# She Trusted The Wrong Person... Solved True Crime Cases | 273

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 12 Jul 2026, 36 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO1348124981.mp3

Episode 273 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, cases too dark for MrBallen, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, cold cases, true crime, true crime solved, 5 true crime cases, solved cases, sleep cases

## Transcript

[0:00] Just after 8 on the morning of November 28th, 2020, a Houston
[0:04] city worker driving his route along Red Hall Lane spotted
[0:08] something in the brush at the edge of the road.
[0:11] It was a woman in her 20s lying there with no visible injuries,
[0:16] and detectives believed she'd been there overnight, roughly 17
[0:20] miles West of downtown Houston. Within days, the whole country
[0:25] would know her name. She was Alexis Sharkey, a 26
[0:29] year old Instagram influencer with a polished feed and more
[0:33] than 20,000 followers. When that worker found her,
[0:37] nobody had yet reported her missing, not even her husband.
[0:42] Long before she was a Houston influencer, she was Alexis
[0:46] Robineau, the oldest of three daughters from Youngsville, a
[0:50] small town in northwestern Pennsylvania.
[0:53] She graduated from Youngsville High School in 2012 and earned a
[0:58] biology degree from the University of Pittsburgh at
[1:00] Bradford in 2016 with minors in nutrition and psychology.
[1:06] Her mother later told reporters that Alexis had originally
[1:09] planned on medicine, but a gap year after college nudged her
[1:13] onto a different Rd. entirely. That road led to West TX in the
[1:18] oil country around Midland and Odessa, where she crossed paths
[1:22] with Thomas Sharkey. He was an oil field worker more
[1:26] than two decades her senior, a man who'd already lived a whole
[1:30] life before her, including a grown daughter from an earlier
[1:34] chapter of it. A friend later recalled that
[1:37] Alexis was working at a local bar when the two met.
[1:40] Whatever the spark was, it moved fast and they took a multi month
[1:45] trip together to Colorado in 2019.
[1:48] Soon after meeting each other on December 20th of that year, they
[1:53] got hitched. She was 25 and he was in his
[1:57] late 40s, a fact which raised some eyebrows.
[2:02] A few weeks later, in January 2020, they relocated to Houston
[2:07] and settled into an apartment on the city's West side.
[2:11] By then, Alexis had built something of her own.
[2:14] She worked with Monat, a multi level marketing company selling
[2:18] skin care products, and she'd climb the ranks to executive
[2:21] director. Her Instagram showed the version
[2:24] of her life you'd expect from someone in that world, all the
[2:27] usual travel photos and the polished beauty content.
[2:32] The Instagram feed, of course, wasn't the whole story, and the
[2:35] reality was much darker than she publicly let on.
[2:40] In October 2020, Alexis took a trip to Marfa with several
[2:44] girlfriends. Marfa is a tiny town out in the
[2:47] West TX desert, a strange and beautiful place for the
[2:51] conversation that ended up happening there.
[2:54] On that trip. According to one of the friends,
[2:57] Alexis opened up in a way she rarely did, and the friend came
[3:01] away convinced that Alexis was petrified, scared for her own
[3:06] life. The friends who spoke publicly
[3:09] about that conversation declined to name the person she was
[3:12] afraid of. Investigators would eventually
[3:15] fill in that blank. Police said after the case ended
[3:20] that they'd established a history of violence in the
[3:22] marriage, though no report was ever filed with authorities
[3:25] while Alexis was alive. By November 2020, the two had
[3:30] effectively separated and it looked like the short marriage
[3:33] would soon be coming to a close. Her friend said publicly that
[3:37] Alexis had recently opened up about the relationship and that
[3:41] a divorce was being filed. Tom wanted to reconcile and
[3:45] Alexis, by all appearances, had no interest in staying married.
[3:50] None of that turmoil showed up online and she kept posting
[3:54] content to Instagram indicating things were going well in her
[3:57] life. On November 22nd, 2020, she
[4:02] posted to Instagram for the last time, photos from a trip to
[4:06] Tulum in Mexico. Three days later, on the
[4:09] Wednesday before Thanksgiving, she talked with her mother,
[4:13] Stacy Robino, about plans for Christmas.
