Man Strangled Girlfriend, Then Started Facetiming and Sending Pics of Her Body to Friends: Police

Police were alerted when multiple people began calling 911 and saying that their friend was reaching out and saying that he'd killed his girlfriend, and was even sending them pictures of her body as proof. This was in the hours after 5:30 a.m. on September 10.

Christopher Whitley, 31, was ultimately arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the strangling death of Auriel Lowe, 34. The pair had been romantically involved for just a few months after meeting on a dating app.

"This man just -- this man murdered his girlfriend," the audibly distraught caller said through gasping sobs in newly-released records covered by The News & Observer.

When the operator told her to take a deep breath and repeat herself, she said, "My friend just called me. He murdered his girlfriend and then switched to FaceTime ... and she's laying on the floor."

She gave police his name and phone number, but did not know his address, before expressing fears about turning him in, saying, "I'm the only one that f--king knows." That call came in at 10:22 a.m.

As it turns out, though, she wasn't the only one who knew, as another person also called police and told them that Whitley said he'd "committed a crime against his girlfriend," adding that "he thought suspect was joking until he sent pictures of victim," per the 911 call log reviewed by the newspaper.

By 12:30 p.m. police had been called to the apartment for a "barricaded subject" at Lowe's apartment and it would be another two hours before paramedics could officially declare her dead after entering the apartment. The death certificate states her time of death as 5:30 a.m. that morning, per the News & Observer.

The paper says that Whitley spent hours in the house with the gun, reaching out to various people, until his family was finally able to speak with him on the phone and persuaded him to give himself up and surrender to police.

Lowe's family said that even though she and Whitley had only been dating a few months, they believed she was already too scared to talk to her parents about the relationship. "She was being private about it," her stepmother Teresa Lowe told the News & Observer last month.

"I think he may have been overpowering her, based on what I’ve seen," she added. "So she may have been afraid to speak up if he was there." She said that they often wondered if Whitley was listening in the background when they were on the phone with her.

Court records from Texas saw Whitley plead guilty to a charge of assault causing bodily injury to a family member in November 2019. He was sentenced to one year in jail and 15 months probation, as well as 100 hours of community service, per court records.

He had previously been hit with the same charge in December 2017, per the paper, but that charge was dismissed in October 2018 for unspecified reasons.

Auriel's father Paul said in a GoFundMe established for the family, "We're just shattered here as a family and her friends, and, I mean, she’s my baby, and it just ... it just hurts."

"She had just begun her dream job in nurse anesthesiology at Duke University Hospital," the fundraiser reads. "She was kind, brilliant, full of promise, and deeply loved by her family, friends, and colleagues. If she wasn’t at work, she was at church or finding ways to care for others."

"She was really upbeat about her work life," her stepmother told the News & Observer, "but then when I asked her about her personal life, she kind of got quiet, almost sad.

"She just picked the wrong guy, unfortunately, and she didn’t know how to vet him," Teresa said. "What I’m upset about is those dating apps; they need to do more background checks."

She said that the family is hoping to use their daughter's death to call for stricter background checks on the various dating apps. "We don’t want another person to pass away in that brutal kind of manner like she went through," she explained. "So if it saves one person, unfortunately, at the cost of our beautiful angel daughter, then it made a difference. Her life meant something."