How Virginia McCullough, who killed her parents and hid their bodies at home, escaped arrest for 4 years

British woman Virginia McCullough has been sentenced to life for murdering her parents and living with their bodies for four years in makeshift tombs at the family home in UK. She won't be eligible for parole for 36 years.

Virginia McCullough plundered £150,000 from her murdered parents finances and went to great lengths to cover her tracks with family and friends through a web of lies, chilling details of which have emerged now. Last year, the bodies of Lois and John McCullough, aged 71 and 70, were found in sleeping bags at their house in Great Baddow, Essex.

When Essex police raided her house, Virginia McCullough confessed her parents' bodies were present in the house and that she had murdered them. Virginia McCullough, 36, admitted to poisoning her father John with prescription medication that she crushed and put into his alcoholic drinks. Realising that she would be put behind the bars for her father's mother, she then bludgeoned her mother, Lois with a rusty hammer and stabbed her eight times with a kitchen knife.


“I did know that this would kind of come eventually,” she said while handcuffed in body-worn footage captured by police that was released Friday. “It’s proper that I serve my punishment.”

“Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy,” Virginia McCullough said adding that “I know I don’t seem 100% evil.”


Further footage from a body camera shows McCullough at the police station telling officers where they can find the hammer and kitchen knife she used to kill her mother.

How Virginia McCullough was not caught for 4 years

Both the murders took place in June 2019 and Virginia McCullough continued to live with her parents bodies for the next four years. In the words of the prosecution, Virginia McCullough kept the body of her father in a "homemade mausoleum" in his ground floor bedroom and study, in a structure that was “composed with masonry blocks stacked together.” It was “covered with multiple blankets, and a number of pictures and paintings over the top”, the prosecutor said.

“She concealed the body of her mother, wrapped in a sleeping bag, within a wardrobe in her mother’s bedroom on the top floor of the property,” he said.

In the years between the murders and her arrest, she ran up large debts on credit cards in her parents' names and after their deaths she continued to spend their pensions.

Virginia McCullough would go on to constantly lie about her parents' whereabouts. She cancelled family arrangements and frequently told doctors and relatives her parents were unwell, or away on lengthy trips.

Four four years, she posed as the elderly couple in messages to her siblings and even pretended to be them in phone calls to the GP and the police, The Mirror reported. She even sent her siblings birthday cards purporting to be from her vulnerable parents which she ordered online with pre-printed messages.

"Covid restrictions were a stroke of luck for this defendant in pursuing the deception that her parents were still alive," the prosecutor added.

Moreover, it was revealed that Virginia “had been thinking about killing her parents since March 2019 and had been planning for it”. The murders came to light after her parents’ GPs raised concerns over missed appointments and police forced entry to the home.

(With agency inputs)