Virginia McCullough: How Virginia McCullough, who killed her parents and hid their bodies at home, escaped capture for four years

Virginia McCullough looted £150,000 from her murdered parents’ finances and did her utmost to cover her tracks with family and friends through a web of lies, chilling details of which have now emerged. Last year the bodies of Lois and John McCullough, aged 71 and 70, were found in sleeping bags at their home in Great Baddow, Essex.

When Essex police raided her home, Virginia McCullough confessed that her parents’ bodies were in the house and that she had murdered them. Virginia McCullough, 36, admitted to poisoning her father John with prescription drugs that she crushed and put in his alcoholic drinks. Realizing that she would be put behind bars for her father’s mother, she then beat her mother and Lois with a rusty hammer and stabbed her eight times with a kitchen knife.

“I knew this was going to happen eventually,” she said as she was handcuffed in body-worn footage captured by police and released Friday. “It is right that I serve my sentence.”

“Shut it, at least you caught the bad guy,” Virginia McCullough said, adding, “I know I don’t seem 100% bad.”

Both murders occurred in June 2019, and Virginia McCullough continued to live with her parents’ bodies for the next four years. In the words of the prosecutor, Virginia McCullough kept her father’s body in a “homemade mausoleum” in his ground-floor bedroom and study, in a structure “composed of masonry blocks stacked on top of each other.” It was “covered with several blankets and a number of photographs and paintings over it,” the prosecutor said.

“She hid her mother’s body, wrapped in a sleeping bag, in a wardrobe in her mother’s bedroom on the top floor of the property,” he said.

In the years between the murders and her arrest, she racked up large debts on credit cards in her parents’ names and continued to spend their pensions after their deaths.

Virginia McCullough is said to continually lie about the whereabouts of her parents. She canceled family arrangements and often told doctors and relatives that her parents were unwell or on long trips.

For four years she posed as the elderly couple in messages to her siblings and even impersonated her GP and police in phone calls, The Mirror reported. She even sent birthday cards from her siblings, supposedly from her vulnerable parents, which she ordered online with pre-printed messages.

“Covid restrictions were a windfall for this defendant in pursuing the deception that her parents were alive,” the prosecutor added.

Additionally, it was revealed that Virginia “had been thinking about and planning to kill her parents since March 2019.” The murders came to light after her parents’ GPs raised concerns about missed appointments and police forced entry into the house.

(With input from the agency)