Jennifer Mulligan’s prosecution moved from a first-degree murder arrest to a second-degree plea before a judge imposed a 17-year prison term.
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Fifteen months after Jennifer Mulligan called 911 and told a dispatcher she had intentionally shot her elderly father, the Virginia Beach case has ended with a second-degree murder conviction and a 17-year active prison sentence.
The path from the May 7, 2025, shooting to the Aug. 4, 2026, sentencing included an arrest on a more serious first-degree murder charge, a disputed bond decision, a preliminary hearing built around Mulligan’s own recorded statements, a plea agreement and a sentencing hearing where relatives described years of alleged abuse by the man she killed. Circuit Court Judge Afshin Farashahi ultimately sentenced Mulligan, 44, to 43 years, suspended 26 and ordered her to serve 17. The result closed the major trial-court proceedings without a jury ever deciding the original first-degree murder accusation because prosecutors agreed in April to a reduced charge and Mulligan pleaded guilty.
The case began with a short police account and an unusually direct admission. At approximately 11:11 a.m. on May 7, Virginia Beach officers were sent to a residence in the 500 block of Rodney Lane for a reported shooting. They found 90-year-old Woodard McClure inside with a gunshot wound. Emergency medical personnel pronounced him dead at the scene. Mulligan, his daughter and a resident of the home, was taken into custody without incident. The Police Department said its preliminary investigation indicated a domestic-related incident, and the Violent Crimes Unit later charged her with first-degree murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
The call that brought authorities into the case also supplied evidence prosecutors would repeatedly use in court. Mulligan told the 911 dispatcher, “I just shot my dad.” When asked whether she had fired accidentally or on purpose, she said it was intentional. During the conversation, she accused McClure of being a child predator and rapist and said he was not a good person. The statements established two themes that remained together throughout the prosecution: Mulligan acknowledged responsibility for the shooting, while also immediately raising allegations about McClure’s conduct toward her and other family members.
By the June 2025 bond proceedings, prosecutors had developed a fuller account of what happened before the emergency call. Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney David Talmage told the court that Mulligan said she had consumed about three beers that morning before going to the garage and getting a firearm. She then went into McClure’s bedroom and shot him while he was in bed. Prosecutors said the wound to his forehead was a contact wound, meaning the weapon was pressed against him when it was fired. Talmage used the evidence to characterize the shooting as an “execution” and urged the court to keep Mulligan in custody.
The defense used that same bond hearing to begin building the context that would become increasingly important later. Attorney Roger Whitus said McClure had been abusive and manipulative toward his children and had abducted Mulligan when she was young, disappearing with her for several years. He said Mulligan and her father later became estranged but eventually resumed contact. When the Texas facility where McClure had been living closed, Mulligan traveled there and brought him to her Virginia Beach home. The lawyer presented the arrangement as a difficult return to close contact with the person Mulligan blamed for childhood trauma. Although a lower court had approved bond under restrictions, prosecutors appealed, and Farashahi ordered Mulligan to remain jailed.
Three months later, a preliminary hearing put the evidence into a more formal public record. Prosecutors played Mulligan’s 911 call in court, allowing the judge to hear her admission that the shooting was purposeful. Testimony also addressed the condition in which officers found McClure and the physical evidence surrounding his death. The hearing was not a trial on guilt; its function was to determine whether the case should proceed. It did, and the murder and firearm charges were certified for further consideration. But the hearing also showed that the defense would not simply deny the prosecution’s account. Whitus said there was substantial mitigating and contrary evidence that would help explain Mulligan’s statements.
Mulligan’s interview with investigators gave the defense one of the phrases it would later have to place in context. She told a detective that she “did what I had to do to take care of the agony.” She accused McClure of physically and emotionally abusing her and her siblings and made allegations of sexual abuse. Whitus said he had spoken with family members who supported those accusations. He also described more recent friction inside the household, including McClure’s alleged treatment of relatives and pets and disputes arising from day-to-day care. Prosecutors, meanwhile, could point to the same interview and the 911 call as evidence that Mulligan knowingly shot her father rather than acting by mistake.
The legal turning point came April 14, 2026. Instead of taking the first-degree murder charge to trial, prosecutors accepted a plea agreement under which the homicide count was reduced to second-degree murder. Mulligan pleaded guilty to that offense and to use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. The change was significant. First-degree murder had been the charge announced immediately after the police investigation, but the negotiated resolution removed the need for the Commonwealth to prove that accusation at trial. Mulligan’s guilty plea also meant that sentencing would become the final major proceeding, with the court deciding punishment from an established conviction rather than a jury deciding whether she committed the killing.
The August sentencing hearing broadened the case beyond the details of the gunshot. Two of Mulligan’s half-brothers testified that McClure had physically, emotionally and sexually abused them as children, according to reports of the proceeding. They also supported allegations that he had abused Mulligan. Her husband described her decision to take McClure into the family home after his Texas facility closed, despite the history she attributed to him. That testimony gave Farashahi evidence about the years before the homicide and about the pressure the defense said grew after Mulligan became involved in her father’s care.
Prosecutors returned the court’s attention to the morning of the killing. Their account was not one of an immediate physical attack that forced a split-second defensive response. Mulligan had been thinking about what she said her father had done, had consumed alcohol, retrieved the gun from another part of the property and went to his room before shooting him. The court therefore faced a record in which severe allegations about McClure coexisted with strong evidence of an intentional homicide. The plea had already reduced Mulligan’s conviction from the original first-degree accusation, leaving the sentencing judge to decide how far the mitigation should affect the amount of time she would serve.
Farashahi said he had considered the defense evidence and recognized that the negotiated plea had produced a favorable outcome for Mulligan compared with the risk posed by the original charge. But he rejected the idea that even a long history of alleged abuse could permit her to become the person who decided whether McClure should live. In one of the hearing’s most widely reported remarks, he told Mulligan, “You got due process and your father got a bullet in his head.” He followed that by saying, “That’s not how we do things.” The comments brought the prosecution’s 15-month progression back to the principle underlying the sentence: mitigation could affect punishment without transforming the killing into a lawful act.
The final judgment calls for 43 years of incarceration, 26 of them suspended. Mulligan must serve 17 years in a state correctional facility. Authorities also said she must surrender her gun, have no hostile contact with her siblings and remain on supervised probation after her eventual release. Those conditions form the last stage of a case that evolved substantially after the first police announcement. What began as a first-degree murder prosecution based on an intentional shooting ended without a trial, after Mulligan accepted a second-degree murder conviction and the court incorporated both her admitted conduct and her family’s allegations into the sentence.
The chronology also shows what did not change. From the first 911 call through the sentencing hearing, Mulligan’s role in McClure’s death was never the central factual mystery. She said she fired the shot, police arrested her at the home, and she later pleaded guilty. The changing questions concerned the degree of the crime and the weight to give the relationship between father and daughter. With the sentence imposed, those questions have moved from pending litigation to the record of the case, and Mulligan has begun the prison term ordered for McClure’s killing.
Author note: Last updated September 9, 2026.