David Fuller, a 67-year-old electrician from Heathfield, East Sussex, is accused of strangling the women in a case that went on to become a high-profile unsolved crime branded the Bedsit Murders after appearing on BBC Crimewatch at the time.
Fuller, who had admitted killing the two women at an earlier hearing on the grounds of diminished responsibility, has denied murder.
In opening the case on Monday [November 1], Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson QC told the Judge at Maidstone Crown Court that Fuller, who is charged with murdering Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, had a ‘clear sexual interest in a bizarre and disturbing activity’.
The court heard that Fuller, who was 32 at the time of the killings, had ‘worked for some time at two hospitals in Kent where he had access to mortuaries’.
Mr Atkinson said that photographs and images on hard drives found during a search of Fuller’s home showed that he had abused women’s corpses at Tunbridge Wells Hospital when it opened in 2010 and its forerunner the Kent and Sussex hospital where he worked from 1989.
It showed that Fuller had a ‘particular interest’ in the sexual assault of dead women.
He said that at the time of the two women’s deaths in 1987, Fuller lived with his then wife in a staff house of Broomhill School, Tunbridge Wells, two and a half miles from where the victims lived.
Shop manager Wendy Knell was last seen on June 22 of that year after she had been dropped home on Guildford Road in Tunbridge Wells by her boyfriend.
“Her body was found in her flat the next day lying on the bed naked but covered with a duvet,” Mr Atkinson said.
She had sustained blunt force trauma to the head and had been ‘asphyxiated by application of pressure to the neck’.
The court was then told that Caroline Pierce’s almost naked body was found in a water-filled dyke at St Mary in the Marsh at Romney Marsh on December 15.
Mr Atkinson said that both women had been sexually assaulted after they had died.
The prosecutor added: “What links these two women is this defendant, David Fuller.”