[4:17] On Thanksgiving itself, the accounts diverge in a
[4:21] significant way, and Tom later claimed the couple shared a
[4:25] holiday meal that morning. Her friends said Alexis spent
[4:28] Thanksgiving with them, not with her husband, and that the group
[4:32] made plans to meet that Saturday to watch movies together.
[4:37] Alexis was last seen alive around six in the evening on
[4:40] Friday, November 27th. What happened at that apartment
[4:44] on Friday night is something only two people ever knew, and
[4:47] neither of them can tell us now. What we have are Tom Sharkey's
[4:52] accounts, and they didn't stay consistent.
[4:55] In one telling, she left home on foot after an argument and then
[4:59] simply vanished after that. In another, he insisted there
[5:04] was no fight at all, just him warning her that she shouldn't
[5:08] drive under the influence before she walked out anyway.
[5:12] Her family and her friends were suspicious of him almost
[5:15] immediately, and one piece of geography goes a long way toward
[5:19] explaining why the couple's apartment sat only about 3 miles
[5:24] from the spot where her body would be found.
[5:27] Her phone went quiet that night, and calls went unanswered and
[5:31] messages sat unread. For a woman friends described as
[5:35] practically inseparable from her phone, the silence was
[5:38] concerning. The next morning came the
[5:41] discovery on Red Hall Lane near the Katy Freeway and Eldridge
[5:44] Parkway in Houston's Energy Corridor.
[5:48] Police noted there was no evidence she'd walked down that
[5:51] road herself, and no sign that anyone had tried to conceal her.
[5:56] She'd simply been left there. The worker who found her later
[6:01] gave an interview about that morning, recalling that she
[6:04] looked clean and almost unmarked.
[6:07] This confirmed to detectives that she had almost certainly
[6:10] been dumped in that location by the perpetrator.
[6:14] That same day, Tom called Alexis's family in Pennsylvania
[6:19] to tell them she was missing, and her mother later said the
[6:22] household went straight into panic mode.
[6:25] But it was her friends, not her husband, who actually contacted
[6:30] police to report her missing. And by the time they did, her
[6:34] body was already lying in the Harris County morgue,
[6:37] unidentified. Tom, despite letting people know
[6:41] she had disappeared, never filed a report at all, which
[6:45] immediately raised further suspicions.
[6:48] On Sunday night, Stacy Robineau posted again, this time with the
[6:53] news every parent dreads, writing that her daughter's body
[6:57] had been found. On Monday, November 30th,
[7:02] Houston police publicly confirmed the identification.
[7:06] From the first days, Tom Sharkey's odd behavior drew
[7:10] significant attention both from the authorities and from
[7:13] Alexis's friend. He posted on social media
[7:17] thanking people for their support in the search, then
[7:20] lashed out at anyone pointing fingers at him.
[7:24] He wrote that his critics should be ashamed and insisting he'd
[7:28] been assisting deputies and working the phones to find out
[7:31] what happened to his wife. He said he was receiving death
[7:35] threats and that he was also a victim in this situation, which
[7:40] is an odd thing for a supposedly grieving husband to say.
[7:45] The case had gone national by then, and the online attention
[7:49] was ferocious, with amateur sleuths picking apart the
[7:52] couple's social media and floating theories about what
[7:56] happened. When a Houston television
[7:59] reporter reached him by phone, he said he'd done everything in
[8:02] his power to find her, told the reporter never to contact him
[8:06] again, and hung up. A day later, he agreed to an
[8:10] interview after all, insisting that he was prepared to tell the
[8:14] truth about the entire situation.
[8:17] In it, he described Alexis as stressed and not as happy as she
[8:21] appeared on social media, but insisted the marriage itself was
[8:25] a good one and denied that any divorce was in the works.
[8:30] He cast himself as the person who'd been holding her together
[8:33] through it all, and he ended the call abruptly.
[8:37] He insisted he wasn't a bad guy, just a man who'd been destroyed
[8:41] by the gossip and rumors floating around online.
