To celebrate the capture of her killer, Bill and Pamela Knell received a bottle champagne from a friend.
They had to throw it away after a few years.
‘We don’t want to die not knowing what happened and who did this,’ Pamela told a newspaper at the time.
Bill Knell, a broken-hearted man, died from cancer in 2017. He didn’t know who had strangled his daughter, 25, and then sexually assaulted her body.
Pamela, now an elderly frail woman, was present at Maidstone Crown Court yesterday for David Fuller’s final statement that he had murdered Wendy Pierce and Caroline Pierce.
Like Wendy, Caroline, 20, was sexually assaulted and killed. Fuller dumped her body along with other members his cycling club in a field he had just passed on his bicycle a few weeks prior.
Both women lived alone in ground floor flats located a mile apart in Tunbridge wells, Kent.
Their deaths were dubbed the ‘Bedsit Murders’ and became one of the UK’s longest double homicide cases.
Pamela Knell was in Maidstone Crown Court yesterday as a frail elderly woman in her eighties to hear electrician David Fuller (pictured), finally admit that he killed Wendy and Caroline Pierce.
Like Wendy, Caroline, 20, was sexually assaulted and killed. Fuller then dumped her body in a field where he had just weeks earlier cycled by with other members of his cycling club.
Their deaths were dubbed the ‘Bedsit Murders’ and became one of the UK’s longest double homicide cases
Indeed, it is only now that 67-year-old Fuller’s murder trial has come to a dramatic halt with his guilty plea, that the full story of one of the most hideous killers in British history can begin to be told.
For having taken the lives of two young women in their prime, Fuller went on to commit further crimes of almost unimaginable evil – raping and sexually molesting the bodies of at least 100 women and girls in mortuaries to which he had access as a hospital electrician.
His oldest victim was 100 and his youngest, nine. He filmed his perverted acts, and took photographs of his victims’ identity bracelets and mortuary log entries. He also recorded their names and searched social media for more information.
He kept meticulous records of all the violations he committed in an upstairs office in his Heathfield, East Sussex home. The prolific hoarder also secured it with CCTV.
Police, who have sifted through millions of images on Fuller’s computers and hard drives, have not yet been able to identify all of his victims.
Aside from the horror of all this – with the jury at Maidstone Crown Court being offered counselling – police believe Fuller’s crimes may go way beyond the 51 counts of necrophilia for which he pleaded guilty, stretching back to the pre-digital era before he was able to use digital cameras to record images of his crimes.
Many families who lost loved one at the Tunbridge Wells Hospital and Kent and Sussex Hospitals, where Fuller worked, will be haunted to think that they might have become Fuller’s victims.
For having taken the lives of two young women in their prime, Fuller went on to commit further crimes of almost unimaginable evil – raping and sexually molesting the bodies of at least 100 women and girls in mortuaries to which he had access as a hospital electrician
Fuller was able to get away with his crimes for almost 35 years by maintaining a facade of respectability and middle-class domesticity.
People who knew him well, at least casually, described him as a family man, a father-of-four thrice-married and a loving husband and father.
He was an avid birdwatcher, photographer, and, according to West Kent Cycle Touring Club members, he was a friendly, enthusiastic cyclist before his back problems ended his passion.
He was living at Broomhill Bank School in Tunbridge Wells as a staff member when he murdered Wendy & Caroline. His second wife, Sally, was a houseparent.
Today we can reveal that beneath this veneer of respectability, Fuller’s offending can be traced back to the 1970s when he was living in Hampshire.
He pleaded guilty to three thefts at Portsmouth Crown Court in 1973 and requested that 23 similar offences be considered.
By the time he murdered Wendy and then Caroline, he was still living in Kent with his second wife.
He used the same criminal techniques as a burglar to stake out potential victims.
Caroline and Wendy lived in Tunbridge Wells’s ground-floor bedsits.
Around the time of the murders, reports claimed that a prowler was looking into the downstairs windows.
