Jurors in North Carolina have convicted a man for murdering his mother and injuring his father in a beating he claimed was fueled by drugs and sleep deprivation.

Christopher McCullough was found guilty of first-degree murder Friday in the 2023 death of his 75-year-old mother Mary McCullough. Local ABC affiliate WTVD reported that McCullough was not convicted of other charges, included the attempted murder of his father and larceny of a dog.

He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The jury had deliberated for around seven hours after receiving the case on Thursday.

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The defendant’s father, John McCullough, testified against his son. According to a courtroom report from local CBS affiliate WNCN, the father told jurors ever since his son was seven, he was “uncontrollably violent” and had “superhuman-like strength.” They tried everything to treat his issues from sending to boarding school to stays at mental health hospitals. None of it worked. Eventually, he and his wife and obtained a domestic violence injunction against him and forbade him from entering their home.

But he ignored that order and entered the home on Aug. 8, 2023. He reportedly told jurors he was high on Adderall and other drugs and hadn’t slept in six days. He said he asked his parents for gas money. When they refused, he began beating his father — all in the presence of his 4-year-old son — though he did not admit to hurting his sickly mother, who used an oxygen tank and weighed just 100 pounds.

“Me and my dad got in a fight, I struck him twice to the ground, I noticed that my mother was face down,” he said, according to local NBC affiliate WRAL.

The younger McCullough then took his son and fled. Cops rushed to the home to aid the elder McCulloughs. There was blood everywhere and both victims were unconscious, cops testified.

“I noticed she had bruises and cuts on her arms,” Raleigh police Officer Phillip Merle said, per WNCN. “Because of the way she was laying, I noticed she had a large puddle of blood underneath her neck. My training officer asked who did this to her. And she was able to grunt out, ‘My son’.”

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She was rushed to the hospital where she died nearly a week later.

Christopher McCullough’s son, now 6, was not physically injured in the incident but has experienced post-traumatic stress disorder from witnessing the incident.

“[The boy] has disclosed witnessing the defendant hurting nanny and poppy,” his therapist Tara Pawlyk reportedly testified. “That poppy was on the ground while the defendant covered his mouth, limiting his ability to breathe. He has also disclosed nanny was laying on the stairs, [which] the defendant had bashed her head against repeatedly.”

Police in Minnesota conducted unconstitutional searches in the case of a Mayo Clinic doctor accused of poisoning his wife and the evidence collected in those searches will be tossed, a judge ruled this week.

Dr. Connor Bowman is charged with first-degree murder and accused of using gout medicine to kill his wife Betty Jo Bowman in August 2023 at their home in the Twin Cities area. Cops with the Rochester Police Department submitted numerous applications for search warrants that Connor Bowman’s attorney’s have argued were unconstitutional. Investigators collected 14 electronic devices plus an iPad in the weeks after Betty Bowman’s death.

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District Judge Kathy M. Wallace took issue with two search warrants and tossed the following information collected from 13 of the devices and iPad for violating the defendant’s right to privacy:

Media including texts, emails, photographs, notes, and/or audio files and
videos, including media regarding toxic/hazardous/controlled substances,
financial matters, divorce and/or personal relationship information.

Text messages/communication including conversations about toxic/
hazardous/controlled substances, financial matters, divorce and/or personal
relationship information.

Web/Internet browsing history including searches/websites/articles etc.
about toxic/hazardous/controlled substances, financial matters, divorce
and/or personal relationship information

Wallace wrote cops failed to meet the particularity requirement, which “prevents law enforcement from having unbridled discretion in determining what items should be searched or seized and from engaging in general searches and exploratory rummaging.”

In other words, Wallace believes the language in the warrants was too broad. At the time of the first application, cops knew of the Bowmans’ marriage trouble, his financial troubles and the fact that the victim ingested a smoothie with the gout medicine that allegedly led to her death.

“This knowledge demonstrates that law enforcement could have provided more specificity in the … search warrant by searching exclusively for data concerning toxic/hazardous/controlled substances, financial matters, divorce and/or personal relationship information,” Wallace wrote.

The judge also noted investigators applied for the second warrant at issue about a month after the first. By then, they knew a lot more and could have been more specific, she said. Despite this, the application was worded almost exactly the same as the first, she said.

It’s unclear how the tossed evidence will impact the state’s case against the doctor. Prosecutors have not commented on the matter.

