Latest news with #VirginiaMcCullough
Daily Mail
20-06-2025
- Daily Mail
What drove a daughter, 36, to kill her parents and then hide their bodies in the family home for FOUR years - as her sister says: 'I understand why she did it, but I never want to see her again'
There is little to distinguish the Seventies 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 secure 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 police 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 time 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, she 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, 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. McCullough's words are every bit as unnerving as her reaction when police knocked on her door that day. '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 murders will be analysed in a compelling new Daily Mail podcast called Trial+, to be released next week. 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 - an aspiring artist - remained at the family home. Yet none of her sisters appeared to have made contact with the authorities 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 sentence. Her account, while to 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. 'Nighttime 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. Det Supt 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 details in her letters. She poisoned her parents' drink 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 in the head with the hammer and stabbed her eight times with a knife. Defensive injuries contradict McCullough's account of her mother being in a deep sleep: the elderly woman had 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 go on to 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 and 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, she plundered their 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's 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 only spent money 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 what she says. '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 very 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 would not 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. Her ability to kill her parents undermines my faith in humanity,' he said. 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 McCullough's sister, 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.' Confessions of a Parent Killer is on Paramount+ now For more on this case, listen to a special interview with retired detective Paul Maleary, available now on the Mail's award-winning podcast The Trial+. To subscribe go to
Daily Mail
19-06-2025
- Daily Mail
The chilling letters from jail that reveal twisted motivation of aspiring artist who murdered her parents then lived with their bodies in her childhood home for FOUR years
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 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
Daily Mail
12-06-2025
- Daily Mail
Confessions Of A Parent Killer: Trailer, certificate and where to watch
The grimly fascinating story of Essex's Virginia 'Ginny' McCullough, who murdered her parents then lived with the bodies for five years Year: 2025
Daily Mail
15-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Sister says she FORGIVES killer who murdered their parents and lived with their mummified bodies for four years
A woman whose sister murdered their elderly parents before hiding their mummified bodies in the family home for four years has revealed she forgives her sibling. Louise Hopkins, 49, was left stunned when police called her out of the blue with fears that her parents, John and Lois McCullough, might be dead. The couple, aged 70 and 71, had in fact been brutally murdered by their own daughter, Virginia McCullough, who kept their decomposing bodies hidden in their Chelmsford home while carrying on with life as if nothing had happened. Virginia stashed her mother's body in a double wardrobe, and concealed her father's corpse in a makeshift tomb disguised as a bed. Yet speaking for the first time since the devastating revelations, Louise insists she holds no hatred towards her younger sister. 'I have forgiven her for what she's done. I am not drinking other people's poison,' she told The Sun. But while she has made peace with the past, Louise, who lives in Cambridgeshire, admits she will never visit Virginia in prison, still unable to comprehend the appalling killings in June 2019. Virginia, now 36, was jailed for life in October last year, with a minimum term of 36 years. A court heard how she poisoned her father with sleeping pills and later bludgeoned her mother with a hammer before stabbing her multiple times. Over the next four years, she lied to relatives, friends and neighbours - even posing as her mother in phone calls and sending out Christmas cards via Moonpig to maintain the illusion that the couple were still alive. She even gambled more than £21,000 and spent nearly £150,000 from her dead parents' accounts. The deception unravelled only in September 2023, when a GP surgery raised concerns after John failed to attend multiple appointments. Police arrived at the family's Pump Hill property and were met with a disturbingly calm response from Virginia. 