Six Hours, Not Live

On the evening of Sunday 18 December 2022, a man's YouTube channel carried a six-hour gaming stream presented as live. It was a recording made days earlier.

Natalie McNally, 32 and 15 weeks pregnant, was killed at her home in Lurgan, County Armagh. Stephen McCullagh, her partner, told police he had been livestreaming at home that night, and police initially accepted it. He was released and told he was no longer a suspect. Weeks later, a digital forensic examination found no user activity on his computer between 6 p.m. and midnight, and he was arrested again and charged.

Six Hours, Not Live follows the case from the Sunday itself to the sentence. It draws on the sentencing judgment, R v McCullagh [2026] NICC 8, the public statements of the Public Prosecution Service and the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and contemporaneous court reporting. It covers:

- the timetable of 18 December, from the stream's schedule to the CCTV trail and the taxi home
- the pathologist's evidence, described in restrained terms
- the 999 call, the wake and the weeks McCullagh spent among the family
- the police interviews, the prepared statement and the charge
- the 2026 trial: the prosecution case, the former boyfriend McCullagh tried to blame, the defence closing and the verdict
- the sentence: a minimum term of 31 years, the aggravating factors the judge found and what the tariff does and does not mean
- the reported sentence appeal and what could and could not be established by the book's research cutoff

Prosecution allegations, defence submissions, witness evidence, judicial findings and the jury's verdict are kept distinct. Chapter endnotes identify the sources for the account, and a source register lists them.