Original subtitles

Dave wasn't a monster.

He wasn't creepy. He wasn't weird.

He was always nice to be around.

Everyone liked him.

Dave had access to everywhere in the hospital.

He had free reign to go wherever he liked,

whenever he liked.

To think that I worked with this guy for three years...

..the fact that one minute we could be in the office

and the next minute he's committing these horrendous crimes

and then, you know, coming back

and talking to me like nothing's happened.

My whole idea of him flipped within an instant of being told.

You know, this is a guy that I trusted. He'd met my kids.

Dave wasn't a monster.

He was practically invisible.

The last person you would ever expect to...

..do what he did.

(CRIMEWATCH THEME TUNE)

Back in 1987, the body of a young woman was found.

She'd been murdered. Crimewatch did a reconstruction.

Five months later, another girl's body was discovered.

Both live in the same town, in Tunbridge Wells,

both killed in the same way.

Police thought a serial killer was on the loose

and they launched a massive manhunt.

But 20 years on, no-one has ever been caught.

Detectives have never given up,

nor have the victims' families.

The whole thing does change you.

Not just what happened, but life in general.

The first anniversary came up and the second anniversary came up.

I-It starts getting pushed to the back of the mind,

and then before you know it, it's five years, ten years.

REPORTER: "A press conference no parent ever wants to attend.

"Bill and Pam Knell are at Tunbridge police station

"in the hope that the killer of their daughter will come forward."

It just takes you back to that point again

and you think, "Will they catch him this time?

"Is this the time? Is this the breakthrough?"

And then, no, it's not.

REPORTER: "Caroline's body was found by a farmworker.

"It was lying in a drainage ditch,

"naked except for a pair of tights."

It's an unsolved murder that has become a part of my life.

It was a massive thing for all of us

and it's not something that you...

..get over.

I think as Dad got sicker,

he started to realise he was never gonna know

what happened to Wendy.

In fact, literally weeks before he died,

he did a TV appeal with Mum on the sofa.

BILL: I've got quite a lot of cancer

and the specialists say they can't do any more for me,

but I would really, really

like him caught,

before the end comes,

to know who it was.

You know?

He was just so determined

to do that one more appeal.

One more, one more try.

He was very sad to think that he wouldn't find out.

I accepted then

that we were all gonna die not knowing. That's it.

And I sort of gave up.

We never ever close a murder investigation.

We wanna bring justice and we wanna give families answers.

We knew at some point during these investigations

that the science would catch up

with the evidence that we had

and that forensics would be the key to this case.

In 1999, a re-examination was carried out

on the duvet from Wendy's bedsit.

The duvet had blood staining on it

and it had semen found on it.

That semen stain was examined more closely

and submitted for DNA profiling,

and they got a full DNA profile.

For the first time in the history of this investigation,

we have got a lead.

We have a full DNA profile

of the man that murdered Wendy Knell.

That is our biggest chance to identify who he is.

The profile was put to the national DNA database,

but there was no match.

So the killer of Wendy Knell

hadn't come to police attention for anything previously

for us to have sort of lawfully taken a sample of his DNA.

REPORTER: "Wendy Knell was found dead in her bedsit in 1987.

"A full DNA profile of the killer is now central to the investigation.

"500 suspects have already been ruled out.

"In the last few days, fresh leads have come to light

"and more men in Kent will be asked for DNA swabs."

Year after year, we re-ran that DNA process.

For every time that we failed, we did it again.

We just hoped that, one day,

the murderer himself would end up on that DNA database.

When she was found in the ditch that's all she had on,

so we believe there may have been the potential

for semen to be found on those tights.

There was a technique that hadn't been used,

so we thought we'd give it a shot.

We got a low-level partial result,

consistent with the full DNA profile

we had from the semen on the duvet at Wendy's bedsit.

This was a lightbulb moment

because for the very, very first time

in the history of this investigation,

we had that full evidential link

to show that the man that left the semen

on the tights of Caroline Pierce

was the same man that left the semen at Wendy Knell's bedsit.

It was the first big breakthrough on the murder of Caroline.

We had nothing else, except this partial profile.

You can look at the DNA profiles of the people on the DNA database

and see if their DNA is genetically similar to your killer.

