Virginia McCullough: The Greed Behind the Sob Story

Troubled childhoods can, sometimes, be connected to emotional challenges and a propensity for violence in adulthood. Virginia McCullough tried to excuse the murder of her parents as the product of neglect and years of abuse in her formative years. The truth was, rather, that a much more sinister motive drove McCullough to kill John and Lois – she wanted their money. This poorly constructed documentary, however, barely scrapes the surface of why these killings actually happened. A copy of my complaint to Ofcom is at the end of the review.

| By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Apr 29, 2026

 

Killed By Our Daughter: The McCullough Murders (ITN Productions for Channel 5, 15 January 2026)

NB, contains spoilers.

 

 

This documentary sets out to explain why, in June 2019, Virginia McCullough, then in her early thirties, murdered her mother, Lois, and her father, John, in the village of Great Baddow, near Chelmsford, Essex. For over four years after she killed them, McCullough lived in her parents’ house alongside their bodies, depriving them of the dignity of a proper funeral. She zipped Lois’s body in a sleeping bag and stored it upstairs in a double wardrobe, sealing the gaps around the doors to prevent the flies and maggots from escaping, as the body decomposed. She also zipped John’s body in a sleeping bag, but kept it downstairs in a do-it-yourself mausoleum built out of wood and breeze blocks. McCullough masked it with rugs, photographs and paintings. She used the remaining breeze blocks to partially obscure the wardrobe containing her mother’s body. McCullough informed neighbours disturbed by the noise, or asking about building materials in the garden, that she was installing a fireplace. It took over four years for McCullough’s crime to be revealed, more by chance than anything else (see below). In September 2023 she was arrested and charged with the murder of her parents. Psychological evaluation showed she did not meet the threshold to plead diminished responsibility (this becomes important later in the piece). In July 2024 McCullough pleaded guilty to both murders. In October 2024 she was sentenced to imprisonment for life, to serve a minimum term of 36 years. 

In trying to make sense of this parental double murder, the documentary begins with the police bodycam footage of her arrest on 15 September 2023. Police accessed the McCullough home, where she lived with Lois and John, after John’s doctor alerted the police that his patient, an elderly man in poor health, had missed multiple routine appointments over a number of years. As every detective knows, murderers usually do their utmost to evade justice by concealing anything connecting them to the crime. Yet, when the police entered the property, McCullough is shown calmly, and almost with a sense of relief, accepting the charges put to her. She points the arresting officers to the location of her parents’ bodies and to where she had stashed the murder weapons. She made no attempt to deny her part in her parents’ deaths, explaining that she poisoned them one night. The next morning she found John dead but Lois still alive, so she hit her mother with a hammer while she lay in bed, and then stabbed her until she bled to death. At one point McCullough breezily tells her captors, ‘Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy’. She seems strangely detached from the arrest.

In the UK, parricidal murder – killings one’s parents – is rare (there are around 20 cases per year, or 5% of all homicides), making McCullough’s confessions to police, along with a string of letters written shortly before her sentencing, well worth studying, to try to make sense of the motivation behind her actions. The documentary puts the letters front and centre of the narrative, alongside interviews with MCullough’s former classmates at the local school, her adult friends, work colleagues, local shopkeepers, and journalists who covered the story at the time. Using a series of subtle cues, the documentary pushes the interpretation that some form of retribution for abuses suffered at her parents’ hands as a child may have been what drove McCullough to kill them. Her father, a university lecturer in business studies, was a disciplinarian with a drinking problem. Her mother suffered mental health challenges around anxiety, agoraphobia, and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The youngest of five daughters, McCullough reports being smacked regularly by both parents. Lois's OCD made her especially offended by McCullough’s persistent bed-wetting, which continued into secondary school. Her academic performance was a keen disappointment to them, John in particular, with McCullough reporting that she was made to feel ‘useless, stupid, a wretched human being who was not their daughter’. Low self-esteem was clearly an issue and, fearful of disappointing her parents, McCullough tried to fake higher grades, but her ruse was discovered. On leaving school with 5 GCSEs, McCullough dabbled in a number of part-time jobs. She left home several times during her twenties, but always returned because she struggled financially. Interviewees who knew her around the village, or worked with her, painted the picture of a socially awkward, lonely figure, prone to odd flights of fancy and inappropriate comments.

