David Fuller was born in 1954 and worked for most of his life as a maintenance electrician, latterly for the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. He had convictions for burglary in the 1970s and was otherwise unremarkable to everyone who knew him. The press called him the Bedsit Murderer.
In June 1987 Wendy Knell, twenty-five, was found dead in her bedsit in Guildford Road, Tunbridge Wells. In November 1987 Caroline Pierce, twenty, was abducted from outside her flat in the same town and found weeks later in a dyke in Romney Marsh. Both had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled. The cases, known locally as the bedsit murders, were unsolved for a generation.
In 2020 advances in DNA analysis produced a familial link, and Fuller was arrested at his home in Heathfield on December 3.
What the search of the house found was the second case. Fuller's job gave him a swipe card and out-of-hours access to the mortuaries at the Kent and Sussex Hospital and the Tunbridge Wells Hospital. Between 2005 and 2020 he had gone into them, alone, and sexually abused the bodies of the dead, filming what he did. Police recovered a vast archive on hard drives and in a hidden compartment under the floor. At least 101 victims were identified from it, aged between nine and one hundred, and the true number is thought to be higher.
He pleaded guilty to the murders on the eve of the trial and was convicted in November 2021 of two murders and fifty-one further offences, and given a whole-life order. The independent Fuller Inquiry, chaired by Sir Jonathan Michael, reported in 2023 and 2024, found that he had been able to do it because nobody was watching mortuary access at all, concluded that the same was true across the NHS and the private funeral sector, and led to a rewriting of the rules on the security and supervision of the deceased in England.