Virginia lived with her parents bodies for four years. Her chilling arrest shocked police.

It's a story that reads like a horror film, but for Virginia McCullough, this nightmare was of her own making.

In 2019, she murdered her parents — using a "cocktail of drugs" to poison her father and then, when her mother hadn't consumed enough of the drugs, stabbing her to death — only to crudely conceal their bodies inside sleeping bags in the family home.

She didn't stop there. For four years, Virginia lived alongside their corpses, keeping up the façade of their lives to the outside world. The question remains: how did she hide this brutal secret for so long? The truth is both deeply unsettling and eerily calculated.

The case of betrayal, lies, and murder leaves behind an unsettling aftermath that nobody saw coming.

Image: Essex Police

How did Virginia McCullough kill her parents?

Virginia's relationship with her parents had been strained for years, with money troubles at the core of their conflict.

She was 36, still living with her parents and relying on them financially. By mid June 2019, judges estimated that she had racked up as much as £60,000 (approx. AUD $117,000) in debt, according to the UK Judiciary.

At this point, her lies and debt reached breaking point, and Virginia made the chilling decision to kill them both. On the 17th of June, she poisoned her father, John McCullough, by crushing prescription medication into his drink.

It was a fatal dose that killed him quickly. But her mother, Lois, didn't drink alcohol and only ingested a sedative dose.

"Your mother was also in bed. You had not put so many drugs in her drink and she had not drunk all of her drink," Justice Johnson said in his sentencing remarks.

Fearing her mother would discover what she'd done, Virginia bludgeoned Lois with a hammer while she lay in bed listening to the radio, also stabbing her repeatedly with a kitchen knife. Lois received eight stab wounds, including 7 to the chest.

She would tell the police, "When I was hitting her it was like someone badly playing the xylophone, it was willy-nilly."

Image: Family handout.

The scene was gruesome. John's body was hidden in what was described as a "makeshift tomb" in his study using breezeblocks, while Lois's body was concealed upstairs in a wardrobe, wrapped in a sleeping bag.

It was clear Virginia had not only planned the killings but had also gone to great lengths to hide the evidence.

"I am sure that these offences involved a substantial degree of both premeditation and planning. You had considered killing your parents over a period of 3 months. In that period you accumulated a large amount of prescription drugs," Justice Johnson said.

Virginia lived with her parents' bodies for four years.

For four years, Virginia managed to keep up the façade of a normal life.

She told family and friends that her parents were either ill, on holiday, or had moved away. And when COVID-19 hit, it gave her the perfect excuse to further avoid questions about her parents' whereabouts.

Neighbours reported seeing Virginia regularly, describing her as "funny" and "irreverent" — never suspecting that her parents' bodies were decaying just a few meters away.

"The curtains were always drawn and you couldn't see if anybody was in the house," said Phil Sargeant, a neighbour of 20 years.

"They were just like shadows, they'd move very quickly from A to B."

He added, "I find it quite difficult even to say that Virginia murdered her parents or killed her parents … She'd come across as quite pleasant; she was funny, she was irreverent as well. She had a dark sense of humour."

Debbie Pollard, who ran a local flower shop, described how Virginia would often shower her with food and gifts.

"We knew she was odd but I would never have dreamt she would ever be capable of doing what she actually did," she said.

"She's actually lived in that house all those years with her mum and dad's remains in there — that horrifies me. Horrifies me."

Virginia continued to live off her parents' pensions and even used their credit cards to rack up tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt. At one point, she posed as her mother to obtain a new credit card and spent tens of thousands on online gambling.

She was deeply embedded in her web of lies, all while her parents' corpses rotted within their family home.

The investigation unravels.

It wasn't until September 2023, four years after the murders, that the truth came to light when a concerned GP raised alarms after John missed several appointments.

Family and friends had grown suspicious, and the police soon began a missing persons investigation. It didn't take long for Virginia's lies to unravel.

"It was further revealed [Virginia] frequently cancelled appointments, using a range of excuses to explain her father's absence," police later said.

When police visited the family home, Virginia initially tried to claim her parents were travelling before she finally cracked.

She told officers, "Cheer up, at least you've caught the bad guy."

"I did know that this day would come eventually," she confessed. "I deserve to get what's coming, sentence-wise, because that's the right thing to do and then that might give me a bit of peace."

Her blunt confession left detectives stunned as they uncovered the horrific truth of what she had done.

Image: Essex Police

Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby said in a statement that Virginia has "meticulously" covered up the murders in the "interest of self-preservation and personal gain."

"Throughout the course of our investigation, we have built a picture of the vast levels of deceit, betrayal and fraud she engaged in," he said. "It was on a shocking and monumental scale.

"McCullough lied about almost every aspect of her life, maintaining a charade to deceive everyone close to her and clearly taking advantage of her parents' good will."She is an intelligent and adept manipulator who chose to kill her parents callously and without a thought for them or those who continue to suffer as a result of their loss."

Essex Police added that documents at the couple's home "built a picture of a woman who was trying desperately to keep her parents from discovering the depth of the financial black hole she continued to dig, while giving them false assurances about her employment and future prospects."

On October 11, Virginia was handed a life sentence at Chelmsford Crown Court for the 2019 killings of her parents, John and Lois McCullough. She showed no emotion while hearing the sentence.

Justice Jeremy Johnson told McCullough: "You think more of money than you do of humanity. Your parents were entitled to feel safe in their own beds and their own home, and they were entitled to feel safe with their daughter.

"You, nevertheless, made a full, conscious and deliberate decision to murder each of your parents."

Image: Essex Police