A woman who murdered her parents and lived next to their bodies for four years buried her father in a ‘homemade mausoleum’ made of concrete blocks.
Virginia McCullough, 36, was sentenced to life in prison and served a minimum term of 36 years for the murders of her mother and father.
She attacked her mother, Lois McCullough, 71, with a hammer and a knife after poisoning her father, John McCullough, 70, with a “cocktail of prescription drugs”.
After killing them, she wrapped her mother’s corpse in a sleeping bag, placed it in a wardrobe in her bedroom and closed it.
On the ground floor of the family home in Pump Hill, near Baddow, Chelmsford, she hid her father’s body in a ‘makeshift concrete grave’ or ‘home-made mausoleum’.
The court was told the structure was located in “the corner of the room” and was made of “masonry blocks stacked on top of each other and secured with white filler, creating a rectangular tomb with the end closest to the inner door, consisting of wooden panels”.
It was covered with “several blankets, and a number of photographs and paintings over them.”
Also inside the structure were at least eleven layers of “plastic and other material” covering Mr McCullough’s body, which was wrapped in a sleeping bag.
Sentencing her, Judge Jeremy Johnson said she had committed a “gross breach of the trust that should exist between parents and their children”.
He told her she had “robbed her parents of their dignity” by keeping their bodies hidden for so long.
Before her arrest, Virginia McCullough was known to her neighbors as a somewhat eccentric but harmless young woman who looked after her parents’ home after they moved to spend their retirement on the coast.
She went out of her way to give the locals food and drinks as gifts and stopped to chat with everyone.
Neighbors received postcards, apparently from her parents, full of anecdotes about their new life in the coastal town of Clacton on Sea.
John and Lois McCullough were described by neighbors as a “quiet couple who kept to themselves.”
The parents of five girls had lived in the quiet street for decades.
Mrs. McCullough, who had a passion for history, was said to be shy, but polite and friendly.
She suffered from agoraphobia and obsessive-compulsive behavior disorder. She had several pen pals and kept in regular contact with them.
Her husband, a published author, was a former lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University who met his friend every Friday for a drink at the nearby White Horse pub. His children said he had a passion for education and writing.
Their children described them as “loving parents” who were “old-fashioned in their ways.”
Butcher Steve Thurl, whose shop Thurley Meats is in the Vineyards Shopping Centre, said that after the couple supposedly moved in the autumn of 2019, an older friend called Pat started receiving postcards from them from Clacton on Sea.
The youngest of the five daughters, Virginia McCullough, known as “Ginny,” was a well-known character at the Vineyards shopping center near the family home.
The slim built, impeccably dressed McCullough often bought drinks and cakes for staff in shops. They called her ‘sausage’.
Mr Thurley, the butcher, said that “she came to the shop mainly to buy fillet steak”.
‘I wondered what she did for a living. I don’t think she had a good job,” he added.
Paul Hastings, owner of The Vines Fruiterers in the same shopping centre, said: “I thought she was normal but a bit eccentric.”
He also said that a few months before she was arrested, she came into the store with a “fake pregnancy belly” and “fake scans of a baby.”
Mr Thomson, who rented the TV to the McCulloughs, said he also remembered Ginny claiming she was pregnant.
A neighbour, Phil Sargeant, 68, said: “She was always at the front of the house, going in and out and sometimes pretending to tidy up.
“I was outside my house playing with something and she came over to talk about unimportant things.
“Looking back, it now seems clear that she did not want to spend time with the bodies in the house.”
McCullough, who The Telegraph understands has a history of nuisance calls, was contacted by Essex Police about two years ago and told to stop calling officers. If she did, she would be arrested.
“It seems bizarre to me that she repeatedly called the police when she had two bodies in her house. I was aware that something was not quite right with her and it could have been a cry for help,” Mr Sargeant added.
In the summer of 2019, unbeknownst to the residents of Great Baddow, John and Lois were dead; their bodies were hidden in the family home.
On June 17, McCullough poisoned her father with prescription drugs, before attacking her mother with a knife and hammer shortly afterwards.
In court, McCullough wept in the dock as she listened to her own story of how she killed her mother.
