Murder suspect sexually abused corpses in hospital mortuaries for extended period

David Fuller, 67, had kept records of the names of women he had abused using ledgers from the mortuary and identification tags on the bodies and had searched for their details on the internet, the jury at Maidstone Crow Court heard on Monday.

Mr Fuller, of Heathfield, East Sussex, had worked as an electrician at the Kent and Sussex Hospital in Tunbridge Wells from 1989 until 2010, when he moved to work at the Tunbridge Wells Hospital at Pembury.

He is on trial for the murder of two Tunbridge Wells women in 1987 – before he worked for the NHS. He has admitted their killing but claims he was “suffering from an abnormality of mind so that his responsibility was substantially diminished,” said prosecuting council Duncan Atkinson QC. “If that were right, then the defendant would be guilty of manslaughter, not murder,” said Mr Atkinson.

In his opening statement, Mr Atkinson outlined the evidence against Mr Fuller for the murders of Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce. Both women lived alone: Ms Knell was found dead in her flat and Ms Pierce’s body was found in a water-filled dyke on Romney Marsh some weeks after she disappeared. Both had evidence of blunt trauma injury and semen was found on their clothing and bed linen. Advances in DNA technology mean this was eventually compared with that of Mr Fuller.

In both cases, it was thought that Mr Fuller sexually assaulted them around the time or possibly after their deaths, he said.

But Mr Atkinson added the sexual assualts in hospitals mortuaries showed his “clear sexual interest in such bizarre and grossly repellent activity” and provided a link between him and the deaths of the two women.

He outlined how Mr Fuller could access the mortuary due to his job but often chose times towards the end of his shift when other staff would have left. He would initially appear to be carrying out tasks in the mortuary but later abused the female bodies – who included a wide range of ages.

Evidence from his swipecard suggested he spent more time with the bodies than needed just for the assaults, Mr Atkinson said. The assaults were recorded on a portable digital camera and then stored on hard drives which police found at his home. This provided a “systematic library of his obscene activity,” Mr Atkinson said. He described Mr Fuller’s actions as ordered and controlled.

When police searched his home in late 2020, they found the hard drives which contained five terabytes of data and, hidden in reams of paper, images of deceased women being sexually abused. In some cases, Mr Fuller was also shown in the images, said Mr Atkinson.

The hard drives “were found to contain a library of sexual depravity. There were both photos and videos showing the defendant sexually abusing bodies in the two hospitals where he had worked,” he said.

But he said that his “bizarre depraved activity… shows that he derives sexual gratification from sexual activity with those who had died.” This provided a reason for the killings which did not depend on mental illness depriving the defendant of self-control, he said.

When questioned by police, Mr Fuller had initially denied involvement in the two women’s deaths but accepted that he had sexually interfered with corpses, although he said it was not for sexual gratification, said Mr Atkinson. He said he did not know how often it had taken place or why it had started, but told police he “had a lot of trauma when he was little” and had been sexually traumatised when he was four or five.

Mr Atkinson told the court that Mr Fuller had a “cold blooded approach” to sexual activity with corpses. He had searched for the women he abused on the internet – including through Facebook — but could not explain how in one case he had searched for a woman who had been taken to a different mortuary, he said.

During the trial, the court is expected to hear evidence from psychiatrists about Mr Fuller’s state of mind. Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told the jury they should focus on whether Mr Fuller could be held responsible for what he had done and offered them advice on coping with the distressing evidence.

The trial continues.

Story updated at 8.10pm on 1 November 2021.