Inside the mind of a parent killer: ‘I shouldn’t have been part of that family’ 

The footage of Virginia McCullough admitting to keeping her parents’ mummified bodies in her family home is both shocking and unforgettable. 

As Essex Police entered her house in September 2023, body worn camera video showed a cooperative woman with mid-length blonde hair telling stunned officers: ‘Cheer up! At least you caught the bad guy,’ after directing them to her parents’ tombs. 

The remains of Lois and John McCullough, aged 71 and 70, were found in sleeping bags at their Great Baddow address. John’s body had been entombed in a crudely built structure of blankets, wood, and breeze blocks, while Lois’ was inside an upstairs wardrobe.

A missing person’s investigation had been launched that month after the couple’s GP spotted missed appointments. When initially contacted, their daughter lied to officers, telling them her parents were travelling and would be returning in October. Unconvinced by her story, days later, they broke down her door and made the arrest. 

Virginia, known locally as ‘Ginny’, admitted to fatally poisoning her father and killing her mother with a hammer and knife in June 2019, in a case that shocked and horrified even the force’s most experienced murder detectives. 

The case raised serious questions. Why did she kill her parents? How did she live with two dead bodies for so many years. And why did no one notice they were missing?

Ginny went to great lengths to conceal her parents’ disappearance, telling neighbours various stories: they were on holiday, on a cruise and that they had moved to Kent or Devon. She texted her siblings and other family members under Lois’ name, keeping them at bay and making excuses not to see them – even pretending to be her mother on one call. And if Ginny ever invited a friend over, she would cancel at the last minute.

In fact, she was living in a homemade mausoleum. Retired Essex Police detective Paul Maleary says the three-storey house on Pump Hill would have been exceptionally malodorous. He tells Metro: ‘I have experienced the smells of a dead body having spent time in mortuaries around the county, and it’s horrendous. And how [McCullough] has been in there with those bodies, I really don’t know.’ 

Despite Ginny having taped up the wardrobe to prevent flies and maggots escaping, there was ‘not a chance’ she would have kept out the smell, Paul adds. 

Simon Dinsdale, also a retired Essex detective, tells Metro: ‘There was some advanced mummification. She taped the wardrobe doors up, which would have vastly reduced the amount of air circulating, so that her mother’s body, in particular will have desiccated very quickly. 

‘She entombed her father in an area that would very quickly become musty. It would have reached a point and the smell would move on. If the place didn’t look terribly hygienic, and she’d quite clearly not opened the windows or rarely did, then it was probably unpleasant inside the house.’

The two former detectives speak about the murder in the Paramount+ documentary Confessions of a Parent Killer, released on 12 June. 

But as seasoned investigators, the most disturbing aspect was that Lois and John’s disappearance wasn’t picked up earlier. ‘What is really horrendous about this case is the fact that there’s been a lack of engagement by the local community,’ Paul tells Metro.

Simon adds: ‘It’s a sad indictment on society today that a couple could disappear for nearly five years, and everyone around them accepts what Virginia told them. And the way she was able to manipulate her siblings…It’s sad and a bit chilling. Why didn’t anybody say something?’ 

Parricide – the killing of a parent – is a rare but profoundly disturbing crime, but a double parricide, committed by a woman acting alone makes this one of the rarest kinds of murders.

Sixteen years ago, Lorraine Thorpe became possibly Britain’s youngest female double murderer when she murdered her father Desmond Thorpe and a woman called Rosalyn Hunt (WHO WAS SHE TO DESMOND, DO WE KNOW?). Thorpe and her accomplice Paul Clarke, who died in prison in 2014, had repeatedly beaten and tortured Ms Hunt and then smothered Mr Thorpe, with their bodies found at separate flats.

Motives can be a complex mix of psychological, environmental, and situational factors and to ‘mercy killings’ and abuse and long term trauma, to revenge, substance abuse, financial motivation or sheer psychopathic hatred. 

Paperwork found at the family home indicated that Ginny had manipulated and abused her parents’ goodwill for financial gain, running up large debts on credit cards in their names and, after their deaths, spending their pensions. She meticulously planned their murder and accumulated a large amount of prescription drugs for the poisoning, which was, in Paul’s words, ‘fiscally driven.’ 

The Essex Police investigation into  Virginia McCullough unearthed ‘vast levels of deceit, betrayal and fraud’. She was jailed in October for 36 years, as part of a life sentence. In a joint statement, the family of John and Lois said: ‘Our Dad was caring and hardworking… and our Mum was kind, caring and thoughtful…Our family has been left devastated and heartbroken at the deaths of our parents who were taken from us so cruelly. As we try to move forward with our lives, we will remember the happy times we enjoyed with them.’

However, consultant clinical and forensic psychologist Dr Naomi Murphy, who has worked directly with individuals who have killed their parents, is not convinced by the assertion that Ginny was motivated by money. 

‘There has always been abuse within those relationships. And from my experience, even when people have been abused by their parents, they’re quite often protective of them’, she tells Metro.

Dr Murphy uses the experience of one man who murdered his father, who described his dad as ‘strict’. When Dr Murphy dived deeper, the son revealed he’d been beaten with a belt buckle, hospitalised with broken bones and had his fingers held under a grill. 

‘People don’t want to be disloyal towards their parents. We all want to feel like we’ve come from loving parents’, she explains. 

‘You have to question why the [McCullough] siblings didn’t know that their parents weren’t still alive over a four year period. Even if they lived on the other side of the world, there’s video calling. I would describe [the relationship between Ginny’s siblings and parents] as estrangement, which to me, would suggest there was something amiss. Public statements that get put out don’t necessarily tell the whole story.’

In a previously unseen letter to documentary producer Charlie Wakefield, who was at school with McCullough, ‘Ginnie’ made claims of emotional and physical abuse, describing a cold and alcoholic father and a mum with severe mental health problems. 

She wrote to Charlier: ‘I knew even as a child that I should not have been a part of that family. My parents were too strict and cold. They would sometimes become violent, and I was smacked and hit for very small things. At five years old, I had not been potty trained. At night, I would be smacked in the bath for bed wetting.’ 

Although there were no police records of domestic abuse,  Dr Murphy, presenter of the podcast Locked Up Living and who developed a treatment program for people who had been considered to be untreatable psychopaths, has questions about what went on behind the doors of the now-boarded-up Pump Hill house.  

She says: ’People who are psychopathic are presented as being cold, callous and remorseless, using violence in a more instrumental way. However, I would say that psychopathy is kind of a form of dissociation. McCullough presents as someone who is quite dissociative.

‘The fact that she was able to live in a house with these bodies, the stench of which must have been horrific, she must have been able on some level to disconnect. And my experience of working in the prison system with people who are predominantly psychopathic was that they often felt their parents hated them as children.’  

The true motivation for these horrific killings can only be known by Virginia McCullogh, who also wrote in her letter to Charlie: ‘I should not have been part of that family.’ The reality being that in the end, she wasn’t.

Watch Confessions of a Parent Killer on Paramount Plus.