Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / YouTuber Who Faked Livestream as Alibi for Pregnant Girlfriend’s Murder Sentenced to 31 Years In Prison

Transcript

YouTuber Who Faked Livestream as Alibi for Pregnant Girlfriend’s Murder Sentenced to 31 Years In Prison · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Think about the last time you pulled up a live
• 0:02
  video on your.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: Phone, right, Yeah, like just casually scrolling, Yeah, exactly.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Maybe it was a friend facetiming you from a concert,
• 0:09
  or I don't know, a news anchor standing in front
• 0:11
  of a storm, right, or just a gamer streaming on YouTube.
• 0:15
  What actually goes through your mind in that split.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: Second, honestly, probably nothing, Right.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: You don't analyze the pixels, you don't sit there and
• 0:23
  question the frame rate. Your brain just automatically registers the
• 0:26
  images as reality.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: You implicitly trust that what you're seeing on that screen
• 0:31
  is happening somewhere in the world at that exact same millisecond.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Yes, And that is exactly what we're tearing apart today.
• 0:38
  We are doing a deep dive into a case that
• 0:41
  really messes with that trust.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: It really does. It's basically the ultimate modern cognitive bias.
• 0:48
  We've spent the last twenty odd years being trained to
• 0:50
  equate digital video with undeniable proof.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: If there's a video, it happens exactly.
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: If there's a live badge glowing red in the corner
• 0:58
  of the screen, your brain says, well, it is happening
• 1:00
  right now, And honestly, it's a very comforting assumption. We
• 1:04
  rely on it to navigate.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: The world, but it's also incredibly dangerous when someone figures
• 1:10
  out how to manipulate.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: That trust, extremely dangerous.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: And that manipulation is the core of what we're looking
• 1:15
  at today. We're unpacking a chilling collision between our highly
• 1:20
  documented modern digital lifestyle and a crime that is just
• 1:25
  as ancient and brutal as human history itself.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the twenty twenty two case of Natalie McNally
• 1:32
  and Stephen McCullough from Northern Ireland.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Right, And our mission today is to map out how
• 1:37
  an absolutely ironclad digital alibi was constructed, how it managed
• 1:41
  to fool almost everyone right out of the gate, and
• 1:44
  then crucially, how it completely unraveled.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: Because when you examine the mechanics of this case, you
• 1:50
  aren't just looking at a.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: True crime story, no, not at all.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: You're really looking at the vulnerabilities baked into our own
• 1:55
  daily lives. You're getting a masterclass in modern digital forensics
• 1:59
  and really the architecture of a twenty first century lie exactly.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: And I do want to set the tone right up
• 2:05
  front for you listening. Usually we keep things pretty light
• 2:08
  around here, you know, we bounce ideas around and have
• 2:10
  some fun. But this story is incredibly heavy.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: It's heartbreaking, it really is.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: We're going to treat the victim, Natalie and her family,
• 2:18
  with the utmost respect, but we are also going to
• 2:21
  relentlessly meticulously dissect the perpetrator's methodology.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: Right because understanding how he exploited the blind spots of
• 2:30
  technology is the only way we learn from this.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: I agree completely. We have to separate the horrific reality
• 2:36
  of the violence from the cold, calculated digital architecture that
• 2:41
  surrounded it.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: You really can't understand one without understanding the other.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: So to really grasp how bizarre and terrifying this gets,
• 2:48
  we need to look at the two people at the
• 2:50
  center of it. The contrast between who they were in
• 2:52
  real life versus how they presented themselves. That's the foundation
• 2:56
  for everything.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's start with Natalie McNelly.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: She was thirty two years old living in Lurgan, which
• 3:01
  is a town in County Armagh in Northern Ireland, and.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: By all accounts from her family and friends, she was
• 3:06
  this vibrant, fiercely independent, highly intelligent woman.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: She had deep roots in her community too, incredibly close
• 3:12
  to her parents, Bernie and knowl and her siblings.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: She had built a really solid, thriving life, and at
• 3:19
  the time of the murder in December twenty twenty two,
• 3:22
  she was fifteen weeks pregnant. She was conspecting a boy, right, Yeah,
• 3:25
  she was, and she had already picked out the name Dean.
• 3:28
  The accounts from those close to her paint a picture
• 3:31
  of someone who was just radiating excitement about this pregnancy
• 3:34
  and her future just devastating.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: And then on the other side you have Stephen McCullough.
• 3:38
  He was thirty six at the time, and his background
• 3:41
  is where this massive digital facade starts to take.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Shape, right because for his day job, he worked part
• 3:47
  time at the Belfast Telegraph as an assistant audience editor.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Okay, but his real identity, the one he projected to
• 3:52
  the world, was a YouTuber. He went by the handle
• 3:56
  vote saxon O seven.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: And he had roughly thirty seven thousand subscrit Now he
• 4:01
  wasn't exactly mister Beast, but thirty seven thousand is a
• 4:03
  highly engaged, solid following.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not nothing, not at all.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: And his content was about as harmless as you can get.
