Murderer filmed himself sexually abusing corpses

Double murderer David Fuller sexually assaulted at least 99 women and girls in hospital mortuaries where he was working as an electrician, it emerged yesterday.

Between 2008 and November 2020 his victims included three under-18s and people older than 85.

Fuller filmed himself carrying out the attacks at mortuaries inside the now-closed Kent and Sussex Hospital and the Tunbridge Wells Hospital, both in south-east England, where he had worked in electrical maintenance since 1989.

The crimes were discovered after Fuller (67) was arrested for the 1987 “bedsit murders” of Wendy Knell (25) and Caroline Pierce (20) last December following a DNA breakthrough. In court yesterday he admitted the murders.

Investigators have so far detected 99 potential mortuary victims, of whom they know the names of 78.

It can now be reported how, ahead of his double murder trial, Fuller pleaded guilty to 51 other offences including 44 charges relating to the 78 identified victims in mortuaries.

They include the sexual penetration of a corpse, possessing an extreme pornographic image involving sexual interference with a corpse and taking indecent images of children.

Libby Clark of the Crown Prosecution Service said Fuller had been a “prowler, peeping Tom” with a history of domestic burglaries in the 1970s who went on to live a very ordinary life in Kent.

“This was a man with a very, very dark secret,” she told reporters.

Describing the type and scale of his crimes as “unprecedented,” she added: “I have never come across anything like it – the numbers, the nature of offending – and I don’t know anybody who has, be they police or other prosecutors.

“They are just crimes which actually defy belief, defy your belief in how people behave, such continued offending against women and girls and a lack of respect.

“He’s moved on from killing to commit offences to actually committing offences against dead people.”

Fuller was born and raised in Hampshire, southern England, before moving to the Kent and East Sussex area, where he lived from the late 1970s.

He married three times and worked in electrical maintenance roles at the hospitals from 1989 until his arrest.

Fuller was directly employed by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust until shortly before the site closed, by when he had transferred to the new Tunbridge Wells hospital, where he was then employed by an electrical contractor.

Fuller generally worked the late shift, from 11pm to 7am, and as a maintenance supervisor had an access all areas pass, with a swipe card he could use to go anywhere, including the mortuary.

He was often alone in the mortuary after its staff left from their day shifts and would disappear into areas not covered by the cameras, detectives said.

Fuller’s crimes were discovered when officers searched his three-bedroom semi-detached home in the town of Heathfield, East Sussex, where he lived with his family, after he was arrested last December for the murders of Ms Knell and Ms Pierce.

Inside an office wardrobe police found four hard drives containing pictures and videos of Fuller sexually assaulting dead women and girls.