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Dear Charlie,

apologies for not writing back to you sooner.

I'm happy to open up to you,

and welcome the sentence I'm about to receive.

I've 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.

I knew, even as a child,

that I should not have been a part of that family.

And I thought about killing myself

before I thought about killing my parents.

I thought that I had no choice.

I do not wish to receive any payments for giving my side of events.

I would just like a chance to have a say,

amongst all others.

A woman from Essex has been charged

with killing two people believed to be her parents.

The most unlikely person to be a murderess.

No one really knew too much about her, to be honest.

She was weird at school, but not like murder your parents

and hide their bodies weird.

I kept on calling out for my father to see if he was alive,

and part of me wanted him to reply to me.

Four years ago, Ginny popped up.

After that, we didn't see her parents anymore.

Killing your own parents is extremely rare,

especially from a female.

What on earth drove her to do something so appalling?

I felt emotionally desperate and trapped.

I did not want to be stuck in misery.

For her to have done that, something bad had happened,

something had driven her to it.

Something was going on behind closed doors

that we just didn't know about.

She was a bit of a fantasist with some of the things

that she used to say to us.

I was relieved in a huge way that the deception was over.

You question whether anything was true about her life.

I have no reason to lie now, as there is no point.

The road that led me to commit the crime

is one which I think should be got first-hand.

I think it is important to allow Virginia to give her say,

because I think the question of why she did what she did

hasn't been answered.

What I don't know is how truthful and honest she'll be.

Ginny?

The footage of Virginia's arrest is extremely unusual

because, first of all,

most perpetrators don't want to incriminate themselves.

But this appears to be the exact opposite

of what happens with Ginny.

Secondly, at no point does she attempt to deny

murdering both of the parents.

And shockingly, she seems to have no problem admitting

she continued living in the house with their bodies.

And that begs the question, why? Why did she do this?

Essex Police say a woman's been arrested on suspicion of murder

after police were called to Great Baddow near Chelmsford.

The force says officers responded to concerns about the welfare

of two people, and an address in Pump Hill yesterday afternoon.

I was the first journalist on the ground.

And when I turned up at the scene,

there was an officer stood guarding the entrance

to the back garden of the property.

And one stood at the front door as well.

And then there was a large police van parked up on the front drive.

I'm Matt Lee. I'm a reporter from Essex Live.

And as the only reporter on shift that day,

I was sent by my editor down to the scene.

Members of the public were wondering what had gone on,

they were wondering who was involved,

they were wondering why the police were all there.

Great Baddow's a quiet village just outside Chelmsford.

It's a sleepy area.

Nothing really happens there.

The main feeling and emotion was one of surprise.

I just turned the corner,

and there was police,

there was press,

there was people walking round in white sort of zip-up suits

and masks and gloves.

I thought it was Ginny.

I was like, "Oh, my God.

Oh, my God, she's dead."

And I was dialling her number and dialling her number,

I was like, "Oh, my God, please be okay, please answer."

I was saying to people, I was going, "Oh, my God,

what's happened? What's happened?"

And it wasn't till a little bit later

that people were saying...

she'd murdered someone.

A woman from Essex

has been charged with killing two people

believed to be her parents.

Russell Hookey is in Chelmsford for us.

A lot of details still remain unclear, Russell.

Very much so.

This is the house behind me

where police have focused their attention.

Thirty-five-year-old Virginia McCullough

is charged with murdering John and Lois McCullough,

her parents.

Neighbours here say all three lived in this house.

When I turned up at the house,

it became clear to me that there was far more to this story

than I'd initially suspected.

In the discussions I had with neighbours,

it became clear quite early on

that it wasn't perhaps what you might think of

as a loving conventional family.

It seemed that John, Virginia's father,

was a university lecturer.

He occupied part of the house.

The rest of the family occupied another part.

It seems this was a family that functioned

but perhaps there wasn't very much love

between him and his children.

He lived with his wife, Lois.

They had several daughters,

including one, Virginia, who lived with them at home.

But there was no suggestion that Virginia

had had prior contact with the police.

So, there was this disconnect between this seemingly

quiet daughter who lived with her parents

and a supposedly cold-blooded murderess.

I was shocked, absolutely shocked.

Because, well, John and Lois were customers of ours for many years.

I'm Alan Thompson.

I've got an electronic shop in Great Baddow.

And I've been here since the 1970s.

So, yeah, part of the furniture now.

John and Lois rented equipment from us.

But I couldn't say I knew much about them personally.

They were not...

people that you would call social.

Yeah, unusual customers, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lois used to come into the shop once a month with her payment book

and make payments for the equipment.

Very serious, very quiet,

subdued, withdrawn.

Absolutely no casual talk at all.

I never managed to get her to smile

or have a conversation about the family.

John was different.

He was a very curt, very brusque man.

I found him fairly impatient, always in a hurry.

You'd say goodbye, he wouldn't normally reply,

he'd just walk out.

I was aware there were four or five daughters,

and I've heard rumours in the village that it was a strict regime

at home for the girls.

And I think that's the reason why they,

as soon as they could leave home,

did leave and make their own way.

I believe that Ginny left home as well

and lived somewhere else,

I think in Chelmsford somewhere.

But for some reason came back to live with her parents.

I don't know when.

In fact, walking past her house one day,

I was surprised to see her there, and not her parents.

Ginny was very easy to talk to.

A slightly unusual girl.

But since it's happened,

it's made me think, really,

that you don't know what people are like in their private lives.

Ginny had moved away when we first got the shop,

and then she moved back.

She started coming into the shop,

and we thought we knew her.

But obviously there was a different Ginny that was running around.

- Alright, love? - Yeah, alright. Do you want a bag?

My name's Paul.

I've been running the greengrocers in Great Baddow for 22 years.

