by A shocking video camera image has emerged of the moment a daughter who brutally murdered her parents describes to police the method she used to take her own life. She then hid them in what were known as “makeshift tombs” for four years.
Virginia McCullough, 36, was sentenced to 36 years in prison for giving her father, John, 70, a fatal “mocktail of prescription medication” in a Guinness. She then brutally attacked her mother, 71-year-old Lois, with a corroded hammer and stabbed her eight times using a kitchen knife.
The chilling admission was recorded on Essex Police body-worn cameras when McCullough was arrested. During her arrest an officer asked if there was anything in the house that the police should be informed about; with a nod, McCullough replied: “Yes, yes.”
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Then she told where her father and mother were, admitting, “My father’s body is in the house.” When asked about her mother, she said: “B is a bit more complicated.”, reports the Mirror.
Showing no emotion, she continued to elaborate on the concealment of their bodies, finally agreeing to sign a confession given to her by the officers. She informed the officers: “So upstairs there are about five wardrobes, it’s behind the bed, but back, next to a sink, it’s the second one.”
She also revealed: “I returned some [prescription medication] into his drink. There were about two or three drinks that I brought downstairs. They were, basically, he didn’t drink them all, he probably drank about half of them. But yeah, when I went in this morning, this is before my mother, when I went in the morning, sometimes early, I got up about half an hour early, about 6am, I came in, he was gone, he was gone.”
For four years, she used the Covid pandemic as a cover to hide her crimes, impersonating the elderly couple in messages to her sisters and even imitating their voices in phone calls to the family doctor and the police. She even sent her siblings birthday cards pretending to be from her vulnerable parents, ordering them online with pre-printed messages.
McCullough continued to abuse their pensions and run up debt on their credit cards. In total, she stole cash worth £149,697 before and after the murders. Police eventually launched a missing persons investigation and stormed the family’s home in Plump Hill, Chelmsford, Essex, on September 15 last year, where they discovered the badly decomposed bodies of the elderly couple.
Prosecutors sought a life sentence for McCullough, which would have kept her in prison until her death, arguing she was “motivated by financial gain” and had “taken concerted and extreme steps to conceal the bodies”. If granted, McCullough would become only the fifth woman in UK history to receive a full life sentence, aligning her with some of Britain’s most notorious murderers such as Rose West, Lucy Letby, and Joanna Dennehy.
The Honorable Judge Johnson admitted that although McCullough’s case was not a “last resort”, she had committed the crimes because her financial deception was about to be exposed. He said: “You say you felt trapped and wanted to be free of them. The truth is you were trapped by your own dishonesty. You must have known that your lies and dishonesty were about to find out.”
As a result of the murders, McCullough made several attempts to poison her parents. The court was told she drugged her lunch, using her father as a “guinea pig”, which left the elderly couple drowsy and drowsy.
However, on June 17, 2019, prosecutor Lisa Wilding KC described to the court how McCullough had slipped “prescription drug cocktails” into her father’s alcoholic drinks. She then went to sleep restlessly and when she woke up the next morning she found her father, who was a father of five, dead in his study where he usually slept. For the latest court reports, sign up to our crime newsletter here.
Virginia McCullough faced the stark realization that she had to kill “her mother”, arming herself with a hammer and a kitchen knife before mercilessly killing her frail mother, who was listening to the radio through headphones in bed.
McCullough pleaded guilty to two counts of murder earlier this year. Ms Wilding said: “She is [Virginia] she poisoned her father with a lethal mixture of prescription drugs which she mixed into his alcoholic drink and the next day she attacked her mother with a hammer and then stabbed her with a kitchen knife bought for that purpose.”
McCullough detailed her mother’s gruesome murder in a hilarious confession, telling how her mother turned to her after the hammer and pleaded: “What are you doing?” She describes continuing to attack him with a knife and hammer, then grabbing her mother’s hand and kissing her as her life slipped away.
After the gruesome murders, McCullough, who was diagnosed with paranoia and autism, went into the town of Chelmsford to buy plastic gloves and sleeping bags with her father’s credit card. On the evening of June 18 and before a visit to the GP, she called them positively, whispering apologetically and affectionately: “I’m sorry, I love you daddy.”
Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby of Essex Police said: “Virginia McCullough killed her parents in cold blood. Her actions were thought to be carefully thought out and carried out in such a way that what she did was concealed for as long as possible maybe.
“These were the actions of someone who took the time to plan and carry out the murder of her parents for self-preservation and personal gain, before living within meters of the bodies of her two victims for several years. During our investigation, we have drawn a picture of the massive levels of deception, betrayal and fraud she perpetrated. It was on a terrible and massive scale.”
