My father is in there....I murdered him. My mother's upstairs in a double wardrobe

A JOBLESS woman brutally murdered her parents then lived alongside their makeshift tombs for four years, while also plundering almost £150,000 from them.

- DAN WARRUPTON

Virginia McCullough was yesterday handed a life term, with a minimum of 36 years, for the killings.

They were carried out in a three-bed terraced village home on a quiet street by a church. Sick McCullough, 36, had slipped her father, John, 70, a lethal "cocktail of prescription medication" in his Guinness.

Realising she faced jail for his murder, she then bludgeoned her mother, Lois, 71, with a rusty hammer and stabbed her eight times with a kitchen knife. She stuffed John's body in what was described as a home-made mausoleum in the downstairs study.

And she wrapped Lois' corpse in plastic sheeting and a sleeping bag before sealing her in a wardrobe in an upstairs bedroom. She used the cover of the pandemic to conceal her crimes, posing as the couple in messages to her siblings and even pretending to be them in calls to the GP and the police.

She sent family members birthday cards purporting to be from her vulnerable parents which she ordered online with pre-printed messages.

Their bodies were not discovered until 2023 after their GP raised concerns about missed appointments.

Before the murders, McCullough fooled John and Lois into thinking she had a well-paid job as a web developer but in reality she was unemployed and conning them out of cash.

Fearing the net was closing in on her fraud, she killed them but continued to squander their pensions, Police stormed the home in Great Baddow, Essex, on September 15 last year where they discovered the couple's badly decomposed bodies.