Murdaugh Housekeeper Recounts Chilling Moment She Went to Dog Kennels on Estate — Found Lock of Maggie's Hair (Exclusive) By KC Baker

In the days and weeks after Maggie Murdaugh and her son, Paul Murdaugh, were shot and killed on the sprawling property of their Lowcountry, S.C., hunting lodge, housekeeper Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson saw reminders everywhere she looked of the woman with whom she had formed an unlikely bond.

After the shocking June 7, 2021, murders, Alex Murdaugh, then 54, asked Simpson and her husband to manage the 1,770-acre property for him.

Nearly two years later, in March 2023, Alex would be convicted of the murders of his wife and son and sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole. He was later found guilty of a slew of financial crimes and sentenced to an additional 40 years in prison. He is appealing the murder conviction.

Before all of this, in the summer of 2021, Simpson remembers Alex asking her to move Maggie’s clothes from the master bedroom closet to another closet at the property’s main house.

“He said he couldn’t stand to see them every time he came over to get more of his things,” Simpson writes in her new memoir, Within the House of Murdaugh: Amid a Unique Friendship — Blanca and Maggie, out this month and co-authored with Mary Frances Weaver.

“When I opened the closet, I could still smell her perfume,” she writes. “I stood there, breathing in the scent; part of her still lingered.”

Simpson, 58, had worked for the once-influential Murdaugh family as one of their housekeepers since 2007 and for Alex, then an attorney, helping him translate for Spanish-speaking clients since 2002.

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She became close to them while caring for their Hampton home, then Moselle in Islandton and their house on Edisto Island.

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

On the day after the murders, Alex asked her to go to Moselle to clean up the house because her parents and others were going to be visiting. Simpson stayed at the house and avoided going to the kennels, where the bodies of Maggie and Paul had been found.

Once she and her husband began managing the property, they had to go to the kennels to check on the dogs.

What she saw during that first visit to the kennels sticks with her to this day, she says.

“As I walked toward the kennel, I spotted a lock of Maggie’s hair lying in plain sight near where her body was found,” she writes. “Obviously, the crime scene hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned. I wasn’t ready for what I saw. I expected the kennel area to look exactly the same as when I last visited. It did not.”

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 multimillion-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. 

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.