• 4:09
  He was reviewing robot toys, talking about pop culture merchandise
• 4:13
  and streaming himself playing video games, which I.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: Mean, that's a very specific type of persona to cultivate,
• 4:18
  isn't it.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely. What's fascinating here is that when you're a
• 4:22
  YouTuber reviewing toys or gaming in that mid tier subscriber range,
• 4:27
  your entire currency is approachability.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Right. You aren't playing the role of a distant, untouchable
• 4:33
  celebrity exactly.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: You're positioning yourself as the friendly, slightly nerdy guy next door.
• 4:39
  You want your audience to feel a parasocial connection with you,
• 4:43
  like you're just a buddy hanging out in their living room.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Right. He was the harmless geek that was the brand.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: And don't forget his offline job, being an assistant audience
• 4:53
  editor at a major publication means he wasn't just some
• 4:55
  guy who figured out how to turn on a webcam.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Well, good point.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: He understood media into He understood audience analytics, public perception,
• 5:03
  how to craft a narrative that keeps people watching. He
• 5:06
  knew how people consume digital information, so he.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Knows exactly how to manipulate attention. Now, these two meet
• 5:13
  on Bumble in August of twenty twenty two, and their
• 5:17
  early interactions seemed totally normal, just based on the WhatsApp messages.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: The later came out, Yeah, they're lighthearted, they're joking around.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: McCullough even leaned heavily into his harmless online persona. In
• 5:27
  one of the messages, he playfully refers to himself as
• 5:31
  that robot weirdo from.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: Bumble, which is a brilliant disarming tactic if you think
• 5:35
  about it, ow so well, self deprecation is the fastest
• 5:39
  way to lower swans defenses. If he preemptively calls himself
• 5:43
  a weirdo, he's signaling that he doesn't take himself too seriously.
• 5:47
  It makes him seem incredibly safe.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Okay, I see that, And their early dates reflected that entirely.
• 5:52
  They went bowling, they played crazy golf, They just standard
• 5:55
  casual dating stuff. But I keep thinking of this dynamic
• 5:59
  as a digital trojan horse, because, okay, let's unpack this.
• 6:03
  When we meet people through dating apps today, we were
• 6:06
  essentially inviting a highly curated, heavily edited avatar of a
• 6:10
  person into our real lives.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: That is so true.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Right like twenty or thirty years ago, if you met someone,
• 6:15
  it was usually embedded in a community context. You met
• 6:18
  through mutual friends, or at work or at a local
• 6:20
  pub where people knew him.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a built in vetting process.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Exactly, if a guy gave you a bad vibe, you
• 6:26
  could pull a friend aside and ask, hey, what's the
• 6:28
  deal with this guy? But on bumble, that community safety
• 6:31
  net is completely stripped away. You're flying blind, completely blind.
• 6:35
  All Natalie had to go on was exactly what Stephen
• 6:39
  chose to show her. The goofy gamer, the guy who
• 6:41
  likes crazy golf, the robot weirdo. But how do we
• 6:45
  reconcile that curated avatar with what he was actually like
• 6:50
  behind closed doors.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: Well you have to realize that the online persona wasn't
• 6:54
  just who he was on camera, It was an active
• 6:56
  shield for who he was off camera. Oh okay, we
• 7:00
  know this because of some really harrowing testimony that came
• 7:02
  out from a former partner of McCullough's detailing an incident
• 7:05
  from twenty nineteen.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: And this testimony completely shatters the goofy gamer image right.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: Utterly shatters it. This ex partner detailed a history of
• 7:13
  extreme controlling behavior, intense jealousy.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: And violence.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: Oh god, yeah, there was a specific assault in twenty
• 7:19
  nineteen that was triggered simply because he saw messages from
• 7:22
  another man on her phone. He demanded to see the phone,
• 7:25
  she refused, and it escalated into physical.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Violence over a text message.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: Over a text message. So, behind closed doors, away from
• 7:33
  the thirty seven thousand subscribers, you have a man who
• 7:35
  is highly volatile, deeply insecure, and fully capable of physical
• 7:40
  assault over something minor.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: That is just terrifying. Yeah, it highlights exactly what you
• 7:45
  were saying about the vulnerability the app ecosystem. A predator
• 7:48
  can isolate you from the jump because they control the
• 7:51
  entire narrative of who they are precisely now. By November
• 7:55
  twenty twenty two, just a few months after they started dating,
• 7:58
  Natalie shared with her family that she was pregnant, but
• 8:01
  behind the scenes, the relationship was already deteriorating rapidly.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: The picture painted in court was a man capable of profound,
• 8:09
  almost psychopathic compartmentalization.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Meaning he could just switch it on and off exactly.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: He could maintain this absolute facade of normalcy, clocking in
• 8:17
  at the telegraph, making toy review videos, playing the role
• 8:21
  of the excited expectant father to her family, while simultaneously
• 8:25
  harboring this intense, controlling darkness in private, and.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: Because he worked in content creation, maintaining a facade wasn't
• 8:32
  just a psychological defense.
