Paul Murdaugh’s childhood friend ‘100%’ sure Alex’s voice is on video before deaths occurred

Rogan Gibson has known the Murdaugh family since he was 11 or 12 years old.

Paul Murdaugh was one of his best friends. He called Paul’s mother “Ms. Maggie” and Alex Murdaugh “Big Red.”

On Wednesday, Gibson testified about the people he called his “second family,” and stated with absolute certainty that he heard the voice of “Big Red” at the scene where Paul and Maggie were murdered.

Gibson was the 17th witness brought by the state against Murdaugh, the disbarred former attorney charged with his wife and son’s murder on June 7, 2021. But Gibson gave the most positive identification yet that Murdaugh, in contrast to what he told police, was at the family’s dog kennels moments before the killings.

Gibson testified he boarded his dog at the Murdaughs’ kennels while he was staying at his girlfriend’s house. On the night of the killings, he asked Paul to take a video of his chocolate lab Cash in the kennel.

“He was going to try to FaceTime me,” Gibson remembers, but since the cell service in the area was unreliable, “I asked him if he can’t get FaceTime to do a video.”

On his phone call with Paul, Gibson said he could hear two voices, one of them Maggie and another he later told investigators he was “99% sure” was “Mr. Alex.”

Gibson never got the video of Cash from Paul. Prosecutors estimate that a little more than three minutes after he shot the video in the dog kennel, both Paul and Maggie were shot to death.

Murdaugh told investigators he was napping in the house at the time the murders took place, but investigators later managed to recover Paul’s video from his cellphone, with the two voices still audible in the background, and finally played it for Gibson.

On Wednesday, prosecutor Creighton Waters asked Gibson how certain he was of his identification of the voice he heard. Now Gibson answered, “100%.”

Later on Wednesday, another friend of Paul’s, Will Loving, testified that he received a Snapchat from Paul about an hour before the shooting of Paul and his father driving around the Moselle property. After being played the video of the dog kennels from Paul’s phone, Loving also replied “100%” how sure he was the voice on the video was Alex Murdaugh’s.

Defense attorney Jim Griffin asked Gibson about the theft of an AR-style rifle from Paul’s truck years earlier, and how secure the guns that the family kept at Moselle were.

“Would it be hard thing to go up on that property and steal stuff?” Griffin said.

Gibson described the Murdaughs as a loving family, and said he couldn’t think of a reason Murdaugh would want to hurt his wife and son.

But even when reminiscing about the good times he had with his second family, Gibson stayed firm in identifying Murdaugh as the voice he heard on the video Paul intended to send him, captured close to the time two members of that family were violently killed.