David Fuller, 67, bludgeoned and strangled to death Wendy Knell, 25 and Caroline Pierce, 20, in 1987 in one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases in the UK that had been branded ‘the Bedsit Murders’ by the press.
The Healthfield electrician was caught when his DNA, found at the murder scene, was linked to him three decades later via his brother.
Fuller, who had admitted killing the two women at an earlier hearing, had pleaded not guilty on the grounds of ‘diminished responsibility’.
However, on the fourth day of his trial last Thursday [November 4], in a week where Maidstone Crown Court had been told that the former hospital worker went onto to abuse dead bodies at Tunbridge Wells Hospital and its forerunner the Kent and Sussex Hospital, Fuller changed his plea.
Returned
When the jury returned from lunch his barrister, Oliver Saxby QC, told the judge that a medical report meant his client could no longer rely on his diminised responsibility defence.
Shop manager Wendy Knell last seen on June 22 on that year after she had been dropped home on Guildford Road in Tunbridge Wells by her boyfriend.
She had sustained blunt force trauma to head and had been ‘asphyxiated by application of pressure to neck’.
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.
She had too also sustained blunt force trauma to head and had suffered asphyxiation by pressure to the neck.
The restaurant worker had also gone missing on November 24 after being dropped off home by a taxi.
Neighbours had reported hearing screams from her flat in Grosvenor Park on the night she vanished.
Both women had been sexually assaulted after they had died, the court was told.
Following the change of plea, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb QC halted the trial and remanded Fuller into custody for sentencing at a later date.