Ginny's mum would come in quite regular,

never really spoke,

because she was quite a dowdy lady,

like with the floral dresses and the cardigans,

and that's how we mainly used to see her.

Never really saw the dad.

I think his name was John. Never really saw him a lot.

And then about four years ago, Ginny popped up.

And, you know, when you start...

when someone comes in on a regular basis,

you start talking to them,

so we start finding out that she's living around the corner

in her mum and dad's house.

And all of us here built up a rapport with Ginny.

She was a bit eccentric.

There was always something going on,

some sort of drama or something or other.

She never really mentioned her relationship with her parents.

She said that she was back there to help her parents sell the house.

So, she was living there for a period of time,

and she'd actually had people round there

just to get it ready for selling.

After that, we didn't see her parents anymore.

The arrest had been made on 15th September,

but the information that we knew at the time

was very limited from Essex Police.

We had no idea about the methods in which she'd killed her parents

and where she had hidden them.

But then, quite quickly, there was a picture circulating

of a trolley and a body bag on top of it being removed.

So, we knew that they had been kept within the property.

So, you are beginning to wonder

what sort of person is Virginia McCullough going to be?

It was just a matter of days

before she was making her first appearance in court.

Seeing her for the first time,

she was quite calm and almost quite shy,

and she spoke only to confirm her name.

There were very few details,

but we learnt for the very first time the broad timeframe

in which Virginia was accused of killing her parents.

We now knew that Virginia's parents had not been seen

for nearly five years.

Suddenly, you're thinking,

"Wow, Virginia had kept this hidden for such a long time."

I'm amazed that nobody picked up on

the demise of Virginia's parents sooner.

There'll be people who will think,

"Do you know what, I had a feeling something was wrong,

I hadn't seen the McCulloughs for some time."

And they'll be wishing that they'd spoken up.

But they didn't.

My name is Paul Maleary. I'm a former Essex Police officer.

And for 30 years I served within Essex,

and eight years I was on the major investigation team.

As a young detective in the early 1990s,

I would go to Baddow, so, I know the area well

and I know the community that actually reside there.

It is pure suburbia.

It is the sort of place that you'd want to bring your kids up in.

These types of crime leave many questions unanswered.

Could the community have done more?

The fact is, that these people had been missing

for some considerable time.

But eventually, the GP of the local surgery

raised the alarm that the McCulloughs had failed to meet

several of their medical appointments.

This was then passed on to the local police

who then carried out the arrest.

The bodycam footage is quite remarkable.

Virginia wasn't taken by surprise.

In fact, I would say that she was almost relieved by the fact

that they'd gone in there.

And I find it really sad that these people

have been in their home dead for years.

Still today I find it difficult to comprehend or accept,

and it makes me think that

I should have been more questioning

about the sudden disappearance of them.

When I'd last seen them?

I would think probably before the first Covid lockdown,

and they were quite hale and hearty.

And then Ginny came into the shop in '21

and said that the equipment that we'd supplied to her parents,

she didn't need them anymore, she wasn't using them.

So, I made an arrangement

for our lads to go round and collect them.

So, they went round there...

and she'd got them just inside the front door

and sort of more or less handed them to them

and they brought them away.

Our technicians were a little bit surprised

that they hadn't got to go into the house to get them.

You know, they were just by the door ready,

but that's the customer's prerogative, isn't it?

The main thing, I suppose,

that seemed completely strange to me was I'd say to her,

"How are your parents?"

And she'd say, "Oh, they're fine. They've moved to Clacton."

When we'd ask where her parents were,

she said, "Oh, they've moved to Clacton.

They're having a lovely time."

And there was no reason for us to disbelieve what she said.

Lots of people move away, you know?

We have it all the time.

So, we never questioned anything about where her parents were.

When she said that her parents had just moved away,

I think I should have asked her more...

but you wouldn't think that you were chatting to a murderer.

She said they'd packed up and they'd gone down

to stay with friends in Devon.

And then she'd said another time that

they were staying with people in Kent.

She didn't talk about her parents in any depth.

The only thing that she really told me about them

was when she said that they were "moving around",

and she was now in charge of looking after the house,

and doing it up and preparing it for sale.

She'd say, "Oh, I've been painting all day,

and I'm doing this to the garden."

She was like telling me that it had been surveyed,

and that it had real problems, structurally.

And there was subsidence.

And she said that pipes were leaking,

some of her plug sockets had gone,

and she even said that it could fall down in 20 years.

She invited me round her home a lot of times,

but she always cancelled.

She made it seem like it wasn't particularly safe.

I certainly didn't think it was because she was hiding

what she was hiding.

There was a huge amount of deception perpetrated by Virginia

in order to cover up the fact that she'd murdered her parents.

No one had seen them for some considerable period of time.

And the local community were being told by Virginia

that they were away on holiday, or they had moved away.

But she's got a dilemma.

Here are the two bodies, what am I going to do with them?

And the disposal of a dead body is not an easy thing to do.

I'm Simon Dinsdale,

and I spent 27 years as a detective

with Essex Police.

So, in my experience, the level of sophistication

of this hiding of the bodies,

I can't recall a case like it.

We now know she'd purchased from a well-known building supplier,

building materials, breeze blocks and cement,

and she then built this mausoleum around her father's body.

To answer about some of the materials in the garden,

I said the garden wall was being done.

I made a wooden and concrete block-type enclosed structure

out of my father's original bed.

I put wood at either end and extra blocks.

I told the next-door neighbour that I was building a fireplace

to make an excuse for any noise.

She layered plastic on top of the body,

and then over the top of that was a blanket,

and she covered that with paintings and pictures.

She's then rolled her mother's body into a sleeping bag.

The following day, I went upstairs and, while crying,

I moved my mother's body into a four-door wardrobe.