'Cheer up — at least you've caught the bad guy,' she told officers. Speaking on the Speakmans' Hope Clinic podcast, Louise opens up about the shame, guilt and trauma she endured — revealing that she had become estranged from her parents back in 2018 due to their volatile home life. 'The worst thing is that my parents were left to rot. The grief has haunted me,' she says. 'I've had various flashbacks, just feeling really guilty that if I don't talk about it, it chews me up and I feel physically ill. I'm sad and at points I've screamed uncontrollably.' Growing up in a family marked by dysfunction, Louise says her father, once a business lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, struggled with alcoholism, while her mother Lois battled agoraphobia and obsessive compulsive behaviour. 'It was crazy. When I hit 18, he'd make me go to the off licence and buy him whisky because he couldn't stop,' she reveals. 'I thought I must be to blame. I tried to save them but dad was a violent alcoholic. They wouldn't help themselves.' Although some may see her forgiveness as remarkable, Louise's message is clear — she is not excusing Virginia's actions, but trying to move forward with her own life. 'It was as though I was carrying some poison and daren't share it. It just kind of eroded me,' she told podcast hosts Eva and Nik Speakman. Despite being invited, she chose not to attend Virginia's trial at Chelmsford Crown Court. 'I was invited to go but didn't want to because I'd made my peace that I'd left the family and didn't want anything more to do with them. I walked away from all of them in 2018 after physically leaving home in 1997.' 'I forgive my sister but I would not visit her. I have created a life of peace and tranquillity for me and my children,' she said. Court proceedings revealed the full horror of the killings. After giving her father a lethal dose of sleeping pills, Virginia decided her mother couldn't be allowed to find out. She attacked Lois as she lay in bed listening to the radio — striking her with a hammer and stabbing her eight times. She then stored her mother's body in a taped-up wardrobe, weighed down with a breeze block. For her father, she constructed a chilling homemade tomb using breeze blocks, wood and blankets - topped with pictures and ornaments to disguise it. When police finally confronted her, Virginia admitted: 'I know why you're here. My father is in there. I murdered him.' A court heard how she was a 'compulsive liar' who invented jobs and medical conditions — even calling Essex Police 238 times over trivial complaints and making 185 calls to the GP surgery, many while pretending to be her mum. In released bodycam footage, Virginia appears calm, telling police: 'I did know that this would kind of come eventually. It's proper that I serve my punishment.'
The Sun
14-05-2025
- The Sun
My world fell apart when my sister confessed she'd killed our parents & lived with their mummified bodies for 4 years
WHEN Louise Hopkins got an unexpected call from police to say that they feared her parents were dead, she reeled with shock. But what unravelled next sent her into a state of horror and despair, as it emerged the couple had been killed by her younger sister — who kept them mummified in the family home for FOUR YEARS. 8 8 8 In a scene that could have come straight from the pages of a Stephen King novel, Virginia McCullough hid her mum's body in a double wardrobe and entombed her murdered dad in a makeshift mausoleum disguised as a bed, while living in the house. Talking for the first time, Louise, 49, told The Sun that she forgives her sister despite her gruesome crimes. She said: 'I have forgiven her for what she's done. I am not drinking other people's poison.' But Louise, who lives in Cambridgeshire, says she will never visit her sister in jail as she still struggles to come to terms with the gruesome killings in 2019. Virginia was jailed for life with a minimum of 36 years in October last year after poisoning dad John and battering mum Lois with a hammer before repeatedly stabbing her. She convinced neighbours, friends and family that the couple were still alive by sending text messages from their phones, sending Christmas and birthday cards and gifts through Moonpig and lying about trips away. The 36-year-old continued to live at the couple's home as their bodies decomposed, spending almost £150,000 from their pension, benefits and credit cards — including more than £21,000 on gambling. The Covid lockdown allowed her to get away with her dark secret — and she even posed as her mum in phone calls. It was the family GP surgery that finally raised the alarm in September 2023 when pensioner John repeatedly failed to turn up for health checks. When cops visited Virginia, she coolly told them: 'Cheer up — at least you've caught the bad guy.' Louise said the murders of her parents John, 70, and Lois McCullough, 71, have led to bouts of guilt and excessive OCD after she became estranged from them in 2018 due to her dad's drinking and her mum's controlling behaviour. She says: 'The worst thing is that my parents were left to rot. The grief has haunted me. 