No Time To Die: The chilling James Bond clue positioned by evil YouTuber who murdered his pregnant girlfriend – and tried to border one other man

Shortly before 8.30pm on a December evening in 2022, a young woman called Natalie McNally logged onto her computer to watch her boyfriend’s YouTube show.

The 36-year-old content creator, Stephen McCullagh had told Natalie – then 32 and 15 weeks pregnant with his child – of his plans to host a gaming marathon six-hour live event in which he would play Grand Theft Auto and Robot Wars for his 37,000 subscribers.

None of those who logged on that night to watch the event, least of all Natalie, could have known the chilling truth: that far from a ‘livestream’, it was pre-recorded – and being used as a ruthlessly constructed alibi for murder.

For in reality at 8.24pm on December 18th – the time which Natalie’s computer shows she had excitedly logged on to watch the father of her unborn child – he was nowhere near his laptop screen, but on his way to her home in Silverwood Green in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, with murder on his mind.

He had pre-recorded six hours of footage, and, pretending it was live, used the time to travel to Natalie’s home where, shortly before 9pm, he beat, strangled and stabbed her to death.

He left her lifeless body lying face down in a dog bowl.

Were it not for the painstaking work of the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s cybercrime unit, McCullagh might have got away with it: he took extreme care to permanently delete the pre-recorded file from his computer – or so he thought.

A forensic examination subsequently exposed this apparently impenetrable alibi, and in January 2023 – a month after Natalie’s death – he was arrested and charged with her murder.

Such was the extent of his callous duplicity that McCullagh not only tried to frame someone else for the murder, but grieved alongside her devastated family.

Last week [23 MARCH] however, he was finally brought to book after a jury at Belfast Crown Court unanimously convicted him of murder, bringing to a close a three year journey for justice for the loved ones she left behind.

‘Having you in our lives was the greatest joy we’ll ever have,’ her brother Declan said outside court this week. ‘We’ll love you for ever and we hope you can now rest easy.’

Natalie’s family – her parents Noel and Bernie, and brothers Declan, Niall and Brendan – were close. The only girl, ‘Nats’ as they called her, was treated like a princess, in part because of her diagnosis of diabetes as a child. ‘A precious egg’ as Niall called her in one poignant tribute.

Clever and forthright, she amassed two degrees, and had a marketing job for a transport company which allowed her to buy her own townhouse on the outskirts of Lurgan, but still spent hours at her parents’ home.

A passionate Everton supporter, she was devoted to her German Shepherd dog River, and enjoyed talking about politics.

On paper, certainly, McCullagh was not an obvious match. A Stars Wars fan and YouTuber, he was later described by his former best friend Anne as ‘boisterous’, ‘loud’ but also selfish. ‘Everything was about him’ she told ITV news.

Nonetheless, in late summer 2022, the couple matched on the dating website Bumble, and after exchanging messages started dating.

Events moved fast: within just a few weeks, Natalie found she was pregnant, a discovery that – as text messages read out to the jury later showed – was initially a shock. Yet that emotion quickly turned to excitement: the couple gave their unborn child the nickname ‘Baby Squish’, and plans were discussed to move in with each other.

Other text messages – also read in court – seemed to show a normal young couple in love. ‘Totally addicted to you’, read one from Natalie.

Yet behind what defence barrister John Kearney KC called the ‘happy couple chat’, it seemed Natalie was not entirely committed to her new relationship.

She had maintained contact with a former boyfriend – granted anonymity at trial – who later gave evidence that they had had sex with each other in October 2022, two months after she had started dating McCullagh and when she was already pregnant with his child.

She was also in contact with a number of other men, one of whom messaged her the week before she was murdered to ask if she and McCullagh were going to break up.

‘I wouldn’t do it before Christmas, that would be mean. I will see how I feel in the New Year. I’ll make no rash decisions,’ she said.

Asked by another if she and McCullagh were still together, she replied they were ‘still figuring it out’.

‘There is no point in acting like happy families if it’s not what I want. I like my independence, so right now I’m doing my own thing. I am not rushing into this family set up if it’s not what I want,’ she wrote.

Could McCullagh have been prompted to murder his girlfriend after seeing these messages? That was the suggestion of the prosecution, who pointed out that McCullagh had the pin number for Natalie’s phone and could conceivably have seen any number of them.

While he has never given any explanation for his actions, their case was that ‘deceived, hurt, angry and enraged’, he certainly came up with his meticulously constructed murder plot.

Notably, his previous relationship, a couple of years earlier, had ended badly when a former ‘on-off’ girlfriend had shared intimate images with another man which McCullagh had also found. In the resulting row, he had assaulted her.

This time however, McCullagh came up with a plan. In the days before his heinous crime, he researched how to get to Natalie’s house and home again without detection and how to minimise forensic opportunities for investigating police.