I taped up the gaps in the wardrobe

to get rid of any remaining maggots or flies

that had initially started to appear.

What Virginia did is staggering.

The concept that you could treat your parents in that way,

first to murder them and then just to hide them away,

is incredible.

What must she have been feeling as she's walking round that house

knowing that her parents are in the next room?

And the fact that she was able to function like that

says a lot to her state of mind.

What on earth drove her to do something so appalling?

Killing your own parents in itself obviously is extremely rare.

But what makes it really unique about this case,

you've got a female perpetrator.

There's no history of violence or offending,

and she's been in close proximity to the bodies for almost five years.

My name is Dr Sohom Das.

I'm a consultant forensic psychiatrist.

And I've psychiatrically analysed several hundred defendants

who've committed a range of violent offences.

For many murder cases,

you would expect the perpetrator to get rid of the body

because they don't want to incriminate themselves.

Ginny didn't do this.

She kept the bodies for a long period of time.

So, what is that about?

Is that that she literally couldn't get over the barrier

of doing it psychologically?

Or is it that she wanted to keep them close

because she still felt connected to them?

In a case like this,

I think the public's natural inclination is to assume

there must be something very dark

and traumatic in her past.

And if I was instructed as an expert in this case,

I would want to delve into Virginia's past

to see if there were any key incidents

or causes of psychological distress and damage.

And one of the most important and key factors is past trauma,

including childhood experiences.

I knew Ginny all the way through infants and junior school,

and we were quite close friends in Year 2

because we were placed next to each other.

I kind of was aware at the time that...

there was differences between us,

and, you know, when you talk to grown-ups, they go,

"Oh, well, she's just a bit odd, isn't she?"

Yeah.

She was weird at school,

but not like murder your parents and hide their bodies weird.

When I first read that it was definitely her,

it was definitely her house, it was definitely a double murder,

and we didn't know the timescale of it,

I immediately thought,

"Oh, my God."

I didn't even know she still lived there.

I was so weirded out by it

because this is a kid I went to school with

who I sat next to.

She was odd.

I don't remember a lot of personality from her.

I did get the overall feeling through most of school

that there was bullying.

You know, when you just remember picking up on people

- just not saying nice things. - Teenagers are mean, though,

- ...aren't they? - Yeah.

Even though she hung around in our group,

there were people in our group that would then,

like tor... like not torment her, but like take the mick out of her.

I think she wanted to be friends with people...

- Yeah. - ...but she didn't always know how.

Like you couldn't really work out who she was,

if that makes sense.

There was a time where she bought me in a gift,

and it was like obviously things she'd like nicked

from around the house.

And I remember kind of being like, "Oh, thank you."

And like I was a kid,

I didn't really know what was going on.

And I do remember that she was a very gifting person.

And for that one year, we were relatively close friends,

but we never got to have any play dates.

It was always kind of her parents wouldn't allow it.

Yeah, I remember when we were at school,

she didn't really talk about her parents.

I knew she was sort of the youngest of the siblings

and her parents had had her when they were quite a bit older.

I think even from quite a young age,

she was very closed down about family.

I was quite aware,

even at a young age, the way she spoke,

especially about her mum,

that it wasn't a great relationship.

Yeah, I just remember her kind of saying,

"I don't like my mum, I don't like my mum at all."

I mean, that's fair enough as teenagers,

but this was quite a lot younger.

So, yeah, for me, it reads as a very sad story

of somebody who's really, really...

fallen through the cracks.

I knew, even as a child,

that I should not have been a part of that family.

My parents were too strict and cold.

They would sometimes become violent,

and I was smacked and hit for very small things.

At five years old, I had not been potty-trained

and was still wetting the bed at night.

I would be smacked in the bath for wetting

if my mum was too stressed out.

I wondered if my parents loved me,

or I was a burden.

About the time I started school,

I still needed help going to the toilet.

Children were noticing that I looked untidy and strange.

I was dirty some days and others I had washing-up liquid

slicked back in my hair in a ponytail.

I looked so unkempt or dirty

that kids started saying, Ginny Germs, no returns.

At home, my drinks were limited to three cups a day

to try to prevent me wetting the bed.

But when I was 10, 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."

According to what Virginia wrote in her letters,

she struggled at school and she also struggled at home.

So, it feels like to me, it's almost like

she doesn't have any kind of safe space.

And so, this is almost like a perfect storm.

The thing that really stands out to me

is just the degree of childhood neglect

that she says that she went through.

Virginia highlights an incident

where her father intentionally shamed her in a pharmacy

whilst they were buying pull-up nappies for her.

Growing up in this environment of not being loved,

of being regularly criticised, and potentially being physically

and emotionally abused,

I think could have left Virginia

with this feeling of resentment towards her parents

that might have bubbled up and grown over time.

I was told off or smacked by both my parents for anything,

and I felt like I had no approval or praise at home.

The one thing that did matter to my parents was academic achievement.

But I experienced some of the worst bullying at secondary school,

and my grades fell short as I found that I struggled.

My father would make speeches to me

where he said I would end up in a cardboard box on the streets

and amount to nothing.

So, I decided to scan my school report to cover up my grades,

and sure enough,

they were actually pleased with me for a change.

But at the end of Year 11,

when it was time for my school report to be given to my parents,

it was posted and there was nothing that I could do.

My mum really laid into me, as did my dad,

telling me I was useless and stupid,

a wretched human being that was not their daughter.

If what she says is correct,

the love from her parents is very conditional.

They would only show her love

if she was able to achieve something in return.

In my professional opinion,

this feeling of not being loved,

feeling like a burden,

would constitute abuse,

specifically emotional abuse.

At the same time,

they would use physical punishment and discipline.

Your parents are the people that support you when you're younger

and they also help you develop your own moral compass.