It could be a mother, a father, aunt, uncle, brother, sister,

even a son or daughter.

So we took the DNA profile that we'd recovered from Wendy Knell's bedsit

and we put that back to the national DNA database.

What was returned to us was lists of other profiles

that potentially could be relatives of the killer

and we, essentially, profiled them.

We looked at their ages.

Were too old in 1987, were they too young?

Did they live in Tunbridge Wells? Did they have links to Tunbridge Wells?

We did all this research

and we whittled our list down to 90 people.

It was enormous to get to that point,

to look at a list of 90 people

and think that one of those may've been a relative of our killer.

So we got a call from the lab.

They had a match.

The match has a brother who lived in the Tunbridge Wells area in 1987.

He was in his sixties,

he worked at Kent and Sussex Hospital

and his name was David Fuller.

Hello. Morning.

Hello. Oh, yes. Come in.

Everything alright?

DC NICKI HILTON:David Fuller was already up, he was already dressed.

David, you're under arrest on suspicion of the murders

of Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce in 1987.

Do you understand?

He seemed very calm.

Anything in your pockets?

One would expect an innocent person to protest. There was none of that.

I'm gonna take you away now.

It was like he was expecting this day to come.

If you just wanna stick your shoes off.

So the priority was to get his DNA sample

and get it directly to the lab as soon as we could

to compare it to the DNA at the crime scene.

And literally the next day, we had the result.

The DNA of David Fuller

was a complete match to the semen DNA

that was found on the duvet of Wendy Knell.

And it also matched the partial DNA

that we had on the tights of Caroline Pierce.

His DNA matched the crime scene stains on the pillows,

the towel, the duvet

and all the intimate samples of Wendy Knell.

It was a billion times more likely the DNA came from Fuller

than any other person.

My name's Jeff McCreary.

I'm a Detective Constable with Kent Police.

Could I have your full name, please?

So we had all this forensic evidence,

but we knew that his defence

were most likely to try and attack our forensics in this case.

We knew that we also had to build a watertight case against Fuller.

My name is Nicki Hilton, I'm a detective constable

also from the Major Crime Department.

You've been arrested on two accounts of murder.

So I'm going to ask you, first of all,

for you to give your account

as to why you're forensically linked

to those murders?

OK.

He spoke politely, he was very quiet.

And intelligent.

Can you tell me what you know about those murders?

Mm. OK. Only what you've heard today.

The reason I ask, you were living in Tunbridge Wells at the time,

you may have heard about...

We asked him whether he knew anything

about either the murder of Wendy or Caroline

and he said he didn't.

He'd never heard of these murders.

There was a large police presence across Tunbridge Wells.

Many media appeals and anniversary appeals.

'Fuller was 34 years old in 1987.'

You would've become aware of these murders as you lived in...

Everybody in the Tunbridge Wells area

knew about the murders of Wendy and Caroline.

For him to sit an interview

and have no knowledge of the murders of those two ladies

is absolute rubbish.

Did you seriously assault Wendy Knell within that flat?

Do you remember any blood at all?

But when he was arrested,

in his wallet was a Post-it Note

with 1-9-8-7 on it.

We suspected that that would be a PIN number.

So every time he used his bank card,

he would've been transported back to 1987

and the year that he killed Wendy and Caroline.

If you want to just listen to what the officer's got to say to you.

So this was the first time anybody had been charged

for the murders of Wendy and Caroline.

It had been 33 years for these families,

they've waited for this moment

and that day had arrived.

The beginning of December 2020,

I got a call from Mum

and it was so strange, I just answered the phone and she's like

"They got him!"

"Got who?"

"The bloke that killed Wendy, they think they've got him!"

When we heard this David Fuller had been arrested,

it just disbelief almost.

We waited for an answer for all these years,

that, yes, perhaps they've actually got someone now. "Really?"

Totally mixed emotions.

Just a overall sense of relief it was sort of over,

and some peace for...

..some peace for Caroline.

A the weird thing is, I didn't feel anything.

You don't feel relief or anything,

even when they said it was definitely him.

I understood the words,

"Yeah, they've caught him,"

but I couldn't feel it.

I felt safe.

