AN ELECTRICIAN who sexually assaulted two women after killing them in 1987 performed similar sex acts on corpses at two hospital mortuaries, a court has heard.

David Fuller, 67, from Heathfield, is standing trial at Maidstone Crown Court accused of the murders of Caroline Pierce and Wendy Knell.

Their deaths, in Tunbridge Wells, went unsolved for more than three decades.

Fuller has admitted to killing the two women but denies the charge of murder on grounds of diminished responsibility.

He was arrested for murder on December 3, 2020, following new analysis of decades-old DNA evidence, and police searched his home.

There they found images of dead women at the two hospital mortuaries being abused by Fuller, Duncan Atkinson QC told the court.

Officers then found four hard drives with five terabytes of data storage in total attached to the back of a cupboard.

“When these hard drives were examined, they were found to contain a library of unimaginable sexual depravity,” Mr Atkinson QC said.

“There were both photographs and videos which showed the defendant sexually abusing female corpses in the mortuaries of the two hospitals at which he worked, first the Kent and Sussex Hospital, where he worked full time from 1989, and then the Tunbridge Wells Hospital, to which he moved in 2010."

The court heard the images showed Fuller performing sexual acts on women of “significantly varying” ages.

In a police interview, Fuller admitted using Facebook to search for photos of the people he abused in the mortuary.

In relation to identifying and naming the files containing images of his offending against dead people, he said he had gone back to name them at a later stage, using the ledgers from the mortuary and identification tags on the bodies, Mr Atkinson QC said.

He added: “He admitted to searching for them on the internet, including on Facebook. He claimed that this would be after the offending, rather than research before offending.”

Mr Atkinson QC said these images provided evidence that Fuller committed the acts out of “sexual gratification” and not mental illness.

“It shows the defendant to derive sexual gratification from sexual activity with those who have died,” he said.

“It therefore provides a reason for the killings, however deviant and repellent, that does not depend on an explanation of mental illness that deprived the defendant of his self-control.”

The trial continues.

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