YouTuber Who Faked GTA Livestream To Murder Partner Found Guilty

Yesterday, a British YouTuber was found guilty of murdering his pregnant partner following a four-week trial that revealed how the Northern Irish man had beaten, strangled and stabbed 14-week pregnant Natalie McNally in December of 2022. It was a horrific crime, but one that has gained wider attention due to the way in which Stephen McCullagh attempted to provide himself with an alibi for his pre-meditated attack: A faked six-hour livestream of GTA Vice City.

It took the jurors only two hours to return a guilty verdict, reports the BBC, after they’d sat through a trial so upsetting the judge assured them none would ever have to perform jury service again, and ultimately sentencing McCullagh to a life sentence. McCullagh denied the murder, thus forcing his victim’s family to suffer through the trial, during which he at first insisted that he could not have been the killer because he was live-streaming for six hours on YouTube at the time. In reality, he had pre-recorded the full six hours of video and broadcast it in an attempt to create an alibi that reads like the plot of an episode in a murder-of-the-week TV show.

His plan—seemingly an act of revenge after learning that McNally, 32, planned to leave him—was to broadcast his stream as if live and then head to his partner’s home to murder her. He then returned to her place the next evening, pretended to discover the body, and called 999 to report her death. Prosecutors say he tried to implicate a former partner of McNally’s.

Investigators saw through McCullagh’s ruse only weeks after the murder, though the 36-year-old content creator maintained that he’d been livestreaming at the time across eight separate police interviews, for a total of 44 days, before the police were able to prove it was pre-recorded. Grotesquely, McCullagh had titled the stream “Violent Night,” with footage of both GTA Vice City and a video game based on Robot Wars, the UK version of Battle Bots. Throughout the six hours, he drank, vaped and mugged to camera as if it were all live, conveniently claiming technical difficulties were preventing him from reading the chat.

The footage was eventually proven to have been recorded four days earlier, and extensive CCTV footage showed McCullagh was near McNally’s house soon after the time of the murder, wearing a wig and hat that he’d previously worn in images on his social media. When he returned to his own home via taxi, he deleted the video file for the fake livestream as well as texts he’d sent to McNally before uploading a video review of a lightsaber toy to his channel. He spent the next six weeks continuing his act, attending his victim’s wake, staying in touch with her family, and trying to spy on them by recording them with his phone which he’d left at their house. He even attended a vigil held in Natalie’s honor.

One of Natalie’s brothers, Niall McNally, posted to X after yesterday’s verdict to say that “justice has finally been served for Natalie,” adding she “is, and always will be, what matters most. Nothing can ever bring Natalie or her unborn baby boy, Dean, back. But they will remain forever in our hearts.”

Her other brother, Declan, called Natalie “an inspirational person” and said that having had her in his family’s life was “the greatest joy they will ever have.” He went on to pay tribute to McNally’s mother and father, saying “Over the last three-and-a-half years, I don’t know how they have done it. They are the most amazing people. They have the biggest strength you could ever think of…they are amazing and we love you very much.”

McCullagh will receive his sentence, which will be anywhere between 15 and 30 years (a peculiarity of UK “life sentences”), on May 15.

If you are a victim of domestic abuse, you can call 800.799.SAFE (7233) for support, or visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline here.