Letters reveal twisted motivation of woman who murdered her parents

There is little to distinguish the 1970s three-storey property that stands on a corner of Pump Hill, in the Essex commuter village of Great Baddow.

The metal shutters that, until recently, covered the entrance and garage, have been removed and the fake daffodils and stone hedgehog that once stood by the door have gone.

A few weeks ago house clearers arrived, emptying both home and garden. Yet, net curtains still hang limply at the windows where a small silver star – an overlooked Christmas decoration maybe – remains stuck to an upstairs pane of glass.

It’s the only enduring reminder of the family – and the horror – that once filled this home.

Two of the most recent occupants are dead and the third, Virginia McCullough, is currently residing within the confines of HMP Downview, in Surrey.

The crimes the bleached blonde, 37-year-old aspiring artist hid here – in her childhood home – are appalling and terrifying in equal measure, not simply because of what she did, but because they stand as ultimate proof that you really do never know what goes on behind closed doors.

The truth about just what did go on here was revealed in September 2023, when the bodies of McCullough’s parents, John and Lois, were found inside the property.

They had been murdered and entombed – Lois, 71, in an upstairs wardrobe, sealed with tape and barricaded with breeze blocks; and John, 70, in a makeshift mausoleum made from more blocks (Virginia bought 40 of them, along with sand and cement, at B&Q), in the downstairs study.

She had, it transpired, been living with their bodies for four years, during which time she ploughed through tens of thousands of pounds of their savings, while tricking everyone into believing her parents were still alive, before their concerned GP finally raised the alarm.

The extraordinary moment of her arrest was captured in bodycam footage, released by Essex Police, after McCullough was jailed for life for murder – a crime she admitted – last October. The video, viewed hundreds of thousands of times online, is as chilling as it is macabre.

‘Is there anything in the property that we should know about?’ asks one officer, as McCullough is handcuffed in the hallway.

‘Yes, there is,’ she replies, calmly and chirpily. ‘Shall I take you to it?’ Her matter-of-fact manner never changes.

‘Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy,’ she quips.

The Daily Mail has visited Great Baddow, where we spoke to neighbours and residents who remember ‘Ginny’, as she was known.

We also spoke to her elder sister, Louise Hopkins – the only one of her four siblings to comment publicly on the tragedy – who provided a disturbing insight into a deeply troubled family, the full facts about whom may never be known.

Of her parents, Louise said: ‘They did their best, but things were bad from the beginning. They both had issues and they did not get the help they needed. When one went down, the other might be up. If they were both down, then all hell broke loose.

‘I grew up in that environment trying to read what was going to happen.’

Louise, now a 49-year-old mother-of-three and a life coach living in Cambridgeshire, said she’d broken contact with her parents in 2018, a year before they were killed.

While she did not want to go into detail about her childhood, Louise said: ‘My mother, when she was young, got involved with an American cult. She was on her own in London and the cult got hold of her. She brought that home.

‘You never knew [what] you were going to get. I left the family for that reason. My sister did what she did for the same reason.’

Now, Virginia McCullough has spoken again, this time in a series of letters written from behind bars to the makers of a Paramount documentary, Confessions of a Parent Killer.

Her words are every bit as unnerving as her reaction when police knocked on her door.

‘I knew I would be arrested one day and should be,’ she writes.

‘I knew I should be punished, which is why I did not try and run or leave. I was relieved in a huge way that the deception was over . . . so I told the police plenty of information to help the investigation and was trying to make things easier for them.’

As a mea culpa it is eerily self-centred and dispassionate. But in truth, everything about the murders of John and Lois McCullough is strange.

The crime will be analysed by former top Essex detective Paul Maleary in a compelling episode of the Daily Mail’s award-winning The Trial+ podcast, out tomorrow (subscribe at thecrimedesk.com).

So who were John and Lois McCullough? And what drove their youngest daughter to murder them?

The couple were in their 30s by the time they married in Doncaster, in 1975 and had Louise, the first of five daughters. Over the next seven years, they had three more girls, before moving south, to Essex, where Ginny was born in 1987.

John was a management consultant-turned-business studies lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University – and also a heavy drinker.

Lois, meanwhile, once worked as a secretary, but battled with anxiety, agoraphobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

By the time of their deaths, only their youngest daughter Ginny remained at the family home.

Yet none of her sisters appeared to have raised the alarm when their parents disappeared in June 2019. We now know that McCullough, masquerading as her mother, texted the rest of the family, asking them to stay away, while neighbours were told the pensioners had moved to the seaside.

It’s McCullough herself who tries to explain her actions, in 60 pages of disturbing and neatly penned prose sent to documentary producer Charlie Wakefield – who was at school with her –before her sentence.

Her account, which must be treated with caution (she was labelled a ‘compulsive liar’ by family in court), nevertheless paints a picture of a deeply unhappy childhood.

‘I knew as a child that I should not have been a part of that family,’ she writes. ‘My parents were too strict and cold.’

She goes on to document being smacked for minor misdemeanours, and battling the humiliation of bed-wetting.

‘At home my drinks were limited to three cups a day to try to prevent me wetting the bed,’ she says. 

‘But when I was ten, I was still not dry at night. My dad took me to the chemist to get Huggies pull-ups and said, very loudly to embarrass me: ‘You can carry them as they are yours.’ ‘

She describes being dirty and unkempt at school, being called ‘Ginny Germs’ by classmates and branded ‘stupid’ and ‘useless’ by her parents after a poor school report. As for her parents’ problems, she says she was the ‘buffer between my dad’s drinking and mother’s mental health’.

