Weekend Plans With Matt Murphy, A Murderer’s Worst Enemy

Weekend Plans is our exclusive lifestyle feature where we highlight the real off-duty routines of the most exciting people in culture. 

This weekend, Matt Murphy — ABC News legal analyst and former senior deputy district attorney — takes The Daily Wire behind the scenes on the road to justice. With decades of experience prosecuting cold cases, “no-body” murders, and serial killers (think the Golden State Killer and the Dating Game Killer) in homicide and sexual assault units, he now offers victims a fighting chance through his private practice. When he’s not penning the follow-up to his bestseller “The Book of Murder: A Prosecutor’s Journey Through Love and Death,” he’s chasing waves and making his peace all around the world. Here’s why uncovering society’s darkest evils only gives him more hope in humanity.

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Matt Murphy greets me from his pied-à-terre on New York City’s Upper East Side with an iced coffee in hand. A long way from his home base in Manhattan Beach just south of Los Angeles, he’s kind of getting used to having his doorman call him “Mr. Murphy.”

“For a kid from California, it’s such a different world for me, the whole New York City deal,” he says, leaning into the sophisticated tradition of lobby attendants. “They’re like the only people that call me Mr. Murphy. Them or angry judges.” 

Fans of “20/20,” CrimeCon, and other true crime documentaries and podcasts will recognize Matt for his expert contributions after dedicating his life to the job. He just finished his latest book, set to come out next year. 

“This one’s a little deeper and a little darker,” he says. “It’s about serial killers. I prosecuted fourteen when I was in the homicide unit.” He just so happened to live in a state with the most victims in the country. “I hope people like it.” Like it? True crime’s winning streak shows no signs of stopping. With 52 homicide cases and zero losses under his belt, all Matt has to do is ride the wave. 

“You know, Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper probably kicked this whole interest off for everybody, and then Truman Capote. Now it keeps getting bigger. It’s getting a little haywire.” Segue to the trial of the summer: Lindsay Clancy. Matt didn’t work the case, but he has thoughts.

“That’s a trial where I can see objectively,” he says. “I got no dog in the fight. I don’t have kids. I’ve never suffered from postpartum. I don’t think the prosecution did a very good job. They made one mistake after another. It was frustrating to watch.” 

“The defense lawyer did a really good job tactically until closing arguments. He lost that juror. It’s like, dude, you picked that guy and you lost him in your closing. I guarantee you he’s hung juries that were 11 to one for the prosecution where he had nothing but praise for the holdout. And here’s this guy that holds out Lindsay Clancy. And it’s like the defense lawyer painted a target on his back.”

Noting how the prosecution lost the jury by muddling the case with useless arguments, Matt describes how he would have leaned into Clancy’s mental illness. “This lady’s batsh*t crazy, obviously,” he explains. “But can still control her conduct to the requirements of the law. That’s what the entire argument should have been from the prosecution.”

“They said it wasn’t a serious suicide attempt. Why would you argue that? Why not embrace the suicide attempt and say she absolutely wanted to kill herself and she wanted to take her kids with her? That’s called a murder-suicide and that’s somebody that knows exactly what she’s doing. Her motivations may be diluted, but that’s how you convict on a case like that.”

“There are plenty of people to point our fingers at, but at the end of the day, the person who let those kids down the most was Lindsay Clancy herself.” For this take, Matt received an onslaught of internet backlash. He says he’s “still a rookie” on the social media stuff and the “masochistic exercise called reading the comments.”

But pro-level legal strategy takes the lead over your typical influencer mom throwing a tantrum about how hard it is to parent. Instead of being overly emotional, it feels precise, unbiased, and true. Maybe that’s why for us outsiders, crime solving feels oddly soothing to the spirit. Unencumbered by society’s gray areas, it’s like a sacred puzzle coming together, each piece revealing the story of the voiceless.

“Your faith in humanity gets challenged when you see the murder,” Matt admits. “And then it’s restored immediately. You see everybody come together and see these detectives work their hearts out.”

“It really impresses upon you the importance of what you’re doing. And the enormity of trying to — it sounds corny, but it’s a real thing — trying to bring justice to the family of a person who’s been murdered. It becomes your calling.”

Paddling out

Matt got called to his very first murder case just as he finished surfing one morning. “I would bring a suit to the beach. And I would change in the parking lot and hope nobody noticed,” he remembers. “I’ve got sunscreen on. I’ve got a beat up old car with a surfboard in it. And I pull up to this crime scene with the yellow tape, and the guy with the clipboard looks at me and he’s like, ‘Who are you?’” 

The victim was sprawled out inside a beautiful townhome in Newport Beach. Matt recalls seeing two guns and a knife placed oddly in the victim’s hand. Bullets had been shot from a gun flush against the man’s chest after he was already down, embedding themselves into the rosewood floor under his back. This guy was “dead as a doornail,” but when detectives moved his body, his lungs compressed and he let out a groan. 