So, if you've experienced violence from a parental figure,

that would increase the risk of you becoming violent later on in life.

She was a nice girl, Ginny.

Quite quiet.

A little bit different, I'd say.

No one really knew too much about her, to be honest.

She did distance herself quite a lot.

And some of the stories that she used to say didn't quite add up.

So, maybe there was another side to Ginny

that we just didn't know.

Maybe the person that she was trying to portray

was different to reality.

I'm Will, I run The Ship,

and Ginny was one of my members of staff here.

She used to do the occasional Saturday night on the bar,

and she worked for us for about two or three years, I'd say.

She always made quite a bit of effort when she worked here.

She'd always dress herself up quite nicely, lots of make-up.

She'd wear these dresses to make herself quite revealing as well.

You know, she used to like the attention.

I think she enjoyed working here, to be honest.

But, yeah, the more I got to know her,

the more I realised she was a little bit different.

She used to do strange things, like stand right behind you,

and you wouldn't know she was there until you turned around

and you're like, "Whoa, where did you come from?"

Like, "I didn't even know you were there."

There'd just be awkward silences with her, you know?

Like the conversation wouldn't flow very well.

She used to make just odd comments as well, here and there.

When you used to ask her to do normal jobs

that someone could probably do, you know, quite easily,

use their common sense, she would just, I don't know,

seem to struggle with that a little bit.

The customers used to find her funny here,

but I don't know if they were always laughing with her.

They may have been laughing at her.

Some of the other staff used to talk about her

a little bit behind her back.

If I was working with Ginny on shift,

she would ask for a lift home.

Used to pull up outside her house.

I think she invited me round for a cup of tea once as well,

but I declined.

And her bag wasn't really that big,

but it seemed like she was looking in her bag for quite a while,

a lot longer than it should have taken her to find the keys.

So, that's when I thought like, this is a bit strange.

It was like she was delaying going back home.

One time, her dad answered the door.

He was wearing underwear and a wife beater.

I couldn't see his face.

Something was going on behind closed doors

that we just didn't know about.

That's what I just thought.

I knew that John was her father,

but he never really spoke to me about his family.

Probably knew him for around about 12 years.

You'd see him in here two to three times a week.

John could be quite volatile, quite eccentric.

And whenever he played snooker,

he'd expect absolute pin drop silence

despite not being a particularly quiet person himself when he spoke.

John would have a drink no matter what time of the day it was.

And he was very keen on snooker.

But if it wasn't going well and it was getting to him,

then he would want a pint of Foster's or a glass of red wine

or a double brandy.

Hopefully not all at the same time, but maybe sometimes.

And there was a little story where he might have had

one too many drinks at lunch one day and then he'd like

fallen over outside the university in front of maybe 20-odd people,

and then decided to stop drinking.

After about a week and a half, he looked noticeably better,

better for the fact that he hadn't been drinking for those days.

But, of course, that didn't last.

Just before the lockdown in 2020,

I'd realised that we hadn't seen John since the previous year.

So, at that time, I was kind of thinking,

I wonder what's happened to John?

But then, of course, the pandemic exploded.

So, we didn't dwell on it for too long.

My dad's drinking began long before I was born.

When Dad got drunk,

fights between my mum and dad would get far too over the top.

I had a role of being a buffer between my dad's drinking

and mother's mental health,

or taking abuse from one or both of them.

My mum had severe OCD for years

and would wipe door handles, sofa surfaces, chairs

in neat disinfectant.

She taught us to see our dad as unclean or covered in germs.

Sometimes my mother would shout out insults in the night

or say she wished I was dead.

It was hard to calm her down or reason with her,

and my dad resorted to drinking more.

I will not go into all details for everything that happened,

that my father did.

There's something not right with that whole family dynamic.

For a while afterwards,

I was playing through every single conversation we had

and everything that she said to me.

Talking about her parents,

she gave me the impression

she had quite a difficult relationship with them.

And I always felt that there was something there,

there was a barrier.

She never said about childhood experiences.

Maybe she thought she would reveal something

or say something if she did.

I thought that there'd been some kind of abuse,

there'd been something terrible that happened

that got her to that point.

For her to have done that,

something bad had happened,

something had driven her to it.

Ginny never shared anything about her home life,

which is a sad thing really,

because everybody talks about their home life.

There's lots of people saying, oh, you know,

that dad was quite abusive and that,

whether that's true or not, I couldn't say that.

But that was the talk.

But I don't know anything about Ginny's father, not really.

Nobody did.

So, you didn't know how much to believe,

you know, what happens behind closed doors,

you're never privy to that information.

So, there's lots of stuff unanswered.

One of the things around every murder is,

why has this taken place?

Now, what we don't know is what happens behind closed doors,

but there is some suggestion that the entire family were unhappy.

Lois is described as being a fun hoover.

Virginia's father was particularly strict in her upbringing.

Was this killing retribution for acts that he'd undertaken previously?

In a village, you know, when something like this happens,

yeah, people start chatting.

And my thoughts really were with the parents.

I thought what a dreadful thing to have happened to them.

When it first seemed that she'd murdered her father,

I wondered if it had been a sudden argument,

because I could imagine John could have a quick fuse.

And John used to go and have a drink.

That came to my mind immediately.

When there is a lack of information

that's publicly available,

there is the opportunity for speculation to fill that chasm.

There was an element of that in this case in Great Baddow.

And because the family were so reserved

and very private in their lifestyles,

that almost added to that element of why this might have happened.

There were some speculations

that there had been an abusive element of the family.

Now, that was something that we weren't able to verify.

So, it was pure speculation.

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.

At this point, the story begins to take a step forward,

because we finally find out how Lois died.

The cause of John's death at this point in the investigation

remained unclear,

but the post-mortem examination

revealed that Lois had died from stab wounds.

