A necrophiliac murderer was able to abuse the bodies of over 100 women and girls for 15 years in the U.K. without being caught owing to “serious failings” at the hospitals where he was employed, an inquiry has concluded.
David Fuller, 69, abused the corpses of victims between the ages of 9 and 100 at health facilities in southern England between 2005 and 2020. The maintenance worker who has since been dubbed the “morgue monster” was already suspected in two sexually motivated killings when police discovered the scale of his offending in hospital morgues.
In 2020, Fuller was arrested for the separate 1987 killings of Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, thanks to recent advances in DNA testing technology. Following his arrest, police searched his home and found footage that Fuller had recorded of himself abusing corpses. In 2021, he was given two whole-life sentences for the killings and a concurrent 12-year sentence for his other crimes.
At his trial, jurors heard how Fuller would enter morgues at times when he knew other staff would not be there, and that he would visit “the same bodies repeatedly.”
That year, the British government launched an independent inquiry into how Fuller was able to get away with his morgue offending for so many years without being detected.
On Tuesday, the inquiry blamed failings in “management” and “governance” along with standard procedures not being followed, according to The Guardian. Senior officials at the NHS trust where Fuller worked were allegedly “aware of problems in the running of the mortuary from as early as 2008,” and “little regard” was shown to who was accessing the site.
Fuller went into the morgue 444 times in a single year, reporters were told, with his frequent visits going “unnoticed and unchecked.” Inquiry chair Sir Jonathan Michael said that a “persistent lack of curiosity” had also “contributed to the creation of the environment in which he was able to offend, and to do so for 15 years without ever being suspected or caught.”
Michael added that Fuller’s abuse “had caused shock and horror across our country and beyond,” the BBC reports.