As Law&Crime previously reported, Dr. Connor Bowman was charged in the summer of 2023 with second-degree murder in the death of Betty Jo Bowman, but a grand jury indicted him for first-degree murder in January 2024. His wife died at a hospital on Aug. 20, 2023, following a four-day stay for what doctors initially thought was food poisoning. Her condition “deteriorated rapidly” from the time of her admission and she began to experience cardiac issues, fluid in her lungs, and organ failure. She was considered a healthy person before her hospital admission, making her death suspicious, investigators said.

Cops grew even more leery of the doctor after friends said Betty Bowman was seeking a divorce and he was in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Friends also noted that as a pharmacy resident who also worked in poison control, he would have the knowledge to poison his wife if he wanted. The Southeast Minnesota Medical Examiner determined her cause of death to be toxic effects of colchicine and the manner of death to be homicide.

Investigators claim that Connor Bowman used his Mayo Clinic email address to buy the the drug colchicine — the drug used to treat gout — that they believe he used to poison his wife. He tried to blame her for buying the drug that killed her, saying she “fraudulently” bought the drug under his name, authorities said.

Detectives recently obtained information from a warrant on his phone which showed he was on the dating app Bumble by Aug. 29, just nine after his wife’s death. He identified himself as a widower and allegedly began chatting with a woman. The woman allegedly told cops she thought it was strange that he brought up the fact that he obtained a nearly $500,000 payout from his wife’s death.

Connor Bowman talked to another woman who asked if it was OK to be flirting with someone and he said it was fine and that his deceased wife would want him to move on and be happy, according to the warrant. He said his wife had died of “listeria poisoning,” a foodborne bacterial illness, “earlier in the summer,” the warrant said. The doctor allegedly told another woman his wife died of a morphine overdose about a year prior.

Cops also obtained his Google searches from his phone, which allegedly included looking for “is widow gender neutral” on Aug. 18, two days before his wife’s death.

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The doctor allegedly suggested to others and in his wife’s obituary that she suffered from hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, or “HLH,” which is a rare illness where certain blood cells build up and damage organs. But investigators learned she had no previous symptoms of HLH.

The day after she died, the medical examiner’s office alerted the Rochester Police Department about a suspicious death. The office had prevented a cremation from taking place due to the unusual circumstances, according to documents.

Connor Bowman had asked the medical examiner’s office that his wife should be “cremated immediately” because her death was natural, authorities said. But according to the medical examiner, they received a call from a woman who knew the Bowmans who said the couple was having marital issues and “talking about a divorce following infidelity and a deteriorating relationship,” a probable cause arrest affidavit said.

Defendant Bowman emailed death investigators at the medical examiner’s office asking if toxicology reports that were being completed were more “thorough” than what would typically be done at a hospital, the affidavit said. He also asked for a list of what would be tested.

Connor Bowman had attended pharmacy school and worked in poison control in Kansas and was currently in medical school. A spokesperson from the Mayo Clinic said in a statement to Law&Crime that his residency at the hospital had just finished in October.

“We are aware of the recent arrest of a former Mayo Clinic resident on charges unrelated to his Mayo Clinic responsibilities,” the statement said. The hospital would not comment further.

Betty Bowman had recently told others that her husband was in debt so they kept separate bank accounts. Connor Bowman told a friend he was going to receive a $500,000 life insurance policy as a result of his wife’s death. Investigators found a check for nearly $500,000 from an insurance company in the Bowman home.

In Rochester Police Department applications for search warrants previously reviewed by Law&Crime, friends of the couple depict a marriage on the rocks because of financial troubles and infidelity. Though the Bowmans were in an “open relationship,” the couple agreed they would not become emotionally attached to their other partners. However, Connor Bowman became infatuated with his new girlfriend, friends told detectives. Betty Bowman allegedly confronted her husband about the woman and suggested they start divorce proceedings. One friend said she went to see Connor Bowman at his home three days after the death to find the girlfriend there with him and his wife’s photos taken down, the warrant said.

Another pal said she was visiting with Betty Bowman 10 days before her death when she gave her a smoothie her husband had made for her in a Lilo & Stich cup. It “tasted very bad,” and the friend thought it was strange Connor Bowman had made a smoothie for his wife because he “never made anything for anybody,” according to the warrant.