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: Mechanism, No, it was literally his professional skill set that
• 8:36
  is so dark, and that stark contrast between his public
• 8:40
  persona and his private reality wasn't just a giant red
• 8:44
  flag in their relationship.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: It actually became the literal blueprint for how he would
• 8:48
  attempt to get away with murder.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: His entire online life was essentially a dress rehearsal for
• 8:53
  the alibi he was about to build.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Let's jump to the timeline of December eighteenth, twenty twenty two,
• 8:59
  because this is where the story splits into two entirely
• 9:02
  different realities happening at the exact same time.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Right, the physical timeline and the digital one.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, we have to look at the physical reality of
• 9:09
  what was happening to NARROWI and the digital reality that
• 9:13
  McCullough was projecting out to the Internet. On the physical side,
• 9:17
  Natalie spent that Sunday evening with her parents in kraig
• 9:20
  of Oaze.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: They were watching the World Cup Final.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, just a totally normal, happy family evening.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: Right and after the match wrapped up, she headed back
• 9:27
  to her house in Silverwood Green in Lurgan. The timeline
• 9:31
  places her arriving back home sometime after five pm.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Now, there is a critical detail from the crime scene
• 9:36
  analysis here. There were absolutely no signs of forced entry
• 9:40
  at her.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: House, meaning she knew the person at the door.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Yes, she voluntarily let her killer inside a place where
• 9:47
  she had every right to feel completely safe. And what
• 9:51
  happened next was a frenzied, horrific attack.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the pathology reports detailed the absolute brutality of it.
• 9:58
  She suffered multiple stab wounds to her neck and head.
• 10:01
  She had lacerations, facial fractures, and broken bones in her
• 10:05
  neck that indicated severe strangulation. Oh my god, it gets worse.
• 10:10
  The pathologist noted that either the stab wounds or the
• 10:12
  neck compression could have been fatal on their own. It
• 10:15
  was a prolonged intimate assault and it resulted in the
• 10:18
  deaths of both Natalie and her unborn son.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: You really have to pause and absorb the level of
• 10:23
  physical violence here, especially against a woman who is fifteen
• 10:26
  weeks pregnant.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this wasn't a single impulsive strike in a moment
• 10:29
  of panic. This was an extended period of extreme physical exertion, rage,
• 10:34
  and brutality. It takes a significant amount of time and
• 10:37
  horrific effort to inflict those kinds of injuries.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: Now, while that absolute nightmare is unfolding in the physical world,
• 10:45
  look at Stephen McCullough's physical movements. He didn't just drive
• 10:49
  his car over to her house in a fit of rage.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: No, it was highly calculated.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: He meticulously planned his route, He traveled by public transport,
• 10:57
  He deliberately disguised himself where a beanie and what appeared
• 11:01
  to be a dark wig a wig a wig, and
• 11:05
  ces TV cameras captured a man matching this exact description
• 11:09
  carrying a rucksack entering the Silverwood Green area around eight
• 11:12
  five two pm, and neighbors actually reported hearing screams around
• 11:16
  nine pm.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: So he's in the immediate area for a very tight
• 11:19
  specific window. The cameras catch him leaving the area at
• 11:22
  roughly nine thirty pm.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: That's a thirty eight minute window, right, a.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: Thirty eight middle window where he arrives, commits the atrocity,
• 11:28
  and flees. He then flagged down a taxi to take
• 11:31
  him back home, and that specific taxi driver would later
• 11:33
  become a crucial witness who confidently identified mccallaugh as the
• 11:37
  passenger he picked up in the Lurgan that night.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Okay, so that is the grim, violent, physical reality. Now
• 11:44
  I want you to hold that timeline, that thirty eight
• 11:47
  minute window of brutality in your head, and let's flip
• 11:50
  the screen to look at the digital timeline McCully had
• 11:52
  constructed for that exact same evening, the split screen exactly
• 11:57
  at the very moment this violence was occurring, McCullough's YouTube channel,
• 12:00
  Vote Sacks and seven was broadcasting a live six hour gaming.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: Stream from six pm straight through to midnight.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Think about that.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: Any of his subscribers could tune in, click the video
• 12:12
  and see him sitting right there in his room in Lisburn,
• 12:16
  which is a solid seventeen miles away from.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Lurgan, and he's just acting completely normal.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, completely yeah. In this broadcast, he's wearing a festive
• 12:22
  Sanda hat, he's eating snacks, he's casually drinking pintes of guinness.
