UPDATE, 11:15 a.m., June 16, 2017: Michelle Carter has been found guilty

Michelle Carter was bubbly, athletic and an attentive student. Conrad Roy was a Red Sox fan from a boating family, with a 3.88 GPA; his loved ones nicknamed him Coco.

Now, he is dead and she is facing manslaughter charges, in a suicide case whose combination of lurid details and legal knottiness has led to national attention and an upcoming hearing before Massachusetts' highest court.

Carter stands accused of involuntary manslaughter for a series of text messages that encouraged Roy, with whom she had a romantic but largely online relationship, to kill himself. He did so with carbon monoxide in a Kmart parking lot in 2014. And over a year later, the case is still unsettled, with Carter's attorney making a free speech argument that will be heard before the Supreme Judicial Court in May.

With the case in limbo, new details have emerged in a feature on the case by New York Magazine, including interviews with Roy's family and Carter's school classmates.

Roy, whose grandfather owned a tugboat company, earned his captain's license at age 18, New York Magazine reported. A Mattapoisett native, he struggled with anxiety and depression, and was hospitalized for a acetaminophen overdose at age 17.

Carter, who attended King Philip Regional High School, was a bubbly, popular athlete, classmates told New York Magazine. She was named "class clown" and "most likely to brighten your day" in school superlatives. But friends also suspected she suffered mental illness of her own, telling New York Magazine that she had made oblique references to time spent at McLean Hospital, a Belmont psychiatric facility.

Roy and Carter had met years ago on vacation in Naples, Florida. As court documents show, they communicated and professed their love through a prolific stream of text messages, but rarely met in person. Roy's family told New York Magazine they only knew of a couple of meetings, and Joseph Cataldo, Carter's attorney, told MassLive last year that the relationship was almost entirely digital.

Carter's legal battle continues to inch its way toward a resolution. More than two months after defense attorney Joseph Cataldo filed an appeal seeking the dismissal of the case, Supreme Judicial Court Justice Margot Botsford made her decision last month -- one that does not bring the matter closer to an end.

Botsford referred the case to the full Supreme Judicial Court and is targeting a May hearing, according to her Feb. 1 ruling. At that hearing, the court will decide whether the manslaughter charge against Carter can go forward, whether Carter should be charged as a juvenile or whether the case should be dismissed entirely.

Cataldo has maintained that however tragic Roy's death, his client has committed no crime and should not be charged as an adult.

"This is clearly just speech," Cataldo said in a courthouse interview in November, "There was no physical action taken by Michelle Carter in connection with the death. It was just words alone. And words alone need to be a true threat in order not to be protected by the first amendment."

The criminal case has stretched on for nearly a year. Carter was charged with involuntary manslaughter in February of 2015. In September Taunton Juvenile Court Judge Bettina Borders rejected Cataldo's motion to dismiss the charge, allowing the case to move forward and for Carter to be charged as a "youthful offender" -- a status that allows harsher punishments than typical juvenile cases and for court files to be open to public inspection. Free speech, Borders ruled, does not extend to encouraging suicide.

Cataldo then filed an appeal to a single justice of the state Supreme Judicial Court and the district attorney's office filed a response in November.

The lengthy proceedings could make prosecutors' jobs more difficult, according to South Coast Today. If the Supreme Judicial Court rules that Carter should be tried as a juvenile, her trial must begin before her 20th birthday on Aug. 11, 2016. Prosecutors said in a court hearing Tuesday that such a time frame could limit their ability to prepare for the case, South Coast Today reported.

In early December the Bristol County District Attorney's office denied a request from MassLive for the prosecution's response to the appeal, saying that it referenced grand jury minutes and was a sealed filing.

Roy drove from his mother's house to a Kmart parking lot in July, 2014. He started a portable engine inside the cabin of his truck, and left it running until he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. A trail of text messages, released in an unsealed indictment, show that Carter encouraged him to kill himself, and urged him to follow through when in his last minutes he exited the truck, afraid of dying.

Prosecutors allege that Carter led a campaign of encouragement that directly led to the death of Roy, who had graduated from Old Rochester Regional High School that June.

"Carter assisted Conrad's suicide by counseling him to overcome his doubts," the indictment reads. "Her counsel took the form of positive direction, where she told him he was 'strong' enough to execute the suicide plan and would be happy once he was dead."

The text messages included in court filings show Carter, in between professions of love, advocating for suicide as Roy's best option after an extended period of depression. "It's painless and quick," she wrote in one text. "Everyone will be sad for a while but they will get over it and move on," she wrote in another. She urged him not to delay the act, and advised him to find alternative methods of producing carbon monoxide when it became clear his truck's diesel engine would not work.

The prosecution has portrayed Carter as an active participant in Roy's death -- one who, after the fact, pretended to have no knowledge of the plan. She texted with Roy's relatives, asking where he was in the hours before his body was found in the Kmart parking lot.