“[The friend] said jokingly at the time that Connor must be trying to poison her, but didn’t think much of it at the time. Betty even joked that she had considered it at the time and said she didn’t think that would happen but decided to not drink the smoothie anyway and threw it out,” the warrant said. The friend became suspicious when Betty Bowman suddenly became ill and died.

The doctor also was not acting like a grieving husband typically would in the days following his wife’s death, the friends said. He seemed “stoic and calm,” even going out for drinks where he “appeared to be happy or at least indifferent” about his wife’s death two days after the fact.

One of Betty Bowman’s boyfriends told detectives that Betty Bowman, on Aug. 14, told him she “had a few days off work and was looking to spend some time with him.” The two saw each other the next day and texted later that night while she was drinking with her husband at home.

On Aug. 16, she told him she was so sick she could not sleep at all. She said she thought it may have been an alcoholic drink that she had that caused her illness because it was mixed in a large smoothie. She went to the hospital a short time later.

The scene inside a Colorado courtroom looked a grim picture of human action on Friday as a young and condemned man testified to his onetime best friend’s alleged glee in violence.

Joseph Edwin Koenig, 20, was a high school senior, but 18 years old, when he and two friends were charged with “extreme indifference” murder over the April 19, 2023, death of Alexa Bartell, 20.

On the day in question, the windshield of the victim’s Chevy Spark was struck and smashed by what authorities termed a “large landscaping rock.” The impact sent the young woman’s car careening “off the roadway” on a remote stretch of road in Jefferson County.

Bartell died a horrible death in the ensuing crash; prosecutors previously testified the victim’s brain was found in her backseat.

A 33-year-old California man will spend the rest of his life in prison for murdering three people, including the parents of a 17-year-old girl he became obsessed with after meeting her in the “furry” subculture nearly nine years ago.

Frank Sato Felix was found guilty last year of three counts each of first-degree murder and enhancements of multiple murders, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said. On Friday, a judge sentenced him to three life terms behind bars.

The victims were 39-year-old Jennifer Goodwill-Yost, and her husband, 35-year-old Christopher Yost, along with their friend Arthur “Billy” Boucher, who happened to be spending the night at the home at the time of the murders.

Drama and scorn ran rampant in a Michigan courtroom on Friday, where a convicted killer was shouted down by his victim’s family members before he could tender some formal condolences.

In June 2023, Sekou Conde, 24, repeatedly shot and killed Donrell Canda, 24, inside his own home – in front of the slain man’s son and girlfriend, according to the Ann Arbor Police Department.

In February, the defendant was convicted by a jury of his peers on all counts against him, including one count each of premeditated murder in the first degree, felony murder, and first-degree home invasion, as well as two counts of possession of a firearm during a felony.

On Friday, Washtenaw County Trial Court Judge Carol Kuhnke sentenced Conde to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A Colorado man who was arrested with human remains in his jacket was convicted of murder after attempting to claim that his victim killed herself.

Solomon Martinez, 27, was found guilty by a jury on March 13 after going on trial for the January 2024 murder of Renee Portillos, 47. According to reporting from the courtroom by KKTV, a local CBS affiliate, prosecutors presented DNA evidence, the autopsy report, and evidence from Martinez’s phone that pointed to his guilt. The defense unsuccessfully argued that Portillos killed herself.

A Florida couple is behind bars after they allegedly lured a teenage girl they met online to their home, tortured and suffocated her to death over a piece of missing jewelry, and dismembered her body before disposing of her remains in a dumpster.

Steven Gress, 35, and his girlfriend Michell Brandes, 37, stand accused of first-degree murder and kidnapping in the death of 16-year-old Miranda Corsette. The St. Petersburg Police Department said in a press release Friday that Gress picked up the girl on Feb. 14 after meeting her on a dating app and took her to his home in the 2700 block of 27th Ave. N. After hanging out that day, he drove her back to her home. Miranda returned to his home the next day, but this time she would not make it out alive.

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St. Petersburg police Chief Anthony Holloway told reporters at a press conference that there was a dispute over some missing jewelry on Feb. 20. Gress and Brandes allegedly assaulted and tortured Miranda for the next week.

“Repeatedly beat the victim, while holding her captive for seven days and eventually suffocating her by wrapping plastic wrap around her face,” a judge said during Gress’ first appearance, according to local NBC affiliate WFLA.

