A HOSPITAL electrician murdered two young women as part of his “bizarre and grossly repellent” perversion of having sex with dead bodies, a court heard today.
David Fuller, 67, bludgeoned and strangled Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, before raping them “at the time of or shortly after death”.
He admits killing the pair five months apart from each other at their bedsits in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1987 close to where he lived but denies murder.
Maidstone Crown Court heard how Wendy was discovered with signs of blunt force trauma to the head and asphyxiation to the neck.
She was naked but covered up with a duvet and there was evidence of sexual assault after her death, it was said.
Five months later, Caroline vanished from her bedsit after neighbours allegedly heard "high-pitched screams of terror".
Her naked body was later discovered in a water-filled dyke at St Mary-in-the-Marsh on December 15, 1987.
After Fuller was arrested, police found photos he had taken of dead bodies in the mortuaries of Kent and Sussex Hospital and Tunbridge Wells Hospital where he worked.
They showed he had a "particular interest" in the sexual assault of dead women, it was said.
Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson, QC, said: “The evidence further shows him to be someone with a particular interest in the sexual assault of dead women.
“The defendant’s clear sexual interest in such bizarre and grossly repellent activity provides a unique and terrible link between him and the treatment of the bodies of those who were killed, and thus with Wendy and Caroline’s deaths.”
The court heard how Fuller had convictions for burglaries in 1973 and 1976 and a man matching his description had been seen prowling in the Tunbridge Wells area at the time of the killings.
He lived with his then-wife around two miles from the bedsits where Caroline and Wendy were living at the time of the killings, jurors were told.
On the night Wendy was killed, a man matching Fuller's appearance was seen peering at a woman through a window close to her home.
Caroline had reported a "prowler or peeping Tom" outside her home around a month before she disappeared, it was said.
'BRUTAL DEATHS'
Mr Atkinson said: “There was no connection when they were alive between Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce.
“What links these two young women is the circumstances and manner of their brutal deaths.
“Each died in a strikingly similar fashion, which allows for the safe conclusion that they died at the hands of the same man.
“In the case of each young woman she was attacked in or just outside her home at night.
“Each address was in an area in which female residents had been the subject of prowlers and/or voyeurs at that time.
“Each had been attacked first by being struck by a blunt object to the head.
“Each was then asphyxiated by the application of pressure to the neck, as if by an armlock.
“Each had been left effectively naked, and each had been sexually assaulted at the time of and or shortly after death.”
'SEXUAL GRATIFICATION'
The prosecutor added: “What links these two young women, in such circumstances, more particularly, is this defendant, David Fuller.”
Mr Atkinson said Fuller got "sexual gratification through the observation and identification of vulnerable women, gaining control of them, and then indulging his depraved sexual predilections in relation to them".
He said it "all provides the explanation in relation to each of his victims for their murder".
"It follows that he is entirely responsible for his actions in killing these two women and in sexually abusing their bodies after their deaths.
"His assertion otherwise, we say, is a continuation of his attempts to avoid the consequence of his actions, by any and all means."
The trial continues.
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