VIRGINIA BEACH — When Jennifer Mulligan called 911 in May, she initially sounded calm and unemotional.
“What’s your emergency?” the dispatcher asked.
“I just shot my dad,” Mulligan said, according to a recording of her call played Tuesday in a Virginia Beach courtroom.
Later, the dispatcher asks Mulligan if the shooting was intentional or accidental. After a few seconds, Mulligan said matter-of-factly, “It was on purpose.”
The 44-year-old Virginia Beach woman went on to tell the dispatcher her father was a “rapist and a child predator.”
“He is not a good person,” she said, as she began to sound emotional.
The call ended a short time later, as sirens and the voice of a police officer are heard in the background.
Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney David Talmage presented the 8-minute recording as evidence during a preliminary hearing in Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court. After hearing the tape and testimony from two police officers, Judge Timothy Quick ruled there was enough evidence to send the case to a grand jury.
Defense attorney Roger Whitus talks with reporters outside the Virginia Beach courthouse on Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025. Standing behind him are friends and family of his client Jennifer Mulligan. (Jane Harper/Staff)
The shooting happened May 7 at Mulligan’s home in the Avalon Hills neighborhood. The first police officer to respond testified Tuesday that he found 90-year-old Woodard McClure on his back in a bed, with a gunshot wound to the forehead.
“He was obviously deceased,” the officer said. An autopsy would later show the gun was pressed against his forehead.
Detective T. Lyons, the lead investigator on the case, testified he interviewed Mulligan a couple of hours after her arrest. Lyons said Mulligan told him her father’s room always “smelled horribly.” Officers found urine and fecal matter on the floor, he said.
Mulligan also told the detective her father had once kidnapped her when she was a little girl, and had been physically and emotionally abusive to her and her siblings. She moved her father into her home a couple years ago because his nursing facility was closing and he had nowhere else to go, Lyons said.
The detective said Mulligan told him she didn’t normally drink during the day, but had two or three beers that morning. At some point, she went into the garage, retrieved a gun, went into her father’s room and shot him, he said.
Lyons said Mulligan told him she felt she had to do it to “take care of the agony.”
After the hearing, defense attorney Roger Whitus spoke with reporters outside the courthouse. Several of Mulligan’s friends and family members stood behind him. Whitus said he’s arranging for psychological evaluations of Mulligan, and that he suspects some of the “longstanding abuse” she’d suffered as a child “was coming to the surface” when she shot her dad.
Mulligan has been held without bond in the city jail since her arrest. Quick granted her bond earlier this year, but prosecutors appealed the decision to the Circuit Court and it was revoked. No trial date has been set.
Jane Harper, jane.harper@pilotonline.com
