Wendy was only twenty-five when she waved goodbye to her boyfriend Ian from her porch late that night. They had spent the evening at his mother’s house, and Ian had dropped her home on his motorcycle. They kissed goodnight, and she smiled and waved as he drove away. It was the last time he ever saw her alive.
The next day, Wendy didn’t show up for work at the photo shop where she was the manager. Her co-workers grew worried when their calls went unanswered. Her mother called Ian, who rushed over immediately. He rang the bell and pounded on the door, but there was no response.
He walked around the back, climbed onto a small roof below her window, and found it unlocked. When he went inside, he froze. He could see the shape of Wendy’s head under the duvet. He walked over, gently stroked her hair, and pulled the blanket down past her shoulders.
He lifted her arm and opened her eyelids. She was gone. Wendy had been beaten and strangled in her own bedroom. There were signs of a violent struggle.
A muddy shoe print was found on a blouse at the scene. Some of her personal belongings were missing, including a diary and a key ring. Investigators believed the killer entered through an unlocked window or tricked his way in after Ian left. Trace DNA was recovered, but forensic science was still too new to identify anyone.
The case went cold, and her murder became the first in what would be called the Bedsit murders. About five months later, and roughly a mile away, another young woman was attacked. Caroline was twenty years old and worked as a waitress at a popular restaurant outside Tunbridge Wells. She was cheerful, humble, and close to her parents.
She had recently started enjoying living on her own and was saving money to take secretarial courses. On the night of November 24th, Caroline took a taxi home around midnight after going out with friends. A neighbor heard a woman crying “No! ” repeatedly for about thirty seconds, then silence.
No one knew where it came from. Days later, on December 15th, a farmer found Caroline’s body in a drainage ditch near Romney Marsh, about forty miles away. She was wearing only a pair of tights. She had been strangled and beaten.
Her apartment showed no signs of forced entry. Police suspected she may have opened the door to someone she knew, or that the attacker climbed through a window. A blurred fingerprint was found at the scene, but it wasn’t enough. Detectives suspected the same killer was responsible for both murders, but they couldn’t prove it.
Both cases went cold. Meanwhile, David Fuller lived a completely ordinary life. He had been born in England and as a young man had gotten into trouble for burglaries and breaking into homes through windows. But he never served time.
He trained as an electrician, married twice, and moved between Portsmouth and Kent. By 1989, he was working at Kent and Sussex Hospital, where his job gave him access to every part of the building, including the mortuary. Co-workers described him as quiet and hardworking. No one suspected him of anything.
He had affairs, divorced, and remarried. In 2002, he was promoted to maintenance supervisor. In 2005, he began using his key card to enter the hospital mortuary at night, where he violated the bodies of dead female patients. When a new hospital opened in Tunbridge Wells in 2011, David moved there too.
The mortuary refrigeration units had doors on both sides. One side was covered by cameras, but the other side, where postmortems were performed, had no surveillance at all. David knew this. No footage ever captured him.
The turning point came in 2019, when a nationwide review of old DNA evidence finally caught up with him. New forensic methods made it possible to extract usable DNA from damaged samples. Investigators used familial DNA to trace the killer through a relative already in the database. That led them to David Fuller.
He was sixty-six years old and living in East Sussex with his third wife and young son when police arrested him at his home on December 3rd, 2020. In his home, investigators found an enormous collection of electronics — hundreds of hard drives, memory cards, SIM cards, mobile phones, and over two thousand outdated storage discs. Hidden behind a cabinet was a secret pocket holding four more hard drives. On those drives were videos David had filmed inside hospital mortuaries.
He had violated at least one hundred dead bodies, ranging from a nine-year-old girl to a one-hundred-year-old woman, and he had documented everything. He had even kept a black notebook with the names of his victims. While reviewing the footage, investigators read patient wristbands and matched timestamps with hospital records. Families learned that their loved ones had been violated in death.
A forensic psychiatrist described David’s behavior as shaped by sadomasochistic tendencies. David also held one of the largest collections of child sexual abuse material ever found by UK police. When questioned, David denied any knowledge of the murders. He said he had never visited the businesses where Wendy and Caroline had worked and claimed he knew nothing about Tunbridge Wells.
But officers found invoices and diaries that placed him in those exact locations. Photographs from his cycling club showed him traveling through Romney Marsh, where Caroline’s body had been found. A photo of David lying in the sun showed the soles of his shoes clearly, and those shoes matched the footprint found on Wendy’s blouse. His fingerprint also matched the blurred print from Caroline’s apartment.
And his DNA matched the sample from Caroline’s tights exactly. For over three decades, no one had connected the hardest-working electrician in the hospital to two unsolved murders. But now everything lined up. David initially pleaded not guilty to the murders.
He said very little, denied being mentally ill, but claimed he had two personalities — one that appeared normal and another that committed crimes. During his trial in November 2021, he changed his plea and admitted to killing both women. On December 15th, 2021, the judge sentenced him to two life sentences with a whole life order. There would be no parole, no release.
The judge said David would die behind bars for taking the lives of two young women and committing unspeakable acts against the dead. Wendy’s family had waited thirty-four years for answers. Her mother, Pam, spoke about the pain of waiting so long. Friends left flowers outside Wendy’s former home.
Caroline’s family held a quiet memorial at her grave, leaving flowers and a photo. Some of Caroline’s friends started a scholarship in her name at a local youth center to help young people study nursing or cooking. The case sparked public outrage. A public inquiry was launched into how David went undetected for so long.
Hospitals across the UK reviewed their mortuary access policies, and lawmakers pushed for stricter punishments for violating a corpse, which had previously carried a maximum sentence of just two years. In 2022, David was charged with additional offenses and sentenced to four more years, served alongside his life sentence. Wendy’s father, Bill, had told the BBC in 2007, “One day, someone’s going to ring that doorbell and say, ‘We’ve caught him. ’ And there will be a celebration.
”
But Bill passed away in 2017 and never lived to see that day. Ian, Wendy’s boyfriend, still blamed 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.
”