[8:45] Then came the tells. Two weeks passed without Tom
[8:49] making any Funeral arrangements. The medical examiner's office
[8:53] took the unusual step of switching her next of kin from
[8:56] her husband to her parents. A private funeral went ahead on
[9:00] December 19th, and the family deliberately kept the
[9:03] arrangement secret from him. Around that same two week mark,
[9:08] Tom packed up and left Texas all together, resettling in Georgia.
[9:15] For seven weeks, the case sat in an official Gray zone because
[9:18] the cause of death hadn't been established.
[9:22] That ended on January 19th, 2021, when the Harris County
[9:27] Institute of Forensic Sciences released its finding Alexis
[9:31] Sharkey's death was a homicide. She had been strangled, which
[9:36] explained why the person who found her hadn't seen any
[9:39] visible injuries on her body. It was the finding her mother
[9:43] had been bracing for since November, and it moved the case
[9:46] out of the realm of speculation. The ruling turned the
[9:50] investigation into a criminal case, and the man who'd left the
[9:54] state without arranging his wife's funeral was now the
[9:58] obvious center of gravity. Publicly, though, Houston police
[10:03] stayed quiet, and for most of 2021, the case looked stalled
[10:07] from the outside. But it wasn't behind the scenes.
[10:12] Detectives spent those months building a file, and one thing
[10:16] they wanted was Tom Sharkey's DNA.
[10:20] He proved remarkably hard to pin down, and police later described
[10:23] him as untruthful and evasive throughout.
[10:27] In August 2021, when Houston detectives traveled to Georgia
[10:31] for an arranged meeting where he was supposed to provide a
[10:33] sample, he didn't show up. They'd crossed several states to
[10:37] hear him explain himself, and he left them waiting.
[10:41] Detectives said Tom later offered a bizarre story to
[10:44] explain why he'd essentially disappeared, and a short time
[10:48] after that failed meeting, he relocated again, this time to
[10:52] Florida. By late September, the
[10:56] investigation had reached its conclusion, one that should
[10:59] perhaps seem quite obvious given the circumstances of the case.
[11:04] Detectives determined that Tom Sharkey was the only person with
[11:07] the means, motive and opportunity to have committed
[11:10] the brutal act, and that he'd acted alone.
[11:14] They'd chase down and eliminated the alternative suspects,
[11:18] including, notably, some that Tom himself had tried to point
[11:22] them toward. On September 29th, 2021, police
[11:27] obtained a warrant for his arrest on a murder charge.
[11:30] Because the case was so high profile, they kept the warrant
[11:34] quiet while they worked out how to serve it, and not even
[11:37] Alexis's own family knew it existed.
[11:41] Deputy US Marshals traced him to a relative's home in Fort Myers,
[11:45] FL, reportedly the residence of his daughter and her boyfriend.
[11:50] Late on the night of Tuesday, October 5th, the marshals
[11:54] knocked on the door and it quickly became clear that there
[11:57] would be no trial in this case. When Tom Sharkey realized who
[12:02] they were and why they'd come, he ran upstairs, and before
[12:06] anyone could reach him, he eliminated himself.
[12:11] The next day, a police spokesman stood before cameras in Houston
[12:15] and laid out the case in broad strokes.
[12:18] He confirmed the history of violence and the divorce Alexis
[12:21] had wanted. He declined to detail the
[12:24] physical evidence, explaining that her parents deserve to hear
[12:27] it before the public did. And that's where the official
[12:31] record comes to an end. With the family's wishes for
[12:34] privacy being respected, there would be no courtroom test of
[12:38] his shifting stories, and no jury would ever weigh the file
[12:42] that detectives had spent ten months assembling.
[12:45] Much of what detectives gathered has never been made public at
[12:49] all, which means the full evidentiary picture of that
[12:52] Friday night has stayed locked in a case file in Houston.
[13:00] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here with my usual reminder to hit
[13:03] the notification bell and turn on all notifications.
[13:06] Also, don't forget to hit that share button and send this video
[13:10] to your friends and family members who enjoy true crime
[13:13] content. At 6:00 in the evening on
[13:19] December 18th, 2022, a YouTube channel called Vote Saxon O 7
[13:24] went live. For the next 6 hours, its host
[13:27] sat on camera playing Grand Theft Auto Vice City, chatting
[13:31] to his 37,000 subscribers. He apologized the technical
[13:36] problems meant he couldn't read the live chat and mentioning the
[13:39] current time again and again as the night wore on.