I felt safer that he was now...

..never gonna be a danger to anyone else again.

(PAPERS RUSTLE)

Martin, do you want come and look at some photos for me?

Well...

WOMAN:Dead people.

One of my CSIs was with the search team.

I vividly remember getting a phone call from her,

in tears, absolutely distraught and upset.

When she finally got her breath back,

she explained that while they were searching the study,

she was there when they found photographs

that appeared to be of dead bodies.

They're literally in the middle.

These might be even be blow-ups of them.

In our job, we go to crime scenes,

we see people who have been violently hurt

and injured and murdered, erm,

but we don't expect to find someone

who's got photographs of dead bodies in their house.

And it wasn't just photographs of dead bodies,

it was photographs of dead bodies

that were being abused in a mortuary setting.

I don't know.

I suppose my first reaction was complete disbelief.

This was an ordinary man.

He was married, he had kids.

It's difficult to get your head round that a human could even think to do.

Pull that whole thing out and seal it up.

And then they discovered some more.

Actually, Martin?

Yes?This, er, on the back of his chest of drawers,

it looks like he's got some hard drives in there, I would say,

stuck to the back.

'They found hard drives, computer drives, floppy discs.'

That's a SanDisk SSD Plus sort of a hard drive.

We've always wondered whether the person that committed these murders

was ever responsible for anything else,

but I would never ever have envisaged this.

As human beings, we always use the phrase

"rest in peace".

And that just kept playing on my mind.

The one thing that these people are not doing is resting in peace.

For 16 years, I'd been a detective sergeant,

running the county's paedophile unit,

and I've developed, I suppose you could call it, a reputation

as an expert in dealing with abusive images.

I was given hard drives

containing what I'm told

is mortuary material.

But I felt, as a sergeant,

"I can't ask someone to look at this

"because I don't even know if I can look at this."

So I decided that I was going to take on that responsibility.

And I remember plugging in the hard drive

and kind of taking a deep breath and thinking,

"Right, gonna have to look at this."

Fuller committed every sexual act

that it's possible to do with a human body.

The ages of the victims ranged from nine,

all the way to a lady who was over 100 years old.

He was abusing ladies up to...

..two or three days before he was arrested.

But the earliest footage we found,

I think, went back 2007.

Just on the first drive there was, I think,

897,000 different files

and I had to go through every single one.

He had a normal compact digital camera

and he would hold it...

..position himself.

You would literally watch him strip off

completely naked, apart from his socks.

And there was just utter silence throughout the whole process.

There was the complete lack of emotion being shown by him.

It seems to me that there's no thought whatsoever

for the fact that that is somebody's loved one,

that is a person.

They may be dead, but they're a still a person.

And that, that's one of the things that really sits in your mind,

that there is...

..there wasn't an ounce of humanity

demonstrated by him at any point.

You do find yourself thinking, "What is going on in his mind?"

and all I can conclude, really, is that

there's no arguing back.

There's no resistance.

He has complete control.

Even the time when he was disturbed

and he heard one of the fridges being opened,

he switched the lights off,

and I'm left watching this darkness and thinking to myself,

"Well, when the lights come back on, surely he's gonna be dressed?"

And then when the lights came back on,

he was stood there, still naked,

and even then I kind of think,

"Surely there can't be anything after this? He nearly got caught!"

And then you open up the next folder and the same thing's happening.

It beggars belief in so many ways that...

..that he was just treating it in such a normal way.

I would look at the stuff, catalogue everything that I found,

looking in fine eye detail at every single part of the body,

tattoos and scars and stuff like that,

and each time you're looking closer and closer and closer

for all of these things that were going to positively identify

each of the different victims.

And that became quite difficult, for sure.

There has been a personal cost.

I'm still struggling to...

..deal with what I have seen.

But for sure, it's taken me down some very dark holes.

I was having flashbacks and nightmares.

And it's that point there

that I told my wife everything about what was going on,

because she needed to understand why

I'm sat on the stairs crying my eyes out.

I never expected to be dealing with this type of offending in my career.

And I hope I never have to deal with it again.

Our inspector told us that we needed to start putting some plans in place

to be able to deliver the message to the families

that their loved one had been a victim of David Fuller's offending.

