A U.K. woman will spend life behind bars for murder after she poisoned her father, fatally stabbed and beat her mother and lived beside both of their bodies for several years.
On Friday, Oct. 11, Virginia McCullough was sentenced to a minimum of 36 years in prison for killing her parents, Lois and John McCullough. The sentencing comes nearly a year after police began investigating their deaths, according to Essex Police.
Last September, following a long stretch of missed appointments and prescriptions, the couple’s doctor became worried and alerted authorities. Essex Police launched a missing persons case, which led them to Virginia, now 36, who lived with the couple in their Great Baddow home.
Initially, Virginia told police that her parents were traveling, just one of the “persistent lies” she told doctors, friends, family and authorities to keep up appearances after concealing Lois and John’s murders and bodies — a task made easier by the COVID-19 pandemic, Essex Police said.
Virginia McCullough.
Essex Police Department
Suspicious, authorities searched the couple’s home, where Virginia “instantly confessed to officers that her parents’ bodies were in the house and that she had killed them,” police said.
Bodycam footage shared by the BBC shows the then-suspect instructing police where exactly in the house to go to find her parents’ bodies. According to the outlet, her father’s body was located in a “homemade mausoleum,” while her mother’s body was in a sleeping bag inside of an upstairs wardrobe.
“I did know that this would kind of come eventually, and it’s proper that I serve my punishment,” Virginia told police as they searched the home, per the BBC.
She also told officers, “Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy,” and noted that serving time “might give me a bit of peace.”
It was later discovered that Virginia murdered her parents during the summer of 2019, police said. Though post-mortem examinations uncovered prescription medication in both Lois and John’s bodies, it was determined that only John died from poisoning.
Virginia McCullough in bodycam footage shared by Essex Police.
Essex Police Department
Virginia later confessed to police that she had crushed the medication and added it to her father’s drinks, per the BBC. Worried Lois would discover what had happened to him, Virginia then sedated her mother with the same medication before killing her by beating her with a hammer and stabbing her several times.
“When I was hitting her it was like someone badly playing the xylophone,” Virginia said of the fatal beating, per the BBC. “It was willy-nilly.”
Investigators later learned that Virginia’s motive was money. She had “long manipulated and abused her parents’ goodwill for financial gain,” running up debts on credit cards in their names and spending their pensions after murdering them, according to police.
In a statement, Essex Police Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby said that the convicted murderer’s actions “were the actions of someone who had taken time to plan and carry out the murder of her parents in the interest of self-preservation and personal gain, before living within meters of the bodies of her two victims for a number of years.”
Kirby also said that through their investigation, authorities “built a picture of the vast levels of deceit, betrayal and fraud she engaged in,” which was “shocking and monumental” in scale. He also called her an “intelligent manipulator” who “lied about almost every aspect of her life.”
Lois McCullough and John McCullough.
Essex Police Department
“The details of this case shock and horrify even the most experienced of murder detectives, let alone any right-thinking member of the public,” the detective superintendent wrote. “It therefore follows that the wider family of John and Lois, understandably, could never have guessed or anticipated that McCullough would be capable of undertaking these murders before committing herself to this level of deceit.”
The family of Lois and John — who were ages 71 and 70, respectively, at the time of their deaths — also released a statement following Virginia’s Oct. 11 sentencing.
“Our family has been left devastated and heartbroken at the deaths of our parents who were taken from us so cruelly,” the statement reads. “As we try to move forward with our lives, we will remember the happy times we enjoyed with them.”
“Our Mum and Dad are forever in our hearts, and are loved and missed beyond any measure,” the statement concludes. “We request privacy as we continue to grieve the loss of our dear parents.”