Gress and Brandes then put the teen’s body in his car and drove the remains some 15 miles to a home in the 12000 block of Mallory Drive in Largo. There, police believe she was dismembered. Her remains were once again moved, this time to a dumpster about 55 miles away across Tampa Bay. Cops have located the dumpster, however the remains were disposed into a Hillsborough County landfill. Cops are continuing to search for Miranda’s body.

Miranda’s grandmother, who had custody of her after both of her parents died, reported her missing to Gulfport police on Feb. 24. Gulfport police commander and acting chief Mary Farrand said her department is “very familiar” with Miranda, who is a “frequent runaway” with a history of mental health issues and drug abuse. She also was the mother of a 11-month-old child. Her grandma told police Miranda was known to run away and she’d usually return home, but not this time.

On Thursday, a “witness” contacted police regarding information about a kidnapping and homicide. Police realized they already had Gress in custody after he allegedly pointed a harpoon at Brandes and was in possession of drugs. Detectives quickly unfurled the horrific case. Brandes turned herself into cops on Saturday.

A 57-year-old Florida man hid behind an apartment building and waited for a man on an ATV to drive by before he shot him to death following a complaint about him riding in the complex, authorities say.

Ralph Francis Hensel stands accused of first-degree murder in the death of 32-year-old Ja’Keem Williams. According to a probable cause arrest affidavit, the leasing office manager at the Bay Pointe apartments in Winter Garden, an Orlando suburb, called police just before 4 p.m. to complain about a man riding an ATV in the complex. Just a minute later, another call came in to report that someone had been shot.

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Cops arrived on scene and found a resident completing CPR on a man later identified as Williams. But it was “apparent he was deceased,” the affidavit said. Witnesses told officers they saw Hensel, armed with a gun, walk from the leasing area toward Williams as he drove the ATV. Hensel shouted something at Williams, but witnesses could not make out what he was saying. Shortly after that, the witnesses heard two loud bangs.

Hensel allegedly walked back to the leasing office and said “I killed him.” Cops on scene took Hensel into custody and recovered a gun nearby. Surveillance video confirmed that Hensel was allegedly the shooter. It showed him walking from the leasing office and around a nearby building with his firearm, where he stood “lying in wait,” according to police. Hensel then shot Williams as he rode past, cops said.

Detectives also reviewed the 911 call from the office manager with a man in the background saying “that motherf—er’s dead,” according to the affidavit.

Local CBS affiliate WKMG said it knocked on the door of Hansel’s apartment. The woman who answered was the leasing manager that initially called 911. She told the outlet she lived with Hansel but declined to speak further because the complex’s owners told her not to speak publicly about the case.

An Idaho man was sentenced this week to a minimum of 45 years and a maximum of life in prison for murdering a man he says bullied him on Facebook — shooting him 17 times in the street outside the victim’s home — over “rumors” that the killer was an undercover cop.

Mark Bent, 43, was found guilty in December of first-degree murder and felony enhancement for the use of a deadly weapon in the commission of a felony for the September 2023 killing of Nikolas Bird, 23, outside his home in Bonneville County, according to East Idaho News. Bent, who was sentenced Monday, took to Facebook after the fatal shooting to explain why he took Bird’s life, saying it stemmed from online bullying related to his occupation. Bird’s family has denied the bullying accusation and says there’s no evidence to support it.

“I am saddened to say that I have committed some serious crimes today that will put me in jail for the rest of my life or lead to death,” Bent wrote after the shooting, according to prosecutors and East Idaho News. “As some of you know, shortly after I moved to Idaho Falls, I was slandered on Facebook with rumors of me being an Undercover Police Officer. Those rumors were followed by threats, harassment and more slander. Even after the facts were out that I am not a Police Officer of any kind, people still chose to believe it and continue to harass, threaten me and eventually look up where I live and work and post it on the internet.”

An octogenarian Tennessee man is behind bars after admittedly killing his wife earlier this week, according to Volunteer State authorities.

Joseph Scrofne, 81, stands accused of one count of murder in the first degree, according to Sumner County Sheriff’s Office records.

The case against the defendant for the death of Linda Scrofne, 80, came together relatively quickly, investigators say.

The man who allegedly self-widowed would make himself known to law enforcement the day after his wife was found dead but not confess to her murder. At least not at first.