An investigation that the British government had commissioned revealed on Tuesday, November 28, the major shortcomings at the hospitals where a man convicted of murder had undetected sexual interactions with over a hundred dead bodies throughout 15 years.
After DNA linked David Fuller to the 1987 murders of two women and the discovery of millions of photos of sexual assault in his house, his necrophilia was exposed in 2020. Two morgues in southeast England were his workplace, and the photos and films showed him having sex with the corpses of women and girls.
"The offenses that David Fuller committed were truly shocking," the inquiry report said, according to AP News. "However, the failures of management, governance, regulation, and processes, and a persistent lack of curiosity, all contributed to the creation of the environment in which he was able to offend."
After pleading guilty to two charges of murder, 69-year-old Fuller is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He also admitted to dozens of other acts of necrophilia.
To put a stop to similar abuse in the future and to determine how Fuller managed to avoid punishment for an extended period of time, an investigation was initiated.
Horrible Crimes
In a report by Boston.com, the now-defunct Kent and Sussex Hospital employed Fuller two years after he murdered 25-year-old Wendy Knell and 20-year-old Caroline Pierce in two 1987 assaults in the town of Tunbridge Wells. Unsurprisingly, Fuller never mentioned his criminal record as a burglar in his employment paperwork. He then went on to work at Pembury's Tunbridge Wells Hospital for 33 years, during which time the murders in question remained unsolved.
The probe determined that between 2005 and 2020, Fuller perpetrated 140 acts of sexual violence against 101 females, ranging in age from 9 to 100. Photographs or videos documenting each incident have timestamps.
The investigation said that Fuller was daring in his criminal acts, especially because he committed them while other personnel were on the clock at the morgue. How he managed to commit the abuse while working without anybody noticing is something that the investigation has not been able to pin down.
The investigation found that Fuller, who was sometimes required to service the mortuary's refrigeration equipment, had unauthorized access to the department on a regular basis, visiting as much as 444 times in a single year.
According to Fuller, he used a logbook to choose his victims. Reportedly, he stayed away from those who had perished from infections or diseases like COVID-19.
Hospital Violations
Installing surveillance cameras in the morgue and post-mortem room was one of 17 suggestions given by the investigation headed by Jonathan Michael, a former chief executive of the National Health Service (NHS). Another proposal was that contractors and non-mortuary personnel should be escorted to the mortuary by another member of staff.
Miles Scott, who took over as chief executive of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust in 2018, said that most of the suggestions from the study had already been implemented and that others will be shortly. He expressed his deepest regrets to the victims' families in a statement, acknowledging their pain.
Those victims' relatives who were questioned by the investigation but whose identities were redacted in the final report expressed shock at the news and the difficulty of moving on after this.
