After nearly three hours of deliberations, a jury reached a guilty verdict Thursday in the double murder trial Alex Murdaugh, a disgraced South Carolina attorney who was charged with the murders of his wife and their younger son at their rural hunting estate in June 2021.

The bodies of Margaret "Maggie" Murdaugh, 52, and Paul Murdaugh, 22, were found dead from multiple gunshot wounds near the dog kennels at the family's estate in June 2021, authorities said.

Alex Murdaugh, 54, who called 911 to report the discovery, was charged with their murders 13 months later.

Jurors -- and the packed gallery -- heard testimony from dozens of witnesses since the trial started on Jan. 23 in the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina.

Here's a look at five key moments from the high-profile trial.

A string of bloody killings and mysteries involving a prominent South Carolina family has been filled with a wild chase full of twists and turns -- culminating in a murder conviction against the family’s patriarch.

At the center of it is Alex Murdaugh, 54, a former lawyer who comes from a legacy of prominent attorneys in South Carolina, where three generations of the family had been state prosecutors in the Hampton County area for more than a century.

The saga began when his youngest son, Paul, was involved in a fatal boat crash in 2019. A year and a half later, Murdaugh's wife, Margaret "Maggie" Murdaugh, 52, and Paul, 22, were found fatally shot on the family's rural hunting estate.

Since then, there have been curveballs in the investigation -- including Alex Murdaugh's alleged money misuse that led to his disbarment, an admitted opioid addiction, an assisted-suicide attempt involving an alleged $10 million insurance fraud scheme and a high-profile murder trial.

Here's a timeline of the key events in the Murdaugh murders and scandals.

ABC News chief legal analyst Dan Abrams said he expects Alex Murdaugh will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, since prosecutors have said they will not seek the death penalty.

"I'm not expecting there to be much debate," Abrams said Friday on "Good Morning America."

"He's now in a tough spot, because he can't really now accept responsibility just after testifying for all these days and talking about how he didn't do it," Abrams noted. "What he could say is similar to what he said on the stand, which is: I regret, I did bad things to people, I'm sorry about that, I hurt people that I cared about, with sort of these broad allusions to the financial crimes without actually admitting anything with regard to the murders."

Abrams said he thinks it was a mistake on the defense team's part for Murdaugh to testify.

"To some degree, you could argue he had to take the stand," he explained. "Suddenly, there's evidence that he's there at the crime scene despite the fact that he's saying he wasn't there."

"So now it doesn't have to be him per se, but somebody's got to explain what he was doing there minutes before the crime occurs," he continued. "In retrospect, was it a mistake? Sure, because if he hadn't taken the stand, he might've been better off. I said at the time I thought it was a mistake for him to take the stand. But they did have to do something to explain why his voice was clearly there at the crime scene minutes before Maggie and Paul were killed."