Their relationship lasted 133 days.
It began on a dating app in the summer of 2022 and ended the week before that Christmas when Natalie McNally (32) was murdered in her Co Armagh home by Stephen McCullagh (36).
She was 15 weeks pregnant with his child, a baby boy who was to be named Dean, and had suffered a “horrendous and savage beating”, prosecutors said.
On Monday, it took the jury of six men and six women two hours to find – unanimously – that the YouTuber and former Belfast Telegraph employee was guilty of her murder. McCullagh was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The crime was a “planned, calculated, premeditated murder” which McCullagh “hoped to get away with”, jurors were told at the outset of a trial that lasted five weeks at Belfast Crown Court.
An “elaborate” alibi – a six-hour YouTube gaming session that he claimed was live but was, in fact, pre-recorded – was initially accepted by police, with McCullagh told he was no longer a suspect.
So convincing was his “distraught” state that Natalie McNally’s parents welcomed him into their home for her wake on Christmas night where he spent 20 minutes alone with her remains.
For weeks after her murder, he played the grieving partner and father-to-be, telling McNally’s family of his excitement about the baby, their plans for the future and his feelings for Natalie.
The family of Natalie McNally celebrate outside Belfast Crown Court after McCullagh was found guilty on Monday. Photograph: Mark Marlow/PA Wire
“He said he treated her like a princess,” said Ann Anderson, an aunt of McNally’s, of a conversation she had with the killer in the McNally home after her murder.
McCullagh, of Woodland Gardens in Lisburn, Co Antrim, had denied the charge of murder from the moment he was first arrested the night after McNally’s death on Sunday, December 18th, 2022.
He declined to take the take stand in the high-profile case and the defence offered no evidence. Throughout the trial he claimed an ex-boyfriend had murdered her.
But prosecution barrister Charles MacCreanor said, as to motive, some friendly and “flirty” messages between McNally and some males, including some of a “sexual nature”, have been found on her phone, and these may have “enraged” McCullagh, who had the passcode to unlock her device.
A law graduate who was a marketing executive at transport company Translink, McNally loved animals – she had an Alsatian dog, River, and two cats – and her passions were reading, music and travelling with her family to Everton and GAA matches.
She spent her final hours at her parents’ home in Lurgan, on the sofa with her father Noel, watching the World Cup final before returning home to her own house in Silverwood Green in Lurgan.
The jury agreed with the prosecution’s case that McCullagh beat, strangled and stabbed her to death and “peddled a false alibi” while he carried out her murder, and then claimed to have discovered her body. He raised the alarm with a “false” emergency call to police.
“It’s an act, it’s put on by him, part of his plan to do the murder and get away with it,” MacCreanor told the trial.
During the 10-minute call, made at 9.55pm on Monday, December 19th, 2022, McCullagh was heard sobbing as he asked for paramedics.
He screamed: “Please come as soon as you can; she’s pregnant, she’s cold. There’s blood everywhere.”
In the dock, McCullagh wiped tears from his eyes as that 999 call was played to the court during the opening day of evidence last month.
Stephen McCullagh. Photograph: Facebook
Behind him the public gallery of Court 13 was packed with Natalie McNally’s family and friends.
Her mother Bernadette McNally broke down towards the end of the recording when she heard her daughter’s dog, River, barking.
McNally had been dead for about 24 hours; the jury was told she was murdered between 8.50pm and 9.30pm the previous night, December 18th.
She suffered “serious and multiple fatal injuries”, MacCreanor said, including three stab wounds to her neck caused by a “bladed weapon”, “blunt-force trauma” in the form of five lacerations to her head and compression of her neck “suggestive of fingertips grasping”.
It took 40 minutes for Northern Ireland’s State Pathologist James Lyness to outline the dozens of injuries to McNally’s head, face, neck, mouth, hands, arms and lower body she suffered during a “prolonged assault”, pointing as he did so to each part of his own body to demonstrate how widespread they were.
McCullagh listened, showing no emotion.
It seemed “likely that the foetus died as a result of the assault”, the pathologist said.
The photographs of McNally’s body taken by police at the crime scene were deemed so graphic, they were not shown to the jury.
A police officer who attended the scene of the murder described seeing a dog bowl filled with blood beside her head. “It looked almost like it had been used to collect the blood,” he said.
McNally and McCullagh met on the dating app Bumble; they began messaging each other on August 7th, 2022, before their first date in Belfast later that week.
