Virginia McCullough jailed for life for murdering parents

“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.”

Before her ruse was uncovered, McCullough fraudulently spent almost £150,000 using her parents’ pensions or debts in their names.

To conceal her actions, she posed as her parents in messages to relatives, friends and the authorities, even mimicking their voices on phone calls. When her parents missed appointments or meet-ups with their relatives, McCullough answered questions by saying they were either away on lengthy holidays or were unwell.

Lois and John McCullough died in June 2019

Chelmsford crown court heard that McCullough, who was found to have psychopathic personality traits, began plotting the murders in March 2019 and experimented with poisoning by spiking her parents’ lunches on several occasions.

On June 17, 2019, she poisoned them using a cocktail of prescription drugs. She gave a higher dosage to her father, a retired lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University and a published author, by concealing drugs in Guinness, red wine and brandy that he consumed.

After finding her father dead the following morning, McCullough attacked her mother as she lay in her upstairs bedroom listening to the radio with headphones on.

McCullough, who had been unemployed for years at the time, first attacked her mother with a hammer before stabbing her eight times with a knife she had bought.

For most of the hearing McCullough appeared emotionless as she sat in the dock wearing a long-sleeved purple top and black trousers. However, she sobbed as Lisa Wilding KC, for the prosecution, recounted part of her confession to police in which she detailed killing her mother.

McCullough confessed to the police officers who arrested her

McCullough told officers that she was “like someone playing the xylophone” as she struck at her mother. She said she held her mother’s hand as she died while repeating: “I’m sorry”.

On the day of the attack, McCullough went to a GP complaining of a cut on her finger, which she said was the result of chopping vegetables, before going on a shopping trip for items she would use to dispose of the bodies.

Prosecutors said that the years-long deception she would carry out began within hours of the killing when McCullough sent a message to one of her four sisters, pretending to be her mother.

In one, she wrote “your dad and I are at the seaside”; in another “goodnight mum x”.

In the ensuing months, McCullough would go to desperate lengths to maintain that her parents were alive as she spent their pensions and used credit cards in their names.

The court heard that her fraud had begun in the years before the murders, with McCullough lying to her parents that she received a salary and worked as a web designer. In reality, she had been unemployed since a stint working at a bar in 2017 and was a social recluse.

As her parents were unable to use online banking, McCullough secretly gained control of their finances and then forged documents to cover her tracks when her parents’ suspicions were aroused.

On one occasion, she wrote to her parents in the guise of the Financial Conduct Authority saying that they were due tens of thousands of pounds in PPI-related payouts. This was untrue. She spent more than £21,000 on online gambling.

McCullough also fabricated a history of health complications, which “petrified” her mother and father. The court heard that this was part of a ploy to keep her tethered to her parents well into adult life so that she could manipulate them.

McCullough kept her parents’ bodies in a “homemade mausoleum” constructed within their house

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Her deception was uncovered in 2023 when the couple’s GP raised concerns that Mr McCullough, who suffered from health complications that required constant review, had not attended appointments.

Wilding said that the Covid-19 pandemic and issues with medical contact were a “stroke of luck in pursuing the deception”.

When police attended the three-storey townhouse on September 15 last year, McCullough immediately confessed, telling officers: “I know why you are here, my father is in there, I murdered him.”

Body-worn camera footage from her arrest shows the police bursting into the house and pointing a taser at McCullough. Calmly, she tells them: “I did know this would kind of come eventually. It’s proper that I serve my punishment.”

As police search the house, McCullough tells officers: “Cheers up, at least you’ve got the bad guy.”

She pointed officers to what Wilding said was a “homemade mausoleum”, constructed using blocks and filler. Her mother’s body was concealed in a wardrobe in her upstairs bedroom that had been sealed. Both bodies were wrapped in sleeping bags, purchased immediately after they were killed. Both were identified using dental records.

In her confession to police officers, McCullough claimed that she was “stuck in the middle of an abusive father and mentally ill mother”. At an earlier court hearing, she admitted murdering them both.

The court heard how social services had briefly been involved with the family many years earlier in relation to Mrs McCullough smacking the children. However, in victim impact statements, McCullough’s siblings said that they were “loving and caring” parents and grandparents whose “only mantra they lived by was that we their children were safe and happy”.

Professor Nigel Blackwood, a psychiatrist who assessed McCullough, said: “The lack of emotional empathy, together with the callous nature of the fatal assaults, represents evidence of the deficient affective experience more typically found in psychopathic personalities.”

Sentencing McCullough, Mr Justice Johnson said she was motivated to carry out the killings to prevent her parents from discovering the extent of her theft. On the day of the murders, she took out a credit card in her mother’s name which she used to buy clothes and jewellery.

He told her: “You said that was because you were trapped and wanted to be free from them. The reality is that you were trapped only by your own dishonest behaviour.”

Describing the killing of her mother, the judge said: “Her last conscious moment was the realisation that you, her daughter, had launched a murderous attack on her.”