THE MAN WITH THE MASTER KEY - The Bedsit Murders & The Kent Mortuary Scandal

🔑 A hospital electrician held the keys to the mortuary — and for 15 years, no one was watching the room.

In 1987, two young women — Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20 — were murdered five months apart in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. The press called them the Bedsit Murders. The case went cold for 33 years, until a familial DNA breakthrough in 2020 finally gave the killer a name: David Fuller, a quiet hospital maintenance supervisor no detective had ever looked at twice.

But when police searched Fuller's home, they uncovered a second, hidden crime that would expose one of the most disturbing institutional failures in British history — and force an entire country to ask a question most of us never think about: 🕯️ who is actually responsible for protecting the dead?

In this episode I trace how the Bedsit Murders were solved, how Fuller used an all-access swipe card to enter hospital mortuaries as many as 444 times in a single year unquestioned, why there were no cameras in the room, and what the official public inquiry concluded about a system where safeguarding the dead was, on paper, nobody's job.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series, Who Guards the Dead. Part 2, The Bodies Nobody Buried, brings the story home to America.

⚠️ Content note: this episode discusses murder and the abuse of the deceased. Handled factually, without gratuitous detail.

📩 Got a case I should cover? Email me: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

▶️ Watch the video version on YouTube. New episodes of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton every week — true crime, conspiracies, and the stories that keep us up at night.

In this episode:

• Who were Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce?
• How familial DNA cracked a 33-year-old cold case
• Who was David Fuller — and how he hid in plain sight
• The 444 mortuary visits nobody questioned
• What the David Fuller Inquiry found — and the reforms still pending in 2026

Sources:
Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) case statements • Independent Inquiry into the issues raised by the David Fuller case (GOV.UK) — Phase 1 report (Nov 2023) & Phase 2 report (July 2025) • GOV.UK government response updates (Dec 2025) • BBC News • Sky News • NBC News • The Guardian • Kent Police