Four days before the murder, he then created the video that would be his alibi, pre-recording six hours of footage of himself riotously playing video games, four days before the murder took place. Wearing a Santa hat, eating crisps and drinking Guinness, he made a point of reinforcing his presence.

‘I am not leaving the house tonight’ he said at one point.

McCullagh’s planning was chillingly meticulous. Having worked out the time of his arrival at Natalie’s house, he decided to upload a photo of a promotional poster for a James Bond movie that would flash up on the screen at exactly the point when he was committing his barbarous crime.

The title? ‘No Time to Die’ – a cold-blooded nod to the murderous act in which he was engaged at that very moment, and which he explained during the ‘live stream’ by saying he had dropped his game controller onto the keypad, accidentally pressing a key and linking to the image.

On the morning of Sunday December 18th, Natalie departed McCullagh’s home having spent the previous evening there, CCTV cameras capturing the moment he waved her off.

She spent the afternoon with her parents, eating a roast and watching Argentina beat France in the World Cup.

‘She was so happy’ her mother Bernie later recalled. ‘She said: ‘Mummy, I’ll see you on Monday or Tuesday.’ And that was her last words to me.’

Back home, Natalie had also texted her boyfriend wishing him luck with his livestream, footage which opened with McCullagh, welcoming viewers and talking about the challenges of broadcasting ‘live’.

Notably, he built in reasons he could not interact with viewers, citing ‘technical issues’.

In fact, he wasn’t live at all: at 8.24pm, as Natalie logged on to YouTube to watch her boyfriend’s broadcast, he was on his way to her home.

Travelling by bus from his Lisburn home to avoid Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras tracking his car, and his identity concealed with a heavy coat and a face mask, he disembarked in Lurgan town centre and walked the mile-and-a-half to her house.

Once inside, he launched his brutal attack, after which he changed into a fresh set of clothes and donned a wig – only to find that his timings were off and he had missed the last train home.

Forced to walk into Lurgan, he called a taxi outside a pub, the driver Jeff McAvoy, later testifying that his passenger had seemed ‘calm’ and chatted normally with a bag – believed to contain his bloodstained clothes – at his feet.

CCTV footage later captured McCullagh at 2am placing something in his bins which – while never proven – police presume to be those same clothes.

His vile cover-ups did not stop there: the following night he travelled to Lurgan to ‘discover’ his dead girlfriend’s body, making an emotional 999 call to friend Anne from the scene.

‘He was really upset, he was screaming,’ she later testified in court. ‘He just kept screaming ‘she’s gone, she’s gone, Natalie’s gone’… I was trying to get him to calm down, but he was so loud, he was howling.’

Not content with murdering in cold blood meanwhile, McCullagh now set about framing her ex-boyfriend – who has been granted anonymity by the court – telling anyone who would listen that he had been ‘hassling’ Natalie. Subsequently arrested, the ex was released when he was found to have an alibi.

Convinced he too was bulletproof McCullagh, who had also initially been arrested and released on the strength of his own ‘livestream’ alibi, continued to play the grieving lover: at Natalie’s wake on Christmas Day 2022, her family left him alone with her remains for 15 minutes, wanting to grant him privacy. He later attended a rally in her honour, at which he provided a video montage.

Behind the scenes however, the net was closing in.

Having seized McCullagh’s computer, forensic examination eventually proved that the alibi on which he had so robustly relied was a fabrication. The police investigation also showed that McCullagh had also googled bus and train times from his town to Natalie’s on the night of the murder.

McCullagh was re-arrested on 31 January 2023, but still kept up his façade of innocence: confronted with the cyber-crime analysis of the ‘livestream’ he accepted it was pre-recorded, but claimed he had been drunk and asleep on the sofa in his home as it played out. Told about the taxi driver’s evidence of his presence in Lurgan, he claimed it was part of a plan to ‘frame him’ by Natalie’s ex-boyfriend, who knew his address and had deliberately left a ‘clear circumstantial trail to link me to the murder’. He later refused to testify in his own defence.

His arrest did not bring immediate closure for Natalie’s family. The slow pace of Northern Ireland’s justice system meant the McNallys had to wait an agonising three years for the case to arrive in court. But finally, on Monday, following a four-week trial, a jury took just over two hours of deliberation to deliver a guilty verdict.

Addressing McCullagh, trial judge Mr Justice Kinney, said the offence comes with a mandatory life sentence, the minimum tariff for which will be determined at a hearing in May.

No amount of time behind bars, of course, will ever bring Natalie – or the unborn child she was planning to call ‘Dean’ – back to her grieving family.

Paying tribute to his ‘inspirational’ sister on the steps of Belfast Crown Court, Declan also spoke of his hopes that the many other female victims of male violence get the justice they deserve.

‘Violence against women and girls is the shame of our society and we must do everything possible to end it,’ he said. A shame that this week accompanied Stephen McCullagh to the prison cell that will now be his home for many years.