31 Years for a Murder Played Out in Plain Sight: The Full Story of Stephen McCullagh, the Fake GTA Livestream, and the Death of Natalie McNally

Sentenced This Morning

This morning, at Laganside Courthouse in Belfast, Stephen McCullagh stood in the dock wearing a grey T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. He nodded slowly as Judge Patrick Kinney told him he would serve a minimum of 31 years in prison before he could be considered for release. Behind him, the public gallery was packed with Natalie McNally's family and friends — people who had attended every court appearance through the five-week trial, through the verdict in March, through the tariff hearing in May, and now through sentencing this morning. As the door closed behind McCullagh and he was taken down, many in the public gallery turned and embraced each other. There were tears and, from some, a sound that had been a long time coming: relief.

The sentence confirms what a Belfast Crown Court jury unanimously determined on March 23, 2026, after just over two hours of deliberation: that McCullagh, 36, a YouTuber known online as votesaxon07, murdered his pregnant partner, Natalie McNally, 32, at her home in Lurgan, County Armagh, on the night of December 18, 2022. Judge Kinney described McCullagh's culpability as "extremely high," calling the killing a "brutal and frenzied attack" — a "cold-blooded and calculated" murder of "someone you professed to love." The murder carried a mandatory life sentence. Today's tariff of 31 years means McCullagh will be 67 at the earliest before he is considered for parole.

Catherine Kierans, Head of the Public Prosecution Service Serious Crime Unit, said after sentencing: "Natalie McNally was a much-loved young woman whose life was full of promise. Stephen McCullagh, the father of her unborn baby, violently and senselessly took her life. Today marks the conclusion of proceedings to hold a cold and calculating murderer to justice."

Who Was Natalie McNally?

Before the forensics, the digital evidence and the courtroom drama, there is the person at the centre of everything: Natalie McNally, 32 years old, a woman from Lurgan in County Armagh who, by every account offered by those who loved her, was someone whose presence made the people around her feel better. She and Stephen McCullagh had met on the dating app Bumble in August 2022 — just four months before her death. Their relationship had moved quickly and, to outward appearances, happily. In late October he met her family for the first time. In early November the couple announced to her family that she was 15 weeks pregnant with their son — a boy they would name Dean. She was looking forward to Christmas. She was seven days away from it.

On the night of December 18, 2022, between 8:50 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., Natalie McNally was beaten, strangled and stabbed multiple times in her home at Silverwood Green in Lurgan. She sustained stab wounds to the neck, blunt force trauma to the head, and neck compression injuries. Prosecutors said either the stab wounds or the strangulation alone could have been sufficient to cause her death. She and her unborn son were both killed.

Outside Belfast Crown Court after the March verdict, her brother Declan spoke to the gathered media and cameras with a steadiness that evidently cost him a great deal. "Natalie was an inspirational person," he said. "Having you in our lives was the greatest joy we'll ever have. You would have been an amazing mother to baby Dean. We'll love you forever and we hope you can now rest easy." He paused, then added: "Violence against women and girls is the shame of our society. Our hope is that all the victims and their families get their day in court and the justice that they deserve."

The Plan: Pre-Recorded Four Days in Advance

The detail that propelled this case beyond local Northern Ireland coverage into a global story — covered by Dexerto, People, The Independent, The Guardian, the BBC, and major international outlets — is the alibi McCullagh constructed. It was not improvised. It was not opportunistic. It was, in the prosecution's word, and in the word of the judge at sentencing, "calculated."

Four days before the murder — on or between December 14 and 17, 2022 — McCullagh sat in front of his camera and recorded himself playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Robot Wars for approximately six hours. He set up the recording to appear as a live broadcast, titled with a Christmas theme: "The Violent Night - Christmas Stream." He promoted it via a social media advertisement created in that same window of December 14 to 17. On the evening of December 18 — the night he killed Natalie McNally — he arranged for that pre-recorded footage to stream on his YouTube channel as though it were happening in real time, complete with an on-screen message telling his subscribers that he was unable to interact with them live that night due to technical issues. Natalie McNally herself was watching the stream from her home in Lurgan as he drove the roughly 20 miles from his house in Lisburn to her door.

A digital forensic analyst who testified at Belfast Crown Court explained the precise sequence of activity that investigators recovered from McCullagh's devices: the creation of a social media advertisement between December 14 and 17, the livestream of a pre-recorded video file between December 18 and 19, and then — in the early hours of December 19 — the deletion of that file. The deletion was not sufficient. Investigators found the traces. Everything was documented. The alibi that McCullagh had spent days building began to collapse the moment investigators looked at the metadata.