The method that Virginia chose to kill her mother,

stabbing her repeatedly, it's very frenzied,

it's very brutal, and it's also very intimate.

For a woman to commit this level of violence is extremely unusual,

particularly when we've got an individual, Virginia,

who doesn't have a known history of previous violence or aggression.

The fact that Virginia could do this

says a lot about her psychological makeup.

In this case, there are some elements that are just so bizarre.

You've got a female perpetrator.

She's chosen her own parents as the target,

and she's been in close proximity to the bodies for almost five years.

So, what would have been definitely considered

is a potential psychiatric defence.

In extreme cases where somebody is driven by mental illness,

they might be found not guilty by reason of insanity,

and that is full absolution.

So, if the court agrees with that plea,

it means in the eyes of the law, you are innocent.

There's always the question in circumstances like this

as to how sound of mind

the possible perpetrator is during these crimes.

But it's quite unsavoury to imagine that someone

could go about their daily life

coexisting with two corpses inside the house.

You begin to wonder how could her daily life have continued

and how she kept up the pretence that her parents were still alive.

I spent the first six months mostly indoors.

I did not sleep upstairs but in the lounge, on the couch.

Having my parents in the house but without any mental abuse or drinking,

I admit, in a strange way, was a silent comfort.

I did go out now and again,

and I did obviously encounter locals and some neighbours.

I told them that my parents were away at first,

and then I said that they had moved to the coast.

I was just living normally and quietly,

which is rather dull to some perhaps,

but it's all I wanted at the time I committed the crime.

She just seemed to appear one day.

Yeah.

Literally she was looking outside, I believe,

and then she just came in.

I hadn't seen her around or anything like that.

It's just kind of like she appeared,

and then hung around for quite a few years.

So, I'm Rachel.

- And this is Debbie. - I'm Debbie.

See you later.

I own House of Flowers in Great Baddow.

And Rachel is my trusty...

Boss.

She started off just browsing at things,

and then would spend more and more time,

and just bought all different stuff.

I didn't really engage with her

because I just felt she was just too much.

Yeah, she was a bit... well, she was strange.

Very strange.

She used to wander around the shop going, la-la-la.

Yeah, she was strange.

She was a bit of a fantasist

with some of the things that she used to say to us,

but you'd just smile and accept it.

And you'd just think,

"Hmm, it's Ginny's behaviour, it's just the way she was."

You know?

But over this period of time,

we got to know that she could be quite a generous person.

It'd be the odd coffee.

Then it'd become more regular,

buying doughnuts for the staff, cakes for the staff.

It was all mainly food stuff, food items.

It got to a stage where I was sort of turning her down

because I wanted to lose a bit of weight

and the stuff that she was buying me was making me fat.

Well, she spent loads of money.

- At first, it was mainly all cash. - All cash.

It would always be over £100, wasn't it?

Quite often, £140, £150.

Just on random goods in the shop.

On giftware more than anything.

And then she came in with a bag of food for us.

I said, "Ginny, let me pay for this."

And she wouldn't take the money.

She brought the second lot in.

I said, "Ginny, you've got to stop doing this."

That's when she started buying the bouquets for people

- after that as well, wasn't it? - Yeah.

For people like the elderly lady over the road. And her neighbour.

And a couple that lived a few doors down.

Yeah.

I just thought, "Why are you buying these things?

I don't understand why."

I thought she was just trying too hard.

Maybe she's just trying to make friends, maybe.

Almost like childlike in a way.

People would say that she was odd,

but she wasn't odd to me.

You know, she was just Ginny.

Ginny was a little quirky.

You know, she was just...

always about.

She was constantly outside her house and around.

And you would see her on her drive

and doing gardening out front

or sweeping up leaves.

And she'd stop me, and she'd say something,

"Oh, your hair's nice,"

"Oh, that colour looks good on you."

And she just seemed, you know, a genuine person.

I don't think she had many people that

did want to listen to her,

or were interested,

or even cared.

I've heard people say that she wanted to buy friendship,

but I don't think she did that.

I think she wanted to feel like she was a nice person,

and she was doing nice things for people.

All the time would be coming over with something,

you know, something to eat, something to drink.

Did we want anything? You know?

And that's when we started to question,

where did she get the money from?

Because as far as we was aware,

Ginny never worked.

We now know that Virginia was taking full advantage

of her parents' financial situation.

After their deaths,

she regularly took money from their bank account.

She knew the PIN numbers, had access to those accounts.

She continued to claim her parents' state pension

and work-related pensions.

She was benefiting hugely from money

which was intended to go to them.

And on the day they were killed,

Virginia ordered a new card in her mum's name

and went on a spending spree.

This was a woman who had no qualms about spending

and stealing time and time again.

You can't help but think, what was she doing with all that money?

Yes, I did use money that I should not have done

that was pension money and on credit cards.

But I did not buy any holidays, vehicles,

designer items or anything high-end.

I spent money on everyday things and bills

to keep the house running.

It is true that I bought some locals food, takeaways,

and other things on regular occasions to be kind.

I was addicted to the smile it would put on some of their faces

and the friendly behaviour that then followed.

Ginny, to me, was a customer.

- And... - I wouldn't call her a friend.

- No way. - To me, she was a nuisance.

She got banned from a couple of shops because she was such a nuisance.

I didn't have a clue what she was talking about half the time.

Most of the time I would just be, yes, no, yes, no,

because I was just trying to cut it short.

There was always something new,

there was always a new story for her to tell you about,

some sort of drama.

You know, her Ring Doorbell getting hacked,

the internet getting hacked,

her phone's getting hacked,

post going missing.

She always had problems with two neighbours across the road.

And I actually spoke to the people that

she was making these things up about, and they were like, "What?"

