Paul Murdaugh was looking after his best mate's chocolate labrador on the night of June 7, 2021 when he suddenly stopped replying to texts.
Rogan Gibson says his friend had called him worried there was something wrong with the dog's tail and wanted some advice.
But without a visual, Rogan wasn't sure what the issue was and the pair agreed Paul would FaceTime back if the reception worked.
It was the last time they ever spoke to each other.
Rogan texted asking for a photo to send to a vet he knew, but never received an answer.
Four calls and a follow-up text to both his friend and Paul's mother, Maggie, went unanswered before he gave up and went to sleep.
The next day, Rogan woke up to a string of missed calls and the news his best friend was dead.
"I called one of my friends, that I had a missed call from, and he told me what happened," he said while under oath in a courtroom last month.
Paul and Maggie Murdaugh had been shot and killed in front of the dog kennel at Moselle, the family's sprawling 1,700 acre estate, not long after their phone call the night before.
It was Paul's father, Alex Murdaugh, who made the grim discovery.
The towering legal scion had loomed large over the rural county of Hampton in South Carolina.
That night, his voice shook as he phoned 911 to report the shooting of his wife and son.
"This is Alex Murdaugh … I need the police and an ambulance immediately," he told the operator.
"My wife and child were shot badly."
When officers arrived on the scene 20 minutes later, they declared both were dead and swiftly set up a crime scene.
News of the double homicide spread quickly through the small community, fuelling a flurry of speculation about the family's long and tangled legal history in the state.
The Murdaughs were wealthy, influential and had deep roots in South Carolina.
But behind the veneer of glamour and power, there were whispers of suspicious accidents and odd behaviour, prompting some folks to wonder if the gruesome murders were driven by vengeance.
As days, months and then a year ticked by without any named suspects, it appeared as if the mystery of who killed Maggie and Paul would never be solved.
Then came the shock news one day late in July last year that Alex Murdaugh had been charged with murder after a spectacular fall from grace.
The southern family with a big secret
For three generations the Murdaugh family held the position of top prosecutor for the state, establishing powerful connections while overseeing thousands of criminal cases.
Alex's grandfather also founded a multi-million-dollar private legal practice, Peters, Murdaugh, Parker, Eltzroth & Detrick (PMPED), which took on lucrative personal injury cases.
Like his grandfather and father, Alex Murdaugh joined the firm as an attorney, going on to build a "good clientele" roster thanks to his "gift of the gab".
"He was successful not from his work ethic, but his ability to establish relationships and to manipulate people into settlements and clients into liking him," Jeanne Seckinger, the chief financial officer of Murdaugh's former law firm, told a court.
"The art of bullshit, basically."
Friends described Alex Murdaugh as a "kind, gentle soul" and social media photos show a father who regularly went hunting with his two kids.
But behind the facade was a man overseeing a collapsing house of cards, whose need for cash began when land deals in 2007 and 2008 went "upside down", chief prosecutor Creighton Waters alleged.
"[Murdaugh was on] a hamster wheel of constantly having to borrow and earn and steal just to keep kicking the can down the road and to stay above water," she said.
"An exhaustive hamster wheel. A slow burn that was heating up and heating up."
Annette Griswold had worked with Alex Murdaugh for many years at PMPED and testified at his trial that she had noticed a shift in his behaviour after his son was involved in a boating accident in 2019.
Paul Murdaugh was charged over the incident, which involved a young woman, Mallory Beach, who was thrown overboard and died in the crash.
"He was just harder to reach, and there were a couple [of] instances in which I referred to him as having his ass on his shoulders," Ms Griswold testified.
"He just wasn't himself with us anymore… He came in and would yell our names, and just didn't treat us the same as before the boat accident."
The Murdaughs were also sued over the crash, and were under significant pressure to provide a detailed account of their finances as part of the case.
Alex Murdaugh is alleged to have orchestrated some suspect financial transactions that eventually raised the suspicions of his colleagues.
Ms Seckinger says she feared her boss was working to hide certain assets to protect them from being disclosed in connection to "the boat case".
She also grew concerned about legal fees that should have been made payable to the law firm and not to individual attorneys.
The morning before his wife and son were murdered, Ms Seckinger confronted Alex Murdaugh about $US792,000 in missing funds.
"He assured me that the money was there, and that he could get it," Ms Seckinger testified.
But the next day, the firm was left reeling by the death of Alex Murdaugh's wife and son.
'He doesn't tell me everything'
Born in Nashville and raised in Pennsylvania, Maggie Murdaugh met her future husband while studying at the University of South Carolina.
Family and friends describe her as a woman with a "heart of pure generosity", who adored her two sons and loved welcoming friends into her home on any given occasion.
"She made the most out of every situation, and lived each and every day to the fullest," her obituary read.
There was nothing on her social media to suggest anything was amiss, but in the months before her death, sources told local news outlet FITSNews the devoted homemaker was living separately from her husband.
The mother-of-two had also allegedly consulted with a divorce lawyer — though these reports have not been confirmed — and appeared to be having doubts about her husband's honesty.
"She felt that Alex was not being truthful to her with regard to what was going on with that [boat] lawsuit. She said, 'He doesn't tell me everything,'" housekeeper Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson testified.
On the day of Maggie's murder, Ms Turrubiate-Simpson said Alex Murdaugh asked his wife to come to the family's hunting lodge.