The Initial Investigation: Released Without Charge, Welcomed to the Wake

The sophistication of the alibi was not merely technical. Its most chilling element was how completely it initially worked. When police arrived following the discovery of Natalie McNally's body, McCullagh was among those interviewed. Investigators checked his YouTube channel. They saw a six-hour gaming stream on the night in question. They provisionally accepted it. On December 24, 2022 — six days after Natalie's death and one day before Christmas — McCullagh was released from police bail. He was no longer a suspect.

The following day, Christmas Day, Stephen McCullagh arrived at Natalie McNally's family home for her wake. He came with his cousin, who went to the door first and asked if he could enter. The family, who had been told he was no longer a suspect and who had no reason to doubt what they had been told, let him in. Natalie's mother Bernadette told the court he was wearing a suit. He had told Natalie he wore it to her birthday meal, she had said she liked it, and so he had worn it to say goodbye to her. At some point during the wake, he showed Bernadette an engagement ring.

The McNally family, devastated and grieving, welcomed the man who had killed their daughter and her unborn baby into their home and comforted him as a fellow mourner. The detail sits in the trial record with a particular weight that is difficult to adequately characterise.

The Forensics That Undid Everything

The alibi held until investigators went deeper. Detective Chief Inspector Neil McGuinness, the Senior Investigating Officer, told the court that when McCullagh was subsequently interviewed by detectives who had examined his devices more thoroughly, he was told that no user-generated activity had been detected on those devices during the hours when he claimed to be broadcasting live. McCullagh's response to this information was: "That is literally impossible because you can see it on YouTube."

He was wrong, and he knew he was wrong. Following that interview, McCullagh provided a written statement to police in which he conceded that the gaming session had been pre-recorded in advance. He attempted to reframe the concession as strategically beneficial to him, adding: "I think it is obvious the true killer of Natalie has left a clear circumstantial trail to link me to the murder" — attempting, even in the admission, to suggest that someone had framed him. He consistently maintained throughout the investigation and throughout the trial that he did not kill Natalie McNally, and he named her former boyfriend as the person he believed was responsible for her death. That former boyfriend testified at the trial. Addressing McCullagh directly from the witness stand, he said: "Natalie really was my best friend, and you killed her."

The CCTV evidence placed McCullagh on the route from his home in Lisburn to Natalie McNally's home in Lurgan on the night of December 18. Phone data, forensic evidence from the scene, and the digital forensic dismantling of the fake livestream alibi together built what the jury found, after two hours of deliberation, to be an overwhelming and compelling case. McCullagh was formally charged with Natalie's murder on February 2, 2026, more than three years after her death. The trial began in February 2026 at Belfast Crown Court before Judge Patrick Kinney.

The Staged Emergency Call: A Second Layer of Performance

The prosecution's case included a detail about McCullagh's behaviour in the immediate aftermath of the killing that established the depth of the deception beyond the livestream alibi. On the night following the murder, McCullagh placed an emergency call in which he was heard crying and urging the emergency operator to send responders as quickly as possible. The court was played audio of him saying: "Please come as soon as you can, she's pregnant, she's cold… There's blood everywhere." Prosecutors told the jury that this call was itself staged — "an act" designed to create the impression of innocence, to help him "get away with it," and to position him as a distraught partner who had discovered the body rather than the person who had caused it.

The fabrication of that call — the performance of grief and panic over the death of a woman and child he had killed — was among the most disturbing elements of the evidence presented to the jury, and it formed part of the prosecution's characterisation of the killing as a "planned, calculated and premeditated" act. Prosecutor Charles MacCreanor KC told jurors that McCullagh had believed he could evade all responsibility through the combination of the digital alibi and the staged emotional performance. He was wrong on both counts.

The Verdict, the Family, the Sentence

When the jury of six men and six women returned their unanimous guilty verdict on March 23, 2026, cheers erupted in Belfast Crown Court. Natalie McNally's family, who had attended every day of the five-week trial, were in the public gallery. There were tears and embraces. Detectives received applause from the gallery as the court session rose. McCullagh, watching the verdict delivered, could be seen slowly nodding his head.