• 12:25
  He's making little jokes to the camera. He created this
• 12:28
  incredibly seamless illusion that he was just relaxing at home,
• 12:31
  celebrating the holidays and playing grand theft Auto Vice City Okay, wait,
• 12:35
  I have.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: A question about this. If it's a live stream, doesn't
• 12:39
  the streamer usually interact with the chat, like reading comments
• 12:42
  out loud, answering questions in real time? How did he
• 12:44
  get around that if he wasn't actually there.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: It's so twisted. He built an excuse right into the broadcast.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: What do you mean?
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: He kept mentioning to the camera that he was experiencing
• 12:55
  technical issues, claiming his setup wasn't letting him see or
• 12:58
  interact with the live check night.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so he preemptively gave his audience a reason for
• 13:04
  why it was going to be a one sided broadcast.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: That is so calculated. But the detail that truly makes
• 13:10
  my blood run cold is the specific gameplay he chose
• 13:14
  for this stream.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where it gets really dark.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: During this six hour block, he deliberately navigates his character
• 13:21
  to select a specific side mission in Grand Theft auto
• 13:24
  titled Waste the Wife.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that is the moment we cross over for mere
• 13:28
  criminal deception into profound psychological sadism.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Inal right.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, think about the psychology of a killer who
• 13:36
  does that? The prosecutors hammered this point during the trial,
• 13:41
  selecting that specific mission was not a random algorithmic coincidence.
• 13:45
  It was an expression of supreme, terrifying arrogance.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: It's sickning.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: He's projecting an image of himself drinking beer and a
• 13:53
  Santa hat, broadcasting a digital game about killing a wife,
• 13:57
  knowing with absolute certainty that at the exact time this
• 14:00
  video is scheduled to hit the internet, he will be
• 14:02
  physically murdering his pregnant girlfriend. It was a taunt.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: It implies he thought his digital alibi made him so untouchable,
• 14:10
  so completely insulated from consequences, that he could essentially broadcast
• 14:15
  a dark inside joke to thirty seven thousand people and
• 14:18
  be the only one in on it exactly. The cognitive
• 14:21
  dissonance required to pull that off is just saggering. Like
• 14:24
  I said, it's at literal split screen reality.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: On one monitor you have visceral brutal violence, strangulation, stabbing blood.
• 14:31
  On the other monitor, you have a digital avatar of
• 14:34
  the killer casually sipping a Guinness.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: It really forces you to confront how totally divorced our
• 14:39
  digital representations can be from our physical actions. And we
• 14:42
  have to recognize why he designed it this way. He
• 14:45
  didn't just want a friend to say yeah, he was
• 14:46
  with me. He wanted an alibi that was publicly verifiable
• 14:50
  by thousands of people simultaneously. But more importantly, he wanted
• 14:55
  to use the credibility of a massive tech platform, YouTube
• 14:59
  to vouch for him.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: So he outsourced his alibi to the Internet.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: He outsourced his alibi to the architecture of the Internet.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: And the craziest part is well it worked because it
• 15:10
  was so audaciously constructed, it initially succeeded in completely blinding
• 15:15
  the authorities.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: Well yeah, put yourself in the shoes of a police
• 15:18
  officer responding to the scene. When law enforcement is confronted
• 15:22
  with a solid, timestamped digital footprint from a major corporation,
• 15:26
  the initial protocol is to trust the data.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: Right, They're not tech auditors right out of the gate.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: Exactly, if YouTube servers say a stream was live from
• 15:35
  an ip address in Lisbon, the initial assumption is that
• 15:38
  it was live. Police aren't trained to immediately assume a
• 15:41
  multinational tech platform is being spoofed by a mid tier gamer.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to December nineteenth, the day after the
• 15:48
  murder and what I can only describe as the ultimate.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: Performance the nine nine nine call Yes.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: At around ten PM that night, mccullaugh himself dials nine
• 15:58
  nine nine from Natalie's house. Yes, he tells the dispatcher
• 16:01
  he just came over, found her body and is actively
• 16:05
  attempting to perform CPR.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: So when the paramedics and police arrive, they walk into
• 16:09
  an absolute bloodbath. Natalie is on the floor, the weapon,
• 16:13
  a knife, is nearby, and McCullough is right there in
• 16:16
  the middle of it, playing the role of the traumatized,
• 16:19
  hysterical boyfriend.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: But they do arrest him initially.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Right, Yes, standard operating procedure in any domestic hommicide is
• 16:25
  that the person who finds the body, especially the romantic partner,
• 16:29
  is the immediate primary suspect. So McCullough was arrested at
• 16:33
  the scene, but.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: They don't hold him. He's released the very.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: Next day because of this stream.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: Right because he points to his YouTube live stream. He says, look,
• 16:40
  I was seventeen miles away, thousands of people saw me,
• 16:43
  and YouTube actually confirmed to the police that the broadcast
• 16:45
  appeared to be legitimate. The system registered it as a
• 16:49
  live event. But here's where it gets really interesting, and
• 16:51
  I don't understand this. How does YouTube not know it's
• 16:55
  a fake stream? How does a multi billion dollar platform
• 17:00
  fall for this?