[13:43] While that stream was running, a man carrying a backpack walked
[13:47] onto a quiet residential St. in Lurgan in County Armagh in
[13:51] Northern Ireland. He left again 38 minutes later,
[13:55] wearing different clothes. Inside one of the houses on that
[13:59] street, a pregnant woman named Natalie McNally had just been
[14:03] killed. The man on the stream and the
[14:06] man with the backpack were the same person, and the broadcast,
[14:11] as police would eventually prove, had been recorded four
[14:15] days earlier. What followed was a multi year
[14:18] saga of lies and deception that ultimately ended with the killer
[14:22] locked behind bars. Natalie McNally was 32 years
[14:27] old. She held two degrees, worked as
[14:30] a marketing executive with Translink and owned her own home
[14:33] at Silverwood Green in Lurgan. She followed our Ma's Gaelic
[14:37] footballers in Everton with equal devotion and doted on her
[14:41] cats and dogs. She also turned up at rallies
[14:45] against violence toward women and girls, a detail that reads
[14:49] very differently and tragically now.
[14:51] Her parents, Noel and Bernadette, lived a short drive
[14:55] away in Craigavon, and she remained close to them and to
[14:58] her brothers. In August 2022, she matched on
[15:03] the dating app Bumble with Steven McCullough, a 32 year old
[15:07] from Woodland Gardens in Lisburn, about 20 minutes up the
[15:11] road. McCullough had a modest online
[15:14] following, posting gaming videos to an audience of roughly 37,000
[15:19] subscribers. The relationship moved quickly,
[15:24] and by November, Natalie was telling her family she was
[15:27] pregnant with his child. Those around the couple believed
[15:31] McCullough was delighted. An old college friend of his
[15:35] would later testify that he seemed excited about becoming a
[15:38] father, and he went as far as buying an engagement ring.
[15:42] There was, however, another side to the story, something that
[15:46] painted a much less happy picture.
[15:48] Transcripts of Natalie's messages to other people, later
[15:52] read in court, suggested she was having doubts and may have been
[15:57] thinking about ending the relationship.
[16:00] Whether McCullough knew, and what it did to him if he did, is
[16:04] a question that hangs over everything that followed.
[16:08] Sunday, December 18th, 2022 was World Cup final day and Natalie
[16:13] watched Argentina beat France at her parents house in Craigavon.
[16:18] Sometime after 5:00 PM she headed back to Lurgan.
[16:21] She was 15 weeks pregnant, didn't yet know whether she was
[16:25] having a boy or a girl, and had a scan booked for the coming
[16:28] Tuesday at 852 PMA. Security camera captured a man
[16:34] with a backpack entering Silverwood Green on foot.
[16:37] At around 9:00 PM. Two of Natalie's neighbors
[16:41] separately heard banging and screaming coming from her home.
[16:45] One man recalled seeing a large shadow on the blinds of the
[16:48] patio doors, but neither of them realized what they were hearing.
[16:53] At 9:30 PM, cameras picked up the same figure, leaving the
[16:56] area, now dressed in different clothing.
[17:00] At 1046, PMA taxi driver named Jeff McAvoy picked up a male
[17:05] passenger outside Fat Joe's Bar on Carnegie St. in Lurgan Town
[17:10] Center. The rider directed him to a
[17:13] house in Lisburn, and the Taxi's GPS logs showed it stopping
[17:18] outside Mccullough's home on Woodland Gardens shortly after
[17:21] 11:10 PM. Mccullough's own cell phone,
[17:25] meanwhile, had gone silent at around 6:00 PM, just as the
[17:29] stream began, and showed no activity again until 11:16 PM.
[17:36] For the entire window in which Natalie was attacked, the phone
[17:39] of the man supposedly live streaming from his living room
[17:43] was completely dark. Nobody found Natalie that night,
[17:47] and it wasn't until around 10:00 PM the following evening,
[17:51] Monday, December 19th, that McCullough arrived at Silverwood
[17:55] Green and dialed 911. He told the operator he
[17:58] discovered her body, that there was blood everywhere, that she
[18:03] felt cold and that she was pregnant, with a scan booked for
[18:07] the very next morning. A recording of that call, played
[18:12] to a jury more than three years later, captured him sounding
[18:16] distraught as the operator talked him through CPR.