As the documentary unfolded, and the murders themselves faded under the weight of McCullough’s apparent ‘confessions’, I started to feel rather sorry for this individual. Clearly, John’s excessive drinking, Lois’s mental health challenges, and their disciplinarian natures, were persistent barriers to nurturing, positive family relations. Simultaneously, however, the documentary flags a number of unexplained anomalies in the witness testimony about her life in the village. First, why, after the middle of 2019, did she suddenly go on huge spending sprees, buying random gifts for locals, none of which they asked for? Second, why did she keep buying flowers, food and drink for people who ran the local shops? Furthermore, the retired police interviewees were unashamedly negative about her ‘cold, calculated act’. Their words were out of step with the documentary’s overall direction of travel, which elicited viewers’ sympathy for the depth of McCullough’s plight, which effectively becomes the vehicle through which the show explains her heinous acts.

Suddenly, however, near the very end of the documentary, we discover that the real driving force behind MCullough’s parricide had nothing whatsoever to do with the challenging relationship she had with her parents. Crucially, it reveals that psychiatric evaluators did not find McCullough to have met the threshold to enable her to plead diminished responsibility – in other words, she was wholly in possession of her faculties at the time of the murders. The judge also made the point, at McCullough’s sentencing on 10 October 2024, that some of McCullough’s account of the family dynamics is disputed by her sisters. In any case: ‘Any difficulties in childhood do not begin to explain or excuse what you did. It does not amount to significant mitigation’. McCullough’s history of depression and symptoms of autism spectrum condition were also brought in as mitigating factors by McCullough’s defence barrister. These can, the judge averred, explain some of McCullough’s behaviour – including the matter-of-fact confession to the police and her perception of the narrow range of options available to her, to extricate herself from a difficult situation (see below). However, McCullough’s mental health challenges were not, the judge said, grounds for a credible defence: ‘None of the experts suggest that decision was motivated or caused by your autistic condition…   there was no impairment of your ability to understand the nature of your conduct, to form a rational judgement and to exercise self-control. These were considered acts of aggression following months of thought and planning’.

And so, the documentary, finally, reveals the real cause of this terrible crime: McCullough had racked up huge gambling debts, these being the cause of her constant financial instability, including her decision to move back in with her parents in the first place. John and Lois had more than enough money to fund the lifestyle McCullough craved, or to which she had become accustomed. Putting herself in the position of overseeing the household finances, by the time of her arrest, McCullough had stolen £150,000 from her parents’ bank accounts, and from their state and private pensions. Greed, plain and simple, not some trauma-induced state, or psychosis, was what motivated McCullough to kill John and Lois. As Judge Johnson explained in his sentencing remarks (surprisingly few of which appeared in the documentary): ‘I am sure that a substantial motive for each of the murders was your intention to avoid your parents discovering that you had been stealing from them and lying to them, and to enable you to continue to take monies that were intended for them. The murders were therefore done in the expectation that you would gain financially as a result of your parents’ deaths. They were murders “done for gain”’.

As the closing credits rolled, I could not help feeling manipulated by the producers of this documentary and, by extension, McCullough herself. These were not the promised ‘confessions’ of a killer, merely a series of half-hearted excuses written to elicit sympathy before the sentencing. As the judge pointed out, however, any domestic abuse in the McCullough household was perpetrated not by her parents, but by Virginia McCullough herself: ‘economic abuse of your parents amounted to domestic abuse within the meaning of the Sentencing Council’s overarching guideline’. John and Lois were not vulnerable people in legal terms; however, there was a certain vulnerability due to old age and ill-health. Significantly, in terms of the trust they put in McCullough, her appointed role in the family was to help her parents manage their finances. Instead, she secured loans in their names, without their knowledge, to increase the amount she could pilfer from them. Any anomalies John and Lois spotted in their finances, McCullough blamed on hackers, fraud or banking failures. Moreover, she repeatedly lied about jobs she did not have and medical conditions from which she did not suffer. 

