All the clues dysfunctional White Lotus Ratliff clan could be based on notorious Murdaugh family

Murdaugh, he wrote.Or did he? Rumors are swirling “The White Lotus” creator Mike White based the dysfunctional Ratliff clan — headed by a nefarious patriarch who is a Duke University-educated financier in North Carolina in the show’s third season — on the infamous convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh and his doomed South Carolina family.In March 2023, Murdaugh, the scion of a blue-blooded legal dynasty, was found guilty of fatally shooting his wife Maggie, 52, and son Paul, 22, at the family’s rural estate in Hampton County, SC, two years earlier.Prosecutors alleged that Murdaugh, 56, who was sentenced to two life sentences and also found guilty of money laundering, fraud and breach of trust, shot his wife and son because the walls were closing in around him — and he hoped the deaths would distract from his financial crimes and possibly garner him sympathy.In the HBO show, Tim Ratliff (played by Jason Isaacs) learns as soon as he and the family arrive at the White Lotus resort in Thailand, the feds are onto what is apparently a shady money laundering and bribery scheme cooked up with an old business associate.Ratliff finds out a reporter from the Wall Street Journal is asking questions — and it’s soon clear his financial crimes are going to be exposed and the family almost certainly faces ruin.

Worse, he doubts his spoiled Southern belle wife Victoria, played by Parker Posey, and their three kids will be able to handle the news and as he panics, he starts taking his wife’s Lorazepam pills.(Similarly Murdaugh was in the grip of an opioid addiction at the time of his family’s murders.) In fact, both Victoria and their son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) mention that they could never live without the family’s money and success.Ratliff plots first to shoot them, then poison them all apart from his youngest son, before coming to his senses at the show’s dramatic climax.“I had read stories about this aristocratic guy who killed his whole family ...