[18:21] The first paramedic on scene found that her hands and lips
[18:24] had already turned blue. Police officers who followed
[18:27] noted a knife lying a few feet from her body in the living room
[18:31] and blood on the floor and the walls.
[18:35] There was no sign of forced entry, which told detectives
[18:38] from the start that Natalie had almost certainly opened her door
[18:41] to someone she knew. The post mortem documented
[18:45] dozens of injuries to her upper body, and while I don't usually
[18:49] get into the details, I think it's necessary here.
[18:54] She'd been stabbed 3 times in the neck, sustained lacerations
[18:58] to the top of her head, and suffered fractures to her face
[19:02] and broken bones in her neck consistent with manual
[19:05] strangulation. The pathologist couldn't single
[19:09] out one definitive cause of death because either the stab
[19:12] wounds or the compression of her neck could have been fatal on
[19:16] their own. What he could say was that she
[19:19] had endured A prolonged assault, something that detectives would
[19:23] view as highly personal. The Crown would later put the
[19:26] attack itself between 8:50 PM and 9:30 PM on the Sunday night,
[19:32] which meant Natalie had lain undiscovered in her own living
[19:35] room for roughly 24 hours. McCullough, for his part, was
[19:40] arrested at the scene that night on suspicion that he was the
[19:43] perpetrator. He told officers he couldn't
[19:46] have done it because he'd spent the entire previous evening live
[19:49] streaming on YouTube. On paper, it checked out.
[19:54] They're On his channel sat a six hour video titled The Violent
[19:58] Night Christmas Live Gaming Stream.
[20:01] Now, it's never been proven, but I can't help but wonder if this
[20:04] title was a subtle tell, or perhaps even a way to make his
[20:08] alibi look even more airtight. After all, it seems like the
[20:13] absolute worst video title given what happened that night.
[20:17] The stream had gone out between 6:00 PM and midnight on the
[20:20] night in question. In it, McCullough played Vice
[20:24] City, talked to his audience and repeatedly referenced the time.
[20:29] He explained early on that technical issues meant he
[20:32] couldn't interact with the live chat.
[20:35] Detectives watched it, and within a day he was released,
[20:39] effectively ruled out as a suspect.
[20:42] Before his release, in a formal interview the day after the
[20:45] discovery, McCullough answered no comment more than 80 times on
[20:50] his lawyer's direction, though he did volunteer one thing an
[20:55] ex-boyfriend, he said, had been harassing Natalie in the weeks
[20:58] before her death. What followed was, in hindsight,
[21:04] one of the most disturbing chapters of the whole case, when
[21:08] for weeks McCullough played the grieving partner.
[21:12] He was welcomed into the McNally family's home and comforted by
[21:16] them at Natalie's wake on Christmas Day.
[21:19] He showed her parents the engagement ring he said he'd
[21:22] bought for her and repeated to them the same suggestion he'd
[21:25] made to police, gently steering suspicion toward another man.
[21:30] When detectives asked him for a routine witness statement
[21:33] describing the scene as he'd found it, he declined, saying
[21:37] his lawyer had advised against it since he'd initially been
[21:41] treated as a suspect. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland and
[21:45] all the United Kingdom grieved the loss of Natalie.
[21:48] Natalie had been cut down a week before Christmas, pregnant in
[21:52] her own home, and the news landed hard.
[21:57] Vigils were held in her memory, her name appeared on placards at
[22:01] rallies and her family began what would become a years long
[22:05] public campaign for justice. Through all of it, in those
[22:09] early weeks, McCulloch stood alongside them, playing
[22:13] perfectly the role of the grieving boyfriend who lost his
[22:16] future wife to senseless violence.
[22:21] On December 22nd, police released the surveillance of the
[22:24] backpack man and asked the public for help identifying him.
