Depraved necrophiliac David Fuller – who evaded police for over 30 years after carrying out a double murder in 1987 – was handed a further four years in prison today for defiling women’s bodies in hospital mortuaries.
The 68-year-old is already serving a whole life sentence for murdering Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, in 1987 as well as the sexual abuse of the corpses of 78 women and girls at hospital mortuaries in Tunbridge Wells.
He appeared at the Old Bailey today to be sentenced for a second tranche of offences against a further 23 dead women.
After being linked to the murders in 2020, police uncovered the systematic sexual abuse of the corpses of females aged between nine and 100 at the now-closed Kent and Sussex Hospital and the Tunbridge Wells Hospital, in Pembury, where he had worked in maintenance since 1989.
An examination of Fuller’s computer hard drive at his home in Heathfield, East Sussex, revealed 818,051 images and 504 videos of his abuse as well as evidence of his ‘persistent interest in rape, abuse and murder of women’.
David Fuller escaped justice for over 30 years after murdering Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, in Tunbridge Wells in 1987
Wendy Knell (left) and Caroline Pierce (right) were beaten and strangled by Fuller before being sexually assaulted
Judge Justice Cheema-Grubb said Fuller’s victims included nurses, teachers, a pilot, a skier, a war veteran, wives and mothers who had nurtured families. Many were still wearing defibrillators and catheters at the time Fuller abused their bodies.
Among those whose bodies were abused by Fuller was a 92-year-old Second World War hero who worked at Bletchley Park. Her daughter said he ‘has done the most heinous crimes, something our family must live with daily’.
She added: ‘David Fuller needs to be in the public eye for the true extent of his offending – he needs to appreciate the scale of what he has done.’
A father said he could not put into words how ‘disturbing’ it was to find out what happened to his daughter at Fuller’s hands.
The brother of another victim said: ‘He has caused complete and utter devastation.
‘David Fuller has tainted every single memory I have of my sister. All I can think of is what he did to my sister when she was supposed to be resting.’
Jailing Fuller for four years, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said: ‘You violated the bodies of all these women while many were still wearing medical equipment from treatment they had received from doctors trying to save their lives, such as catheters and defibrillator pads.
‘The women you abused were women who lived fulfilling lives. They were the best, one had flown a propeller plane across Iceland, one was a talented skier and one worked at Bletchley Park during World War Two.
‘A number had long marriages, some had long careers such as teaching and nursing. All had families they nurtured and loved.
‘Some spent their last years in pain but kept their dignity, until you took it from them.’
David Fuller’s office, where police found hidden hard drives, one taped to the back of a small cabinet
Detectives said Fuller did not look surprised when they arrested him (pictured) but he initially denied any involvement and said he had no knowledge of the case
Fuller was part of a Kent cycling club in the 1980s. One of their routes travelled directly past where victim Caroline Pierce’s body was found in 1987
VICTIM’S MOTHER: ‘I GRABBED A KNIFE AND WENT OUT TO PLUNGE IT IN HIS HEART’
Azra Kemal, 24, died after falling from a motorway bridge in July 2020. Her body was raped by Fuller in the morgue of Tunbridge Wells Hospital
One of Fuller’s victims, 24-year-old Azra Kemal, died after slipping through a 10ft wide void between two carriageways on a road bridge of the A21 between Sevenoaks and Tonbridge on July 16, 2020.
Her body was taken to the morgue at Tunbridge Wells Hospital and was later identified as among those raped by Fuller.
Upon learning the horrific news, Azra’s mother Nevres described how she grabbed a knife from her kitchen and went straight to Colindale Police Station where she believed he was.
‘The rage . . .’ she said. ‘My only thought was, ‘He is not going to get away this’. I’d just been told he’d raped her in hospital when she was dead. It was incomprehensible. I felt I had to take things into my own hands — find him, punish him. I’m her mother.
‘If I’d found him, I’m 99.99 per cent sure I’d have put that knife straight through his heart because he’d put a knife through mine. The thought of him violating her — of touching her hair, touching her skin…
‘But as I walked towards the police station, all hell broke loose. Police officers seemed to spring from everywhere. I was handcuffed and thrown to the floor by eight or nine of them.
Nevres Kemal (pictured) was ‘consumed by rage’ upon learning what Fuller had done to her daughter’s body
‘The two officers who had come to the house had telephoned in and said I was running around with a knife. But the police who arrested me didn’t know what had happened.
‘I was crying: ‘My daughter was raped in hospital and she’s dead.’ They were looking at me, going, ‘Does this woman need psychiatric help?’
‘They read me my rights but I had this rage. I was shouting, ‘What are you doing? I need to put an end to this. No one is violating my child. I am her mother. I’m here because I’m looking for Dave. He needs to be punished’.’
As it was, Mrs Kemal herself was thrown into a cell and kept there for 34 hours.
Fuller sat expressionless in the dock at the Old Bailey wearing a grey jumper and glasses. He spoke only to confirm his name.
One man shouted ‘scum’ from the public gallery as he was taken down from the dock.
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb added Fuller had sought out a hospital position to avoid the same publicity as when he killed two women.
She said: ‘You obtained the position of maintenance supervisor. I have no doubt you were wary of the risk of continuing to commit sexual offences given the alertness in the area after the bedsit murders.
‘These roles gave you access to areas ordinarily out of bound of the public.
‘Once inside, hidden from CCTV surveillance, you were free to systemically and relentlessly abuse the bodies of at least 101 women and girls.
