Secret Service would assist in the process, Dove said, so he sent the phone to the agency.īut before federal investigators shared the device, Dove said, they decided to make one more attempt to unlock the phone using a passcode that Dove hadn’t tried - Paul’s birthday. “And once we lost that information - even six months from now, a year from now, we might have been able to get into it - it does us no good because the information’s gone.”Īs the months ticked by and the investigation stalled, Dove said he eventually learned of a company that could likely access the phone, figure out its passcode and process the device. "I had to be mindful that if we try these attempts and we failed that we could have potentially lost any information on there,” he said. So he decided to hold off and wait for a technological advance that might help them crack Paul’s passcode. The technique recovered little on Paul's phone, and investigators were still unable to search the entire device, Dove said. Days before her death, a Wisconsin woman sent an ominous letter: ‘He would be my first suspect ’.Illinois nurse who was terrorized by her ex turned to the court for help.A decade later, he faced another foreclosure - and a murder charge. His wife was killed the day before their eviction.A killer known for his ‘zombie hunter’ costume is on death row, but some suspect he has another victim.After a limo driver disappears, a fugitive’s web begins to unravel and sets off an international manhunt.A secret room and a jarring first date: G ilgo Beach murders suspect set off alarm bells.Some were birthdays, Dove said, but none were Paul’s.Īlthough a date of birth might appear to be an obvious choice for a passcode, Dove said that in his experience - he’s been a computer crimes investigator for 15 years - the codes that people use vary. Investigators had supplied Dove with roughly 20 numbers that he described as significant dates associated with Paul, he said. He said he wasn’t sure who had entered the wrong code or how many times they’d done so. When Dove got the phone, he said it was temporarily disabled, with a message telling him to enter a passcode again in a few minutes. To access the device after that, it needs to be reset - a process that would wipe out everything on it, including videos. But it was locked and authorities didn’t know his passcode.Īpple allows users to enter the wrong passcode only a handful of times before the phone is permanently disabled. The passcode problemĪfter the killings, authorities obtained Paul’s iPhone almost immediately, Owen said. Gibson mentioned something else: Paul had tried to send him a video of the dog but couldn't because of spotty cell coverage, Owen said. The friend, Rogan Gibson, told investigators that while talking with Paul, he was nearly certain that he heard Alex in the background, Owen said. He was convicted in March and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Joshua Boucher / Pool / The State via APĭuring his trial, Murdaugh, 55, blamed the deception on his addiction to pain pills and paranoia. Alex Murdaugh at his murder trial on Feb. Murdaugh, who has proclaimed his innocence in the killings of Margaret, 52, and Paul, 22, has acknowledged lying to authorities about his alibi on the night of the murders. “I hollered out that I found it to nobody in particular ’cause I was in the office working by myself.” Britt Dove, a computer crimes investigator for the state Law Enforcement Division. In his first interview about the case, the South Carolina investigator charged with cracking the phone told NBC News' “Dateline” why the process took so frustratingly long, how law enforcement finally gained access to it, and how astonished authorities were when they discovered the video. It took investigators months to recover the video - even though the six-digit passcode to the locked device was as basic as it gets: 041499, Paul’s birthday.
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