On Tuesday, June 23, 1987, Wendy Knell, twenty-five, was found by her boyfriend in her bedsit on Guildford Road in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, naked and bloodied in her bed. She had been beaten and strangled and then sexually assaulted. Five months later, on November 24, Caroline Pierce, twenty, was snatched outside her home in Grosvenor Park, in the same part of town. Her body was found on December 15 in a water-filled dyke at St Mary-in-the-Marsh on Romney Marsh, forty miles away. The press called the cases the Bedsit Murders. Forensic samples were taken from both scenes and from many local men, but DNA profiling was in its infancy and nothing matched.
The cold case teams did not let it go. In 1999 advances in forensic science gave detectives a full DNA profile of the man who killed Wendy Knell, and it went on the national database. In 2007 a review linked it to the Pierce killing. In 2020 new analysis of the old DNA led to David Fuller, then sixty-six, who was arrested at his home in Heathfield, East Sussex, on December 3, 2020.
He was born on September 4, 1954, in Deal, Kent. From 1989 he had worked in electrical maintenance at the Kent and Sussex Hospital in Tunbridge Wells and later as a maintenance supervisor at the Tunbridge Wells Hospital at Pembury, for the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, and he was still working there when the police came. His job took him into areas the public never saw, and he passed security with his swipe card when the mortuary staff had gone home.
The search of his house uncovered the second case. On his hard drives were 818,051 images and 504 videos of the sexual abuse of the dead, which he had filmed himself. The victims were women and girls in the mortuaries of the two hospitals, the youngest nine years old and the oldest a hundred. He admitted in a police interview that he had used Facebook to look up photographs of the people he had abused. Detective Sergeant Ivan Beasley, who led the Kent Police investigation, said the scale was likely to be unprecedented in the United Kingdom.
His trial for the murders opened at Maidstone Crown Court in November 2021, and four days in he pleaded guilty to both. He also admitted fifty-one further offenses against seventy-eight victims in the mortuaries between 2008 and 2020. On December 15, 2021, Mrs. Justice Cheema-Grubb gave him a whole life order, so that he will never be released. "You became a vulture," she told him, "picking your victims from among the dead from the hidden world of hospital mortuaries, which you were left free to inhabit simply because you had a swipe card." The government announced an independent inquiry into how he had gone undetected and said it would look again at the maximum sentence for necrophilia, then two years.
On November 3, 2022, at Croydon Crown Court, he pleaded guilty to sixteen more offenses against a further twenty-three dead women, bringing the total to at least 101, and was given twelve more years. The judge told him she had no doubt he had been wary of committing sexual offenses among the living, given the public alertness in Tunbridge Wells after the Bedsit Murders. Families of the dead called him sick and twisted. He is held at HMP Frankland.