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: Okay, so this comes down to how broadcasting software actually
• 17:04
  handshakes with a platform like YouTube.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: Walk me through it.
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: When you stream, you don't stream directly from your webcam
• 17:11
  to YouTube's website. You use a middleman software, in this case,
• 17:15
  an industry standard program called OBS Studio or Open Broadcast Software.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, I've heard of OBS.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's what everyone uses. OBS takes your video, your
• 17:25
  game capture, and your audio, packages it into a continuous
• 17:28
  feed of data packets and fires those packets at YouTube
• 17:31
  servers using a unique stream key.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Okay, so it's like a secure pipeline exactly.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: And YouTube servers are relatively dumb in this specific regard.
• 17:39
  They don't have eyes. They just look at the pipeline.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: Oh I see.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: If the pipeline is sending a steady stream of data
• 17:44
  packets tagged with mccullus stream key, YouTube's interface lights up
• 17:47
  and says vote sax and seven is live.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: Ve.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: The platform doesn't know if the video inside those packets
• 17:53
  is happening right now, or if OBS is just playing
• 17:56
  back of video file recorded a week ago.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: It just sees incoming data and broadcasts it. So when
• 18:01
  the police ask you to was this live, the software
• 18:05
  basically says, yes, we received a live data feed.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: That is wild. This software validation inadvertently armed a killer
• 18:13
  with an impenetrable shield. He really did, and because he's
• 18:16
  released and officially cleared by the initial investigation, he leans
• 18:19
  into the role of the grieving boyfriend with a level
• 18:21
  of commitment that is just disturbing.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: It's sociopathic.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: He attended Natalie's wake, he visited her grave, He stood
• 18:29
  by her coffin and wept openly. He even edited together
• 18:32
  a memorial video for her.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: It's extreme emotional manipulation. And he's not just doing it
• 18:37
  to the police. He's inflicting this on Natalie's devastated parents.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: He trusted him.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: They did. They are welcoming him into their home, sharing
• 18:44
  their deepest grief with him, completely unaware that they are
• 18:47
  comforting the man who slaughtered their daughter and their unborn grandson.
• 18:51
  The level of psychopathy required to sit on a couch,
• 18:54
  look grieving parents in the eye and cry with them
• 18:57
  under those circumstances is hard to even comprehend.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: And he didn't just stop at playing the victim. He
• 19:02
  actively started playing spy.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: This part is unbelievable.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: The court records showed that he deliberately left his phone
• 19:09
  on record hidden at the McNally family home. He was
• 19:13
  secretly recording their private, agonizing conversations to gauge their suspicions
• 19:18
  and find out what the police were telling them behind closed.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: Doors, just sitting there gathering intel.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: And while he's doing that, he's actively pointing fingers at
• 19:26
  Natalie's ex partner, planting seeds that she had been dealing
• 19:30
  with harassment. He was actively trying to frame an innocent
• 19:33
  man to deflect the blame.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: This raises an important question. Though he was basically applying
• 19:39
  his skills as an audience editor to a murder investigation,
• 19:43
  I do mean he was monitoring the feedback loop. He
• 19:46
  recorded the family to see if his performance was working,
• 19:49
  and he fed the police alternative storylines to see if
• 19:52
  they'd take the bait. And because his digital alibi was
• 19:55
  holding up, the public and the family were left in
• 19:58
  a state of absolute.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Terror because they thought a random killer was loose.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: Exactly, the community believed a random, frenzied killer had broken
• 20:06
  into a home and was still walking the streets of Lurgan.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: It's like relying blindly on the GPS. You know those
• 20:12
  stories where someone drives their car straight into a lake
• 20:15
  because the GPS told them to take a right turn
• 20:17
  and they trust the screen more than they trust their
• 20:19
  own eyes.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a perfect analogy.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Our societal over reliance on digital confirmation made the authorities
• 20:25
  temporarily ignore the most basic human suspicion. The boyfriend is
• 20:30
  almost always the prime suspect in a domestic homicide, especially
• 20:34
  when the victim is pregnant. But the digital dashboard said
• 20:37
  he was seventeen miles away drinking a Guinness. It temporarily
• 20:41
  overrode common sense.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: But here's the thing about a digital facade. It is
• 20:45
  only as strong as its code, and code, by its
• 20:49
  very nature, leaves traces. It wasn't that the police were incompetent.
• 20:54
  It's that standard homicide protocol hadn't fully caught up to
• 20:58
  obs spoofing yet. But human intuition didn't just go away.
