A woman who murdered her parents and then lived alongside their bodies for four years told police officers who arrested her: “Cheer up, at least you’ve 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 tomb” for her father in a ground floor room of the family home, which had been his bedroom and study.
She is then said to have put her mother’s body in a sleeping bag in a bedroom wardrobe on the top floor of their home in Pump Hill in Great Baddow, Essex.
When police arrested her last year, she admitted everything to them and said “you’ve caught the bad guy”.
The court also heard how McCullough made 185 calls to a GP surgery including calls where she pretended to be her mother.
McCullough also spoke to a police officer over the phone and told them her parents were away but would be back for her mother’s birthday.
McCullough benefitted by more than £135,000 ($288,800) after the murders from cashing in her parents’ pensions.
Professor Nigel Blackwood, a psychiatrist, who assessed McCullough, told the court her behaviour including her “lack of emotional empathy” was “more typically found in psychopathic personalities”.
Essex Police has now released footage of her arrest.
On September 15, 2023, officers attended McCullough’s home address after her parents’ failure to attend GP appointments had raised concerns for their wellbeing. Video footage shows five officers outside the suburban home as a policeman in riot gear breaks a glass plane in the back door.
An officer in forensic clothing then crawls through the door, and says: “No one here at the moment, hold on.” He shouts: “[This is] the police.”
Holding a yellow Taser, an officer walks through the property to the front door, where McCullough is standing wearing a pink top.
Appearing calm, McCullough is then told: “The time is 12.12pm and you are under arrest on suspicion of murder against John McCullough and Lois McCullough, okay?”
She replies: “Yes.”
While being handcuffed, one of the officers asks McCullough if there is “anything improper we should know about?”
She replied: “Yes, there is.”
The officer interjected: “Where?”
She went on: “Can I take you to it?”
He replied: “No, you can tell me.”
Four years earlier, on June 17, 2019, McCullough had poisoned her father with prescription medicine before stabbing her mother and hitting her with a hammer the next day. Their bodies had never left the house.
As she continued to be 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 house’s ground floor.
Asked where her mother’s body was, she said it was “a little bit more complicated”.
“So, upstairs, there are about five wardrobes,” 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’ve slipped a pile of those into his drink,” she said. “There were about two or three drinks that I brought downstairs.
“He didn’t drink all of them. He only drunk probably half of them. Six o’clock in the morning, I came in and he was gone. He was gone.” As officers searched the house, McCullough continued to talk to the officers who arrested her.
“I did know that this would kind of come eventually,” she told them. “It’s proper that I serve my punishment.”
The court heard she had told persistent lies about her parents’ whereabouts, cancelling family arrangements and frequently told doctors and relatives her parents were unwell, on holiday or away on lengthy trips.
The murders were only uncovered after a GP at Lois and John’s practice raised a concern for their welfare, having not seen them for some time.
It later emerged that McCullough frequently cancelled appointments, using a range of excuses to explain her father’s absence.
McCullough initially lied to officers when they first contacted her claiming her parents were travelling and would be returning in October. The footage of her arrest goes on to show McCullough signing the confession she had just made to police.
The officer asks her: “Are you happy to sign that to say it’s a true account?” She replied, “Yes, yeah”, before signing with a biro pen, apparently emotionless.
In a bizarre turn, McCullough then told the officer to “cheer up” because he had “caught the bad guy”.
“I know I don’t seem 100% evil,” she added.
The officer replied: “I’ve just woken up today and done my job.”
Detectives told the court that McCullough had “long manipulated and abused her parents’ goodwill for financial gain”.
She stole from them while they were alive to support her gambling habit and also after they died. Documents found at the property showed she had run up tens of thousands of pounds of debts on credit cards in her parents’ names. As she continued to talk to the officers, McCullough told them that her eventual conviction “might give me a bit of peace”.
“I deserve to obviously get whatever is coming sentence-wise because that is the right thing to do and that might give me a bit of 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 in the police station where McCullough was taken after her arrest shows her revealing the location of the knife used in the murder of her mother.
Handcuffed in a cell, she said: “So, um, murder weapon is upstairs … a kitchen knife.”
The court was told that her fatal attacks were, by her own admission, the culmination of months of thought and planning that began around March 2019.
She struck her mother over the head with a hammer as she pleaded with her, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”.
McCullough then stabbed her mother with a kitchen knife when she “realised that the hammer was not going to work”, she admitted to police.
McCullough admitted to police that there would still be “blood traces” on the hammer she used to attack her mother.
“The next bit is very hard to talk about, that’s probably the most grisly detail,” she told officers from her cell.
“So on the ground floor, underneath the stairs, there’s a few, like, storage boxes and things.
“You will find that forensically it’s helpful. There’s a hammer. It will still have blood on it. It’s rusted but it will still have blood traces on it.”
In the final clip, McCullough was filmed candidly telling police why she admitted her crimes, saying she “should pay for what I’ve done”.
“So not co-operating is, it’s futile,” she said. “There’s no point not co-operating. There really isn’t.
“And plus apart from which, anyway, I should pay for what I’ve done. So that’s the other side of the coin, I think.”
Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby, from Essex Police, said the case had shocked “even the most experienced of murder detectives”.
“This process, from the finding of John and Lois’ remains, to the unravelling of McCullough’s web of lies, has taken a huge toll on the wider family network,” he said.
“With this sentence and with all that we have uncovered throughout our investigation, we hope they can now start to find a way forward with their lives.”