Sick web of lies that proves Virginia McCullough is a ‘next level psychopath’ after sealing parents’ corpses in DIY tomb
THE officer points a taser at her, but Virginia McCullough remains eerily calm – before quickly giving a full and frank confession.
Police body camera footage shows the moment she admits killing her elderly parents and living with their bodies for four years, with her chillingly telling officers: “Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy.”
Twisted McCullough murdered her dad John, 70, by poisoning him with a lethal cocktail of prescription medication that she crushed into his drink, before hiding his body in a makeshift mausoleum in his ground-floor bedroom.
She then hit her mum Lois, 71, with a hammer before stabbing her to bed and shoving her body in the wardrobe of an upstairs bedroom.
Now, a new Channel 5 documentary, Killed By Our Daughter: The McCullough Murders, reveals how McCullough spent up to eight hours a day tricking everyone into thinking her parents were alive and well, while draining £150,000 from their life savings.
The double killer even bombarded her neighbours with bizarre gifts to convince them her parents were still alive.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun, former Scotland Yard detective Peter Bleksley says: “It is next-level sociopath, psychopath, whatever you want to call it.
“In fact, she was a level all of her own.”
Peter, who spent 21 years with the Metropolitan Police, adds: “Her abominable behaviour outstrips any of the wickedness that I have encountered when I was a detective.”
Plotted parents’ murders for 3 months
To the outside world, McCullough, who still lived at the family home in Great Baddow, Essex, appeared to be a devoted carer for her frail, ageing parents.
According to court documents, Lois “suffered from anxiety and agoraphobia and had traits of obsessive compulsive disorder” while John “had hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, hypercholesterolaemia and glaucoma.”
The youngest of five daughters, loner McCullough and her sisters were picked on at school, with her being nicknamed “Smelly Ginny” and “Pi**y Ginny”.
She lied to her parents, telling them that she was a web designer but she didn’t work and received payments from her dad, a former management consultant turned business studies lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University.
McCullough also had control of the family finances and stole from her parents, getting loans out in their names without their knowledge and gambling away the money.
After they started to become suspicious, in March 2019, she spent three months meticulously plotting her parents’ murders, stockpiling a stash of prescription drugs and buying implements to crush them into fine powder to slip into her parents’ drinks to poison them.
Peter says in the documentary that she treated them like “guinea pigs” by putting “sample amounts of medication” into their food and drinks in the days before their murders.
Professor Rachel Condry, Professor of Criminology at Oxford University says in the film: “The kind of cold and quite calculating characteristics of this case makes it really very unusual.
“Parapsychosis are almost always explosive incidents.
“This is often something that isn’t planned a long way in advance. It’s something that escalates.”
Hammered & stabbed to death
On June 17, 2019, she poisoned her dad by slipping the drugs into his Guinness and brandy, before going to bed.
She also laced her mum’s drink with poison but she did not finish and the next morning McCullough found her still alive.
She attacked Lois with a hammer as she listened to the radio in bed, before stabbing her to death.
Speaking in the documentary, Professor Condry said: “It would have been a real awful death for the mother who would have known her own daughter was killing her.
“It’s rare we see this level of violence from women.”
Peter feels the crime is even more horrific because she was their daughter.
He tells us: “Her elderly parents trusted her entirely to look after them and then for her mother to see her daughter raining blows down upon her with a hammer and then getting a knife to finish the job.
“The terror that her mother must have gone through and the pain that her father must have gone through having been poisoned as he was.”
Peter continues: “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.”
Lived with bodies for 4 years
Immediately after, she went on a shopping spree, applying for a credit card in her mum’s name and continued to claim their benefits.
Incredibly, McCullough even impersonated her dad to get early release of his pension.
The documentary also tells how, after cutting her hand during the frenzied attack on her mother, she visited her GP, claiming she had injured herself while chopping vegetables.
The killer bought sleeping bags that became makeshift body bags for her parents. And two days after the murders, McCullough placed an order with B&Q for 40 breeze blocks, cement and sand.
At some stage the smell would have been absolutely unbearable but she lived with it. She’s a monster
Peter Bleksley
She used the materials to create a homemade tomb for John in his ground floor bedroom, covering it with blankets to make it look like a bed.
The monster also hid her mum in a wardrobe up in Lois’ bedroom on the top floor, sealing it shut with tape.
Speaking to The Sun, Peter says: “Dead bodies go through different stages of decomposition. There’s about five or six stages. Putrefaction is the most smelly.
“They would have gone through that because she had them for so many years.
“At some stage the smell would have been absolutely unbearable but she lived with it.”
He adds: “She’s a monster.”
Gifts ‘reeked of perfume’
The film reveals how McCullough devoted up to eight hours a day keeping her twisted charade alive, texting her siblings from her dead mum’s phone with excuses about “extended holidays” or “illnesses” to keep them away.
She sent pre-printed Moonpig birthday cards and postcards from Waltonon-the-Naze, a seaside town in Essex where she claimed her parents had moved to.
