Woman who murdered her parents told police: ‘cheer up, you caught the bad guy’

A woman who murdered her parents and lived next to their bodies for four years told police “cheer up, at least you caught the bad guy” when she was arrested.

Virginia McCullough poisoned her father, John McCullough, 70, with prescription drugs that she crushed and put in his alcoholic drinks in June 2019.

A day later, she also hit her mother, 71-year-old Lois McCullough, with a hammer and fatally stabbed her.

She was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 36 years at Chelmsford Crown Court on Friday.

Body-worn video footage released by police shows the moment McCullough was arrested on September 15, 2023, where she can be seen confessing to the murders and telling officers where they can find her parents’ bodies and the murder weapons.

Handcuffed and wearing a pink sweater, she told officers she put something in her father’s drink and placed his body under a bed downstairs, and hid her mother’s body in a closet upstairs.

“I knew this would happen eventually, it is appropriate that I serve my punishment,” McCullough added.

Having been arrested on suspicion of double murder, she can be seen in handcuffs telling a police officer: “Cheer up, at least you caught the bad guy.”

“I know I don’t look 100% bad,” she added.

“I deserve, obviously, whatever comes next in terms of sentencing, if that’s the right thing to do and it can give me some peace.”

She can also be seen telling police that there was a bag containing a bank card in which there were “many transactions that had occurred over the last few years with money belonging to my parents.”

Other footage from a body-worn camera shows McCullough at the police station telling officers where they can find the hammer and kitchen knife she used to kill her mother.

Crying and wiping her eyes, she added: “It’s really hard to talk about the next part, that’s probably the most horrible detail, so downstairs, under the stairs there are some storage boxes and stuff and in the middle, I think it’s in one of the boxes or in a bag or something… you’ll find that from a forensic point of view it’s useful – there’s a hammer.

“I’m trying to help you find everything,” she continued.

“It’s in the middle of the stairs, it will still have blood on it, it’s rusty, but it will still have traces of blood.”

She adds: “Not cooperating is useless. There’s no point not cooperating, there really isn’t.”

At her trial, the 36-year-old hid their bodies in makeshift tombs at the family home in Great Baddow, Essex, and then told persistent lies to cover her tracks.

She ran up large credit card debts in her parents’ names and, after their deaths, continued to spend their pensions.