“This is something I’ve never even seen on TV. I hear the dead guy go, ‘Uhhh,’ and I’m like, holy sh*t, we’re sure this guy’s dead?” They had enough evidence to go for first-degree murder, but after the killer ex-girlfriend made bail, she bludgeoned another former lover to death, then rented a pistol at a gun range and eliminated herself from the equation. 

But none of that ruined Matt’s love of quality surf. These days, a typical morning involves catching three waves, hitting the gym, and sitting down at his desk by 10 a.m. “This is going to sound totally Californian, so bear with me,” he warns me. “A resident pod of Pacific bottlenose dolphins lives right there. They’re in the water every morning and they do what’s called spy-hopping, where they stick their eye out and look at you. It is tough to have a bad day after a dolphin has literally looked you up and down.”

He’s weeks out from a chartered surf trip he’s taking with a tight group of friends. “We’ve been doing this for 25 years,” he says. If they once aimed to be champion surfers, it’s a different story now. “We’re all in our fifties and the conversations have gone from girls we’re dating to what anti-inflammatory works best for you.”

They’ll spend 13 days off the coast of Indonesia surfing, scuba diving, and fishing. “We’re off the grid, which is wonderful. We go to these places where they keep putting in cell towers and then the locals canoe out and steal all the copper wiring.” This year, there’s talk of Starlink on the boat. “I hope it’s just a bad rumor. As soon as I have no ability to read my text messages or my emails, my stress level drops exponentially. I sleep like a baby on those trips.”

The “other” Manhattan

The Big Apple’s a little less surfable, but Matt discovers all available nature in Central Park. “I read this author who said that he would walk his way into thoughts,” Matt says. He leveraged the movement technique for himself to write two books. “It totally works. I go on a walk … just think about stuff. I would then pick a bench in Central Park, sit down, write, and then start walking again.”

A second writing tip that made use of the City That Never Sleeps? A bit of solitude. “Another thing that same guy said was for your first book, get an apartment in a city where you don’t know anybody and don’t tell anybody you’re doing it. That was my motivation to get the place in New York.”

To fuel the creative juices, Matt grabs coffee from Sant Ambroeus. Claiming he’s “not tough enough for black coffee,” he says his usual order is “basically a conduit for sugar and oat milk into my body.”

He stays fit and lean on his usual Manhattan Beach routine, but when in New York City, he says, “Every important meeting happens over a meal. The worst restaurant in New York is better than the best restaurant in L.A. Basically I sit around tables and eat too much.” 

East Coast Italian cuisine might be on point, but the West Coast food scene isn’t all bad. “The one food type that LA really does have on New York is Mexican food, and I’m a sucker for it. If they know how to make guacamole, you’ve got authentic Mexican food.”

A moment of zen

I’m curious about what one does to blow off steam after a long day of taking bad guys to task. “I had a crew of buddies in the DA’s office who are all now judges, but we would play tons and tons of golf.”

Along with those luscious greens, surfing isn’t the only thing keeping Matt’s mindset above water. “A recent passion that I’ve really gotten into is scuba diving,” he says. “In the Caribbean, they have a huge problem with lionfish.” The invasive species went rogue when pet lionfish entered the local ecosystem in the ’80s. “In Cuba, biologists are trying to train the local sharks, groupers, and eels to see and recognize lionfish as a food source. They go down with scuba divers and they let you hunt the lionfish and feed the sharks off a spear. It is the most thrilling thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.”

Matt’s more of a catch-and-release kind of guy, but just one lionfish can eat a hundred reef fish in a day. “Every lionfish you kill, you’re helping the reef,” he says. I can’t help but notice the oceanic justice. 

 

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In the Sea of Cortez off Baja California, Matt dives with bull sharks, one of the most dangerous species in the world next to great whites and tiger sharks. If you want to live in the moment, make eye contact with one of these fellas.

“When you’re looking at a 10-foot bull shark swimming up to you — they’ve never touched a diver — and they look you in the eye, you are pretty focused on what’s happening right then and there,” he says. “If you want a way to forget whatever other noise you have going on in your life, dive with bull sharks because you are completely absorbed in that moment.”

If he can’t swing the saltwater thing, he’ll settle for owning a few sharks in court. He recently defended an innocent LA County police officer involved in an on-duty shooting of a known gangster. “If my client had gone to prison, he wouldn’t have survived between BLM and the gangs. There were so many threats on his life, there were threats on his children’s lives. They even threatened to kill his dog.” The case was ultimately dismissed. 

“When I left the DA’s office, I didn’t know if I was ever going to find cases that I could get passionate about again. We fought it and we won. It is incredibly rewarding,” he says. I could listen to Matt’s stories forever, but I’ll catch up with him on his next episode of “20/20.”

“I think true crime sort of offers us a little anchor of stability for people that are just kind of over all the vitriol,” he says. “I hope so anyway. It makes me optimistic.”

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