David Fuller killings were ‘the stuff of nightmares’

David Fuller, 67, beat, strangled, and sexually assaulted Wendy Knell, 25, and 20-year-old Caroline Pierce, who were both from Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1987.

He was finally arrested for the crimes dubbed the “bedsit murders” in December last year following a DNA breakthrough.

Senior Crown Prosecutor Libby Clark said: “It’s the stuff of nightmares to be perfectly honest.”

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Ms Knell, the manager of a Supasnaps photography shop in Camden Road, was dropped off at her ground floor flat in Guildford Road by her boyfriend at around 11pm on June 22.

He found her body in the bedsit just before 11.30am the following day after breaking in when she failed to show up for work. She was naked, covered with a duvet.

The bed, duvet and pillows were bloodstained, and her bloodstained head was resting on a towel.

Police could find no signs of forced entry, and neighbours heard nothing through the flat’s thin walls.

Ms Pierce, who worked in popular café Buster Browns, also in Camden Road, was attacked and abducted outside her bedsit at the end of a cul-de-sac in Grosvenor Park around five months later, on November 24.

She was last seen at around midnight when she was dropped off by a taxi at her home following a night out with a friend.

Neighbours heard screams coming from the direction of the cemetery next to her flat at the time she is believed to have been abducted.

She was reported missing by her concerned family when she did not turn up for work the next day.

David Fuller

Her body was found by a farm worker driving a tractor around the edge of a field on December 15, some 40 miles away in a water-filled dyke near St Mary in the Marsh, close to Romney Marsh. She was naked apart from a pair of tights.

Both victims had suffered severe blunt force trauma to the head and both had injuries of compression of the neck by strangulation – either of which could been the cause of death – and both victims had suffered similar injuries during sexual assaults.

There is evidence Fuller remained with Ms Knell for some time after her death, while his second victim’s body was not discovered until weeks after her disappearance.

Top pathologist Dr Nat Carey found evidence that the sexual injuries suffered by Ms Knell occurred at the time of death or after death.

Prosecutors believe the killings may have been motivated by his sexual interest in the women after death.

At Ms Knell’s home, police found blood-stained clothing, a blood-stained Millets carrier bag and a distinctive shoe print in blood.

It is not known whether her killer, who could have broken in through an insecure rear window, was laying in wait or came in after she was sleeping.

With DNA profiling still in its infancy, a crude, low-level profile was recovered from the duvet cover on Ms Knell’s bed following her murder.

Samples were taken from many men in the area but no match was found.

In 1999, advances in science meant detectives obtained a full DNA profile but there were no matches on the national DNA database, which was launched in 1995.

A decade later, in 2019, police for the first time forensically linked the killer to Ms Pierce when a partial DNA profile was recovered from her tights, which had been in the water for three weeks more than 30 years earlier.

With still no match, detectives looked for any potential relatives on the DNA database, making a list of 1,000 names.

The list was whittled down to the 90 people most likely to have a familial link to the killer – by being a parent, child or sibling – and they were visited to obtain voluntary DNA samples.

A breakthrough came at the end of November 2020 when a very close match in a possible sibling was found.

Fuller was arrested for the murders of Ms Knell and Ms Pierce at his home in Heathfield, East Sussex, where he lived with his family, in the early hours of December 3 2020.

Detectives said he did not look surprised, but he denied any involvement and said he had no knowledge of the case or the area where the women lived.

A DNA comparison with the sample recovered from Ms Knell’s home was an exact match.

DNA found on her duvet, pillowcase, and towel, as well as intimate samples, was found by scientists to be a billion times more likely to have come from him than anyone else.

Tests on the DNA from Ms Pierce’s tights showed it was 160,000 times more likely to have come from Fuller than anyone else.

A fingerprint in Ms Knell’s blood, recovered from the Millets carrier bag found on the floor behind the headboard of her bed, was also matched to Fuller.

And the shoe print found on a blouse in her blood matched a white Clarks Sportstrek trainer, which family photos recovered from Fuller’s home showed him wearing in the 1980s.

Paperwork proved he lived in Tunbridge Wells, where he worked as an electrician, at the time of the murders, while both sets of his grandparents lived near Romney, where Ms Pierce was found.

He had holidayed there both as a child and an adult and was a keen birdwatcher, who visited the marshland area to pursue his hobby, while one of the routes of a cycling club he was a member of went directly past the dyke she was dumped in.

Fuller was convicted of “creeper-type” domestic burglaries often involving break-ins through rear windows in the 1970s.

He pleaded guilty to three domestic burglaries at Portsmouth Crown Court, with 23 other offences taken into consideration, in 1973 and a further offence in 1977, with three other offences taken into consideration, but he was never jailed.

Described by police as a “hoarder”, his 1980s diaries showed he had visited Buster Browns, while the semi-professional photographer also had Supasnaps sleeves in his home.

The victims’ family members were said to be in “genuine shock” when they were told of Fuller’s arrest and said they “thought this day would never come”.