[22:29] They renewed the appeal over the holidays and returned to the
[22:32] Silverwood greenhouse in early January for a fresh examination
[22:36] of the scene. In mid January 2023, detectives
[22:41] arrested a 46 year old man in South Belfast in connection with
[22:46] the case, but he was released on bail the following day and never
[22:51] charged. The investigation kept circling
[22:54] back to the same unanswered questions.
[22:57] Who was the figure on the video and why did the boyfriend's
[23:00] phone go dark for the exact window of the attack?
[23:04] Piece by piece, detectives trace the backpack man's full journey.
[23:08] A masked individual matching Mccullough's build was seen
[23:11] boarding a bus in Dunmurry near Lisburn and traveling toward
[23:15] Lurgan, then continuing on foot to Silverwood.
[23:18] Green Cameras near his own home even caught a figure tossing 2
[23:23] objects over a hedge beside the property on his return.
[23:26] The taxi driver, Jeff McAvoy, later picked McCullough out of a
[23:31] police lineup as the passenger he'd driven to Woodland Gardens.
[23:35] Then the cybercrime unit took his computer apart, and what
[23:38] they found dismantled the alibi entirely.
[23:42] The streaming software OBS Studio showed no background
[23:46] activity during pauses in the broadcast, something that
[23:49] couldn't happen in a genuine live transmission.
[23:53] As someone who has been a streamer before, there would at
[23:57] the very least need to have been some sort of button press to
[24:01] transition the screen over to the pause screen.
[24:06] Forensic analysis established that a single six hour recording
[24:09] had been created on December 14th and saved in the early
[24:13] hours of December 15th. It had then been manually
[24:17] deleted and the recycle bin emptied shortly after midnight
[24:21] on December 19th, just after the broadcast wrapped up and while
[24:25] Natalie's body still lay undiscovered.
[24:29] The analysis also showed no user interaction with the computer at
[24:32] all between 6:00 PM and midnight on the night of the attack.
[24:36] Whoever's face was on that stream, nobody was sitting at
[24:40] that computer on the night in question.
[24:43] On January 31st, 2023, McCullough was rearrested and on
[24:50] February 2nd he was charged. At the initial hearing, a
[24:55] Detective Chief Inspector told the court that the surveillance
[24:58] trail, the taxi driver's evidence and the hours long
[25:02] silence of Mccullough's phone all tied him to the crime.
[25:07] Under questioning after his rearrest, McCullough finally
[25:10] admitted the video had been recorded around December 14th.
[25:14] He said that there was an innocent reason for this, though
[25:17] he offered no explanation for the senseless cover up.
[25:21] He claimed that he spent the evening of the 18th getting
[25:24] absolutely hammered at home before falling asleep.
[25:27] Confronted with the mountain of evidence, he offered a new
[25:31] theory. The real culprit had
[25:33] deliberately laid a trail of circumstantial evidence to frame
[25:37] him. This was consistent with his
[25:40] previous attempts to pin the crime on other people, though
[25:43] this time no one was buying what he was selling.
[25:48] Bail was refused repeatedly and I ended up going down a bit of a
[25:53] rabbit hole on Northern Irish law on this one.
[25:56] His bail was denied mainly because a Northern Irish court
[26:01] believed there was a real risk that he could interfere with
[26:05] witnesses or obstruct the prosecution.
[26:09] The prosecution pointed to allegations that he had created
[26:12] a false alibi using a pre recorded YouTube live stream.
[26:17] They also noted he continued interacting with Natalie
[26:19] Mcnally's family after her death.
[26:22] It also came to light that he secretly left his phone in their
[26:25] home to record their conversations and learn whether
[26:29] they or the police suspected him.
[26:32] At one bail hearing, he was also found to be a flight risk and it
[26:36] was determined that confiscating his passport wouldn't be enough
[26:40] to ensure that he didn't go on the Lam.
[26:44] At a pretrial hearing in March 2023, prosecutors described the
[26:49] case as strong and persuasive and disclosed the detail that
[26:53] made headlines across the world during the pre recorded session.
[26:58] McCullough had gone out of his way to play an optional Grand
[27:01] Theft Auto Vice City side mission called Waste the Wife.
[27:06] Now, if you're familiar with this series, I'm sure you can
[27:09] figure out what this side quest entailed.
