A British man who murdered two women and sexually abused more than 100 corpses will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
According to Sky News, 67-year-old David Fuller was sentenced Wednesday for the separate 1987 murders of Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20. Fuller pled guilty to the charges at the start of his trial last month, when he also admitted to sexually assaulting the victims’ bodies after murdering them. Prosecutors say the murders took place five months apart from one another in the town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent, England.
“Although the guilty plea won’t change anything deep down as the pain and loss will always be there, it’s good knowing he will not be in a position to hurt or cause any more pain,” Knell’s family wrote in a statement.
Authorities initially struggled to identify the killer because there wasn’t an established DNA database until years later. They eventually linked him to the murders in 2019 thanks to advances in DNA analysis. After Fuller’s arrest in 2020, investigators confirmed his DNA matched that of the killer’s and determined his fingerprints matched those found in Knell’s home.
A subsequent search in his home yielded computer hard drives, 1,300 videos, and 34,000 photographs containing “distressing images of sex offenses.” According to Sky News, the 14 million images included footage of Fuller sexually assaulting female bodies at Kent hospitals, where Fuller worked as an electrician and maintenance engineer. He told investigators he had sexually assaulted 102 corpses between the ages of 9 and 100.
“You have sullied and stolen fond memories, and ripped open old wounds. Your violations go against everything right and humane. They are incomprehensible,” Justice Cheema-Grubb said. “Many speak of inconsolable guilt of not being able to protect the vulnerable, of their own and their family’s damaged mental health, the impossibility of un-knowing what they have been told happened, of un-seeing the images they have imagined. It has shaken their sense of being able to trust the world, trust 6 hospitals, predict the respect and decency with which those who are vulnerable will be treated. They have been left in a dark place. They feel the outrage and revulsion that their daughters, wives, sisters, mothers and aunts would have felt at your objectification of girls and woman and they speak on behalf of them.”
Fuller received two life sentences for the two murders and a concurrent 12-year jail sentence for his abuse in the hospital morgues.
