Constantly popping round for lengthy chats, posting gifts and dropping off food, Virginia McCullough was seen as a kind, if perhaps lonely and eccentric, neighbour.
Single, jobless and claiming to be an artist, she grew up in the Essex village of Great Baddow and was still living there with her parents in her thirties.
Her curtains were always drawn and she installed a security camera outside, yet she was far from a recluse. Instead she tried to “buy friends” by offering them presents.
Shop owners said she would come in constantly with gifts of milkshakes, doughnuts and buns — and one time even a wig. A neighbour described her as a “pest” who would knock on their door and “chat for ages”.
One man who lived opposite McCullough felt under bombardment with home visits and messages over the course of three years, and even kept a file of evidence in case he needed to report her to police.
Advertisement
But most neighbours viewed her as harmless, other than suspecting she might have mild mental health issues or was a “bit of a fantasist”.
However, in September last year, they discovered McCullough, now 37, had murdered her parents in 2019 and had been living with their bodies in makeshift tombs inside the family home ever since.
She had spent three months planning the killings, stockpiling prescription drugs to poison them and testing them out in their lunch.
Somehow she had managed to keep her dreadful secret from her four sisters, extended family and friends — tricking everyone into believing her parents were still alive while plundering £150,000 of their life savings.
The Sunday Times has traced McCullough’s life and discovered:
Reclusive parents and cruel jibes
McCullough was born in Chelmsford in October 1987, the fifth daughter of “reclusive” and “very old-fashioned” John and Lois. They were known as eccentrics and dressed “like something out of the 1950s”.
Advertisement
The family lived at 7 Pump Hill, a busy thoroughfare in Great Baddow, which has a population of fewer than 15,000 people and whose proximity to Chelmsford makes it popular with London commuters looking for some small-village country charm.
McCullough’s childhood was not idyllic, however. John, a management consultant then business-studies lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, was a heavy drinker “on the autistic spectrum” and “very much a man of routine”, according to court testimony.
Lois “suffered from anxiety and agoraphobia and had traits of obsessive compulsive disorder”. She fanatically cleaned with disinfectant, fearing microscopic germs. The couple slept separately and McCullough described her mother as a “happiness hoover”.
John Brewster, 49, who grew up on Pump Hill and whose mother still lives there, said: “They were very reclusive people. They never socialised or mixed with the community, no one had anything to do with them.”
Several people in Great Baddow said the children wouldn’t be dressed well at school and would be teased. Others said it was nothing out of the ordinary, particularly for parents of modest means bringing up five children.
Advertisement
Steve Thurley, 70, a local butcher, said: “I have customers that went to school with her, they said she was picked on. I’ve heard she took a lot of bullying and mickey-taking. Her nickname was ‘smelly Ginny’.” Another recalled how McCullough once confided that she was teased at school and called “pissy Ginny”.
Lisa Wilding KC, the prosecutor, said: “One of the children used to wet the bed and was punished for it by Lois. Social services became involved for a period of time. Notwithstanding this, John and Lois are described by the defendant’s siblings as ‘functional rather than affectionate’.”
Neil Mulcahy, 50, a postman, worked with one of McCullough’s older sisters at a local supermarket when they were teenagers. He claims she was terrified of her father: “I remember once her dad, as punishment, made her cut the grass with a pair of scissors, she told me. She didn’t want to be at home; she left as soon as she could and didn’t go back after that.”
Racing through £150,000 life savings
McCullough is thought to have remained in the family home and, about ten years ago, took a part-time barmaid job at The Ship pub in Chelmsford.
Jo Themistocleous, 48, who worked alongside her a few times, said she was “strange” and used to bring in presents for staff, including make-up and wigs. One worker said the manager would drop her home and she would go into her bag for the keys and “take for ever to find them, like she didn’t want to go in”.
Advertisement
Years before the murders, McCullough secretly gained control of her parents’ finances, stealing money and forging documents to cover her tracks. Before her arrest she had fraudulently spent almost £150,000 using their pensions, credit cards and winter fuel payments. She spent £21,000 on online gambling after their deaths.
About eight years ago the couple had mentioned to a neighbour that they planned to retire to Walton-on-the-Naze, a seaside town about 45 miles away. This aspiration was to become a key component of McCullough’s web of lies.
Fake texts to cover up the truth
McCullough poisoned her parents’ evening drinks with a cocktail of prescription drugs on June 17, 2019, killing John. The next morning she attacked Lois, who hadn’t finished her drink, with a hammer as she listened to the radio in bed, then stabbed her to death.