[27:12] But if you're not, it involves the player eliminating someone's
[27:15] wife. The player has to stage her
[27:18] death to look like a car accident, thus preventing the
[27:21] police from realizing what actually occurred.
[27:24] The prosecution suggested this mission was a hidden message, a
[27:28] taunt embedded to her family in the recording.
[27:32] His defense called it a tragic coincidence and stressed that
[27:36] the case was entirely circumstantial.
[27:39] McCullough formally pleaded not guilty in January 2024, and in
[27:44] November 2025 the trial was adjourned when 30,000 pages of
[27:49] new material were served on the defense.
[27:52] By the time a jury was finally sworn in at Belfast Crown Court
[27:56] on February 16th, 2026, before Justice Patrick Kinney, more
[28:02] than three years had passed since Natalie's death.
[28:07] The prosecution, led by Charles Mccreener, opened by telling the
[28:11] jury the attack was planned, calculated and premeditated, and
[28:15] that Mccullough's tearful call had been a performance.
[28:19] Over 5 weeks, the Crown built its case strand by strand.
[28:23] Jurors watch sections of the fake stream, including the
[28:26] moment McCullough explained why he couldn't read the chat.
[28:30] They were shown a compilation of footage from doorbell cameras
[28:33] and a bus following the masked traveler from Dunmurry to Lurgan
[28:38] and back out again by taxi. A detective from the cybercrime
[28:42] unit walked them through the streaming equipment evidence and
[28:46] the forensic pathologist described Natalie's injuries.
[28:49] The human testimony cut deepest and it really drives home what
[28:54] an absolutely sick individual McCullough is because most
[28:58] people can't pull this off with a straight face.
[29:01] Her parents described how McCullough had grieved alongside
[29:04] them and shown them the ring, claiming that he had lost the
[29:08] love of his life. His old friend recalled him
[29:11] being inconsolable about the entire thing without showing a
[29:15] single sign that he was responsible for the brutal
[29:18] crime. Then an ex-girlfriend of
[29:22] Mccullough's testified that he'd attacked her several times
[29:25] during their seven-year on and off relationship after she
[29:29] delivered a stillborn baby in early 2022.
[29:32] She'd received private counseling sessions at his
[29:35] house, which police later told her he had secretly recorded.
[29:40] Jurors also watched recordings of Mccullough's police
[29:43] interviews from early 2023 in which detectives showed him all
[29:48] the evidence and invited him to explain it.
[29:51] He showed no emotion, gave them nothing in the moment, then
[29:55] later handed over a prepared statement insisting the case was
[29:59] entirely circumstantial. The statement said that he
[30:03] wasn't the man in the footage and that someone was framing
[30:07] him, which I can't imagine looked very good to jurors.
[30:11] His actions showed a lack of basic human emotion that one
[30:14] would associate with the loss of 1's bride to be and your own
[30:18] unborn baby and such a tragic and horrific attack.
[30:22] The defense, led by John Kearney, aimed everything at one
[30:26] target, Natalie's ex-boyfriend. The two had met on Tinder in
[30:31] 2019 and carried on an on off relationship for years, with a
[30:36] final encounter at her house as late as October 2022.
[30:40] While she was seeing McCullough. The man admitted from the
[30:43] witness box that he'd lied to detectives about when he last
[30:47] saw her in an effort to diminish his temporal connect to Natalie.
[30:52] He also admitted that he'd factory reset his phone when
[30:55] police arrived because he'd recently been arrested over
[30:58] threatening messages to a former partner.
[31:01] But he'd been watching the World Cup final at home with his
[31:04] current girlfriend that night. An alibi she corroborated on the
[31:08] stand and a short video taken at the time supported over 3 days
[31:14] of cross examination. He held to one position.
[31:18] He told lies about other things, but he had nothing to do with
[31:21] Natalie's death. At one point he turned the
[31:24] accusation directly on McCullough in open court, saying
[31:28] that he was the one who did it. Had the case against McCullough
[31:32] been weaker, the series of lies and half truths he told may have
[31:37] created reasonable doubt. But, spoiler warning, they
[31:41] didn't hear. When his turn came, McCullough
[31:45] declined to testify and his lawyer called no witnesses at
[31:49] all on his behalf. Now, there's nothing unusual at
[31:52] all about an accused choosing not to testify, especially given
[31:57] how brutal cross examination can be even for an innocent person.