‘Some were abused very shortly after they died.
‘Once you had captured the sexual abuse you reviewed the images, and made stills from the videos.
‘One hard drive alone contained 800,000 images and 804 videos. 2,500 floppy disks and 35 mobile phones were found.’
The judge went on: ‘I have seen no indication of genuine remorse, just hollow regret that you are now under public scrutiny.’
Judge Grubb ordered the destruction of the images and videos Fuller took.
She added: ‘You spent years living a lie, the facade of a mild and ordinary life, while in seclusion you committed revolting and outrageous acts of the deepest darkness. You have a family who you deceived over all those years.
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‘The depravity of what you did, to those you killed and those you defiled after death, reveals that your conscience is seared.
‘It is almost impossible to believe that a single man can cause the misery, to so many, that you have done. But you did it and in consequence you are paying the price that human justice can exact, the rest of your mortal life in prison.’
Fuller was still working for the NHS trust when arrested on 3 December, 2020, and had access to all areas in both hospitals via a swipeable identity card.
Fuller had been employed by Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust since 1989 and would wait for mortuary staff to finish their shifts before accessing fridges where the bodies were stored.
Earlier this year he admitted a further 16 charges of assault by penetration and possession of extreme pornography.
They relate to the 23 remaining victims, all of whom were dead adult women. 13 have been identified, while 10 remain unidentified.
The identified women were aged between the ages of 45 and 92. Some were removed from the gurney and placed on the floor, and one was positioned on a chair before the sexual abuse.
Some were offended against on multiple days as they waited for post-mortems.
The 92-year-old met her husband while working at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and his daughter said knowing what had been done to his wife would cause him to turn in his grave.
Prosecutor Michael Bisgrove said a ‘systematic digital library’ of Fuller’s crimes was discovered in his home office.
A homemade box was attached to the rear of a chest of drawers containing portable hard drives containing 900,000 files, named after women’s names or dates.
One folder was titled ‘Necro lord’ while another was titled ‘deadly’, with another folder inside titled ‘deadliest’ and another inside titled ’00 best yet’.
Fuller stored multiple videos and still images of each victim, and manipulated the videos to produce still images, where he changed the colouring or removed scars.
He used the mortuary logbook, which had names and images of the deceased, to create his file structure. Printed images were also found.
Fuller had made regular Google searches of topics such as ‘rape’, ‘torture’ and ‘death’.
His defence lawyer Catherine Donnelly said: ‘It is accepted and understood that profound and untold harm has been caused to a significant number of people.
‘I advance no mitigation as it is understood that there isn’t any.’
In his 20s Fuller was convicted of dozens of burglaries by climbing into homes by windows.
In impact statements read to court, victim’s family members said his crimes had blighted their memories of their loved ones and taken them back to their grief.
They were informed of the crimes at the end of 2021, for some more than a decade after their loved ones deaths.
An inquiry into Fuller’s crimes was announced by the then health secretary Sajid Javid in November last year.
It will investigate how Fuller was able to carry out his crimes on corpses and ‘why they went unnoticed’.
Two years ago, Fuller admitted murdering Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, in 1987 after he brutally bludgeoned and strangled them to death.
Both women, who lived alone in bedsits in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, were then sexually assaulted by the former hospital electrician as they were either dying or post-death.
Miss Knell’s body was discovered in her bed on June 23, 1987, while Miss Pierce, who was attacked just feet from her front door on November 24, was found three weeks later on December 15 wearing just a pair of tights, in a field 38 miles away in Romney, Kent.
Their horrific deaths – dubbed the Bedsit Murders – became one of the UK’s longest unsolved double homicide cases.
Three-times wed Fuller was finally arrested on December 3, 2020, after a major breakthrough in DNA science identified a familial link to a relative on the national database.
But detectives only realised the true extent of his crimes when they uncovered what was described by prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC as ‘a library of unimaginable sexual depravity’ concealed in a hide at his home.
Fuller’s victims, some of whom the 68-year-old violated more than once, included three who were under 18 at the time of death. Several others were said to be over 85 years old.
He then used mortuary records to log their details in his own notebooks, and even looked up some of his victims on Facebook.
Also on the hard drives were a staggering four million indecent images of children – mostly downloaded from the internet.
Fuller, from Heathfield, East Sussex, initially denied the historic murders on the grounds of diminished responsibility before unexpectedly changing his pleas to guilty amid dramatic scenes on the fourth day of his trial.
The depraved killer was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.
At the time of the sentencing, 81 of the mortuary victims had been identified.
However, due to difficulties in identifying all the corpses he abused and fearing there may have been hundreds of others going back to when Fuller’s hospital employment record began, Kent Police set up a call centre at the conclusion of the trial to deal with any public concerns.
The Government also announced an independent public inquiry would be held, while NHS England ordered all hospitals to review their security.
Following Fuller’s conviction, the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate were able to identify a total of 101 victims.
The latest charges are connected to the 23 remaining victims – all deceased adult females – whose corpses were abused between 2007 and 2020.
An extensive and complex identification process led officers to formally identify 13 of these 23 further victims.
Police were unable to establish the identities of the other 10 victims, however the charges reflect offending against all of them.
No evidence has been found of any further victims.
- Any of the families who want to speak to the Trust, or access the victim support services which have been put in place, should contact Victim Support online at: www.victimsupport.org.uk or by calling the Supportline: 0808 1689111.
