A North Carolina man being held without bond for murder allegedly strangled his girlfriend in her apartment and then FaceTimed his friends to show them her body, newly released 911 calls reveal.
Christopher Whitley, 31, has been jailed since being charged with first-degree murder in the Sept. 10 killing of 34-year-old Auriel Lowe in Durham.
“This man just — this man murdered his girlfriend,” the first 911 caller said at 10:22 a.m., gasping and so wracked with sobs that the dispatcher asked her to repeat. “My friend just called me. He murdered his girlfriend and then switched to FaceTime … and she’s laying on the floor.”
Whitley called another friend to say he had “committed a crime against his girlfriend,” according to recordings obtained by The News & Observer. According to the call log, the friend “thought [the] suspect was joking until he sent pictures of [the] victim.”
Police, responding to a 12:30 p.m. report of a “barricaded subject,” sent heavily armed officers and a SWAT team to the scene. Whitley’s family finally cajoled him into capitulating at around 2:30 p.m.
First responders then discovered Lowe’s body in her bedroom and declared her dead at the scene. Authorities determined she had been strangled at around 5:30 a.m., after which Whitley had apparently hung out in the apartment with a gun for hours before contacting friends.
Lowe had met Whitley on a dating app about two months earlier, her family told local media, bemoaning the absence of background checks by matchmaking companies.
A nurse at Duke University Hospital, Lowe had just begun working her “dream job” in nurse anesthesiology, her ultimate career goal.
Whitley, for his part, had pleaded guilty in November 2019 to assaulting and injuring a family member in El Paso County, Texas, the N&O reported. He received a suspended single year in jail, 15 months of probation and was ordered to perform 100 hours of community service.