Murder of parents: Perpetrator lives with corpses in the house for four years

Double murder
Woman killed her parents – and lived under the same roof with the bodies for four years

A British court has sentenced a 36-year-old to life imprisonment (at least 36 years) for double murder. As British media (including The Guardian) reported on Friday, Virigina M. killed both of her parents – and then kept the two bodies in her house for four years.

Police became aware of the murders through suspicious doctors

According to the verdict, the perpetrator first mixed her 70-year-old father’s drugs into his drinks in June 2019 and, after his death, hit her 71-year-old mother with a hammer and stabbed her 71-year-old mother several times in the chest with a kitchen knife.

She then dug a kind of “grave” for her father’s body in their home in the county of Essex, northeast of London. According to the public prosecutor’s office, it consisted “of bricks stacked on top of each other” and was “covered with several blankets and a number of pictures and paintings on top of them.” The mother’s remains were wrapped in a sleeping bag and hidden in the wardrobe in her parents’ bedroom.

The crimes were discovered after doctors became suspicious of missed appointments and alerted the police. When she was arrested in September 2023, W. confessed to the crimes. “I knew this would happen at some point. It is right that I serve my sentence,” she told the officers at the time.

The public prosecutor’s office assumes that the motive for the two murders was that M. wanted to prevent her parents from noticing that their daughter had stolen from them. Among other things, the convicted woman was active in online gambling. Even after their parents died, they continued to support them from their income. After the murders, they are said to have collected the equivalent of around 160,000 euros in pensions from their father and mother.

Sources: The Guardian, Sky News, BBC

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