A woman who murdered her parents and then lived next to their bodies for four years told police who arrested her: “Cheer up, at least you caught the bad guy.”
Virginia McCullough, 36, poisoned her father John McCullough, 70, with a “cocktail of prescription drugs” and fatally stabbed her mother Lois McCullough, 71, with a kitchen knife in the summer of 2019.
At a sentencing hearing on Friday, the court heard how McCullough had built a ‘makeshift grave’ for her father in a ground floor room of the family home, which had been his bedroom and study.
She then allegedly stuffed her mother’s body into a sleeping bag in a bedroom cupboard on the top floor of their home in Pump Hill, Great Baddow, Essex.
When Essex Police arrested her last year, she admitted everything and said: “You caught the bad guy”.
The court also heard how McCullough made 185 calls to a GP practice, including calls where she pretended to be her mother.
McCullough also spoke to a police officer by phone and told them her parents were away but would be back for her mother’s birthday.
McCullough profited more than £135,000 from cashing in her parents’ pensions after the murders.
Professor Nigel Blackwood, a psychiatrist who assessed McCullough, told the court that her behaviour, including her “lack of emotional empathy”, was “more typical of psychopathic personalities”.
Essex Police have now released images of her arrest.
On September 15, 2023, officers attended McCullough’s home address after her parents’ failure to attend GP appointments raised concerns for their welfare.
Video footage shows five officers outside the suburban home as a police officer in riot gear breaks a glass plane in the back door.
An officer in forensic clothing then crawls through the door and says, “There’s no one here at the moment, just wait.” He shouts:[This is] the police.”
An officer walks through the building with a yellow Taser to the front door, where McCullough is standing in a pink top.
McCullough appears calm and is then told: “It’s 12:12 and you’re under arrest on suspicion of murdering John McCullough and Lois McCullough, okay?”
She answers, “Yes.”
While handcuffed, one of the officers asks McCullough if there is “anything inappropriate that we should know about?”
She replied, “Yes, it is.”
The officer interjected, “Where?”
She continued, “Can I take you there?”
He replied, “No, you can tell me.”
Four years earlier, on June 17, 2019, McCullough had poisoned her father with prescription drugs before stabbing her mother and beating her with a hammer the next day. Their bodies had never left the house.
While being questioned by police, McCullough told them her father’s body was in what prosecutors described as a “homemade mausoleum” in the back room of the main floor of the house.
When asked where her mother’s body was, she said it was “a little more complicated.”
“So there are about five wardrobes upstairs,” she said. “It’s behind the bed at the back, next to the sink.”
Footage shows McCullough telling police how she killed her father by spiking his drinks.
“I put a bunch of them in his drink,” she said. “There were about two or three drinks that I brought down.
‘He didn’t drink them all. He probably only drank half of it. I came in at six in the morning and he was gone. He was gone.”
As officers searched the home, McCullough continued to talk to the officers who arrested her.
“I knew this would happen eventually,” she told them. “It is right that I serve my sentence.”
The court heard she had told persistent lies about her parents’ whereabouts, canceled family arrangements and regularly told doctors and relatives that her parents were unwell, on holiday or on long journeys.
The murders only came to light after a GP at Lois and John’s practice expressed concern for their welfare, having not seen them for some time.
It later emerged that McCullough regularly canceled appointments, using a series of excuses to explain her father’s absence.
McCullough initially lied to officers when they first contacted her, claiming her parents were traveling and would return in October.
The footage of her arrest shows McCullough signing the confession she had just made to police.
The officer asks her, “Will you sign this to say it is a true account?” She replied: “Yes, yes,” before signing with a ballpoint pen, seemingly emotionless.
In a bizarre twist, McCullough then told the officer to “cheer up” because he “caught the bad guy.”
“I know I don’t seem 100 percent bad,” she added.
The officer replied, “I just woke up today and did my job.”
Detectives told the court that McCullough had “manipulated and abused her parents’ goodwill for financial gain for a long time.”
She stole from them while they were alive to support her gambling habit and also after they died. Documents found at the home showed she had racked up tens of thousands of pounds in debt on credit cards in her parents’ names.
As she continued to talk to the officers, McCullough told them that her eventual conviction “may give me a little peace.”
“I deserve to get what’s coming, obviously, because that’s the right thing to do and that could give me some peace,” she said.
McCullough was sentenced to life in prison at Chelmsford Crown Court on Friday and ordered to serve a minimum term of 36 years.
Later footage, filmed at the police station where McCullough was taken after her arrest, shows her revealing the location of the knife used in her mother’s murder.
Handcuffed in a cell, she said: “So, the murder weapon is over… a kitchen knife.”
The court was told her fatal attacks were, by her own admission, the culmination of months of thought and planning that began around March 2019.
She hit her mother on the head with a hammer while pleading with her, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”.
McCullough then stabbed her mother with a kitchen knife when she “realized the hammer wasn’t going to work,” she admitted to police.
McCullough admitted to police that there were still “strains of blood” on the hammer she used to attack her mother.
“The next bit is really hard to talk about, that’s probably the most gruesome detail,” she told officers from her cell.
“So on the ground floor, under the stairs, there’s a few storage boxes and stuff.
“You’ll find it’s forensically useful. There is a hammer. There will still be blood on it. It’s rusted, but there will still be traces of blood on it.’
In the final clip, McCullough was filmed candidly telling police why she admitted to her crimes, saying she “has to pay for what I did.”
“So not cooperating is pointless,” she said. “There’s no point in not cooperating. There really isn’t.
‘And besides, I have to pay for what I did anyway. So that’s the other side of the coin, I think.”
Det Chief Inspector Rob Kirby, of Essex Police, said the case had shocked “even the most experienced murder detectives”.
“This process, from the discovery of John and Lois’ remains to the unraveling of McCullough’s web of lies, has taken a huge toll on the wider family network,” he said.
“With this sentence and everything we have discovered during our investigation, we hope that they can now find a way forward in their lives.”