Double murderer David Fuller sexually assaulted at least 99 women and girls in hospital mortuaries where he was working as an electrician, it can now be revealed.

The 67-year-old’s victims included three children under the age of 18 and others older than 85 between 2008 and November 2020.

Fuller filmed himself carrying out the attacks at mortuaries inside the now closed Kent and Sussex Hospital and the Tunbridge Wells Hospital, in Pembury, where he worked in electrical maintenance roles since 1989.

The shocking crimes were only discovered after Fuller was arrested for the 1987 “bedsit murders” of Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, in December last year following a DNA breakthrough.

Investigators have so far detected 99 potential victims, of which they know the names of 78.

It can now be reported that ahead of his double murder trial, Fuller pleaded guilty to 51 other offences, including 44 charges relating to the 78 identified victims in mortuaries.

They include the sexual penetration of a corpse, possessing an extreme pornographic image involving sexual interference with a corpse and taking indecent images of children.

Senior Crown Prosecution Service Crown Prosecutor Libby Clark said Fuller had been a “prowler, Peeping Tom” with a history of domestic burglaries in the 1970s, who went on to live a very ordinary life in Kent.

But she added: “This was a man with a very, very dark secret.”

Describing the type and scale of his crimes as “unprecedented,” she added: “I have never come across anything like it – the numbers, the nature of offending – and I don’t know anybody who has, be they police or other prosecutors.

“They are just crimes which actually defy belief, defy your belief in how people behave, such continued offending against women and girls and a lack of respect.

“He’s moved on from killing to commit offences to actually committing offences against dead people.”

Fuller was born and raised in Hampshire before moving to the Kent and East Sussex area, where he lived from the late 1970s.

He married three times and worked in electrical maintenance roles at the hospitals from 1989 up until his arrest.

Fuller was directly employed by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust until shortly before the site closed, by when he had transferred to the new Tunbridge Wells hospital, where he was then employed by an electrical contractor which works with the NHS.

Fuller generally worked the late shift, from 11pm to 7am, and as a maintenance supervisor had an access all areas pass, with a swipe card he could use to go anywhere, including the mortuary.

He was often alone in the mortuary after its staff left from their day shifts and would disappear into areas not covered by the cameras, detectives said.

Fuller’s crimes were discovered when officers searched his three-bedroom semi-detached home in the town of Heathfield, East Sussex, where he lived with his family, after he was arrested for the murders of Ms Knell and Ms Pierce in the early hours of December 3 2020.

The box room acted as his home office, which was monitored by a CCTV system and had access to the loft through a hatch.

Inside an office wardrobe, police found a handmade box screwed to the back of a cabinet, with four hard drives hidden inside, containing pictures and videos of Fuller sexually assaulting dead women and girls.

Kent Police Chief Superintendent Paul Fotheringham chaired an identification panel, with the help of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS trust and the coroners service, using techniques learned from the Manchester Arena bombing and the Grenfell Tower disaster.

But he said: “Whilst we are going to be able to identify the vast majority to a very high standard to be able to tell the families, there are some we are not going to be able to ever identify.”

More than 150 specialist family liaison officers were tasked with visiting the victims’ families from Kent, Sussex and Essex and the Met.

Some £1.5 million has been earmarked to pay for bespoke support by the Victim Support Service and a phone bank will be set up for anyone concerned their relatives may have been a victim.

Ms Clark said the victims’ families were in “utter disbelief” when they were told what Fuller had done.

“Some of the victims will have been dead for a good many years but others will not have been, and families are just getting used to it, going through that cycle of grief and now receiving devastating news of this man’s conduct towards their loved ones when they were dead.”

She said Fuller is “clearly a danger to women,” adding: “The offending is incomprehensible, it’s so off the scale and not what you think people in hospital are going to be doing.

“It’s just incomprehensible the scale and depravity of what he’s done.”

The evidence found dates back to 2008 but police believe that could be because that was when digital camera devices were becoming more widespread, so the true scale of his offending may never be known.

More than 3,500 exhibits were seized from “hoarder” Fuller’s office and loft, including computers going back to the late 1970s, mobile phones as old as 20 years and handwritten diaries.

There were more than 100 hard drives, 2,200 floppy discs, 30 sim cards and mobile phones, 1,300 CDs and DVDs, 34,000 photo prints, negatives, slides and camera rolls, and 3,500 digital storage devices.

A dedicated team of 100 officers and staff was created to investigate and officers took five months to sift through the material.

Fuller pleaded guilty to seven charges relating to the material, including possession of indecent images of children, possession of prohibited images of children, possession of extreme pornography and voyeurism.

Mr Fotheringham said there is no evidence Fuller shared the images, worked with anyone else or carried out similar offences outside of the two hospitals.