The trial of a man accused of murdering his pregnant girlfriend has heard from a former partner who said he assaulted her after discovering images she had sent to another man.<\/p>\n
Natalie McNally, 32, was beaten, strangled and stabbed in her home at Silverwood Green, Lurgan in Co Armagh, on the night of 18 December 2022.<\/p>\n
She was 15 weeks pregnant.<\/p>\n
Her former boyfriend and father of her unborn child, 35-year-old Stephen McCullagh, from Woodland Gardens in Lisburn, denies her murder.<\/p>\n
Today his trial heard from a former partner of the accused.<\/p>\n
The woman, who cannot be named by order of the court, said she had been in an “on and off” relationship with Mr McCullagh for around seven years.<\/p>\n
She told the court that at the end of 2019, she and Mr McCullagh had an argument.<\/p>\n
They had a discussion about whether they were speaking to other people. The woman lied to the defendant and said she was not.<\/p>\n
She later gave him her phone to look at because it was running slow. He found messages and images that she shared with another man on the device.<\/p>\n
The witness said they had spent the day arguing about it and at one point she said Mr McCullagh had assaulted her and knocked her into the bath.<\/p>\n
He also threatened to share the images with her family, workmates and anyone else she knew.<\/p>\n
“I was really really worried. That’s why I tried to reconcile.<\/p>\n
“I was trying to get him to stop threatening me about them.”<\/p>\n
In the early hours of the following day, Mr McCullagh agreed to bring her home.<\/p>\n
The witness said she was deeply upset and tried to jump from the moving car as they drove along a motorway.<\/p>\n
She claimed he struck her on the face then punched her on the temple. He told her she should “kill myself in my own time”.<\/p>\n
She made a statement of complaint to police, but a few days later she made another statement withdrawing the complaint.<\/p>\n
“I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want Stephen to get into trouble.<\/p>\n
“Because I thought we could still reconcile and I didn’t want him to go to prison.<\/p>\n
“I thought him hitting me was just him trying to knock some sense into me because that’s what he said,” she said.<\/p>\n
The relationship restarted following the pandemic and the woman said she experienced a still birth on 7 January 2022.<\/p>\n
Suffering from poor mental health, she sought help from counselling services in the following months and counsellors came to Mr McCullagh’s house where she was living for the sessions.<\/p>\n
The court heard how police contacted her in 2024 and told her some of those sessions had been recorded and found on his computers.<\/p>\n
She said she had not been asked if she wanted them to be recorded and did not know they had been recorded.<\/p>\n
Defence barrister John Kearney said it was Mr McCullagh’s case that he had offered to tape some of the sessions because the woman had told him she was struggling to remember what she had said during them.<\/p>\n
She replied: “He never discussed with me recording my sessions.”<\/p>\n
‘He talked just like any other customer’<\/p>\n
Later the trial heard from taxi driver Jeff McAvoy. He picked up a fare outside a pub in Lurgan town centre on the night of the murder at 10.46pm.<\/p>\n
The customer sat in the passenger seat and asked him to take him to Lisburn.<\/p>\n
“The only thing I recall is that he was the full of the seat.<\/p>\n
“He was a big person. He had a bag which he placed at his feet.”<\/p>\n
He said the customer had directed him and when he came to a stop it was outside a small bungalow behind a high hedge.<\/p>\n
The man went into the driveway of the house and emerged a few minutes later to pay him in cash.<\/p>\n
The witness told police he assessed the customer to be around the same height as himself 5, 7″ and that he spoke with a Lurgan accent.<\/p>\n
Mr McAvoy said by that he meant the accent was local, not a foreign one.<\/p>\n
He said the customer was “very polite, very calm”.<\/p>\n
“He talked just like any other customer.”<\/p>\n
The jury also heard a witness statement by an IT manager for FonaCAB, Mr McAvoy’s firm.<\/p>\n
He said the company’s taxis used GPS to chart their position and a taxi app recorded details such as pick-up and drop off locations and times.<\/p>\n
He said having examined the data Mr McAvoy’s taxi had travelled from Market Street in Lurgan to Woodland Gardens in Lisburn that night leaving at 10.46pm and arriving at 11.11pm.<\/p>\n
The case continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The trial of a man accused of murdering his pregnant girlfriend has heard from a former partner who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-332366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}