As David Fuller, 69, revealed the meticulous steps he took to cover his tracks, he said he had always feared being seen, “because the bubble will burst at that point and then everything will come out”.
He also told how he scoured the mortuary register and selected victims not marked “high risk” to avoid catching infections.
But despite near misses he was able to continue unhindered as a hosptial worker for more than a decade.
Fuller was interviewed from prison, where he is serving a full life term, for the independent inquiry into how he was able to offend for so long, with extracts released in an initial report. He told how he created graphs showing temperatures of mortuary fridges. This allowed him access to the mortuary logbook which he used, to choose “safe” bodies free of serious infections and to catalogue offences.
Fuller said: “It would say high risk… on a selection basis, they would naturally not be offended against.”
The report added: “Fuller went on to tell us that he would also look at the mortuary logbook after he offended, to assist in the cataloguing of crimes.”
He interfered with more than 100 bodies of girls and women aged nine to 100 over 15 years while a maintenance worker at
the former Kent and Sussex Hospital and later Tunbridge Wells Hospital.
After DNA advances led to his arrest on suspicion
of two 1987 murders in December 2020, detectives discovered nearly 900,000 images and videos of his offences on hidden memory devices.
The naked blood-stained body of Wendy Knell, 25, was found in her bedsit in June 1987. Five months later Fuller abducted Caroline Pierce, 20, and dumped her body.
Fuller pleaded guilty to both murders and also 67 charges relating to 101 women and girls’ bodies between 2005 and November 2020, receiving a whole-life prison term in December 2021. The report said: “David Fuller commented that one of the measures that would have prevented him from committing his offences was the presence of CCTV in the post-mortem room.
“David Fuller told us that he would take care to leave the mortuary and the bodies of the deceased as he found them.
“Advisers to the inquiry noted the considerable lengths to which Fuller went to re-dress and re-position the deceased, and his meticulousness in repositioning items that had been placed with the deceased in exactly the same position that they were prior to his offending.”
Fuller said: “Everything would be put back as it would have been before I entered. In the back of my mind I was thinking what happens if I get disturbed?
“Because at the end the bubble will burst at that point and then everything will come out.”
Fuller told his interviewer he was able to lock himself in the post-mortem room of the mortuary at the Kent and Sussex Hospital so it could not be unlocked from the outside and was able to continue this from 2011 in the same room in Tunbridge Wells Hospital.
The report said: “(Fuller) was brazen in his offending and appeared confident he was not going to be disturbed.
“He used the mortuary admissions logbook when selecting his victims. “Staff knew he looked at the logbook, accepting that this was for the purpose of monitoring fridge temperatures. This was not a credible reason and demonstrates a lack of curiosity and poor practice by technologists.”
Alan Collins, at Hugh James Solicitors, who specialises in abuse and clinical negligence claims, said: “The frankness of Fuller’s account of how he came to abuse and degrade his victims and their families is breathtaking. The brazen opportunism that Fuller exhibited was extended to him by those whose job it was to run and manage the NHS hospital he worked in.”