That's where her eccentricity comes from,

because she was making up all these things.

I always felt she was a little bit of a fantasist.

I'd speak to her for a while

and it would be a normal conversation,

but then she'd say something which was completely off the planet.

You'd think, "That can't be right."

She'd sometimes say something like,

"Oh, the neighbours are spying on me.

You have to be careful with that one over there,"

or, "My mail's being stolen."

I mean, a few weeks before she was arrested,

she was going around telling people that she was pregnant.

She said she was pregnant.

So, you start to question then,

"Oh, who's the dad?"

Because there's never been a mention of a boyfriend

in any of this time that she's been here.

So, "Oh, the dad's an old boyfriend of mine.

You know, you know how it is."

When she came out that she was pregnant,

she didn't tell us who it was

or...

any information about him as a person either.

Anyone normal, you'd have a two-way conversation,

but you just didn't have a two-way conversation with her.

She would just tell you what she wanted you to hear,

and then that was it.

And then I started to doubt if there ever was the pregnancy.

Some days she would really be rubbing the belly

and really showing the belly,

then other days I was like,

"Where's the bump gone?"

It wasn't consistent as it was getting bigger.

- It was... - But it went from...

...bigger some days than other.

It went from a nice, high, neat bump to quite a big...

- And then to quite a big bump. - Yeah.

How can your baby grow that much in such a short time?

I'd already questioned a few things, hadn't I,

- with the paperwork and stuff? - Because of the paperwork,

she carried around everywhere with her,

it was photocopies of something.

It was just photocopies in her handbag,

and it always poked out of her bag as much...

just enough for you to see baby stuff,

but not enough for you to actually physically see...

- The whole... - ...exactly what it was.

I just don't think she was pregnant at all.

When someone comes in and says they're pregnant

and shows you a scan, all very quickly,

you have doubts.

I don't know why she did it.

I just think it was just like everything else

that went round in Pump Hill.

This was just another one of them things.

Maybe it was the crackling of the edges

that she'd had this façade for so long,

and things were starting to tumble down.

So, she was starting to come up with things

so, people would feel sorry for her a bit more.

I don't know.

But there was definitely stuff going on.

When you're friends with somebody,

there's an element of trust and truth and honesty,

and I don't know how much she was with me

with all of those things.

She said that she'd had a scan,

and the baby was fine,

and that's when she told me it was a girl.

She said that there was this big family gathering

and they were all going to be there,

and she said that she was gonna go and tell them all

that she was pregnant.

And when I saw her the next day,

I said, "Oh, yeah, how did it go down?

Was everyone really happy for you? Are they all excited?"

You know, and she went, "No. No."

She said, "My parents are very old-fashioned,

and they don't approve of the fact that I haven't got a partner

and I'm single."

I don't know. I just...

I just believed her and took everything on face value.

You know, I think she must have known that

she wouldn't have had time with this baby

because she was hiding her huge secret,

and she must have known there was a time when it would all come out.

Telling all these lies, this is either something

that's completely fabricated or lying for sympathy.

Somebody who's extremely sensitive

and perhaps quite dramatic.

They are simply a pathological liar.

We do know that Virginia is obviously quite deceitful

in terms of the fact that she managed to hide the death of her parents,

lie about their location for years.

Virginia had engaged in a very comprehensive

and complex cover-up of her parents' deaths.

There was a huge amount of deception perpetrated by Virginia.

Ginny contacted the GP nearly 200 times,

making and then cancelling appointments for her parents.

She was, in effect, juggling plates all the while,

booking medical appointments and then cancelling them,

suggesting that they couldn't attend for one reason or another,

using their bank accounts sufficiently

to make it seem that they were still using them.

She had to convince people that her parents were still alive,

and she was doing that through multiple text messages

to the authorities.

It was one lie after another.

Looking at Virginia's lie,

in terms of keeping her parents' body

in the family home,

yet telling so many different people across years

about her parents' apparent whereabouts and their travelling,

it shows a real commitment.

The average person would significantly struggle

with lying about something so intense, so emotional

about covering up the murder of your own parents,

especially doing it consistently for such a long period of time.

I imagine it must have been psychologically taxing for Virginia,

and I do wonder whether this pressure just built up in her mind over time.

In the weeks leading up to her arrest, she got quite paranoid.

I don't think she was in a very good place.

Her conversations were more and more about

how awful her life was becoming

with what she was having to deal with.

And the problems that she was having living in her street.

And it was a lot about her neighbours

and a lot about the police.

One particular day she came in, obviously very, very distressed.

I've never seen her like that before.

But she had a big bandage on her arm, didn't she?

Yeah.

And then she just kept blaming her neighbours,

said her neighbours had attacked her.

We hadn't seen her for about two weeks,

which was a long time not to see Ginny.

And she walked in the front door of the shop,

and she had bruises and lacerations.

So, I'm like, "What happened?"

"Oh, I was in the bedroom, and at three o'clock in the morning

I heard a kerfuffle out in the garden.

So, I've gone downstairs and gone outside.

And someone was there, and I confronted them.

They jumped me, and then they jumped off and ran away."

She told me that they were slashing her

with some kind of blade,

and they were punching her in the face.

She said that she was convinced it was her neighbours.

But there were people saying that it was all self-inflicted.

And I don't know, you'd really have to go some to do that to yourself.

Her face was really bad,

because we both were scrutinising her to see if it was really good makeup.

- We didn't think it was. - I don't think it was makeup.

It looked really good, if it was.

I was genuinely worried about her.

As much as I thought she was crazy,

I wouldn't wish that on anybody.

But then she said the police were against her.

They've been round, they've asked questions,

but I don't trust them, I can't trust them at all.

They're all in on it.

I just kept saying, "Deb, just back off,

she's becoming crazier."

It was just too much.