In short, McCullough first of all stole from John and Lois, then she stole their lives by killing them, in turn stealing from her sisters any chance of a future relationship with their parents. ‘You say that was because you felt trapped and you wanted to be free from them. The reality is that you were trapped only by your own dishonest behaviour.’ The murders were not committed on the spur of the moment, from rage or vengeance, but showed considerable premeditation and planning. For McCullough began conceiving the murder plot at least three months prior to the act, when she purchased the materials to hide the bodies, along with drugs and murder weapons. By 17 June 2019, McCullough was £60,000 in debt and decided it was time to act. That night, she put a cocktail of prescription drugs in her parents’ drinks. The following morning, John was dead in his bed. Lois was still alive, but McCullough, the judge said, had a back-up plan. ‘You hit her over the head with a hammer… You stabbed her with a knife eight times, including seven stabs to her chest’. Lois had wounds from where she had tried to defend herself. Significantly, in terms of seeing McCullough’s callous thought process at work, ‘The following day, 19 June, you pretended to be your mother to obtain a new credit card and PIN number. You then used that card to buy clothes and jewellery for yourself’.

Reading the judge’s sentencing remarks, the documentary interviewees talking about McCullough’s random spending sprees around the village fell into place, as did the police detectives’ complete lack of sympathy for her. McCullough spent the four years and three months after murdering her parents spinning a web of lies to cover her tracks. The judge’s description of the scale of her deception is telling. The afternoon after murdering her mother, after obtaining the new credit card, ‘you sent a text message from your mother’s phone to one of your sisters. The message was “your dad and I are at the seaside in Walton this week. Mum x”. Then, that night, another message “Good night. Mum. x”’. McCullough ‘continued to send such messages over the following months and years. You even spoke to one sister pretending to be your – and her – mother. You used a large number of different SIM cards to contact your siblings and others pretending to be your parents’. McCullough’s deceit did not finish there. To members of John and Lois’s family ‘You sent pre-printed birthday cards using an online service. You took your parents’ pension payments amounting to almost £136,000. You telephoned your father’s pension company, pretending to be him. You also spent money on their credit cards, and opened new credit cards in their names and spent money on those. You used their bank accounts and took their winter fuel payments’. McCullough then started contacting other authorities to throw them off the scent, in case questions were asked: ‘You made calls to the police, pretending to be your mother, complaining about trivial matters. You made calls to your parents’ GP pretending to be your mother. You are described by one of your sisters as having always been a compulsive liar’.   

As I put together my book, which tries to make sense of my father's 1991 murder, I was given access to a detailed 32-page letter written by Jean Daddow – the woman who organised his shooting – shortly after her first arrest in 1992. The letter contains some verifiable facts and things which, I have no doubt, did occur in real life, exactly in the way she describes. However, the letter also contains some outrageous fictions about my father, my mother, even myself and my brothers. Jean Daddow rewrote history entirely to suit her narrative that she, effectively, was the victim, that my father deserved to die because he was abusive towards her. She maintains throughout that she had nothing to do with his death, and never has admitted any wrongdoing or her part in the conspiracy to have him shot. If you did not know the details of Jean Daddow’s crimes, you might, as with the way this documentary, start to feel sorry for her, reading her 'confessions'. But they are not confessions. This is how criminally-minded arch-manipulators operate – they subtly encourage people to look the other way while they commit their crimes, and are able to offer up multiple pre-rehearsed reasons to take pity on them if they do get caught. They are serial liars and propagandists who think only of themselves. Unlike Jean Daddow, McCullough at least tried to claim she was remorseful but, as judge Johnson told her, ‘there is also a considerable element of self-pity, and any feelings of remorse are largely overshadowed by your failure to take practical steps to demonstrate any remorse by handing yourself in to the police, and instead spending years covering up what you had done and spending your parents’ pensions’. McCullough’s remorse is of the calculated and strategic kind, rather than a genuine emotion that could lead to a credible sense of justice for the victims.