'I have had bouts of thinking I must be to blame because I walked away from all that. 'I've had various flashbacks, just feeling really guilty that if I don't talk about it, it chews me up and I feel physically ill. I'm sad and at points I've screamed uncontrollably.' She tells how she struggled to come to terms with the murders, in a new interview on podcast The Speakmans Hope Clinic, with therapists Eva and Nik Speakman. Louise, the eldest of five sisters, tells the Speakmans how she felt 'shame' and 'guilt' — despite leaving home decades earlier, before becoming estranged from her parents. She said: 'It was as though I was carrying some poison and daren't share it. It just kind of eroded me.' To the outside world, the McCulloughs looked like a perfect family unit — a loving daughter who stayed at home to look after her ageing parents in their modest house in Pump Hill, Chelmsford. 8 8 8 John was a retired business studies lecturer who had worked at Anglia Ruskin University, while neighbours later described Lois as a quiet woman who did not engage in small talk. 'They were nice, normal people,' a local shopkeeper said after their deaths. 'I thought they'd gone away on holiday.' Other neighbours said Virginia was 'quite chatty' and 'a little bit odd' but there was no indication of the 'psychopathic tendencies' later described in court. While they presented a picture of respectability, behind closed doors John was fighting alcoholism and Lois suffered with anxiety, agoraphobia and obsessive compulsive behaviour. Growing up, Louise said that her dad — described in court as being in poor health with high cholesterol and diabetes — would down a 'bottle of wine in ten or 11 minutes.' The worst thing is that my parents were left to rot. The grief has haunted me. Louise She told the Speakmans: 'It was crazy. When I hit 18, he'd make me go to the off licence and buy him whisky because he couldn't stop. 'I thought I must be to blame. I tried to save them but dad was a violent alcoholic. They wouldn't help themselves.' It is clear from the podcast that Louise is not victim blaming, but struggling with the reasons behind her sister's actions and her own estrangement from her parents. 'I will never forget them. I loved them,' she says, 'but I didn't like them.' 'I was drinking the poison in the household I grew up in' After she found out about her parents' deaths, Louise initially 'mourned quietly' — but when her sister was arrested, she lost friends. She said: 'I felt like I was drinking the toxicity of the poison in the household I grew up in.' OBSESSIVELY WASHING HANDS After struggling with OCD in the past, Louise began obsessively washing her hands and struggled with everyday life as she came to terms with the murders. Breaking down, she says: 'I'd obsessively wash my hands, have memory blanks about what's happened, controlling the children, checking their hands as well. It's too much. 'I think it's just a control thing but I've had issues with that, way back, from when I was small. Mum was very clinically clean and dad would never wash his hands.' Louise never attended her sister's trial after Virginia pleaded guilty to murdering her parents between June 17 and 20, 2019. She said: 'I was invited to go but didn't want to because I'd made my peace that I'd left the family and didn't want anything more to do with them. 'I walked away from all of them in 2018 after physically leaving home in 1997.' Louise told The Sun: 'I forgive my sister but I would not visit her. I have created a life of peace and tranquillity for me and my children.' Chelmsford Crown Court heard how Virginia gave her father a fatal dose of sleeping tablets in his drink. When she found him dead the next morning, she decided her mother could not be allowed to find out. 8 8 As Lois lay in bed listening to the radio, her daughter hit her with a hammer and stabbed her eight times in the chest and neck, apologising as she bled out. When police finally knocked on the door and started asking Virginia about her parents, she eventually said: 'I know why you're here. My father is in there. I murdered him.' After stuffing her mum's body into a wardrobe, which she taped up, putting a breeze block against it, she built a DIY mausoleum for her dad. The structure was made from masonry blocks and wooden panels and covered with multiple blankets, with pictures and paintings on top. 'COMPULSIVE LIAR' Inside, police found at least 11 layers of plastic covering the body, which was wrapped in a sleeping bag. The court was told that Virginia was a 'compulsive liar' who told her parents she was a web designer and made up medical conditions such as thunderclap headaches. She made 238 calls to Essex police about trivial matters that 'showed paranoia' and 185 to the GP surgery, including calls pretending to be her mum. In bodycam footage released by police, Virginia told officers who smashed down her door: 'I did know that this would kind of come eventually. 'It's proper that I serve my punishment.' After four years, the law had finally caught up with the cold-blooded killer. Louise, meanwhile, is still slowly rebuilding her life. She said: 'My children are happy and healthy, I'm more positive than negative and I have a good support network.'