"She kind of sounded like she didn't want to come home," Ms Turrubiate-Simpson said.
Maggie went to Moselle, sitting down to dinner with her son and Alex Murdaugh before their fateful visit to the dog kennels.
Threats from strangers and a mysterious distant cousin
Paul was shot at close range twice, with a shotgun, while Maggie was shot multiple times with an assault rifle.
When police arrived at the scene, Alex Murdaugh immediately told them he knew what motivated the killer.
"This is a long story," he told a deputy sheriff, according to body cam footage played during the trial.
"My son was in a boat wreck months back; he's been getting threats. Most of it's been benign stuff we didn't take serious. I know that's what it is."
Paul had been receiving online threats from strangers since the wreck, his uncles Randy and John later told ABC America, but they didn't believe they were "credible".
Alex Murdaugh's lawyers filed a motion in court late last year that named a murder suspect who they insisted required further police scrutiny.
Curtis "Eddie" Smith, Alex Murdaugh's distant cousin and drug dealer, sold him narcotics to fuel his oxycodone addiction.
Nearly three months after his wife and son were murdered, Alex Murdaugh asked Smith to kill him so that his surviving son could claim the insurance payout.
The plot, however, failed and Smith was later arrested and charged with conspiring to assist Alex Murdaugh's suicide for insurance fraud.
Alex Murdaugh's lawyers say South Carolina police carried out a polygraph on Smith that showed he "attempted deception" when asked if he had anything to do with the murders of Maggie and Paul.
"[Smith] often committed other crimes at the location of the murders — crimes which he would presumably want to conceal, but which Maggie and Paul would certainly not allow to be concealed if they were present," the lawyers said.
But as investigators were encouraged to hunt for the Murdaughs' enemies, officers began to home in on the family patriarch.
The case against Alex Murdaugh
Over a 13-month probe, investigators uncovered dozens of alleged crimes, including those related to Alex Murdaugh's faked assassination.
The former attorney was charged with insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and filing a false police report over the incident, and indicted in October.
He was charged with the double homicide of his family nine months later.
"I think when this case started a lot of people assumed this was a murder case and then with some white collar [crime] running in there," Ms Waters said.
"But the reality is, as we've done this extensive investigation, we've realised that this was a white-collar case that culminated with two murders."
Alex Murdaugh was accused of killing Maggie and Paul in order to garner sympathy and divert attention from his financial crimes, which were about to be discovered by his law firm colleagues.
Investigators had laid out a motive, but the forensic evidence against him was not particularly strong.
While gunshot residue was found on his clothing and car, studies found it was a substance that could be easily transferred, sometimes even via a handshake.
The Murdaughs were also big hunters, which meant gunpowder was everywhere on the property.
But one piece of evidence presented a big problem for the defence.
Police discovered a short video less than a minute long on Paul's phone, filmed at 8:44pm the night of the killings.
Three different voices can be heard in the footage, which appeared to have been recorded around the Murdaugh family's kennels, according to testimony from a law enforcement witness.
Two witnesses identified the voices as belonging to Maggie, Paul and Alex Murdaugh, placing him near the crime scene 16 minutes before the window of time when his wife and son were killed.
Alex Murdaugh, who pleaded not guilty, claimed he was visiting his mother at the time of the slayings and had returned home to discover the bodies.
In a highly unusual and risky move, he decided to take the stand in his own defence.
"I didn't shoot my wife or my son," he insisted, during a tear-filled and gruelling testimony.
But then he made a stunning admission. After 20 minutes denying the prosecutor's accusations, he admitted that he was at the dog kennels where the killings occurred on the night of the murders.
He blamed paranoia from his drug addiction for his lies.
"I lied about being down there. I'm so sorry that I did," he said.
As the case wrapped up this week, it was left to a jury of 12 people to decide whether there was enough convincing evidence to convict Alex Murdaugh.
It took only a few short hours for the room of strangers to reach a unanimous decision.
A lengthy trial with a bomb threat
The trial took place at the Colleton County Courthouse, where a portrait of Alex Murdaugh's father once hung.
In the lead-up to the court case, residents had mixed feelings about the prominent family's public downfall.
"They are benevolent kings in Hampton County. They do wonderful things for the community. They're loved. But they're also feared," local attorney Ronnie Richter told Live5WSC.
"Because they are the law and as a king – even as a benevolent king – they have the power to smite you."
The heady mix of corruption, mystery and intrigue also attracted a steady stream of true-crime tourists from outside the state.
"[It] definitely kind of rocked our community on our little island that we are on and so I've been following it," South Carolina resident Madeline Wagoner told the ABC outside the courthouse.
After five weeks, which included a bomb threat to the court and admonitions of the Murdaugh family for an obscene gesture made in court and the passing of contraband items, Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of killing his wife and son.
For more than 100 years, the Murdaughs' grip on the state of South Carolina and its legal system was unyielding.
Now it is undeniably broken.
At a hearing on Friday, Circuit Court Judge Clifton Newman sentenced Alex Murdaugh to life in prison without parole.
When asked by the judge if he had anything he wanted to say before being sentenced to two consecutive life terms, he maintained his innocence.
This week's verdict came after a long-running battle for justice by family and friends caught up in the Murdaughs twisted web of lies.
A community left reeling by a brutal family slaying will now hopefully be able to find closure.
