WHEN Louise Hopkins got an unexpected call from police to say that they feared her parents were dead, she reeled with shock.
However, what unfolded next plunged her into a state of horror and despair, as it was revealed that her younger sister had killed the couple and kept their bodies mummified in the family home for FOUR YEARS.
In a scene similar to a Stephen King novel, Virginia McCullough concealed her mother’s body in a double wardrobe and entombed her murdered father in a makeshift mausoleum disguised as a bed, all while living in the house.
Talking for the first time, Louise, 49, told The Sun that she forgives her sister despite her gruesome crimes.
She said: “I have forgiven her for what she’s done. I am not drinking other people’s poison.”
Louise, residing in Cambridgeshire, says she will never visit her sister in prison as she is still grappling with the horrific killings from 2019.
Virginia was jailed for life with a minimum of 36 years in October last year after poisoning dad John and battering mum Lois with a hammer before repeatedly stabbing her.
She convinced neighbours, friends and family that the couple were still alive by sending text messages from their phones, sending Christmas and birthday cards and gifts through Moonpig and lying about trips away.
The 36-year-old continued to live at the couple’s home as their bodies decomposed, spending almost £150,000 from their pension, benefits and credit cards — including more than £21,000 on gambling.
The Covid lockdown allowed her to get away with her dark secret — and she even posed as her mum in phone calls.
It was the family GP surgery that finally raised the alarm in September 2023 when pensioner John repeatedly failed to turn up for health checks.
When cops visited Virginia, she coolly told them: “Cheer up — at least you’ve caught the bad guy.”
Louise said the murders of her parents John, 70, and Lois McCullough, 71, have led to bouts of guilt and excessive OCD after she became estranged from them in 2018 due to her dad’s drinking and her mum’s controlling behaviour.
She says: “The worst thing is that my parents were left to rot. The grief has haunted me.
“I have had bouts of thinking I must be to blame because I walked away from all that.
“I’ve had various flashbacks, just feeling really guilty that if I don’t talk about it, it chews me up and I feel physically ill. I’m sad and at points I’ve screamed uncontrollably.”
She tells how she struggled to come to terms with the murders, in a new interview on podcast The Speakmans Hope Clinic, with therapists Eva and Nik Speakman.
Louise, the eldest of five sisters, tells the Speakmans how she felt “shame” and “guilt” — despite leaving home decades earlier, before becoming estranged from her parents.
She said: “It was as though I was carrying some poison and daren’t share it. It just kind of eroded me.”
To the outside world, the McCulloughs looked like a perfect family unit — a loving daughter who stayed at home to look after her ageing parents in their modest house in Pump Hill, Chelmsford.
John was a retired business studies lecturer who had worked at Anglia Ruskin University, while neighbours later described Lois as a quiet woman who did not engage in small talk.
“They were nice, normal people,” a local shopkeeper said after their deaths.
“I thought they’d gone away on holiday.”
Other neighbours said Virginia was “quite chatty” and “a little bit odd” but there was no indication of the “psychopathic tendencies” later described in court.
While they presented a picture of respectability, behind closed doors John was fighting alcoholism and Lois suffered with anxiety, agoraphobia and obsessive compulsive behaviour.
Growing up, Louise said that her dad — described in court as being in poor health with high cholesterol and diabetes — would down a “bottle of wine in ten or 11 minutes.”
The worst thing is that my parents were left to rot. The grief has haunted me.
Louise
She told the Speakmans: “It was crazy. When I hit 18, he’d make me go to the off licence and buy him whisky because he couldn’t stop.
“I thought I must be to blame. I tried to save them but dad was a violent alcoholic. They wouldn’t help themselves.”
It is clear from the podcast that Louise is not victim blaming, but struggling with the reasons behind her sister’s actions and her own estrangement from her parents.
“I will never forget them. I loved them,” she says, “but I didn’t like them.”
‘I was drinking the poison in the household I grew up in’
After she found out about her parents’ deaths, Louise initially “mourned quietly” — but when her sister was arrested, she lost friends.
She said: “I felt like I was drinking the toxicity of the poison in the household I grew up in.”
OBSESSIVELY WASHING HANDS
After struggling with OCD in the past, Louise began obsessively washing her hands and struggled with everyday life as she came to terms with the murders.
Breaking down, she says: “I’d obsessively wash my hands, have memory blanks about what’s happened, controlling the children, checking their hands as well. It’s too much.
“I think it’s just a control thing but I’ve had issues with that, way back, from when I was small. Mum was very clinically clean and dad would never wash his hands.”
Louise never attended her sister’s trial after Virginia pleaded guilty to murdering her parents between June 17 and 20, 2019.
She said: “I was invited to go but didn’t want to because I’d made my peace that I’d left the family and didn’t want anything more to do with them.
“I walked away from all of them in 2018 after physically leaving home in 1997.”
Louise told The Sun: “I forgive my sister but I would not visit her. I have created a life of peace and tranquillity for me and my children.”
Chelmsford Crown Court heard how Virginia gave her father a fatal dose of sleeping tablets in his drink.
When she found him dead the next morning, she decided her mother could not be allowed to find out.
As Lois lay in bed listening to the radio, her daughter hit her with a hammer and stabbed her eight times in the chest and neck, apologising as she bled out.
When police finally knocked on the door and started asking Virginia about her parents, she eventually said: “I know why you’re here. My father is in there. I murdered him.”
After stuffing her mum’s body into a wardrobe, which she taped up, putting a breeze block against it, she built a DIY mausoleum for her dad.
The structure was made from masonry blocks and wooden panels and covered with multiple blankets, with pictures and paintings on top.
‘COMPULSIVE LIAR’
Inside, police found at least 11 layers of plastic covering the body, which was wrapped in a sleeping bag.
The court was told that Virginia was a “compulsive liar” who told her parents she was a web designer and made up medical conditions such as thunderclap headaches.
She made 238 calls to Essex police about trivial matters that “showed paranoia” and 185 to the GP surgery, including calls pretending to be her mum.
In bodycam footage released by police, Virginia told officers who smashed down her door: “I did know that this would kind of come eventually.
“It’s proper that I serve my punishment.”
After four years, the law had finally caught up with the cold-blooded killer.
Louise, meanwhile, is still slowly rebuilding her life.
She said: “My children are happy and healthy, I’m more positive than negative and I have a good support network.”