They've already lost a loved one

and dealt with the grief for that loved one,

we're then going back to tell them

something else has happened to that loved one, that wasn't the end.

That could trigger the grief again for people,

and that was something that I struggled to deal with.

It was October 2021.

I got a call when I was at work

saying that I needed to come home pretty quickly.

Didn't know why.

I think in the minutes that it sort of took them

to explain what's been going on,

I went through every emotion possible.

I felt sick to my stomach. I felt angry at him.

I felt sad because I thought, "My poor mum."

And then the sort of last thing was, "No, no, you must be mistaken."

I felt like my heart had been ripped out and I'd lost her all over again.

Mum died in February 2017.

She was 48.

My mum was that sort of person

that she'd walk into a room and it'd just get brighter.

She had that sort of aura about her,

that character that'd just make people smile.

I was 15 when she was diagnosed.

She said, "I've found a lump.

"I've had it checked and I've got breast cancer."

We knew within probably a month,

six weeks, that it was incurable.

For a long time, I couldn't look at pictures of my mum.

All I could see was him and his disgusting, vile face.

And I was having nightmares for weeks and weeks.

He was literally taking over my life and I'd never met him.

When you're unwell, you go to a hospital

because that's the safe environment, that's where you go to get better.

And I think when we left her there

on the 10th of February, when she died,

we never, for a minute, thought that she was in any danger,

and then to know that, actually, that place that we thought was safe

is actually the place

that she was actually at her most vulnerable.

In January of 2021,

the team produced Fuller out of custody

and interviewed him for the first time

about the mortuary offending.

So, do you know when you started at the Kent and Sussex Hospital?

What was your role there?

Electrician. OK.

'Dave was known by everyone.'

He'd worked in the previous Kent and Sussex Hospital

and then moved onto the new Pembury Hospital.

And did you have access to all areas or...?

As a senior electrician,

there wasn't really any restrictions for Dave.

He had responsibilities to carry out jobs in the hospital,

whether that means that he has to go to A&E, to the maternity wards,

there was nothing ever really stopping him to go wherever he liked.

And did you do much work in the mortuary?

There was nothing odd about him

needing to go and do jobs in the mortuary.

They had a lot of faults

on the temperature sensors for the body freezers.

They would often ask Dave to go and have a look at them

because I don't think anyone else really knew how they worked

or how to repair them.

Dave always worked the late shifts.

They were the best times for Dave to go and carry out his maintenance work

because there was no-one there.

Do you need a swipe card to get through there?

There's a key.

The entrance to the mortuary was directly opposite our office.

So while I'm going about my shift,

he's literally just on the other side of the door, erm,

you know, sexually abusing a dead body.

There's about approximately 80 allegations

of sexual penetration with, er, corpses.

So, whereabouts shall we start?

Where do you feel comfortable starting to take about?

Did...

No. Do you want me to help you?

For him, it's all about making it easy for himself.

That's the impression I get from him.

Why did you record what was going on?

He's all about minimising

his actions.

I can only assume to make him feel better.

What age range

are we talking about?

And the youngest?

FULLER: Erm...

He didn't seem to be concerned over the victims and their families,

he seemed to be more concerned about what people will think of him.

Yeah. OK.

And he's never explained why he's done it.

He's only ever said, "I admit those offences."

So maybe there is shame there,

but I don't think shame's the same as remorse,

and I think the shame is being found out.

(FULLER SIGHS AND STAMMERS)

Mm.

PRODUCER: If you could say something to David Fuller now,

what would you say?

I just wanna know why.

Why? Why would you do this?

Why would you destroy lives?

I-I don't know what I'd say to him. I think I'd cry. I genuinely do.

I-I think if he was sat in front of me right now,

I'd burst into tears.

I'm a firm believer that he has used his access through the hospital,

probably as soon as he got there in 1989,

and that's probably why we've never seen any more murders

because he's getting his necrophilia fixes

through his employment.

We still had to take Fuller to trial

for the murders of Wendy and Caroline.

We couldn't risk this case falling apart at any point.

His defence said they would challenge

the reliability and accuracy of the DNA evidence.

We had to prove to the jury

that there is nobody else involved in these murders.

