Gruesome bodycam footage has captured the moment a daughter who gruesomely murdered her parents coldly described to police officers how she took their lives. She later hid them in what were described as “makeshift graves” for four years.
Virginia McCullough, aged 36, was jailed for 36 years for giving her father, John, aged 70, a fatal “cocktail of prescription drugs” in his Guinness. She then brutally attacked her mother, Lois, aged 71, with a corroded hammer, followed by eight stabbing blows with a kitchen knife.
The chilling confession was recorded on Essex Police’s body-worn cameras when McCullough was arrested. During her arrest, an officer asked if there was anything in the home that the police should be alerted to; With a nod, McCullough replied, “Yes, it is.”
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She then told the location of both her father and mother and confessed, “My father’s body is in the house.” When questioned about her mother, she commented: “A bit more complicated.”, reports the Mirror.
She showed no emotion and continued to elaborate on the concealment of their corpses, eventually agreeing to sign a confession presented to her by the officers. She told officers: “So upstairs there are about five wardrobes, behind the bed, but in the back, next to a sink, it’s the second one.”
She further revealed: “I slipped a bit [prescription medication] in his drink. There were about two or three drinks that I brought down. In fact he didn’t drink them all, he probably drank about half of the two. But yeah, when I went in in the morning, this is before my mother, when I went in the morning, in the early hours, I got up about half an hour early, around six in the morning, I came in , he was gone, he was gone.”
For four years she used the Covid pandemic as a cover to hide her crimes, posing as the elderly couple in messages to her siblings and even imitating their voices in calls to the GP and the police. She even sent birthday cards to her siblings, pretending to be from her vulnerable parents, and ordered them online with pre-printed messages.
McCullough continued to abuse their pensions and rack up debt on their credit cards. In total she stole cash amounting to £149,697 both before and after the murders. Police eventually launched a missing persons investigation and stormed the family home in Plump Hill, Chelmsford, Essex, on September 15 last year, where they discovered the seriously decomposed bodies of the elderly couple.
Prosecutors sought a life sentence for McCullough, which would have kept her in prison until her death, arguing that she was “motivated for financial gain” and took “coordinated and extreme steps to dispose of the bodies hide”. If it had been allowed, McCullough would have become only the fifth woman in British history to be given a life sentence, which would put her on a par with some of Britain’s most notorious murderers such as Rose West , Lucy Letby and Joanna Dennehy.
The Honorable Mr Justice Johnson acknowledged that although McCullough’s case was not a “last resort”, she committed the crimes because her financial deceit was about to be exposed. He noted, “You say you felt trapped and you wanted to be freed from it. The reality is that you were trapped by your own dishonesty. You must have known that your lies and dishonesty were about to be discovered.”
Leading up to the murders, McCullough had conducted several trial runs to poison her parents. The court was told she had laced their lunches with drugs, using her father as a “guinea pig”, leaving the elderly couple feeling drowsy and drowsy.
However, on June 17, 2019, prosecutor Lisa Wilding KC described in court how McCullough ground a “cocktail of prescription drugs” into her father’s alcoholic drinks. She then went to sleep casually and when she woke up the next morning, she found her father, a father of five, dead in his study where he usually slept. For the latest court reports, sign up for our crime newsletter here.
Virginia McCullough was faced with the grim realization that she ‘had to kill’ her mother by equipping herself with a hammer and kitchen knife before mercilessly killing her vulnerable mother, who was listening to the radio in bed through headphones.
McCullough entered guilty pleas to two murders earlier this year. Mrs Wilding said: “She [Virginia] poisoned her father with a fatal combination of prescription drugs that she put in his alcoholic drink and the next day she attacked her mother with a hammer and then stabbed her with a kitchen knife purchased for that purpose.
McCullough described her mother’s harrowing murder in a terrifying confession, telling how, after hitting her with the hammer, her mother turned around and begged, “What are you doing?” She describes continuing her attack with a knife and hammer, then holding her mother’s hand and kissing her as her life slipped away.
After the gruesome murders, McCullough, who had been diagnosed with paranoia and autism, went to the town of Chelmsford to buy plastic gloves and sleeping bags using her father’s credit card. On the afternoon of June 18, before a visit to the doctor, she called them in tears and whispered apologetically and lovingly, “Sorry, I love you, Dad.”
Det Supt Rob Kirby, of Essex Police, said: “Virginia McCullough murdered her parents in cold blood. Her actions were deliberate, meticulous and carried out in such a way as to conceal what she had done for as long as possible.
“These were the actions of someone who had taken the time to plan and carry out the murder of her parents in the interests of self-preservation and personal gain, before living within feet of the bodies of her two victims for several years . Over the course of our investigation, we built a picture of the enormous levels of deceit, betrayal and fraud she engaged in. It was on a shocking and monumental scale.”