She even went so far as to impersonate her mum in a phone call to one of her sisters and wrote letters to her uncle, pretending to be Lois.
Neighbours describe McCullough as a “pest” that tried to “buy friends” with presents that reeked of perfume.
Who are the UK's worst serial killers?
THE UK's most prolific serial killer was actually a doctor.
Here’s a rundown of the worst offenders in the UK.
- British GP Harold Shipman is one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded history. He was found guilty of murdering 15 patients in 2000, but the Shipman Inquiry examined his crimes and identified 218 victims, 80 per cent of whom were elderly women.
- After his death Jonathan Balls was accused of poisoning at least 22 people between 1824 and 1845.
- Mary Ann Cotton is suspected of murdering up to 21 people, including husbands, lovers and children. She is Britain’s most prolific female serial killer. Her crimes were committed between 1852 and 1872, and she was hanged in March 1873.
- Amelia Sach and Annie Walters became known as the Finchley Baby Farmers after killing at least 20 babies between 1900 and 1902. The pair became the first women to be hanged at Holloway Prison on February 3, 1903.
- William Burke and William Hare killed 16 people and sold their bodies.
- Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was found guilty in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill seven others between 1975 and 1980.
- Dennis Nilsen was caged for life in 1983 after murdering up to 15 men when he picked them up from the streets. He was found guilty of six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder and was sentenced to life in jail.
- Fred West was found guilty of killing 12 but it’s believed he was responsible for many more deaths.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, Russell Thorington, a personal trainer who lived opposite, said: “She would leave strange notes, a tiny LED Christmas tree once.
“I had a steak in a packet put through my letterbox.
“She stalked me to the point that she knew when I had come in from work, sometimes at 8pm or 9pm, and within 15 minutes there would be a knock on my door, ‘Hi Russ, how are you?’
“I’d get a note from her like once a week. Nothing was ever malicious, apart from the fact it was really annoying. It was just over-friendly and quite odd.”
Jo Themistocleous, 48, who worked alongside her a few times at the local pub, described her as “strange” with her gifting staff presents, including wigs.
McCullough’s gardener, Judith Way, who is in her 60s, told the paper how she would give her jewellery and expensive perfume, baking her muffins and cooking her soup.
She said: “I vaguely knew her parents, she told me they would visit under the cover of darkness from the seaside town because they didn’t want to be seen by the neighbours who were being horrible to them.”
But she added: “It was a load of rubbish, of course.”
For someone to treat their parents in such an evil way… is just a level of wickedness
She also revealed McCullough would give her seashells, telling her she had picked them up while visiting her parents.
Judith says she was never allowed inside the house, adding: “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.”
Shopkeepers in the local area also told The Sunday Times they recalled her pretending to be pregnant in the months before her arrest, walking around with a fake baby bump and even flashing phoney hospital paperwork.
Then, last August, a month before their bodies were discovered, she bizarrely made up an allegation that she was a victim of assault, prompting police to visit the family home.
The officer was unaware the bodies were there and an Essex police review later concluded they had done nothing wrong.
Jailed for 36 years
Her sick crime only came to light after a GP raised concerns that they hadn’t seen her parents for years, and their prescriptions hadn’t been collected.
After police were alerted, they quickly carried out a raid of the home, battering in the front door.
Retired undercover fugitive hunter Peter points out in the film that officers were already in forensic suits, explaining that if it was just “a welfare check” it would have been “just a knock on the door” – suggesting they had done some background checks.
The footage of her arrest features in the documentary. She says: “I did know that this [day] would kind of come eventually”, adding: “I deserve to obviously get whatever’s coming sentence-wise, because that’s the right thing to do, and then that might give me a bit of peace.”
Peter says of her composed manner: “She knew the game was up when the police officers arrived there.
“She knew that her deception was gonna be found out and I think she endeavoured to try to retain control of the situation by giving the information to the police in order to try and just cling on in some way to that element of control over the proceedings, which for me just shows what a duplicitous, wicked mind she possesses.”
No excuse
McCullough admitted to the murders and was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 36 years last month at Chelmsford Crown Court.
Justice Johnson told her: “Any difficulties in childhood do not begin to excuse what you did.”
Reflecting on her lengthy sentence in the documentary, Professor Condry says: “She was given a minimum tariff of 36 years and that’s actually very high.
“Usually a tariff for a life sentence is around 15 to 30 years, but there were circumstances here that the judge pointed to of the calculated planning of the hiding of the bodies afterwards and the fact that she killed two parents “
And Peter adds: “She will be well into her 70s before she even becomes eligible for parole and it’s far from guaranteed that that will ever be granted.”
Another expert, Dr Neema Trivedi-Bateman, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Loughborough University, says in the film: “Virginia will be at the age when she killed her parents when her minimum term is over which is quite chilling.”
Killed By Our Daughter: The McCullough Murders, is on Channel 5 tonight at 10pm