• 21:02
  The detectives, combined with a much deeper, much more granular
• 21:06
  kind of digital scrutiny, eventually started finding the cracks in
• 21:10
  his perfectly constructed split screen reality.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: So how did the dam break? How do we move
• 21:17
  from this flawless allusion to the actual data because DCI
• 21:22
  and Neil McGinnis and the Police Service of Northern Ireland
• 21:25
  did not let this go.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: No they didn't. They were persistent.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: They had this nagging, persistent hunch. They had CCTV footage
• 21:32
  of a man with a rucksack on a bus traveling
• 21:34
  from dun Murray to Lorgan.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: It was a faint physical trail and the guy was
• 21:38
  in disguise, but physically it matched McCall's profile.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: But to prove it was him on that bus, they
• 21:43
  had to break the digital alibi. They had to prove
• 21:46
  the live stream was a lie.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: And this is where the cyber forensics unit gets involved,
• 21:50
  and the work they did is brilliant. They realized they
• 21:52
  couldn't just rely on YouTube's API data. They had to
• 21:55
  look at the source. They analyzed the data generated by
• 21:57
  the OBS Studio software on McCall's computer.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: So tell me how that works. If the video looks perfect,
• 22:03
  how does this software give them away?
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: It comes down to how a computer behaves when it's
• 22:08
  genuinely broadcasting live versus when it's just playing a video file.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'm listening.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: When you are truly streaming a video game live, your
• 22:16
  computer's central processing unit the CPU is working incredibly hard.
• 22:21
  It's rendering the graphics of the game in real time,
• 22:24
  it's processing the audio from your microphone, it's managing the
• 22:27
  network connection, and crucially, it's capturing every tiny piece of
• 22:32
  background activity.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: Like what kind of activity.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: Well, if you pause a game to go to the
• 22:36
  bathroom during a live stream, the stream doesn't just freeze
• 22:39
  into avoid It keeps recording the ambient reality, meaning what.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: Like the sound of a chair squeaking.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: Exactly, ambient noise in the room, the sound of a
• 22:46
  mouse click, or even just the tiny microscopic fluctuations in
• 22:50
  the computer's processor usage. A live computer is a noisy environment,
• 22:55
  both audibly and digitally. That makes sense, But when the
• 22:58
  PSNI cyber experts and the raw data from McCullough's six
• 23:02
  hour broadcast, they found massive technical tells. The most glaring
• 23:07
  one was that during the moments when the gameplay was paused,
• 23:10
  there was absolutely zero background computer activity, none at all.
• 23:14
  No ambient data, no process or spikes, nothing. It was
• 23:18
  a digital dead zone.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: Wow. So the absence of data was the smoking gun.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Precisely, it is impossible for a live broadcast to be
• 23:27
  that silent on a data level if you were sitting
• 23:29
  at a computer, even if you were holding your breath
• 23:31
  in perfectly still, the operating system is still generating background.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: Data, right, the machine is still running exactly.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: The complete absence of that background data proved forensically that
• 23:42
  the stream was not being generated in real time. It
• 23:45
  was a pre rendered video file simply being played back
• 23:47
  through the OBS pipeline.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: That is brilliant detective work.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture in cyber forensics,
• 23:54
  the concept of a digital footprint doesn't just apply to
• 23:56
  the files you leave behind. Very often the silence and
• 23:59
  the metadata is the loudest signal you can find.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: And once they knew it was a file, they could
• 24:04
  track the life cycle of that specific file. Right.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: Yes, and the timeline they uncovered is devastating to his
• 24:10
  case laid out for us. The forensic analysis proved that
• 24:13
  the six hour video was actually pre recorded four days earlier,
• 24:17
  on December fourteenth, he sat there, played the game, drank
• 24:21
  his guinness, and saved the.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: File four days before the murder. Yes.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: Then on the evening of December eighteen, he queued it
• 24:29
  up in OBS and set it to broadcast as if
• 24:31
  it were live. And then the final nail in the
• 24:34
  coffin shortly after midnight on December nineteenth, just hours after
• 24:38
  he committed the murder, and right before he went over
• 24:40
  to Natalie's house to discover the body, he deleted the
• 24:43
  file from his hard drive.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: He genuinely thought he was a tech mastermind playing forty
• 24:48
  chess with the police.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: He really did.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: He thought hitting delete made him invisible, but he was
• 24:53
  actually leaving a massive timestamp, digital paper trail. Deleting the
• 24:57
  file on December nineteen didn't erase the crime. The deletion
• 25:01
  itself became a highlight of his guilt.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: It's like a bank robber who wears a ski mask
• 25:06
  to hide his face, but drops his driver's license on
• 25:09
  the floor of the vault on his way out.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: And the cyber team correlated all of this with another
• 25:14
  crucial piece of missing data. His mobile phone.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Oh right, what was his phone doing.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: During the exact hours of the murder, From roughly six
• 25:22
  pm to midnight, when he was supposedly sitting at home
• 25:25
  live streaming to thirty seven thousand people, His mobile phone
• 25:28
  showed complete and total inactivity.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: Not a single notification checked.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: No message is sent, no screen unlocks, no background approfresh
• 25:36
  is triggered by movement, which.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Makes perfect sense that the phone is sitting on a
• 25:39
  desk in Lisburn while he's on a bus to Lorgan.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: Exactly when you combine the fake, pre rendered stream with
• 25:45
  the dead, motionless phone, the entire alibi collapses. If we
• 25:49
  look at the evolution of detective work, this case is
• 25:52
  a perfect milestone. In the twentieth century, detectives relied on fingerprints,
• 25:57
  blood typing, and hair fibers. Today digital metadata is the
• 26:01
  new DNA.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: And once that digital damn breaks, his whole demeanor changes.
