The House of Secrets

John and Lois McCullough lived on Pump Hill in Great Baddow, a village on the edge of Chelmsford in Essex. By June 2019 their daughter Virginia was thirty-one, out of work, and carrying about £60,000 of debt they knew nothing about. John was seventy and Lois was seventy-one, and both of them trusted her with their medication and their money.

On the night of June 17, 2019, Virginia crushed prescription drugs into her father’s drink and he died in his sleep. Her mother took only a sip of hers and survived, so the following morning Virginia killed Lois in her bed with a hammer and a kitchen knife. She then stacked masonry blocks around John’s body to make a tomb in his ground-floor study and sealed her mother’s remains in a wardrobe upstairs. For the next four years she kept both parents alive on paper, texting relatives from her mother’s phone, putting off doctors and drawing roughly £149,700 from their pensions and credit. When their GP reported his concerns, Essex Police came to the door with a warrant on September 15, 2023.

She admitted the killings at the door. At Chelmsford Crown Court she pleaded guilty to both murders on July 4, 2024, and on October 11, 2024, Mr Justice Johnson jailed her for life with a minimum of thirty-six years before parole.