Hospital Worker Admits Two Murders and Sexually Abusing Multiple Corpses

A hospital electrician has admitted to murdering two women in the 1980s as well as sexually abusing scores of female corpses in mortuaries, including children.

David Fuller, 67, from East Sussex strangled and sexually assaulted Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce in separate attacks in Tunbridge Wells in Kent in 1987. On Thursday, the fourth day of his murder trial, he pled guilty to the murders.

Knell, 25, a shop manager, was found dead in her home on the 23rd of June 1987 after failing to turn up for work. Five months later Pierce, 20, a waitress, was attacked and killed outside her home. Her body was found in a ditch 40 miles away.

Fuller evaded justice for the murders for 33 years, before police made a DNA breakthrough in 2020 thanks to huge advances in science and arrested him. While searching his home, police found evidence of sexual offending on a vast scale.

Fuller admitted to 51 sexual offences including 44 charges relating to 78 corpses stored in two mortuaries in Tunbridge Wells. The crimes took place between 2007 and last year.

Police found four million images of sexual abuse at Fuller’s home in Sussex. While most were downloaded from the internet, they included images of Fuller abusing corpses at the mortuaries, which he had access to because of his job as a hospital maintenance supervisor.

Fuller would wait until other staff had finished their shifts before accessing the fridges in which women’s bodies were stored. His victims, including Azra Kemal who died in an accident last year aged 24, ranged from 85 years old, to three who were under 18 at the time of death. Police found evidence of 100 victims, and have so far identified 81 of them.

He was also charged with seven counts unrelated to the mortuary, related to possessing indecent images of children.

Libby Clark, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “David Fuller’s deeply distressing crimes are unlike any other I have encountered in my career and unprecedented in British legal history. 

“No British court has ever seen abuse on this scale against the dead before and I have no doubt he would still be offending to this day had it not been for this painstaking investigation and prosecution.” She said Fuller abused his position of trust as a hospital electrician “in the most grotesque manner imaginable”.

“This highly dangerous man has inflicted unimaginable suffering on countless families and he has only admitted his long-held secrets when confronted with overwhelming evidence. With his uncontrolled sense of sexual entitlement [Fuller] treated Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce with extreme depravity. Both women were simply at home or returning from work when he ambushed them.”

Detective Chief Superintendent Paul Fotheringham of Kent Police said: “Fuller used his role as an electrician at these two hospitals to carry out these heinous acts on deceased victims. 

“Not only did he kill and assault two young innocent women in 1987, who should have had their whole lives in front of them, he then found another way to continue his horrific offending by assaulting and defiling multiple victims and traumatising their already grieving families in a way that is clearly beyond comprehension.”