[32:03] What is unusual is that no expert witnesses were called
[32:05] with respect to any of the surveillance evidence or phone
[32:08] evidence. Simply put, the prosecution had
[32:12] experts testify as to why McCullough was the man on the
[32:15] tapes, but Mccullough's defense had no expert evidence to push
[32:19] back and create doubt. Now, it's not necessary for the
[32:24] defense to do anything whatsoever, since there's no
[32:27] reverse onus on the defendant. But the lack of any pushback on
[32:31] the prosecution's experts is unusual.
[32:35] In closing, the prosecution argued he'd lied to everyone in
[32:39] every direction until each lie was disproven, and that his
[32:43] silence in the face of a compelling case spoke for
[32:45] itself. The defense answered that a
[32:48] wholly circumstantial case with strands pointing at another man
[32:52] was the very definition of reasonable doubt.
[32:56] Justice Kinney reminded jurors that the ex-boyfriend wasn't the
[32:59] person on trial and instructed them to weigh each bit of
[33:03] evidence individually. From there, they would then
[33:07] decide whether the strands of evidence they accepted, taken
[33:10] together, proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
[33:15] On March 23rd, 2026, after about two hours of deliberation, the
[33:20] jury returned a unanimous verdict of guilty.
[33:24] Natalie's relatives cheered the result, metaphorically speaking,
[33:28] from the public gallery. But despite this result,
[33:32] McCullough showed almost nothing in the way of emotion.
[33:36] Just as Kinney told him, the conviction carried a mandatory
[33:39] life sentence, with the minimum term to be fixed at a later
[33:42] hearing. Within hours, YouTube terminated
[33:46] his channels, which had remained online throughout the trial and
[33:50] had actually gained subscribers while he awaited it.
[33:54] He was immediately moved to protective custody amid reported
[33:58] fears of a revenge attack from fellow inmates.
[34:01] Given that Natalie was pregnant at the time, it was believed
[34:05] that even serious offenders would take the opportunity to
[34:08] dish out some prison justice on him.
[34:11] Ultimately, the latest report suggests that he may never be
[34:15] returned to the general prison population and that he may serve
[34:19] his entire sentence in protective custody.
[34:23] At a hearing on May 21st, the court learned that McCullough
[34:26] had told a probation officer after the verdict that he might
[34:30] have been responsible, but had no memory of that night.
[34:34] He'd reportedly described himself as a monster to that
[34:37] officer and claimed he was suffering from psychological
[34:40] problems as a result of coming to accept this.
[34:44] The prosecution called his contradictory statements an
[34:47] attempt to manipulate a future parole board and sought a
[34:51] minimum term of between 27 and 35 years.
[34:56] And I have to agree, this was clearly an attempt to further
[34:59] manipulate the situation. His defense argued for 15 or 16
[35:04] years, though there doesn't appear to have been any cogent
[35:08] argument why he should get such a light sentence given the
[35:10] circumstances. On June 3rd, 2026, Justice
[35:16] Kinney sentenced McCullough to life imprisonment with a minimum
[35:19] of 31 years. The judge described A brutal,
[35:22] frenzied attack on a woman he professed to love, carried out
[35:26] in the full knowledge that she was pregnant.
[35:30] He also noted a detail that had stayed largely out of view until
[35:33] sentencing. And again, while I don't usually
[35:37] get into these details here, it's necessary to understand the
[35:41] criminal in question. The judge mentioned that
[35:45] McCullough had intentionally placed Natalie's face in a dog
[35:48] bowl, an act he characterized as an aggravating factor.
[35:52] It was, according to the judge, some sort of sick act of
[35:57] perceived punishment for an offense that only existed in the
[36:01] mind of this deranged individual.
[36:04] Personally, I think that McCullough is lucky to have
[36:07] gotten 31 years, but his lawyers seem to disagree.
[36:12] Within a month after the sentencing, they had reportedly
[36:15] filed an appeal against the 31 year sentence, though whether
[36:19] anything will come of this remains to be seen.

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