She stayed over at his house in Lisburn the night before he murdered her, watching a sitcom and Christmas episodes of The Office. Unbeknown to McNally, McCullagh was also researching bus and train timetables for the journey to Lurgan to kill her later that day.
At about 1pm on December 18th she left for her parents’ home. McCullagh was captured on a neighbour’s doorbell camera waving her off.
Later, she messaged him about the World Cup result: “Argentina win it, I’m crying …” and McCullagh responded: “Right, I’m off to stream the night away. Wish me luck.”
Her last message to him was sent at 5.59pm: “Good luck. I might have a peek at your live stream later.”
Police analysis of her YouTube account showed she had indeed logged on to watch him, at 8.24pm, just as McCullagh was making his way to her house to kill her.
Footage of that purported live stream was played to the jury during McCullagh’s trial. Watching from the dock, McCullagh laughed at his own jokes and expletive-ridden commentary about how he was a “very angry gamer”.
It showed him drinking and wearing a Santa hat as he played Grand Theft Auto on his “Violent Night Christmas Live Gaming Stream”, announcing: “I’m not leaving the house tonight.”
McCullagh continued to message McNally. He told her: “I love you and I don’t want to do anything to hurt or upset you,” in a message sent at 4.09pm on Monday, December 19th. He later claimed he was “getting a little worried” when she didn’t reply.
At 9.31pm he messaged to say he was going to her house.
McCullagh was arrested that evening but was released the following day. Police believed his “false alibi” that he had been playing the online game from 6pm to midnight on the evening of the murder, and his deception was not discovered by cyber-experts until late January 2023 when he was rearrested.
In the meantime, McCullagh visited the McNally family home and attended her wake. He showed her mother Bernadette an engagement ring and an image, saying: “’This is what baby Dean would have looked like’ … taken from a photograph of Natalie and a photograph of himself.”
Natalie McNally’s mother Bernadette. Photograph: Mark Marlow/PA Wire
McNally’s mother said at the time she felt “devastated” and worried for McCullagh, and broke down when the prosecution barrister asked her how she had coped since the murder.
“Not very good – it has been devastating,” she replied.
Natalie McNally’s father Noel said McCullagh had been treated “with the utmost respect” and was regarded as “a grieving partner and a grieving father-to-be” with people hugging and consoling him when he became upset at the wake.
McNally’s brother Brendan said he remembered McCullagh “constantly checking media” during the wake, telling him the prominence of his sister’s murder on news websites was “dropping down” and it should be “an international news story”.
Another brother, Declan McNally, later took McCullagh to visit her grave.
“He appeared completely distraught. He was saying: ‘How could anyone do this to her?’,” he said.
“He said he found her with her head in a dog bowl. He said someone had left her like an animal.”
McCullagh had not attended her funeral. Bernadette McNally said he told her “he didn’t want to be recognised” and was worried he would lose his job “just for being arrested”.
Family members carry McNally’s after her funeral service at her parents’s home in Lurgan in 2022. Photograph: Oliver McVeigh/PA Wire
On January 5th, 2023, he accompanied the family to a vigil at Stormont organised by Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill to call for an end to violence against women and girls. He was “happy to be introduced as Natalie’s partner” and showed people a photo of a baby scan, Declan McNally said.
Natalie McNally’s cousin Gavin Haddock described to the court how he tried to comfort McCullagh who told him: “I should have been there to protect Natalie. No man would have got past me.”
The prosecution argued that McCullagh travelled by bus to McNally’s house to carry out the murder before returning home in a taxi, changing clothes and disguising himself with a long, dark wig while doing so.
Jurors were shown CCTV clips and Ring doorbell footage which tracked the route of a “person of interest” – which they were told was the defendant making his way to McNally’s house to kill her. The individual boarded a bus in Dunmurry, Co Antrim, and travelled to Lurgan on the evening of December 18th.
Further footage showed the person, wearing different clothes, walking from McNally’s street to get a taxi.
A taxi then arrived at McCullagh’s house and a figure “appears to throw two objects over the hedge” before “walking into the front gate of the defendant’s home address”, a detective told the court.
In a police interview read to the court, a detective put it to McCullagh that the male on the CCTV had gone to “extensive lengths” to plan the murder and it appeared to be “premeditated”.
She told him that the male was inside McNally’s house for 39 minutes and in that time “Natalie is killed by injuries consistent of compression of the neck, stab wounds of the neck and blunt force injuries to the head.
“Everything from our inquiries tells us you are the male in the CCTV and we believe that male in the CCTV is the person who murdered Natalie.”
McCullagh replied: “No comment.”