While in custody, McCullough explained to officers how she killed her mother, who she described as a “lucky hoover.”
She said she put on “Wilko’s gardening gloves” and armed herself with a kitchen knife and a hammer.
She told police: “It was pretty much: do it or you’re going to be arrested for your father’s murder and go to jail.”
She said she attacked her mother as she lay in bed listening to the radio “looking so innocent”.
McCullough told officers how she hit her mother in the head with a hammer, who then shouted: “What are you doing, what are you doing.”
McCullough said she hit her over and over again and when she hit her it was “like someone was playing the xylophone badly or something.”
She later told a psychiatrist that she had always wanted her parents’ deaths to be “nonviolent” and that she only had the murder weapon as a “backup.”
She described her murder plot as “ad hoc” and said it was “not planned down to the last detail”.
In the years after the murders, among her other eccentricities, neighbors began to notice that McCullough seemed increasingly paranoid and erratic.
Mr Hastings also recalled McCullough’s growing paranoia. He said: “She was fixated on some things. She thought her Ring doorbell had been hacked and replaced it three times.”
During this time, McCullough was building an extraordinary web of lies, including dozens of fake telephone calls, calls to GPs and text messages to friends.
On the day of the murder, McCullough went to the doctor with a cut on her finger that she claimed happened while chopping vegetables.
She then sent a message to one of her sisters from her mother’s phone saying, “Your father and I are at the seaside this week.”
Later, she sent another text saying, “Good night. mommy x”. For the next four years, she would continue to pretend to be her parents.
Prosecutor Lisa Wilding said detectives found a total of 145 phone numbers linked to McCullough.
The court heard how on one occasion she tried to pose as her mother Lois to one of her sisters during a telephone conversation.
One of her sisters said she considered their relationship close and that in the year before her arrest they would speak weekly, during which she would tell her what their parents were up to.
McCullough said their parents were “traveling and visiting people and places.”
Ms Wilding said McCullough had “been thinking about and planning to kill her parents since March 2019”.
She said the motivation for the murder was money and that she had accrued around £60,000 in debt on her parents’ credit and debit cards, as well as her own.
She said McCullough had “not been employed for years.” She said she “engaged in online gambling” and had spent £21,193 between June 1, 2018 and September 14, 2023.
In total, she fraudulently took almost £150,000 from her parents.
Ms Wilding said it appeared the money had been “thrown away” and the investigation revealed no expenditure on expensive, luxurious or extravagant items.
As well as lying to her family and friends, McCullough made 185 calls to the GP surgery from 2019 to 2024 “including calls pretending to be her mother”.
Eventually, one of the receptionists called the police after becoming concerned about the number of appointments McCullough was making and then canceling for her parents.
McCullough initially lied to officers when they first contacted her, claiming her parents were traveling and would return in October.
However, on the morning of September 15, detectives from Essex Police raided her home.
When they broke down the door, they discovered McCullough inside and she immediately admitted to killing her parents.
Nicole Rice, a specialist prosecutor for the CPS, said: “McCullough callously and brutally murdered both her parents before hiding their bodies in makeshift graves at their home address.
“She spent the next four years manipulating and lying to family members, medical staff, financial institutions and the police, spending her parents’ money and racking up large debts in their names.”
McCullough’s murders horrified “even the most experienced murder detectives”, Essex Police said.
Det Supt Rob Kirby said: “Over the course of our investigation we have built up a picture of the enormous levels of deception, betrayal and fraud of which she was guilty. It was on a shocking and monumental scale.
“McCullough lied about almost every aspect of her life, perpetuated a charade to deceive everyone around her and clearly took advantage of her parents’ goodwill.
“She is an intelligent manipulator who chose to callously kill her parents without thinking of them or those who continue to suffer as a result of their loss.
“The details of this case shock and frighten even the most experienced murder detectives, let alone any right-thinking member of the public.”
In a victim impact statement, Mrs McCullough’s brother Richard Butcher said he feared his niece would target other members of the family if she were ever released.
He said that while she is in jail, she would have “a lot of time to plan something else.”