The police arrived at his door on a cold December morning in 2020. David Fuller, a 66-year-old hospital maintenance supervisor, answered in his dressing gown. He had lived in the quiet East Sussex neighborhood for years with his third wife and teenage son. No one on the street had ever suspected a thing.
“Morning, David. It’s the police. We need to come and speak to you. ”
He didn’t resist.
He barely even seemed surprised. “We’re from Kent Police and we’re investigating the murders of Wendy Nell and Caroline Pierce in 1987. ”
“Okay. ”
“You’ve been linked as a suspect both geographically and forensically.
”
“Okay. ”
They arrested him on suspicion of murder. He was 66 years old, and for 33 years, he had walked free. The truth about David Fuller began much earlier, in 1954, when he was born in Portsmouth.
As a teenager, he stole bikes, set fires, and damaged property. By his early twenties, he had two burglary convictions. He completed an electrical apprenticeship at the Portsmouth Dockyard in the 1970s, then moved to Kent to work his trade. Along the way, he married three times and had four children.
On the surface, he appeared to be an ordinary man. He liked birdwatching, cycling, and photography. He even worked as an unpaid photographer for the band Cutting Crew during a tour in 1985. By the mid-1980s, he was living in Kent with his second wife, Sally, working as an electrician.
And then, in the summer of 1987, he crossed paths with a woman named Wendy Nell without her ever knowing. Wendy was 25 years old, beautiful, kind, and funny. She had moved into a small apartment on Guildford Road in Tunbridge Wells after her divorce, which had hit her hard. She was independent, but she desperately wanted children and a home of her own.
By 1987, she had become the manager of Super Snaps, a photo processing shop on Camden Road. Her boyfriend, Ian Plass, was becoming serious about her. They had talked about marriage. On the evening of June 2nd, 1987, they had dinner together at Ian’s mother’s house.
He drove her home on his motorcycle, they kissed goodnight, and she stood on her porch waving as he rode away. That was the last time anyone saw her alive. The next day, Wendy didn’t show up for work. Her co-workers tried to call, but her phone had been disconnected.
Her mother called Ian, who left work immediately and rushed to her apartment. He had no key, so he rang the bell and pounded on the door, calling her name. No answer. He walked around the back and climbed onto a small roof beneath her window.
It was unlocked. When he climbed through, he froze. Wendy’s head was sticking out from under the duvet. He walked over, gently stroked her hair, then pulled the blanket down.
He lifted her arm and opened her eyelids. She was gone. Wendy had been beaten, strangled, and sexually assaulted in her own bedroom. The room showed signs of a violent struggle.
There was no clear sign of forced entry. Detectives believed the killer got in through an unlocked back window or somehow tricked his way in after Ian left. They found a muddy shoe print on a blouse. Her diary and a unique key ring were missing, likely taken by the killer as trophies.
There was trace DNA at the scene, but in 1987, forensic science was still in its infancy. There was no way to find a match. The case went cold. Months later, on the evening of November 24th, another young woman vanished.
Caroline Pierce was 18 years old, cheerful, humble, and liked by everyone. She worked as a waitress at Buster Browns, a popular restaurant near Tunbridge Wells, and was saving up to take secretarial courses. She had recently started to enjoy living alone. That night, she took a taxi home around midnight after a night out with friends.
A neighbor heard a woman crying out “No! ” over and over for about 30 seconds. Then silence. No one could tell where it came from.
Caroline was murdered inside her own apartment. On December 15th, a farmer found her body in a roadside drainage ditch near Romney Marsh, about 40 miles from her home. She was wearing only a pair of tights. Her underwear was missing, which suggested the killer had haphazardly redressed her.
The autopsy showed strangulation, blunt force trauma to the head, and sexual assault. Like Wendy’s case, there were few clues. Her apartment had no signs of forced entry. Police suspected the killer climbed through a window or that Caroline knew him and opened the door.
There was one thing found at the scene: a blueprint, but it was too unclear to study. Both murders went cold. Police suspected the cases were connected, but they had no proof. For decades, the two young women’s families waited.
Meanwhile, David Fuller continued living an ordinary life. In 1989, he started working at the Kent and Sussex Hospital, where he had access to every part of the facility, including the mortuary. His colleagues described him as quiet but hardworking. He had a two-year affair with a nurse while he was still married, and she later said he often carried tools so he could claim he was fixing things if anyone questioned him.
His marriage to Sally ended. In 1999, he married his third wife, Mala, from Trinidad. They lived in a quiet neighborhood in Heathfield, East Sussex. In 2002, he was promoted to maintenance supervisor.
And then, beginning around 2005, David began committing crimes so disturbing that they would shock the entire nation. Using his key card, he entered the hospital mortuary at night. There, he violated the bodies of dead female patients. In 2011, when the new Tunbridge Wells Hospital opened, David moved there.
The mortuary refrigeration units had doors on both sides. One side was covered by security cameras. The other side, where postmortem examinations took place, had no cameras at all. David seemed to know this instinctively.
No surveillance footage ever captured him. The turning point came in 2019, during a nationwide review of old DNA evidence. New forensic methods had been developed to extract DNA from damaged samples, like those found in Caroline’s tights. Investigators also used familial DNA, a technique that allowed scientists to identify whether a suspect was related to someone already in the national database.
