LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (Court TV) — A Georgia man has been sentenced to multiple life terms in prison after a jury found him guilty of murder and rape in the death of his daughter.
William McCue appears in court on the first day of his trial. (Court TV)
William McCue, 51, was convicted on charges of felony murder, rape, child molestation and incest following the 2022 death of his 10-year-old daughter, Zowey, who was found locked in a bathroom at the family’s home following a house fire.
The defendant wasn’t home when the fire started — prosecutors conceded in their opening statement at William McCue’s trial that his 15-year-old son was the one who sparked the blaze. After starting the fire, that teen walked 6 miles through the night and then asked for help from a church. In interviews with investigators, the 15-year-old said that he had started the fire because he needed to escape from his parents, who he said put shock collars on him and his siblings, beat them and forced them to stand for hours or even days on milk crates or cinderblocks.
When officers searched the home, they found no plumbing; there were buckets the children were forced to use as bathrooms. The kids were tasked with emptying the buckets once or twice a week.
William McCue was with his eldest daughter, working at Waffle House, when the fire started. His wife and mother of the children, Carina McCue, rescued her 12- and 8-year-old sons from the house. Zowey’s body was found in a locked bathroom where a piece of plywood covering the bathtub served as her bed.
“The treatment of these children was horrible,” District Attorney Patsy Austin-Gaston said in a statement following the jury’s conviction. “This child’s death was unconscionable and preventable, and [Zowey] and her siblings deserved better than they received from her parents.”
Carina McCue was sentenced to 90 years in prison. (Gwinnett County DA)
Carina McCue testified against her husband, telling the jury that the defendant had confessed to raping their oldest daughter; that teenager said that her father had been sexually assaulting both her and her younger sister since they were young children. Carina McCue had previously pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree cruelty to children, aggravated assault and false imprisonment as part of a deal with prosecutors that required her to take the stand in her husband’s trial. She was sentenced to 90 years in prison.
Jurors deliberated for less than four hours before finding William McCue guilty on all the charges he faced. He was sentenced to serve three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, followed by a fourth life sentence and, consecutive to that, 120 years in prison. Prosecutors said that the surviving children “flourished” once they were removed from their parents’ home.
