More than four years after the murders that upended South Carolina’s Lowcountry and two years after the conviction that sealed Alex Murdaugh’s downfall, the family’s longtime housekeeper is sharing the moment she says everything finally clicked.
In her new book, Within the House of Murdaugh: Amid a Unique Friendship – Blanca and Maggie, Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson paints a vivid, intimate portrait of life inside the Murdaugh home before and after the June 2021 killings of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. With co-writer Mary Frances Weaver, she traces the small details and quiet moments that—looking back—formed the trail she believes ultimately implicated the man she had known for nearly two decades.
Maggie, 52, and Paul, 22, were shot to death near the dog kennels at the family’s sprawling Moselle estate on June 7, 2021. Murdaugh claimed he’d been visiting his ailing parents and returned home at 10:07 p.m. to find their bodies. He called 911 in anguish, telling dispatchers through sobs that his wife and son were gone.
Turrubiate-Simpson had worked for the family for 14 years and considered Maggie a close friend. She testified during Murdaugh’s 2023 murder trial about the couple’s strained finances and the shifting mood in the household. But she says her “aha” moment came only afterward, when she saw body camera footage showing a beach towel sitting in the back of Murdaugh’s SUV.
She says she recognized it instantly — because she had washed the towel herself and placed it on a high shelf in the laundry room the very same day the murders occurred. It had no business being in the Suburban unless someone had moved it.
“I looked at the towel and I said, ‘Oh my God. He did it,’” she writes.
In her account, she believes Murdaugh used the towel to clean up after the killings. Like the shirt he wore that day, the towel later vanished.
“What happened to that towel?” she asks.
Turrubiate-Simpson says she first learned something was wrong when her phone rang at sunrise on June 8. On the other end was Murdaugh, panicked. “They’re gone, B,” she remembers him saying. “They’re gone!”
A few hours later, he asked her to clean the Moselle home before Maggie’s parents arrived. She walked into a house that felt wrong in ways she could not yet explain. Maggie’s SUV was parked on the wrong side of the driveway. Her pajamas and underwear were neatly laid out — despite Maggie never wearing underwear to bed. “I knew automatically that wasn’t her,” she writes.
She believes the inconsistencies, and the rushed request to tidy the home, point to staging. In the book, she even outlines her theory that Murdaugh had help—someone who moved cars, cleaned up, and laid out clothing to throw investigators off the trail.
Still, she says, police didn’t ask about the details she noticed. When she tried to offer information, she recalls being brushed aside. “To them, I was just the Mexican housekeeper,” she writes.
Turrubiate-Simpson says she still struggles to understand how the man she once trusted could kill his own family. Murdaugh was convicted in 2023 and is serving two consecutive life sentences.
Her book is also an effort to reclaim Maggie from the narrative that swallowed her. She describes Maggie as generous, funny, and quick to treat her like a friend rather than an employee. “I have so many fond memories of her,” she says. “She was thoughtful, generous — and a lot of fun.”
After the murders, she adopted Bubba, Maggie’s beloved Labrador — the same dog whose barks helped place Murdaugh at the scene. “He kind of emotionally took care of me,” she says.
In sharing her story, Turrubiate-Simpson hopes readers won’t remember Maggie and Paul as footnotes in a true-crime saga but as people. “She was so full of life,” she says. “I want to honor her legacy.”