‘A number of months before the end, my mother was getting more and more emotionally cruel, telling me I was worthless and there was growing toxicity from my dad’s drinking. 

Night time was my only respite, and even then I would cry and feel hopeless. I felt emotionally desperate and trapped. I got to a point where there was nothing that I wanted more than a normal quiet life at almost any cost.’ 

We, of course, now know what that cost was.

Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby, of Essex Police, described McCullough as an ‘intelligent and adept manipulator’ who perpetrated fraud and betrayal on a ‘monumental’ scale.

Years before she killed them, she’d gained control of her parents’ finances, and frittered away thousands on shopping and online gambling, which she covered up by telling them they’d been victims of fraud.

By June 17, 2019, she was £60,000 in debt, so that night she enacted a plan she had been hatching for months – a plan she describes in harrowing detail in her letters.

She poisoned her parents’ drinks with a cocktail of prescription drugs. The following morning, she found her father dead in his bed.

But, as she says in her letters, her mother, who slept separately from her husband, was still alive. ‘One worked and one did not,’ she writes, chillingly matter-of-fact.

‘I’d given less drugs to my mother. I quietly went into the doorway and found her. As it turned out, she was in a deep sleep. I pulled the door back closed again and went to get gloves, a knife and a hammer.

‘I went back in, and she was facing away from me. I hesitated, and then I carried out the act.’

The ‘act’ was appalling – McCullough hit her mother on the head with the hammer and stabbed her eight times with a knife. Defensive injuries contradict McCullough’s account of her mother being asleep: the elderly woman fought for her life.

That same day, McCullough purchased sleeping bags, into which she placed her parents’ bodies, wrapping them in layer upon layer of plastic and then constructing the makeshift tombs in which they would eventually be found.

The next day, she posed as her mother to apply for a new credit card and PIN, which she would use to buy clothes and jewellery.

The subterfuge that followed was swift. That afternoon, she sent a text message from her mother’s phone to one of her sisters. It read: ‘Your dad and I are at the seaside in Walton this week. Mum x.’ Later that night, there was another message: ‘Good night. Mum. X.’

Over the ensuing months and years, McCullough sent numerous messages pretending to be her mother. She made phone calls to her siblings, to the GP and to her father’s pension provider. There were birthday cards, and postcards to neighbours filled with anecdotes about their life by the sea.

Meanwhile, McCullough plundered her parents’ bank accounts and pension payments, spending almost £150,000.

To those on the outside – neighbours, shopkeepers, the postman – McCullough, with her peroxide hair and two-tone fingernails, was viewed either as an annoyance or an eccentric. 

She would stand outside for long periods sweeping away six or seven leaves; she would arrive unannounced at neighbours’ homes with gifts – steak, doughnuts, or a takeaway.

McCullough’s own written account of that time, living with her terrible secret, is extraordinary, to say the least.

‘I spent the first six months mostly indoors. I did not sleep upstairs, but in the lounge, on the couch,’ she wrote.

‘Having my parents in the house but without any mental abuse or drinking, I admit, in a strange way, was a silent comfort.

‘I was just living normally and quietly . . . but it’s all I wanted at the time I committed the crime.’

She claims, to have spent money only on ‘every day’ things, insisting her gifts were because she was ‘addicted’ to the smile it would put on people’s faces.

Those the Mail have spoken to revealed there may be kernels of truth in that. ‘Ginny did what she did, but deep down she was trying to prove she was not a bad person,’ says one villager. ‘She was trying to endear herself to people by giving them presents, so much so that she became a bloody nuisance. She went overboard. It was too much.’

In Great Baddow, there remain mixed emotions about the killer who lived among them.

One friend says: ‘When you boil it down, what Ginny did, you cannot condone. You do not go around killing people, least of all your parents. But you can understand why. It leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

‘Something had to give. Maybe if she could have got the support from her family when she was growing up, maybe this whole wretched thing wouldn’t have happened.’

Life in prison, however, seems to suit McCullough, and she says she’s happier than she ever was on the outside. And she continues to profess her remorse. In her letters to the documentary makers, she writes: ‘Not only do I think I deserved life without parole, but felt that even that was not punishment enough to ease my guilt or remorse, even mildly.

‘I have made so many mistakes in my life through deception, secrecy and self-sabotage. The worst of all is the crime that I killed my parents.’

Certainly McCullough’s siblings and uncle would agree.

At Chelmsford Crown Court, Richard Butcher, Lois’s brother, who lives in India, said he had been manipulated into thinking his sister was alive and that the truth was still incomprehensible.

‘Virginia is very dangerous,’ he said. ‘Her ability to kill her parents undermines my faith in humanity.’

Meanwhile, her other siblings released a statement, in which they said: ‘Mum and Dad always enjoyed the time they spent with us. Family was their pride and joy. Our family has been left devastated and heartbroken at the deaths of our parents who were taken from us so cruelly.’

Only Louise – who didn’t attend court, nor even her parents’ funerals – can begin to understand. She says of her youngest sibling: ‘I think I know why she did it. I forgive her, but I feel nothing for her. I do not want to see her. I will never see her.’

Additional reporting: Stephanie Condron

Confessions of a Parent Killer is on Paramount+ now

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