including Biscuit, Sugar, Honey, and Bourbon.

A bittersweet reminder of the friend she lost, Bubba provides comfort in the moments when Simpson grows emotional about the horrific way Maggie and Paul, “who was my heart” were killed.

“I took care of Bubba and he kind of emotionally took care of me,” she says.

Though she tells Alex exactly what she thinks of him in a sometimes scathing open letter she wrote to him in the epilogue, she does include fond memories she has of him, as well.

Not only was he a good boss who always looked out for her, “He was always the life of the party. Everybody liked him. He was good to the people around him, including me.

“So people still have to hear about the good things he did,” she says.

As for the naysayers who don’t believe she and Maggie were so close,  she says, “I hope one day they find their own Maggie so they can enjoy the kind of friendship we had.”

Within the House of Murdaugh: Amid a Unique Friendship – Blanca and Maggie by Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson and Mary Frances Weaver, is available now, wherever books are sold.