A British woman will spend at least 36 years behind bars after a jury found her guilty of killing her parents “in cold blood” and then hiding the bodies in their family home for four years while she spent their money.

Virginia McCullough, 36, was sentenced to prison last Friday after admitting to hiding her mother’s body in a wardrobe and building a “makeshift grave” for her father.

Her crimes date back to June 2019, when she used a mixture of crushed medicinal drugs, which she slipped into 70-year-old John McCullough’s drink, to poison her father to death. The next day, she killed her mother, Lois McCullough, 71, with a hammer and a kitchen knife.

During the trial, the Guardian reported that prosecutor Lisa Wilding detailed the details of the case Handmade tomb She built it to hide her father’s body in his bedroom, describing it as “composed of blocks of stone piled together” and “covered with several blankets, and a number of pictures and paintings over them.”

“She hid her mother’s body, wrapped in a sleeping bag, inside a wardrobe in her mother’s bedroom on the top floor of the property,” Wilding continued, describing the days following the murders inside the family home in Essex.

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Once the bodies were hidden, McCullough made increasing efforts to convince people that her parents were okay, attorneys say.

She asked her relatives to stay away, the BBC reported, and her friends were told the couple had done so He retired and moved away. The court heard that the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown measures in the year following their deaths helped, in part, to cover up her crimes.

The couple’s family doctor became suspicious after a number of missed appointments over the years and alerted police, who forcefully entered the home on September 15, 2023.

Bodycam footage of their arrival shows officers confronting McCullough at the home, where she admitted to the murders.

“I knew this would come eventually. It is appropriate that I serve my sentence,” she can be heard telling police.

“Cheer up, at least you caught the bad guy,” she added.

While in detention after her arrest, she spoke in detail about how her parents were killed.

She motioned to the officers toward the knife she used to kill her mother, hidden under the stairs of the house, saying: “It will still have blood on it, it’s rusty, but there will still be traces of blood on it.”

She also said that she had to “gain the gumption” to kill her mother.

“I knew I had to get it done.”

Richard Butcher, Lewis McCullough’s brother, wrote in a victim impact statement that his niece – the defendant – was “Very dangerous” What happened “undermined my faith in humanity.”

The Independent reported that McCullough was as well She has accumulated large debts on her parents’ credit cards While they were still alive and continued to spend their pensions after their death, all while living rent-free in the family home.

The forged letters showed that McCullough was tricking her parents into thinking they had lost money through fraud.

Essex Police said documents found at the address “painted a picture of a woman who was desperately trying to prevent her parents from finding out”. The depth of the financial black hole She continued to dig, while giving them false assurances about her job and future prospects.

At sentencing, the judge told McCullough she was close to £60,000 (C$107,000) in debt before the killings, and that she had grown and maintained an “elaborate, extensive and enduring network of deception” over months and years.

“I’m sure the primary motive for every murder was to prevent your parents from finding out that you were stealing from them, lying to them, and taking the money that was meant for them,” he said, according to The Independent.

McCullough was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum term of 36 years.

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