The method was key. Without it, the DNA from the crime scenes would likely have remained unidentified forever. Using familial DNA, investigators narrowed a pool of millions of profiles down to a workable list. They focused on people who had lived near the crime scenes and matched the likely age range.
The strongest partial match came from one of David’s siblings. They traced his family tree, and eventually, they found him. When David’s DNA and fingerprints matched evidence from both murder scenes, police reopened Caroline’s case immediately. During questioning, David insisted he knew nothing about Tunbridge Wells.
He claimed he had never visited the Super Snaps store or Buster Browns restaurant. He said he had nothing to do with the murders. But detectives had already figured out he was lying. David was a packrat.
He had hoarded electronics dating back to the 1980s: computer towers, hard drives, floppy disks, and phones. He also had around 34,000 printed photographs. He had documented nearly everything, including job invoices from his work as an electrician and pictures from his cycling club rides. He even kept diaries about what he did on his evenings out.
Those invoices pointed directly to locations around Tunbridge Wells. His diaries mentioned visits to Buster Browns. Members of his cycling group recalled routes they had taken, including ones through Romney Marsh, the exact place where Caroline’s body was found. And in the 1970s and 80s, David had lived on the same street Wendy later moved to.
Then came the final pieces of evidence. A photograph from the 1980s showed David lying on his stomach in the sun, his feet kicked up behind him. The soles of his Clark’s brand shoes were clearly visible. Investigators matched the pattern to the muddy footprint found on Wendy’s blouse.
His fingerprint matched the bloody print left on a shopping bag in her apartment. And his DNA matched the sample collected from Caroline’s tights. After 33 years, police had finally found their man. But that wasn’t the end of it.
From David’s hoard of electronics, forensic teams recovered hundreds of hard drives, memory cards, and SIM cards, along with 30 mobile phones and over 2,000 outdated storage discs. Hidden inside a secret pocket screwed to the back of a cabinet were four more hard drives. On those hard drives, David had filmed himself inside the hospital. Investigators carefully reviewed the footage.
They could make out patient wristbands. They paused the videos, read the names, and compared the data to hospital records. The timestamps in the videos lined up exactly with the days those patients had been in the mortuary. He had even kept a black notebook with the names of his victims.
The prosecutor later described his behavior in chilling terms: “He wouldn’t leave them alone. He went back to them again and again. ”
Police counted around 100 victims. They ranged in age from 9 to 100 years old.
David also held one of the largest collections of child sexual abuse material ever found by UK police. A forensic psychiatrist who reviewed David’s actions described his behavior as shaped by sadomasochistic tendencies, following a clear and chilling pattern. His crimes against the dead carried a maximum sentence of only two years, a fact that sparked public outrage and calls to change the law. David pleaded guilty to 51 offenses related to the violation of a corpse, including 44 charges involving 78 known victims between 2008 and 2020.
He also admitted to creating and storing illegal images. He showed little emotion as he entered the pleas, but the families of his victims said hearing the words brought them a measure of relief. When charged with Wendy and Caroline’s murders, David initially pleaded not guilty. He spoke very little during questioning.
He denied being mentally ill but described himself as having two personalities: one that appeared normal, and another that committed crimes. Then, during his trial in November 2021 at Maidstone Crown Court, he changed his plea. He admitted to both killings. On December 15th, 2021, the judge sentenced him to two life sentences, to be served concurrently, with a whole life order.
There would be no parole. No possibility of release. David Fuller would die behind bars. The judge spoke of Wendy and Caroline as vibrant young women who had their futures stolen.
Caroline was only 20 years old. After David’s guilty plea, Wendy’s family released a statement expressing both sorrow and relief. After 34 years of not knowing who was responsible, they could finally begin to grieve properly. Her mother, Pam, spoke about the pain of waiting so long for the truth.
Friends laid flowers outside Wendy’s former home on Guildford Road. She was buried in Kent. Caroline’s family had expected her home for Christmas the year she was killed. She never made it.
They held a quiet memorial at her grave after the conviction, leaving flowers and a photo. Some of her friends started a small scholarship at a local youth center in her name, helping young people study nursing or cooking, two things Caroline had been interested in. David’s crimes ignited public outrage and forced the government to act. In January 2022, the health secretary announced a public investigation into how he had gone undetected for so long.
Hospitals across the UK were ordered to review mortuary access policies and recordkeeping. In October 2022, new evidence emerged. David was charged with 16 additional offenses related to violating a corpse. He pleaded guilty again.
On December 7th, 2022, he was sentenced to an additional four years, to be served alongside his existing life sentence. During that hearing, families of more victims addressed the court. One woman said her nine-year-old daughter had been violated by David. He remained silent, showing no visible reaction as he was led away.
David is now incarcerated at HMP Frankland in County Durham. Prison staff describe him as quiet, keeping mostly to himself. He has given no interviews since his arrest. Back in 2007, Wendy’s father, Bill, told the BBC: “One day, someone’s going to ring that doorbell and say, ‘We’ve caught him.
’ And there will be a celebration. By God, there will be, especially if he goes down for a very, very long time. ”
That day eventually came. But Bill had passed away in 2017.
He never lived to see it. And Ian, Wendy’s boyfriend, never stopped blaming himself. He said: “Not a day goes by when I don’t feel guilty about her death. If I’d stayed the night, she’d be alive today.
”