At the tariff hearing in May, McCullagh's probation officer reported that he had made "self-contradictory" and "incredible" statements — first insisting he "was convinced that he was not guilty of the murder," then describing the killing as "evil" and "vicious," referring to himself as "a monster," and saying: "I'm sorry for what I did to that poor family, what I did to Natalie." The judge described the murder as one of "extremely high" culpability.

This morning, with the minimum term set at 31 years, the formal legal proceedings in the case of Natalie McNally came to their conclusion. Detective Chief Inspector Neil McGuinness said in the PSNI statement issued after sentencing: "Natalie McNally was 32 years old when she was murdered in her own home. Today's sentencing is for Natalie, and for baby Dean, who never got the chance to take his first breath."

What This Case Means Beyond the Courtroom

The McCullagh case has been widely discussed not only because of the specific horror of what was done to Natalie McNally but because of the way digital technology featured in its commission and its unravelling. It is, in the most clinical sense, a case study in how digital forensics has evolved to the point where a carefully constructed digital alibi — one that fooled investigators initially, that relied on the architecture of one of the world's largest video platforms, and that was promoted via social media in advance — ultimately provided the very evidence that demolished the defence it was meant to construct.

The metadata on the files, the timestamps on the social media advertisement, the absence of user-generated activity during the supposed live session, and the deletion of the source file in the early hours of the following morning were all recoverable. The platform's own infrastructure preserved the traces of what McCullagh had done even as he deleted what he thought was the evidence. The YouTuber who had built an audience on a platform built around authenticity and presence had overlooked the central and permanent irony of the internet: the internet does not forget.

That dimension of the case has been discussed extensively in technology, true crime and legal media since the trial began in February 2026. Content creator MoistCr1TiKaL was among the first major YouTube commentators to cover the case when it first became widely known, and the case has been examined across podcasts, documentary formats and news analysis in the intervening period as an illustration of the specific intersection of online culture and serious crime that defines a category of case that courts will increasingly encounter.

But the more important dimension of the case is simpler and older than any of that: it is about Natalie McNally, 32 years old, 15 weeks pregnant, killed in her own home by the person she trusted most. And it is about her family, who have carried this for three and a half years with a dignity that the judge himself commended from the bench. And it is, as her brother said outside the courthouse in March, about violence against women and girls — which remains, in his words, "the shame of our society."

Today, with the minimum sentence of 31 years handed down and Stephen McCullagh taken from the courtroom, Natalie McNally's family left Belfast's Laganside Courthouse. They held each other. They had seen, as completely as the justice system allows, their daughter and sister and the mother of baby Dean receive the acknowledgement that what was done to her was catastrophic, deliberate, and deserving of the most serious consequence the law can impose.

Sources

1. ITV UTV News — Stephen McCullagh sentenced to 31 years for murder of Natalie McNally (June 3, 2026) — itv.com
2. PSNI — Police statement following the sentencing of Stephen McCullagh (June 3, 2026) — psni.police.uk
3. The Irish Times — Stephen McCullagh ordered to serve 31 years for murder of Natalie McNally (June 3, 2026) — irishtimes.com
4. CrispNG — Stephen McCullagh found guilty in Natalie McNally murder: How a fake YouTube livestream alibi collapsed in court (March 23, 2026) — crispng.com
5. BBC News NI — Natalie was our greatest joy, says family after murder verdict — aol.com/bbc
6. AOL / People — Streamer Found Guilty of Murdering Pregnant Girlfriend After Trying to Use Grand Theft Auto Livestream as Alibi — aol.com
7. Dexerto — YouTuber accused of killing pregnant girlfriend while using pre-recorded GTA stream as alibi (February 24, 2026) — dexerto.com
8. AOL / The Independent — The YouTuber who tried to get away with murder by 'live streaming' Grand Theft Auto — aol.com
9. AOL / The Independent — YouTuber filmed Grand Theft Auto 'livestream alibi' days before murder, trial hears — aol.com
10. AOL / People — YouTuber Accused of Stabbing Pregnant Girlfriend to Death Used Pre-Recorded 'Grand Theft Auto' Livestream as Alibi: Prosecutors — aol.com
11. AOL / BBC — Family comforted murder accused after Natalie McNally's death — aol.com
12. AOL / The Independent — YouTuber convicted of murdering pregnant partner in savage attack — aol.com
13. Fox on Games Podcast — The Livestream Lie: YouTuber Votesaxon07 Found Guilty — radio.foxnews.com
14. AOL / The Independent — 'No trace of argument' in messages between Natalie McNally and YouTuber accused of murder — aol.com