• 26:07
  The records show that when he was rearrested in late
• 26:10
  January and formally charged in February twenty twenty three, he
• 26:14
  totally pivots his defense.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: He abandons the alibi.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he drops the IWA was streaming act he had
• 26:19
  missed to the police. Okay, yes, the stream was pre recorded.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: What was his excuse.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: His new story is that he had just been drinking
• 26:27
  heavily that night, He was passed out drunk at home,
• 26:30
  and he faked the stream earlier because he just wanted
• 26:32
  to keep his YouTube subscribers happy and maintain his content schedule.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: It's a desperate pivot, but By then it was far
• 26:38
  too late. The police didn't just have digital proof that
• 26:41
  he lied. The collapse of the alibi gave them a
• 26:44
  clear window to apply all the physical, circumstantial evidence.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: They had been gathering, Right, so now they can actually
• 26:49
  place him at the scene exactly.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: They had the CCTV footage of the man in the disguise,
• 26:54
  They had the taxi driver who confidently identified him, They
• 26:57
  had his phone records, and they found on a staggering
• 27:01
  piece of physical evidence linking him directly to the disguise.
• 27:05
  What did they find They combed through his own Instagram
• 27:07
  account and found a photo of him wearing the exact
• 27:10
  same dark wig that the killer was wearing on the
• 27:12
  CCTV footage.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: Wait, really, he kept a photo of his murdered disguise
• 27:17
  on his Instagram.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, arrogance often breaths sloppiness.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: That is just wow. So armed with this inescapable web
• 27:25
  of digital and physical evidence, the case finally moves out
• 27:29
  of the police station and into the courtroom.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah. The trial took place over five weeks at the
• 27:33
  Belfast Crown Court in February twenty twenty six, presided over
• 27:37
  by Justice Patrick.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Kenney and the prosecutor Charles mccreeer KC. Was meticulous. He
• 27:42
  didn't just stand up there and prove that McCullough was
• 27:44
  the man in the house. He proved the deeply planned, calculated,
• 27:48
  and premeditated nature of the entire operation.
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: The defense tried their best to argue that the case
• 27:53
  was purely circumstantial. They even tried to claim that selecting
• 27:56
  the waste of the wife mission on GTA was just
• 27:59
  an incredibly un fortunate coincidence.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: Coincidence, sure, but when you.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: Stack the silence of the obs metadata on top of
• 28:05
  the physical movements on the bus, on top of the
• 28:08
  taxi driver's identification, on top of the history of violent,
• 28:12
  controlling behavior described by his ex partner, the web becomes
• 28:16
  completely inescapable for a jury, and the.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: Jury saw through the facade almost instantly. After sitting through
• 28:23
  five grueling weeks of testimony, it took the jury of
• 28:26
  six men and six women just over two hours to
• 28:29
  return a unanimous guilty verdict.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: Two hours. That's remarkably fast for a trial that long.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: It really is. The accounts of the courtroom note that
• 28:37
  the gallery actually erupted an applause from the McNally family
• 28:40
  and their supporters when the verdict was read, you can
• 28:42
  only imagine the visceral release of three years of pent
• 28:45
  up agony and terror.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: And the sentencing, which happened a few months later on
• 28:49
  June three, twenty twenty six, reflected the absolute horror of
• 28:52
  what he did.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: What did the judge say?
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: Well, Justice Kenny did not mince words. He sentenced McCullough
• 28:58
  to life in prison, handing down a minimum tariff of
• 29:00
  thirty one years before he can even be considered for release.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Thirty one years is massive, It.
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: Is incredibly significant. It is one of the longest sentences
• 29:09
  ever handed down in Northern Ireland's judicial history, and Justice
• 29:12
  Kinney's remarks made it clear why he highlighted the excessive
• 29:16
  and gratuitous violence, but he focused heavily on the premeditation
• 29:20
  against a pregnant woman right. He specifically called out the
• 29:24
  chilling humiliation of the attack. There was evidence presented that
• 29:27
  during the assault, Natalie's face had been placed in a
• 29:30
  dog bowl. It's depraved. The thirty one year terraff reflects
• 29:35
  not just the physical brutality, but the sinister psychological elements
• 29:39
  of the crime. He weaponized his own unborn child. He
• 29:44
  used his media savvy to manipulate the public, the police,
• 29:47
  and the victim's grieving family.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: The sentence had to reflect that unique level.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: Of terror exactly a perpetrator who was that cold and
• 29:54
  that calculating.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for the rest of us?
