A British woman will spend at least the next 36 years behind bars after a jury found her guilty of murdering her parents “in cold blood” and then hiding the bodies in their family home for four years while she spent their money.
Virginia McCullough, 36, was sentenced to jail last Friday after admitting to hiding her mother’s body in a wardrobe and building a “makeshift tomb” for her father.
Her crimes date back to June 2019, when she used a cocktail of crushed-up prescription drugs, slipped into 70-year-old John McCullough’s drink, to poison her father to death. The next day she killed her mother, Lois McCulllough, 71, with a hammer and a kitchen knife.
Lois and John McCullough.
Essex Police / Handout
During the trial, reports The Guardian, prosecutor Lisa Wilding detailed the hand-built tomb she built to hide her father’s body in his bedroom, describing it as “composed with masonry blocks stacked together” and “covered with multiple blankets, and a number of pictures and paintings over the top.”
“She concealed the body of her mother, wrapped in a sleeping bag, within a wardrobe in her mother’s bedroom on the top floor of the property,” Wilding continued, describing the days following the murders inside the family’s Essex home.
Once the bodies were hidden, lawyers argued, McCullough went to increasingly elaborate lengths to convince people her parents were fine.
She asked relatives to stay away, reports the BBC, and friends were told the couple had retired and moved away. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown measures the year following their deaths helped, in part, to cover up her crimes, the court heard.
The couple’s family doctor became suspicious after a number of missed appointments over the years and alerted police, who forced entry into the home on Sept. 15, 2023.
Bodycam footage from their arrival show officers confronting McCullough in the home, where she admitted to the killings.
Virgina McCullough is seen being placed into handcuffs on police bodycam footage.
Essex Police / Handout
“I did know that this would kind of come eventually. It’s proper that I serve my punishment,” she can be heard telling police.
She added: “Cheer up, at least you caught the bad guy.”
In custody following her arrest, she went into detail about how she killed her parents.
She pointed officers in direction of the knife she used to killed her mom, stashed under the home’s stairs, saying it “will still have blood on it, it’s rusted, but it will still have blood traces on it.”
She also said she had to “build up gumption” to kill her mother.
“I knew I had to get it done.”
Richard Butcher, brother of Lois McCullough, wrote in a victim impact statement that his niece — the defendant — was “very dangerous” and what had happened “undermined my faith in humanity.”
The Independent reports that McCullough had run up large debts on her parents’ credit cards while they were still alive and continued to spend their pensions after their deaths, all while living rent-free in the family home.
Forged letters showed McCullough had been tricking her parents into thinking they had lost money through scams.
Essex Police said documents found at the address “built a picture of a woman who was trying desperately to keep her parents from discovering the depth of the financial black hole she continued to dig, while giving them false assurances about her employment and future prospects.”
At sentencing, the judge told McCullough that she was close to £60,000 (C$107,000) in debt before the killings and that she grew and maintained an “elaborate, extensive and enduring web of deceit” over months and years.
“I’m sure a substantial motive for each of the murders was to stop your parents discovering you had been stealing from them and lying to them and to take money that was intended for them,” he said, according to The Independent.
McCullough was sentenced to life in prison, to serve a minimum of 36 years.