A man who killed his former partner at her home in Lurgan in December 2022 is due to be sentenced.<\/p>\n
Stephen McCullagh, aged 36, of Woodland Gardens, Lisburn, was found guilty of the murder of Natalie McNally by a jury at Belfast Crown Court earlier this year.<\/p>\n
The 32-year-old had been 15 weeks pregnant when she was subjected to a violent attack and murdered.<\/p>\n
McCullagh denied the murder, claiming that he had been live-streaming himself playing computer games on his YouTube channel at the time.<\/p>\n
But police experts discovered the six-hour stream had actually been filmed four days before, and broadcast as live on 18 December.<\/p>\n
A sentencing hearing in May was told that McCullagh made “self-contradictory” and “incredible” statements to his probation officer, first insisting he “was convinced that he was not guilty of the murder”.<\/p>\n
The probation officer further noted McCullagh described the murder as “evil” and “vicious”, and referred to himself as “a monster”, the court heard.<\/p>\n
He also said: “I’m sorry for what I did to that poor family, what I did to Natalie.”<\/p>\n
He added: “I would take it back if I could.”<\/p>\n
Trial judge Mr Justice Patrick Kinney is expected deliver the sentence later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man who killed his former partner at her home in Lurgan in December 2022 is due to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-480596","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\/480596","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=480596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}