A daughter who killed her parents before living with their bodies for years has been branded a ‘next-level’ psychopath, as her bloody murders are set to be retold in a Channel 5 documentary.
John and Lois McCullough, 70 and 71, were killed by daughter Virginia at their home in Chelmsford after she racked up £60,000 in debts while pretending she had a full-time job as a web designer.
The 36-year-old schemed to kill them over several months before she slipped prescription medicine into their drinks in June 2019, killing Mr McCullough in his sleep. She then battered her mother with a hammer the next day before stabbing her eight times.
McCullough, described in court as showing signs of a personality disorder, then bundled her loving parents’ bodies up into sleeping bags and barricaded them away for four and a half years in a wardrobe and a makeshift tomb fashioned like a bed.
The new documentary, Killed By Our Daughter: The McCullough Murders, reveals the vicious killer spent as much as eight hours a day then trying to convince her parents’ family and friends they were alive and well.
Now former Scotland Yard detective Peter Bleksley has said she was ‘a level all of her own’, as he branded her a ‘next-level sociopath, psychopath’.
McCullough plotted her murders for three months before striking
While living with her parents, she claimed to suffer from complex medical issues including thunderclap headaches – which did not surface during her time in custody – and had not been employed since she was a barmaid in 2017.
Nevertheless, she pretended to her parents she was a salaried web designer, and pretended to go into the office. She also lied about having benign cysts requiring treatment, and falsely made out to her GP that she was pregnant and had miscarried.
She resented her mother, the court heard, branding her a ‘happiness hoover’ who would smack her while bathing her as a child.
And when they became suspicious of her lies, she schemed their deaths for three months.
In the documentary, Mr Bleksley says that she used them like ‘guinea pigs’ as put ‘sample amounts of medication into their food and drinks in the run up to their murders, The Sun reports.
Sentencing her, Mr Justice Johnson told McCullough she had engaged in ‘substantial planning and premeditation’ that saw her accumulate large amounts of prescription drugs, a knife and implements to crush the tablets into powder.
Prosecutor Lisa Wilding KC had earlier urged the court to impose a whole-life order for the crime, saying: ‘Her actions were, on her own admission, the culmination of months of thought and planning which began in March 2019.’
She killed her mother in horrific hammer and knife attack
The court heard McCollough gave her father a fatal dose of sleeping tablets, leaving him to die alone. McCullough found him dead the next morning – before deciding her mother could not be allowed to find out.
As Mrs McCullough lay in bed listening to the radio, unaware her husband was dead, her daughter entered and exited the room, plotting how to kill the woman who had given her life.
The gruesome attack began with a hammer – before she fetched a Lakeland kitchen knife because ‘the hammer was not going to work and I didn’t actually want her to suffer’, she told detectives.
‘I was hitting like someone badly playing the xylophone or something,’ she had added.
She then held her mother’s hand and apologised as the 71-year-old bled out.
Mr Bleksley, who was the most commended cop of his generation for his undercover police work, told The Sun that the crime was even more horrific because it was carried out by the woman’s daughter after they had ‘trusted her entirely to look after them’.
He said: ‘For someone to treat their parents in such an evil way and then to disrespect them by not even affording them a proper burial for so many years and living with those bodies morning, noon and night is just a level of wickedness.’
McCullough lived with her parents’ ‘smelly’ bodies for four years
Police said she embarked on a ‘meticulous’ campaign of ‘deceit, betrayal and fraud’ after helping herself to her parents’ finances – which culminated in her decision to kill them and bury the crime so she could continue doing so.
Relatives who had been told for years they were away on lengthy trips or unwell had pleaded with the judge to lock her away for good. Her mother’s brother told the court she would have ‘a lot of time to plan something else’ while in prison.
The artist – described in court by a psychiatrist as exhibiting psychopathic tendencies – admitted to police who turned up to arrest her that she had murdered them before spending more than four years covering it up.
McCullough had wrapped her mother’s body in plastic packing and placed it into a sleeping bag which was stuffed into a double wardrobe. The doors were taped shut and concrete blocks were placed in front.
The bodies of both Mr and Mrs McCullough were severely decomposed and had to be identified from dental records.
Mr Bleksley continued to the red top: ‘At some stage the smell would have been absolutely unbearable but she lived with it. She’s a monster.’
McCullough tried to ‘buy friends’ with gifts doused in perfume
McCullough spent four years living with the bodies of pensioners John and Lois, during which she fobbed off enquiries about their whereabouts with a feeble cover story, while trying to ‘buy friends’ by showering people with unwanted gifts.
She even used to meet with neighbours wearing a false pregnancy bump in the weeks leading up to her arrest, showing them a scan picture of her ‘baby’.
One, Judith Way, who worked as a gardener for the killer, said that she was showered with gifts alongside her £20-an-hour fee.
‘She opened the door and the waft of perfume, would just … oh, she stank of perfume always. In fact everything she gave me reeked of perfume,’ she told The Times.
Mr Sargeant, 68, was one of the recipients of unwanted gifts, despite him repeatedly telling McCullough he didn’t want anything.
‘She would leave food on my doorstep,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it would be enough Chinese takeaway for three days and I would have to get a friend round to help eat it all. Other times I would come back from a bike ride and find four doughnuts.
‘I kept on telling her I was not hungry but it didn’t make any difference. Sometimes she would give me bottles of drink, like Southern Comfort, and even two cherry trees in pots.
‘She also gave me DIY equipment, such as door wedges to help in door hanging, and two different sizes of brand new pruning saws.
‘Other people in the neighbourhood would get flowers or plants in pots. It was as if she was trying to buy friendships.’
Another neighbour said: ‘I got a bottle of drink – I can’t remember what it was but it was alcohol and not something that I would ever have.
‘Another time I got some flowers. They were very nice but it was awkward because I didn’t know what they were for.’
McCullough gave no excuse when she was finally caught
Body-worn camera footage released by police revealed the chilling words McCullough said when justice finally caught up with her – four years after the murders sometime in June 2019.
The ‘compulsive liar’ can be heard telling officers: ‘Dad’s body is in there, mum’s in the wardrobe.’
She then appears to stifle a smile as she tells a stony-faced officer to ‘cheer up, you’ve caught the bad guy’.
‘I did know that this would come, eventually,’ she then adds. ‘It’s proper that I serve my punishment, so, yeah.’
After she admitted murder, a judge sentenced Virginia to serve a minimum of 36 years in prison for what he called a ‘gross violation of the trust between parents and their children’.
She will be almost the same age as her parents when she is finally eligible for parole, when she is herself in her 70s.