She sent a message from her mother’s phone to one sister reading: “Your dad and I are at the seaside in Walton this week. Mum. x”. Later that evening she wrote another that said: “Good night. Mum. x.”
In the following years, she would send pre-printed Moonpig birthday cards — and postcards from Walton-on-the-Naze — in her parents’ names and make excuses not to meet up in person. She called the police, the local GP and once even her sister, pretending to be her mother.
Advertisement
About five years ago, she began telling neighbours her parents had moved to Walton-on-the-Naze. She would tell some her parents left because they disliked people “gossiping” about them.
Her lies would change according to the person. Mulcahy, the postman, started delivering to Pump Hill about three and a half years ago.
“After a couple of times delivering there I said, ‘I worked with your sister’ and I was asking where the mum and dad were because I hadn’t seen them,” he recalled. “She said her parents were in their holiday home in Norfolk. As soon as she found out that I knew her sister she got a PO box to pick up the mail because she didn’t want me going near. Obviously you don’t want to open the door if there’s dead people in the house.”
Afterwards McCullough would bring boxes of Greggs doughnuts to the post office for him and other workers. She told neighbours people had been stealing her post.
One elderly neighbour, who asked not to be named, described her as a “pest” who would knock on the door and chat for ages. “I think we’ve all suffered, everybody on the road, wherever you knock.I had books, lottery tickets, plants and flowers from her,” she said. “Once I said I liked history and the royal family and she gave me some books which I now realise were her mother’s.”
Bombarded with home visits
Russell Thorington, a personal trainer who lives opposite, also found McCullough’s behaviour uncomfortable. He had moved abroad for five years, returning in 2019, and a few days later McCullough appeared at his door asking how he was. She would barrage him with messages and visits for the next three years.
“She would leave strange notes, a tiny LED Christmas tree once. I had a steak in a packet put through my letterbox,” Thorington, 40, recalled. “She stalked me to the point that she knew when I had come in from work, sometimes at 8pm or 9pm, and within 15 minutes there would be a knock on my door, ‘Hi Russ, how are you?’
“I’d get a note from her like once a week. Nothing was ever malicious, apart from the fact it was really annoying. It was just over-friendly and quite odd.”
In one of her notes, McCullough offered to do a free “portrait” of his pet dog Pip, writing: “She’s a nice-looking dog.” She claimed she had drawn the dog of another neighbour in a note which said: “They have been lovely to me while two of my family have been seriously ill when things have got too emotional for me. They have met all my siblings and parents and known us for a while growing up too.”
Thorington started keeping a file of evidence in case he needed to report her to the police. He said: “At the time it was like, ‘What does a 35-year-old personal trainer do? Call the cops because he’s getting notes through the door?’” After her arrest he gave officers the file.
Phil Sargeant, 68, who lives two doors down, says she gave him steaks, doughnuts, Chinese takeaways and tools, including two saws.
Judith Way, in her sixties, was hired as a gardener by McCullough about two years ago. She paid her £20 an hour and gave her jewellery and expensive perfume, and cooked her muffins and soup.
Way, who would get calls from McCullough on several numbers, typed out a four-page-long list of the items she was given that she provided to police, among them: “Dettol (lots)”, “sandals (old and tatty, her mums??), “ant killer” and “anti-wrinkle cream”.
“I vaguely knew her parents, she told me they would visit under the cover of darkness from the seaside town because they didn’t want to be seen by the neighbours who were being horrible to them,” Way recalled. “It was a load of rubbish, of course.”
McCullough also gave her seashells she claimed she had picked up while visiting her parents. Although she often worked in her garden she was never allowed in the house.
“She opened the door and the waft of perfume, would just … oh, she stank of perfume always. In fact everything she gave me reeked of perfume.”
Buying friends and a police visit
Around the corner from Pump Hill is a courtyard of shops called The Vineyards which McCullough would frequent three or four times a day. Often on spending sprees, she’d buy up expensive trees and plants at the Vines Fruiterers greengrocer.
Owner Paul Hastings said: “She would come in daily and waffle a load of rubbish. She’d create scenarios around people in Pump Hill and you just dismissed it and thought she probably needs a bit of help.”
She would “buy friends” by taking shop owners milkshakes and doughnuts. Hastings got cinnamon buns from Marks & Spencer in Chelmsford, because she knew he liked them. She would hold her hand over the name on the bank card while paying.
