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Cold-Case Detectives Arrest Man Over the 1987 Tunbridge Wells Bedsit Murders

A 66-year-old was detained in Heathfield 33 years after Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce were killed. By December 5 he had been named as David Fuller and charged with both murders.

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Kent Police custody photograph of David Fuller

For thirty-three years the Tunbridge Wells bedsit murders had no suspect anyone could put a name to. On Thursday, December 3, 2020, cold-case detectives from the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate arrested a 66-year-old man in Heathfield, East Sussex, on suspicion of killing Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce in 1987.

Wendy Knell was 25. She was found dead in her bedsit on Guildford Road on June 23, 1987, sexually assaulted and beaten to death. Five months later Caroline Pierce, 20, was dropped off by a taxi at about midnight on November 24 outside her bedsit in Grosvenor Park, a mile away, and was never seen alive again. A farm worker found her body on December 15 in a field near St Mary in the Marsh on Romney Marsh, forty miles from home.

The two women did not know each other, but their lives ran close. Both lived alone in basement bedsits, and both worked on Camden Road. Both had been beaten and strangled, and both had been sexually assaulted. Distinctive key rings were taken from each of them, the first hint that one man had killed them both.

The investigation of 1987 found no one to charge, and the case passed into periodic cold-case reviews. In 2007 Dave Stevens, the detective superintendent who had led the original inquiry, came out of retirement to help the small team still working on it, and a Crimewatch appeal on the twentieth anniversary drew more than forty calls. What finally moved the case was science: a full DNA profile believed to belong to the killer, which, according to the Daily Express, became available for the first time in 2012. With no match on file, detectives turned to familial DNA, the search for relatives of an unknown man, to find a suspect.

Police told both families about the arrest that day. Wendy's mother, Pam Knell, 83, said the news was "such a shock." She had come to accept, she said, that she might die without knowing who killed her daughter, and she was trying not to let her hopes rise too far. Wendy's father, Bill, had not lived to see it.

The man was not named on the day of his arrest. By December 5 he had been identified as David Fuller of Heathfield, charged with two counts of murder and remanded in custody to appear before Medway Magistrates' Court.

What was known on December 3, 2020. Police had arrested a suspect and detained him on suspicion of murder; he had not been charged, and nothing about his guilt was established that day. The details of the 1987 killings come from police appeals and press reports at the time of the arrest. Accounts differ on when the full DNA profile was obtained (one report places it in 2007, another in 2012), and the year given here is attributed to the paper that reported it.

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