Around a month before the arrest took place,

officers attended the home address of Virginia McCullough.

Now, they'd gone there in order to investigate

an alleged assault on her.

She invited the officers in.

The officer that attended,

whilst she didn't see anything untoward,

she would have carried out house-to-house enquiries

in relation to the assault that had taken place.

And a neighbour had said,

"Well, actually, there's three people who live there,

but we haven't seen the old couple for some considerable time."

She became very unhappy.

She said that the police had been knocking on people's houses

and saying things like, "Do you think Virginia's a nuisance?

Does she bother you? Do you want to make a complaint about her?"

It seemed strange that she was so obsessed with the police.

She just wouldn't let it go.

She was talking about a court case

that she was bringing against the police.

And she'd even told me that the police had told her

that if she'd kept calling, they were going to arrest her.

If you had done what she'd done,

you'd want to be so far off the police's radar

that you wouldn't even want them to know that you were born.

I think she did want to be found out.

It's the only thing that kind of makes any sense.

She must have known that there was a knock on the door coming.

I had a call on the Tuesday asking where my parents were,

and I said that they were away.

I knew that the officer was unhappy with my answers.

On the Wednesday,

police were knocking on windows and doors.

They called out for me through the letterbox.

I did not come to the door,

but I knew that the arrest was fast approaching.

The last time I saw Ginny was on a Thursday.

She spoke to one of my colleagues,

and she said that the police were looking for her.

We didn't pay much attention to it at the time.

But she did say to my colleague that the police were after her

because she had murdered her parents.

You what?

And we just was all like,

"Oh, yeah, it's one of her sort of fantasy stories

that she's coming out with."

On the Friday, I heard thuds at the door.

Police were all over the garden trying to see into the house.

I had to barely make a sound, or they would know I was there.

On the Friday, my colleagues I was working with at the time said to me,

"The police are round Ginny's."

So, I went flying around there because

I thought something had happened to her.

So, I managed to grab one of the police officers there,

and I said, "Can you just tell me if she's alright?"

And they said, "Yeah, she's alright, but she won't let us in."

And I went, "So, she's okay, but you're here to arrest her?"

And he goes, "Yeah."

She sent me a message,

that she thought she was gonna be arrested.

The number you have dialled is currently not available.

She sounded like, "Oh, this is just an inconvenience.

It'll all get sorted out, you know..."

But it was the last communication.

I didn't hear from her again.

Please leave your message after the tone.

I knew I would be arrested one day and should be.

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.

I was also relieved to welcome what would take its course.

So, I told the police plenty of information

to help the investigation,

and was trying to make things easier for them.

I tried to open best I could.

After Virginia was arrested

and taken to the police station,

I'm not sure that the officers were prepared

for the regurgitation of information

that Virginia supplied to them.

The fact is, she was quite happy to deliver all of this information

about the way that she killed her parents.

She almost vomited the information to them.

It's a very, very rare occurrence

for somebody to make that type of confession.

It's incredible.

From my point of view, what this actually says about her

is that she is a controlling, coercive individual,

that she knows what she's doing.

The fact is she's trying to portray herself as being compassionate,

but she's not compassionate. She's cold-hearted.

I suspect that Virginia took great pleasure

in describing the way in which she had murdered

in particular her mother.

The description that Virginia gave is quite frankly appalling.

One of the most shocking aspects is the amount of planning.

We know she started to plan it from about March.

She started to stockpile her own prescription medicine.

She researched on the internet

the effects that that would have had on people.

She even tried it out on her parents in small doses over several occasions

to see the effect it would have on them.

We now know that John died from prescription medication.

You can imagine how horrific it must have been for him

thinking he was maybe falling ill.

But then you also wonder was there any point that he asked himself,

why this was happening to him?

And I think that is a difficult visual image to have.

I used the fact my father had a drinking problem

to poison his drinks with a cocktail of drugs.

And I found him laying on his bed,

and he had passed away.

We then heard she had also intended

to kill her mother the same way,

but the quantities used hadn't quite been sufficient.

So, she told the police she'd got a knife and stabbed her mother.

I did try and kill both of my parents with drugs.

One worked, and one did not.

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.

"I went back in with the hammer."

She just looked so innocent.

"I hit a little at the side around the top of the cranium."

"I wasn't even hitting her properly.

I was hitting like someone playing the xylophone badly.

I didn't want her to suffer.

I wanted her to pass quickly like my father."

It's difficult to read these notes without feeling some pain

and putting yourself in the room of the victim.

These good people went through some unspeakable pain.

It's awful. It doesn't bear thinking about.

It was a cold, calculated act.

And she quite openly admitted that she has done this.

No one person could get inside the mind of a murderer

despite all these self-professed experts.

But the fact is, she is a cold-hearted killer.

She is bad. Not mad.

She knows exactly what she's doing.

I think it's fair to say the people that knew Virginia

thought that there was something a little bit odd about her

and her behaviour.

But as a forensic psychiatrist,

I can categorically say that that is not the same

as having a severe mental illness

that might affect your culpability.

The very fact that Virginia had pre-planned

both murders quite effectively,

is a strong indication to me

that she knew exactly what she was doing.

We know that she stockpiled her own medication to use as poison.

She actually physically went to get a knife to use.

So, it's somebody that's got forethought.

What the forensic psychiatrist is really looking for

is symptoms of potential mental illness

to see if this affects their criminal culpability or not.

And the patients that meet this threshold

usually have very intense, life-changing symptoms

like hearing voices or paranoid delusions,

and they're out of touch of reality.

But in this case, after psychiatric evaluation,

the court experts determined that Virginia

didn't meet the threshold for diminished responsibility.

Which, in layman's terms, means that she didn't have a mental impairment.

