A 36-year-old woman was sentenced to life in prison in England after the murder of both her parents in 2019. Arrested in 2023, she managed to hide the death of her family for four years.
In England, in Essex, a 36-year-old woman was sentenced to life in prison for the poisoning murder of her parents. For four years, she had managed to conceal her crime.
Virginia McCullough was sentenced to life in prison at Chelsford Crown Court on Friday, with a minimum term to serve of 36 years, in the murder case of her parents, whose bodies were found in September 2023, reports the BBC.
John and Lois disappeared in 2019, but their daughter managed to ward off suspicion for nearly four years. The latter, who was living with her parents at the time of the events, managed to make the neighborhood believe that her parents had retired to the Clacton region, on the Sunshine Coast of Essex, particularly at the time of Covid, whose confinement had served as a pretext for departure. Furthermore, the murderer had come up with several excuses to ward off suspicion from the neighborhood. “The curtains were always drawn and we couldn’t see if anyone was in the house,” a neighbor testified.
It was not until September 2023 that a general practitioner in the region alerted the authorities to the couple’s strange absence. Finally, the body of the father, aged 70 and fatally poisoned, was found hidden in a grave built with concrete blocks and blankets. The mother’s body was found hidden in sleeping bags in a closet upstairs. She was 71 years old.
A girl in debt
“I deserve to get what’s coming to me, sentence by sentence, because it’s the right thing to do and it might bring me some peace,” the murderer said. The BBC revealed that the latter was drowning in debt and extorting money from her parents for many years. A great gambler, she notably spent 21,000 pounds sterling (25,070 euros) between 2019 and 2023 on online games of chance.
In total, Virginia McCullough benefited from 149,697 pounds sterling (178,690 euros) thanks to the death of her parents, coming from their pension, their credit card, or even the sale of assets.