We know that David Fuller is the killer.

Our biggest fear was that he would walk free.

Fuller was a hoarder.

When our team searched his address,

they found pieces of evidence

that all linked together

to build our case.

In the original 1987 investigation,

officers found a blouse in Wendy's bedsit

and on the cuff of that blouse was a bloodied footwear mark.

Back in 1987, they identified that as coming from a Clarks sports trainer.

This is a photograph of Fuller taken in the mid '80s.

You almost couldn't believe it.

You could see the soles of his shoes

almost perfectly.

And the sole mark matched the bloodied mark

that was found on the cuff of Wendy's blouse.

Wendy Knell was strangled to death

and sexually assaulted in her flat in Guildford Road.

So, to your knowledge, have you ever been to Guildford Road

in Tunbridge Wells?

We found a document for a vehicle registered in 1979 to David Fuller

and, at the time, Fuller was living at Guildford Road in Tunbridge Wells,

so he did know Guildford Road

and he lied to us.

We also found a number of these envelopes.

These are SupaSnap photograph envelopes.

There was a SupaSnaps branch in Tunbridge Wells

and that's the branch that Wendy was the manageress of.

He was asked if he knew about Buster Browns,

the bar that Caroline used to work at.

He had nothing to give us.

This is his 1986 diary.

There's a diary entry for him,

"Fuller, at Buster Browns, on the 19th of November, 1986."

Just over a year before he abducted Caroline.

This is the London to Brighton Bike Ride.

Fuller took part in this ride the day before Wendy's murder.

And this is a service record for Fuller's car.

On the 23rd of June, 1987,

he had his vehicle serviced in Tunbridge Wells.

He's ridden the London to Brighton Bike Ride,

he's murdered Wendy,

and then the next day he's had his vehicle serviced.

It's like he's two people in one.

He leads a normal life, going about his own daily business,

and then on the other hand,

he's out murdering women.

(SIRENS WAIL IN DISTANCE)

There was a huge anxiety

about having to give evidence at his trial.

I didn't want to see him.

The thought of being in the same room,

I was not the slightest bit courageous about this at all.

I just... It was just horrific!

He never looked anyone in the eye.

He just sat there with his head down most of the time.

We expected the trial to last for three to four weeks.

Day three, our forensic scientist

was presenting the vast quantity of DNA

that had been located at Wendy Knell's bedsit.

Whilst the scientist was giving evidence,

the proceedings were just stopped by the defence team.

Some more breaking news, and that is that David Fuller

has pleaded guilty to both murders of Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce.

The former hospital worker was arrested in December last year

after new DNA evidence linked him to two separate attacks in 1987.

He has today really thrown in the towel

and has accepted he committed those murders.

We'd spent months and months and months building up to this trial

and you could feel a sense of relief throughout the court.

And it's true to say that feelings are running very high

inside and outside court.

(EXHALES LOUDLY) Oh, my God.

All done. Guilty.

Finished. That was it.

The police had kept saying to us, "You must be aware

"there is some dreadful stuff that's gonna come out.

"Some really, really bad stuff."

And we're going,

"Well, he raped and murdered our friend,

"how much worse can it be?"

So in court, my sister was literally a couple of metres from him

and she said that he didn't show any sort of remorse,

wasn't crying, anything like that,

and it made her angry because she thought,

"Is this bloke even human?"

He had every opportunity to say,

"I'm sorry,

"I have done this, I'm so sorry." He could've and he didn't

and I think that just sums him up as a person.

It doesn't change anything. She is still gone.

We've had a whole life of feeling that way.

So even though he's been caught,

nothing really has changed.

I just can't understand the mind of such a man.

He has to be so twisted

beyond the normal world of human understanding.

But if it hadn't been for the work we did then,

they wouldn't have got their killer today.

He deserved those sentences, there's no doubt about it.

He should never be allowed out of prison.

As awful as those mortuary crimes are,

we have to remember that in 1987

this man committed crimes against two innocent young women,

horrific crimes,

and we should not forget that.

Death is sacrosanct to all of us.

We will all experience it some time in our lives.

And when you see what he did,

you realise that even that

is not sacred...

..any more.

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