An Essex woman who's previously admitted

murdering her parents

after their bodies were found at the family home in Great Baddow

is due to be sentenced at Chelmsford Crown Court today.

The atmosphere in the courtroom was one of mostly anticipation,

but also wonder as to what details we're about to hear.

There was just a hush amongst people

as they were waiting for the judge to arrive,

and also, for Virginia to be brought into the secure dock.

I was called into court and simply asked to state my name,

and yes to a couple of statements.

Then details of the case were read out by the prosecution.

We could see up close every movement,

every twitch of emotion from Virginia

as all of the details of the case were read to the court.

For the vast majority of the sentencing hearing,

Virginia didn't show any sort of emotion

apart from when there were some finer details being read

about the methods in which she'd killed her mother.

The evidence that I heard in the morning

surrounding my mother's death made me cry in court.

I know how wrong what I did was,

and I'm guilty and remorseful for this.

But it is something that is very hard to go over emotionally.

These really were very graphic details that we heard in sentencing.

But we also heard about what her motivation had been.

The evidence presented in court

painted a picture of a very manipulative and devious woman.

During this investigation,

there had been those who thought perhaps her upbringing

may have played a part.

But it became clear that the prosecution

were focusing on a financial motive for this crime.

The motivation in relation to this murder

from my point of view, is money.

Her whole aim was to obtain money from her dead parents.

She needed to get them out of the way in order to maintain a lifestyle

that she'd become accustomed to

through her gambling and lifestyle in general.

Now anybody that would kill a family member

for their pension

is a very, very evil person.

Understandably, Virginia's siblings don't want public attention.

So, they're protected by a court order,

which is a legal ruling that their identities

shouldn't be uncovered.

But at the same time, they wanted to submit statements

that could be read out in court.

It is impossible to describe the prolonged pain

Virginia has inflicted.

It is impossible to process such a senseless crime.

Virginia's prolific lies, laziness, and greed

are such senseless reasons for killing our parents.

Virginia's siblings have been through two tragedies, really.

There's the horrific death of their parents,

and then just having to appreciate and understand

that it was caused by their own sister,

and her general web of deceit.

One of the things revealed at sentencing

is the fact that Virginia had tried to make sure that the family

are unable to maintain any form of communication

with their nearest and dearest.

It became quite clear during sentencing

that Virginia was ruthless in her deception.

She pretended to be her mother and her father.

She sent numerous texts to people trying to rebuff any visits.

She's contacted her siblings.

She's texted using her mother's name.

She's hoodwinked her uncle, her auntie.

The court heard that she had 145 separate SIM cards

with which she used to message her sisters,

and also other relatives as well.

The very sad thing for her sisters was that these messages

would suggest that John and Lois no longer wanted to see them.

That must have been absolutely awful.

In a sinister twist to this case,

Virginia pretended to be her mother by making a phone call

to one of her siblings.

She altered her voice sufficiently to convince her sibling

that she was Lois.

Virginia had pretended to be my parents

and communicated with me in that role on almost a daily basis.

This grotesque intrusion is made incredibly painful

by the messages sent to me,

purporting to be my parents, that were at times hurtful.

This and the ridiculous excuses for not seeing me

left me with the feeling of being unvalued as their child,

that my own parents didn't want to see me.

To have been manipulated and deceived so significantly

and in such a prolonged way, has been truly shocking.

When you're listening to all of these details,

it's difficult not to feel shocked by the manipulation

that she embarked on.

You can't imagine what the family will have been going through

to experience that,

and to have been led on such a journey of lies.

Virginia lied repeatedly over such a long period of time,

but Virginia's siblings' statements corroborated

some of what Virginia was saying,

their mother did have mental health issues,

and their father did have problems with alcohol.

However, one thing that appears to be categorically contradicted

is whether or not Virginia was physically abused.

Virginia had the audacity to lie even more

and try to accuse our parents of behaving in the most awful way,

which is totally untrue.

Her lies about the whole family

are a disgusting, untrue misrepresentation.

Virginia seemed to be very keen to place herself as the victim.

But when there is physical abuse or domestic violence,

often there is a trail of evidence.

But as far as we're aware,

there is no such police record within this family.

And to me, this is really important

because that kind of underpins all of Virginia's reasoning

and explanation of what she did.

I was not trapped physically but was emotionally trapped.

The problems were behind closed doors at Pump Hill.

My siblings had their own lives to live,

and there was no one else behind me to support or give respite.

But I chose myself over my parents wrongfully.

Having read the multiple letters that Virginia wrote,

it feels like she's trying to gain sympathy from the public.

The profile that I'm building of Virginia

is that she's willing to do almost anything

for her own motivations.

And the court experts determined

that Virginia had a neurodevelopmental disorder,

as well as traits of psychopathy.

In terms of the psychopathic traits,

this would include a lack of empathy,

not caring about the rights of other people,

impulsivity, criminal versatility,

and also being quite cunning and manipulative.

And it's the psychopathic traits that drove her to kill her parents.

When I heard 36 years being read out,

I told the lady next to me in the dock

that I should have got life without parole.

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.

I wish my siblings healing,

and I'm glad that they have each other.

I hope that in time they are all able to be happy again

and be a closer family than it was when I was part of it.

I will try and be a better person in prison

and make a life of sorts.

I've been here for one year and four months,

and I'm happier and more myself in prison

than I was able to be around people on the outside

and my family.

I also thank you for reading this letter.

Kind regards, Virginia.

I can't get round my head

that somebody would do what she did

for some pensions

and for a little bit of money,

it just doesn't make sense to me.

I have for a long time thought about

were we really friends, you know?

Because she was living this other life

trying to divert everybody away from what really was going on.

But I hear she's happy,

and she's flourishing.

And I'm glad,

because I think it's probably the right environment for her.

It's the peace that she said she wanted,

and I'm glad she's got that.