Several shopkeepers recalled her pretending to be pregnant in the months before her arrest, wearing a fake bump and grey maternity dress and carrying fake hospital paperwork.
McCullough was a frequent caller to police, reporting minor things. A month before the discovery of the bodies she claimed she had been assaulted. A police officer interviewed her at the house — unaware there were two dead bodies in it. An Essex police review concluded the officer had done nothing wrong.
Shopkeepers remember seeing her “black and blue”, with “cuts on her arms”. The assault allegation came to nothing and some believe she was testing the water with the police.
McCullough’s crimes were only uncovered when a GP raised concerns with Essex county council’s safeguarding team that her father had not attended appointments. The team informed the police.
As the net closed in and McCullough appeared to realise she was close to being caught, she went into the Fruiterers and told the cashier, who gave her name as Sam: “The police are after me, they think I’ve murdered my mum and dad, but I haven’t.”
Sam, who enjoyed going for coffee with McCullough, still describes her as “sweet”. Her teenage daughter was ill and McCullough would buy her magazines and make-up. “I actually really liked her. I just can’t believe it really,” she said.
‘Cheer up, you’ve caught the bad guy’
On September 15 at 11.30am police raided 7 Pump Hill. Chilling footage shows McCullough matter-of-factly admitting to killing her parents, telling officers where to find the bodies and saying: “Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy.”
“I did know that this (day) would kind of come eventually,” she confessed, adding: “I deserve to obviously get whatever’s coming sentence-wise, because that’s the right thing to do and then that might give me a bit of peace.”
John was found in his study-bedroom, concealed in a sleeping bag in a makeshift mausoleum made from breeze blocks and covered with blankets and paintings. Her mother was also wrapped in a sleeping bag in a cupboard upstairs sealed with tape.
Three weeks earlier an 85-year-old woman who lived on a nearby street had died of cancer. Police learnt McCullough had been taking meals to her and ordered a post-mortem examination to check that she hadn’t been poisoned. Her house was cordoned off and searched for days.
A friend of the woman, who had been acting as her carer, said: “She had been leaving stuff on the doorstep like jellies. I told the police that she didn’t [poison her]. There was no personal gain, she couldn’t get any money. It was completely irrational and over the top.”
Essex police also tested the hair of another local who ate a Chinese takeaway given to her by McCullough two days before her arrest after she complained she felt ill, but found nothing suspicious.
A police spokesman said: “As part of our wide-ranging and extensive investigation into the murders of John and Lois McCullough, we carried out some early inquiries into the death of a woman who had previously come into contact with Virginia McCullough.
“These inquiries quickly and unequivocally ruled out any suspicious circumstances and the death was deemed to have been expected and as a result of natural causes. Her family were informed and supported throughout these brief inquiries.
“We were duty bound to carry out these inquiries, but our investigation uncovered no further offending on the part of Virginia McCullough. The investigative team hold no ongoing concerns of any other offences in this case.”
Sister says she was always a compulsive liar
McCullough admitted to the murders and was jailed for life with a minimum term of 36 years. At her sentencing, she stared at the floor, emotionless.
Medical reports found she had “symptoms of personality disorder and autistic-spectrum condition”, may have had mild depression and since the murders “developed some psychosis”.
The judge, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson, mentioned one report suggesting McCullough’s autism could have led to her thinking she had “a binary choice between living with your parents and killing them”. However he said the evidence “compellingly shows a financial motivation” and desire to avoid discovery of her stealing and lies.
In mitigation McCullough accused her parents of “emotional and other neglect” when she was young. One of her sisters described her as “having always been a compulsive liar”.
Justice Johnson told her: “Your sisters do not support everything you say. But in any event, you were in your thirties when you killed them. Any difficulties in childhood do not begin to excuse what you did.”
In a statement released after McCullough was jailed, three of the four sisters described John, 70, and Lois, 71, as their “beloved parents”. They wrote how their parents loved trips to the seaside, saying “family was their pride and joy”. The other sister did not take part. All were granted anonymity by the court.
One neighbour, who did not want to be named, claimed to have received several letters from McCullough since her arrest. She told him “things aren’t black and white” and the brutality of her crime “wasn’t the real her”. He said McCullough used to confide in him and his wife, and once said to them: “Your kids are lucky to have parents like you.”
He said: “And that spoke volumes. Her upbringing wasn’t very good. It was heinous what she did, but like so many things in life there’s two sides to every story.”
