When he pulled the trigger on his final victim, a sleeping girl, Paul Michael Merhige did so with the most awesome cruelty, a witness said.
After shooting Makayla Sitton, 6, in her bed on Thanksgiving Day, the last of the four relatives police say he killed that day, he left the room but immediately hesitated.
Apparently not convinced his work was done, he returned to Makayla's bed and shot her again, leaving her to die with a bullet in her back, another in her hip and one more in her head, said Patrick Knight, Merhige's brother-in-law, who was critically wounded but survived.
Months later, sitting in the Palm Beach County Jail, Merhige, 35, seemed shaken by the horrors of his alleged deeds. He called his father collect at his Miami-area home, begging forgiveness.
"I think about them," he told his father. "I think about heaven, you know? I think about them constantly. I don't know how I could have done what I've done to everybody, everybody I've hurt."
His father, sounding dry and defeated in a static-filled recording of the jail phone call, had by then given Merhige an accounting of the wreckage:
"We have nothing," he told his son. "You have nothing. It's a total nightmare. Our lives have changed forever."
New details in audio recordings and hundreds of pages of court documents released on Friday paint an ever-more chilling portrait of Merhige's alleged Thanksgiving Day 2009 massacre at a relative's house in Jupiter, while also offering insight into Merhige's own mind after his capture in January and his years-long struggle with mental illness.
He was seemingly merciless in his cold-blooded execution of his twin sisters, his aunt and his cousin's daughter at the end of a Thanksgiving dinner celebration, according to police interviews with survivors. A relative who survived the attack described seeing an "evil haunting look" on Merhige's face.
He shot his aunt, Raymonde Joseph, 76, once in the shoulder and then, as her husband cowered on the ground next to her, trying to stop the bleeding, he held the gun to her chest and fired again, blowing a hole in her sternum, Joseph's husband later recalled.
After fatally shooting Joseph, and his two sisters, Carla Merhige and pregnant Lisa Knight, both 33, he made his way to Makayla's bedroom twice before slipping away, fleeing south and disappearing for more than a month. He was eventually tracked down and captured Jan. 2 in a Florida Keys motel.
The estranged recluse, once a talented athlete and standout prep school student in Miami, had shown no signs of violence or anger at the family gathering that evening, despite his long history of violence and threats to his sisters. One sister had once been granted a restraining order against him years earlier, and he had once shot himself in a suicide attempt.
But court records show in the weeks before the meal he had painstaking and discreetly spent $2,000 on at least four guns and ammunition in two Broward County gun shops. He even asked for a scope to be attached to a bolt-action Remington 700 rifle. He said he wanted to use it for hunting.
Merhige had been asking his parents for days about the Thanksgiving event but never committed to attending. And his parents never alerted their hosts, Jim and Muriel Sitton, that he might be coming.
When he called that evening to announce he was on his way, his mother couldn't resist a sinister thought.
"I hope he doesn't come and kill us all tonight," Carole Merhige recalled telling her daughter, Lisa Knight, according to a Jupiter police report.
"Mom, it came to my mind," her daughter replied. "But don't say that to Dad because Dad would get upset that we had such ideas."
The newly released documents suggest that Patrick Knight, a board certified civil trial lawyer from Miami, would likely be a star witness for the prosecution in a trial. Lying shot and wounded on the living room floor, it was he who witnessed Merhige shoot Makayla once, leave the room and then reenter.
"It was quick," Knight told investigators in March, after awaking from a medically induced coma. "He went and shot her and came out and almost instantly, like a second thought, went right back in and shot her again, I guess to make sure she was dead."
After his capture on Jan. 2, Merhige seemed dazed by his own deeds and worried about his future. Records show he rambled on in a police interrogation, implicating himself in the murders without discussing them directly.
"It's impossible, you know, to reconcile what happened with me," he said. "It's just, it's not even real. I'm not violent. I've never been violent. I'm not a criminal or a drug addict. It's just unbelievable what I've done to everybody."
Seemingly unaware of the workings of the court system and scale of the criminal charges that would face him, he asked a police officer if he would be facing "a long process."
"A year? Two years?" he asked.
Told that the wait for a trial could be lengthy, he wondered what would happen next.
"What about afterwards?" he asked. "What's the worst-case scenario for this?"
If prosecutors have their way, the worst-case scenario is death. The State Attorney's Office is seeking the death penalty for Merhige. His next court hearing is set for November, when a judge is expected to set a trial date.
But his public defenders are expected to pursue an insanity defense, which could result in Merhige being sent to a mental hospital instead of Death Row.
It is a result Merhige apparently is hoping for.
"Hopefully after the case, hopefully I get sent to a hospital," he told his father in the phone call from jail.