A mother told of her devastation at discovering that a monstrous killer raped her daughter’s dead body as she lay in a hospital mortuary.
Azra Kemal, 24, who died in 2020 after falling from a bridge in Kent, had been taken to the morgue at Tunbridge Wells Hospital, where her body was violated by David Fuller – a prolific offender with an estimated 100 victims.
Speaking to Sky News, where her work at Azra’s mother, Nevres, said she wanted to let the public know what happened, recalled the moment police arrived at her door to inform her of the news.
She said: “What does one think? How do you comprehend such a thing?”
Nevres a social worker from North Londo,n told Sky News that she had slept next to and cuddled her daughter to say her goodbyes, completely unaware that hours earlier she had been raped by Fuller.
Fuller had sex with her dead body three times, and even researched her death online reading tributes from her family and friends.
“I had spent two hours in the mortuary sleeping with her; and that gave me some sort of comfort. Little did I know that my daughter had been violated prior to that day and the evening of that day,” Nevres said.
“So, whilst I’m stroking my daughter’s hair, sleeping on her hair, a man had… crawled all over her skin… And there’s me kissing and cuddling and saying my last goodbyes.”
Fuller reportedly researched his victims’ identities online ahead of his sick crimes and would photograph their names on the mortuary record log along with their ID tags.
He would record his crimes on a digital camera and store them on a computer in folders sometimes titled with the victim’s name.
Officers found four hard drives hidden in Fuller’s home, with five terabytes of storage between them.
At a hearing in Maidstone, the court heard the hard drives contained “a library of unimaginable sexual depravity” filmed in the hospitals where he worked.
Fuller worked initially in the Kent and Sussex Hospital, before moving to the Tunbridge Wells Hospital in 2010.
He assaulted Azra for 16 minutes on July 20, 2020 and again the next day when Nevres visited. He returned a third time to abuse her for 35 minutes.
Fuller was an electrical maintenance worker and had legitimate reasons to access the mortuary – and had access to his own swipe card.
He had worked out that the separate post-mortem rooms would often be deserted after hours, so his crimes went undetected for years.
There is no CCTV in post-mortem rooms, to preserve the dignity of the patients. Fuller would access the bodies by opening the doors to fridges where they were being preserved.
Nevres told Sky News she was confused at how Fuller had been allowed to enter the mortuary “not hundreds but thousands” of times during his time at the hospital, and said he “groomed” hospital staff into thinking he was “a great guy”.
The court heard: “CCTV from the mortuary area shows that when on cameras he carried items or performed actions that would afford a legitimate explanation for his presence.”
Nevres has called on Miles Scott, the chief executive of the hospital trust, to resign.
“He should ask the victims ‘do you think I’m the best person to be managing this hospital trust?’ If you are truly sorry, you would step aside,” she told Sky News.
She added that she was shocked at the length of sentence attached to necrophilia.
According to 70 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the maximum sentence attached to Fuller’s crimes is two years’ imprisonment.
“We need to respect the dead and this must never happen again,” she said.
Fuller, 67, today admitted murdering Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce in their Kent homes in 1987, before going on to have sex with at least 99 corpses in hospital mortuaries.
More than 20 years after their deaths, he violated scores of dead women and girls at the hospital mortuaries.
The youngest victim was just nine, while the oldest was 100.
Fuller initially pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but midway through his trial he suddenly admitted murdering the women.