Through close scrutiny of the ways in which convicted killers try to elicit sympathy for their actions when they put their side of the story, one can see how easy it is to be sucked in by manipulative characters. They artfully weave webs of lies to ensnare the unwitting or the gullible into believing the fictions of their own making. These woe is me" fictions may help criminals sleep at night, but they are not the truth. Until I researched the full extent of McCullough’s crimes after watching this documentary, I was unaware quite how far her greed and deception went. By so uncritically regurgitating McCullough’s words, I cannot help feeling that the programme producers simply re-victimised everyone affected by her crimes. The narrative this show presented barely does justice to the memory of John and Lois McCullough, who died in the most terrible circumstances, deprived of even a decent burial. Their family and friends were in turn denied the opportunity to mourn them properly. In the interests of responsible true crime broadcasting, incendiary sources such as murderers’ ‘confessions’ letters should be handled more judiciously. The aim should be to put the information they contain in the context of what actually happened, which is readily available from the courts, rather than what murderers want credulous researchers to believe happened, to downplay the seriousness of the atrocities they commit. True crime broadcasting needs to be held to higher ethical standards than this documentary. It is perfectly possible to promote ‘good practice while still telling compelling stories that audiences want to watch’. I plan to reflect on this in other blogs on this website and, in the meantime, I welcome your comments about this documentary.     

Image credits:

1. Essex Police / Handout
2. Essex Police / Handout
3. Essex Police / Handout

Ofcom Complaint

Channel 5 is a signatory to the Association of True Crime Producers (ATCP). This body has guidelines to help ensure victim protection when making true crime documentaries. On 23 January 2026 I complained to Ofcom about how the key materials were handled in this documentary, its clear bias in favour of the murderer, and how its imbalanced, slipshod handling of McCullough's letters, going against both the trial verdict and sentencing remarks, might have negatively affected McCullough’s relatives and friends of her parents. To my mind the show was in clear breach of several of the ATCP guidelines. Below is a copy of my submission:

Programme title:
How I Murdered Mum & Dad: The Virginia McCullough Confessions

Date of broadcast:
15/01/2026

Time of broadcast:
22:00

Channel / station:
5

Subject:
Programme breached Association of True Crime Producers Guidelines.

Description:
This documentary was in clear breach of the Association of True Crime Producers Guidelines, especially number 5 ['Ensuring that the programme is fair, accurate and unbiased. Presenting a balanced and objective account of events]. The documentary repeats words from McCullough’s prison letters, in which she justifies her crimes on the grounds of childhood neglect and abuse. She might have had a difficult childhood, but the abuse claims are, and were never, substantiated by the authorities. Until the final few minutes of the show, you would not know McCullough’s *actual* motive (which is why viewers would watch): financial gain. As the judge’s sentencing remarks made perfectly clear, McCullough was the domestic abuser, not her parents. She was an adult, who planned and premeditated two vicious murders, stole their money, and then lied to her sisters and relatives about her parents’ whereabouts for over four years. She denied her parents a dignified burial. She deceived everyone into thinking her parents were still alive. Almost none of this them came through in the documentary. McCullough duped the producers with her sob story, as expertly as she duped her family and the authorities for so many years.

As a fellow victim of a murder in my family, I cannot begin to imagine what McCullough’s relatives made of this programme, which was not ‘fair, accurate or unbiased’. It was totally biased in McCullough’s favour. This results in breaches of Guidelines 1 and 2 (respect to the dignity of the families), and needs investigating accordingly. I have written a more detailed analysis should you wish to read it.