Wendy was the Supasnaps store manager in the town center. On the evening she died – Monday, June 22 – she left work at 5.30pm and, after a visit to a laundrette, went to boyfriend Ian Plass’s house.
He gave her a lift on his motorbike home at around 11pm. They said goodbye on the porch.
At the time he killed Wendy (pictured), he was in staff accommodation at Broomhill Bank School. His second wife, Sally, was a house parent.
He was living in Kent at the time he killed Wendy (pictured), then Caroline.
Staff phoned Ian to inform them that she had failed to show up at work the next day. He then went to her flat. Wendy lay naked on her bed, bloodied, and battered.
Detectives leading the investigation believed Wendy’s killer had been lying in wait for her.
The killer had taken items, including her diary. They have never been found.
Ian Plass has since died, but in a witness statement he gave to police, which was read out in court this week, he described the horror of finding his girlfriend’s body.
‘I recall there was blood somewhere. I could see Wendy’s head sticking out from the top of the duvet. The rest of her body was covered in the duvet. I moved closer to her and stroked her head. I pulled the duvet back to her shoulders. She was laying on her left side and facing the wall.’
Caroline Pierce was shot to death on Tuesday, November 24, 1988. She was the manager of Buster Browns, a Tunbridge burger restaurant.
On the night of her death, she went out with friends and took an Uber back to Grosvenor Road.
The staff raised the alarm when she failed again to show up at work the next day.
Three weeks later, her body was found 40 miles away in a water-filled drainage ditch near Romney Marsh – naked apart from the black tights she’d been wearing.
She was also raped and strangled, just like Wendy.
The jumper and skirt that she was wearing were never found. Her keys, which were also missing from her handbag, were also not recovered.
Fuller might never have been caught, if it wasn’t for scientific advances. The clock was ticking since the moment Fuller’s family member was arrested and DNA was added to the national database.
During a cold-case review of Wendy and Caroline’s murders, the DNA was found to be a close match to that left the killer of both women.
Fuller was taken into custody in December of last year. He claimed that he didn’t know anything about the case, but that his DNA was a match.
Fuller eventually admitted killing both Wendy and Caroline but, claiming he was of ‘abnormal mind’ at the time, refused to plead guilty to murder – until yesterday.
Although he blamed his obsession with having sexual contact with corpses on a childhood trauma, there is ample evidence that he was capable to have normal relationships with women.
One former lover described him as a ‘normal, loving man’.
During a cold-case review of Wendy and Caroline’s murders, the DNA was found to be a close match to that left the killer of both women
Fuller, who was 16 years old, left school to become an apprentice electrician at the Ministry of Defence in Portsmouth.
He married Gillian in 2002 and they had 3 children. He claimed in court that their relationship ended after she had an affair.
He then moved to Tonbridge in Kent, where he met Sally.
They married in 1982, and Fuller described their 17-year marriage as ‘long-lasting, in-depth and nice’.
He said that the marriage fell apart when she left him to become a member in his cycling club.
While working as an electrician at Kent & Sussex Hospital, he met Mala, his current wife.
They were married in Barbados in 1999, and had a son together. In police interviews, he claimed their relationship was ‘pretty perfect’.
His wife was seen crying in the public gallery at a hearing held on October 8. It is believed she learned the extent of her husband’s crimes only that morning.
Fuller was sitting in custody with his head down as officers interrogated him about his necrophilia crime.
When he answered, speaking in a quiet voice after lengthy pauses, it became clear he couldn’t bear to describe what he had done. ‘I am admitting the offences but I don’t really want to go into detail,’ he said.
Justice has been a long wait for Caroline Pierce and Wendy Knell’s families.
Caroline’s family are believed to have moved to Spain several years ago, but yesterday, on the steps of Maidstone Crown Court, Wendy’s family paid an emotional tribute to Kent Police’s cold cases team.
Fuller has not yet been sentenced. Despite their horrific nature, Fuller’s hospital mortuary offenses carry a maximum sentence only of two years.
The worst possibility is that his true evil may yet be revealed.