• 29:57
  Following his conviction, YouTube finally acted. They terminated his channels
• 30:01
  for violating creator policies, essentially erasing his online persona from
• 30:05
  the platform, but leads you wondering about the systemic side
• 30:08
  of this. While procedural justice was finally served, it took
• 30:12
  three years.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: Three long years.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: That is three years of the McNally family fighting, attending,
• 30:18
  agonizing hearings, and waiting in limbo.
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: The systemic delay is incredibly painful for families, But in
• 30:25
  a strange way, it also highlights why the PSNI had
• 30:28
  to be so meticulous. How so well building a digital
• 30:32
  forensics case that is air tight enough to withstand a
• 30:35
  five week trial against a defense team trying to poke
• 30:37
  holes in metadata that takes immense resources and time.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: That's a good point. It also forces us to look
• 30:43
  at broader societal lessons that extend way beyond digital software.
• 30:47
  This case highlights the urgent, desperate need to recognize the
• 30:51
  early red flags of domestic abuse. Absolutely, the controlling behavior
• 30:55
  of the intense jealousy, the monitoring of text messages that
• 30:58
  the ex partner described in twenty nineteen, and those are
• 31:00
  not quirks, they are.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: Precursors exactly, and crucially, it highlights a terrifying statistical reality.
• 31:06
  Pregnancy is a very high risk escalation period in abusive relationships.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: It is yes, the.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: Danger often spikes dramatically when an abuser feels they are
• 31:14
  losing control or when the dynamic of the relationship permanently shifts,
• 31:18
  which pregnancy obviously causes.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: As we wrap up this deep dive, I want to
• 31:22
  pivot away from the procedural justice and the tech forensics
• 31:25
  and the killer's arrogance. We need to bring this back
• 31:29
  to the human core of the tragedy.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: I completely agree we spent.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: An hour dissecting Stephen McCall's lies, but we need to
• 31:36
  end by remembering Natalie McNally.
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: That is the most important takeaway. Reading the victim impacts statements,
• 31:43
  particularly from her father, Noel McNally, it's clear that Natalie
• 31:47
  was not just a true crime statistic, not even She
• 31:50
  was a deeply loved daughter, a sister, and an expectant mother.
• 31:54
  Her family remembers her for her daily visits, her infectious kindness,
• 31:58
  and her generosity. That is what defined her life, not
• 32:02
  the violence that ended it.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: Her family's resilience throughout this entire ordeal is just profound.
• 32:08
  They have stated publicly that they hope the severity of
• 32:10
  this thirty one year sentence acts as a deterrent to
• 32:13
  future violence against women. They are actively fighting to ensure
• 32:16
  that Natalie's legacy is one of prevention, awareness and systemic change.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: And we really have to grapple with what this case
• 32:23
  tells us about the dual nature of the technology we
• 32:25
  use every day.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah to double edged sword.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: It really is. It shows us how a digital footprint
• 32:30
  can be completely manipulated to hide a monster in plain sight.
• 32:34
  He projected a smiling, festive gamer to the world, while
• 32:38
  a brutal reality unfolded in the shadows. But it also
• 32:42
  shows how that exact same technology, when subjected to brilliant,
• 32:46
  relentless forensic scrutiny, can be utilized to expose the truth
• 32:50
  and tear down the facade.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: The digital realm gave him his alibi, but the digital
• 32:55
  realm also gave the police the exact data they needed
• 32:58
  to lock him away for decades.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: It's a tool, and a tool's morality depends entirely on
• 33:03
  who is wielding it and who is analyzing it.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: Which brings me back to the question I asked you
• 33:07
  at the very beginning of this deep dive. Have you
• 33:09
  ever trusted something completely just because you saw it on
• 33:12
  a screen? I want to leave you with a final
• 33:14
  chilling thought.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: To mulover, Okay, lay it on us.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: Steve McCullough built his fake stream using standard Clunky off
• 33:20
  the shelf consumer software from the year twenty twenty two.
• 33:23
  It was just an OBS file playback. It was primitive
• 33:26
  enough that forensic experts could eventually dig in and find
• 33:29
  the missing background ambient data. But technology does not stand still.
• 33:34
  Right now, we are hurtling forward into an era of
• 33:37
  flawless real time AI video generation. We have voice cloning
• 33:41
  that can mimic anyone's cadence in seconds. We have hyper
• 33:44
  realistic deep fakes that could be generated live on a
• 33:47
  video call.
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: It's moving so fast.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: The ability to create a false digital reality is becoming
• 33:53
  infinitely easier, infinitely cheaper, and far more sophisticated than anything
• 33:57
  McCullough had access to. So the question is how will
• 34:00
  our justice system keep up.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: It's going to be a huge challenge, and.
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: More importantly, how will our own personal intuition keep up
• 34:07
  with the digital alibis of tomorrow? When the fake streams
• 34:10
  become completely indistinguishable from reality, even on a forensic metadata level,
• 34:15
  we'll singing ever be believing again,