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

On a morning in the summer of 1987, in a tidy English town called Toonbridge Wells, a young woman named Wendy Bell didn't open the shop. Wendy was only 25. She ran the counter at a photo lab. Back when that was a thing you did, you dropped off your rule of film. Then you would come back in an hour for the prince. She was very dependable. So when the doors stayed locked and the lights stayed dark, the people who knew her got worried in a hurry. Her boyfriend went round to her bedsit, that's the British word for a little one room flat to check on her. He's the one that found her. She'd been attacked in her own bed, in the one place a person is supposed to be able to shut a door and feel safe. I'm not going to linger on what was done to her. I'll tell you it was brutal. And it was up close, and whoever did it walked back out into that quiet town like nothing had happened at all. Now, five months later, a couple of miles away, a twenty one-year-old named Caroline Pierce stepped out of her flat into the dark and never came back inside. Caroline waited tables at a restaurant in town. She had a friend's, a life, and a whole open road of just being twenty. She disappeared off her own street. Three weeks went by before they found her out in the marsh country, in a ditch filled with water. The same kind of violence, the same hands, the same man. Now, according to the murders of Whitney Nell and Caroline Pierce in the Tunbridge Wells 1987 prosecuted as the bedsit murders, this was quoted in a CPS case summary. That's where I've gotten this information from. So the trail, it went cold, not for a season, not for a couple of years, for 33 years. No one on earth could put a name to the man who had done this. Now, here is what none of them knew back then. This killer wasn't going to run. He wasn't going to trip up and get caught the following spring. He was going to move a couple of counties over, get married, raise a child, hold down a steady job, and live an aggressively ordinary life for the better part of three decades. And the entire time, tucked behind that forgettable face, he kept a second secret, something so far past what most of us believe a person is capable of, that when the police finally uncovered it, a detective who had worked the worst days of her career said this case took something out of her she never got back. So today is the story of two murdered women and 33 years it took to give their killer a name. But underneath that, it's the story of a door. A door he was handed a key to, a door that should have been locked, in a room that should have been watched and wasn't. Not once, not in 15 years. This is just killing time. I'm your host, Elizabeth Stanton. This is a true crime conspiracy and stories that keep us up at night. So hey, time killers, I'm glad you're here. I owe you a heads up before we get rolled because this one kind of needs it. We're going to talk about not just murder today, and we're going to talk about what can happen. This is the worst part, to a body after death when the wrong person has the keys. I'm going to handle that in just a second. But I want to handle it the way a stranger that I would want a stranger to handle my loved one's body lying on that table. I'll say it plainly one time, and then we're going to move on from that part because it's pretty bad. And turning your stomach for sport has never been an idea of a good episode for me, and you know that. So this is the first half of kind of a two-parter. Each one's a standalone episode, but I'm calling it Who Guards the Dead, these two episodes. Today we're in England, and next time we're coming home, because I hate to say it, but we've got our own versions of this, more than one of them. And a few happen close enough to home that somebody listening right now drives past the spot. But this one starts in Kent. So picture place first. Toonbridge Wells is the kind of English town that lands on postcards. It's old, leafy, well-mannered. The sort of spot where most weeks the biggest headline is the weather attorney. Two young women living out their lives until they were murdered just five months apart in 1987. And the press did what the press does, and it gave it a name. They called it the Bedsit Murders. Wendy Nell in the spring and Carolyn Pierce in the autumn. The detectives of 1987 worked it with the tools of 1987, what they gave them. They went over the scenes, they chased the leads they had, and here's the choice that ends up mattering more than any of them could have known. They preserved the physical evidence, including a biological sample left by the killer. The science that would one day turn that sample into a name did not yet exist. They held on to it anyways, and they filed it away because it does come back. What they did not have was a suspect, though. No witness who could sketch him, no name scribbled in a notebook. He had no obvious link to either woman, and the absence is exactly what protected him. When you go looking for a killer, you look in the boxes, the boyfriend, the ex, the coworker, or the man seen hanging around, and he didn't fit any of it. He wasn't in the picture at all. So the case cooled, and then it went stone cold. And for the two families, the calendar just kept turning. Birthdays, Wendy and Caroline worked there for Christmases with an empty chair. King found performer of that. And then the anniversary of the worst days of their lives coming back around every single year and every single year landing on the same answer, which was no answer. That's the part of a cold case we don't always slow down on this show for. 33 years of it, a whole generation grew up in a time it took to find this man. Now let's move ahead to 2007. A cold case team pulls the old evidence back out and runs it again. And the DNA confirms what the original investigators had suspected but just could not prove. One man killed both women. Same profile, both scenes, useful to know, still nameless. Now the name finally arrives in 2020 and it shows up through the side door. The technique is called familial searching, and it works on a simple, almost unfair little truth. You give a chunk of your DNA with your relatives, you share that with them. And so even if a killer is never given a sample in his life, one of his family members might have. Investigators stopped hunting for the band himself and started hunting for his bloodline. And they ran the 1987 profile looking for partial matches. A parent, a sibling, a cousin. Anybody close enough to point down to the right branch of a family tree. And it worked. A pool of around 500 possibilities narrowed to roughly 90 familial leads, and one of those leads was a close relative. Fuller's own brother. Below that branch, and at the end of it sits a man no detective looked at twice in 33 years. It was David Fuller. Here's the man they'd been missing by 2020. Fuller was in his mid-60s. He'd been married more than once, raised a CERN, and built a quiet life out of Sussex. He liked cycling, he liked bird watching, he took photographs as a hobby. He had a long and remarkable work history, and one thing in his past he kept to himself. An old burglary record he never bothered to mention to the people who would later put him on payroll. To his neighbors, to his family, and to anyone who passed him on the street, he was a nobody. Just ground noise, the man you wouldn't really notice. In December of 2020, they arrested him for the murders of Wendy Nell and Caroline Pierce. And honestly, that could be just the whole episode right there. But a cold case cracked open by science with justice arriving just 33 years late, but thankfully arriving. And then they searched his house. And what they found there is a reason this is a two-part series instead of a tidy ending. When investigators went through Fuller's home looking for evidence tied to the murders, they found hard drives. Ooh, this is getting all goosebumpy, I don't like it. He hadn't just stashed them in a drawer. He'd built a concealed space, a hide to keep them out of sight, and what lived on those drives was a crime no one had been looking for because no one had imagined they needed to. I'm gonna tell you what it was just a single time, and then we're gonna spend the rest of our energy on how it was allowed to go on. For roughly 15 years, across his job at two different hospitals. David Fuller had been letting himself into the mortuaries. In America we call it the morgue, but in England they call it the mortuary. It's the rooms where bodies are kept after death in the hospital. And David Fuller was sexually abusing the dead. And he filmed himself doing it every time. Oh these so awful. These aren't the tabloid numbers. They come from a formal government inquiry that went through his own recordings. The inquiry concluded Fuller committed around a hundred and forty separate violations against at least a hundred and one women and girls. The youngest was nine years old. And the oldest was a hundred. And it went on from roughly 2005 until his arrest in 2020. And there was a time-stamped photo or video evidence of each one because he kept it well. And I learned all of this through the Fuller inquiry, um, 140 violations against 101 women and girls, ages nine to a hundred. And this is all documented by Fuller's own recordings. Now, the prosecutor who handled the case had been doing this a long time, and when she put it about as bluntly as a lawyer ever does, she said Fuller's crimes were unlike any she had encountered in her career and unprecedented in British legal history. She talked about his, and this is her phrase, uncontrolled stents of sexual entitlement, and he said he treated Wendy Nell and Caroline Pierce with extreme depravity. One of the Kent detectives who worked it said it was the hardest case of her life. She said going through what Fuller had recorded stole a piece of her s. These are not people who shock easily either. That's how far outside the normal this at. Alright, that's the what. So it's time to move on because the question that grabbed me about this case and would not let me go isn't the obvious one. It isn't how could a person do that? Although, oh, how could a person do that? You and I have done enough of these episodes together to know that for some reason some people we could not fully explain, just do monstrous things. The question that kept me up was smaller and somehow worse than that first question. How did he get into that room every time for 15 years and not one person noticed? The answer is the reason this episode is called what it is called. David Fuller was not a doctor. He wasn't a pathologist or a mortuary technician. He was a maintenance man, the electrician, eventually the supervisor, the guy who keeps the building running. He'd worked in these hospitals since 1989. And a man in that role, big hospital, gets handed something completely ordinary and quietly dangerous. An all access pass. A swipe card that opens every door in the place, including the mortuary, because when the refrigeration unit acts up at two in the morning, somebody has to be able to get in there and fix it. He worked nights. He'd wait for the mortuary staff to clock out and go home, and then the building was his. No one to ask him what he was doing. No one to wonder why the maintenance man was down there again. Now sit with one number because when I read it, I had to stop and read it a second time. In a single year, Fore went into that mortuary as many as four hundred and forty-four times. And as far as the inquiry could find Poles, nobody ever questioned it. And the reason nobody saw what he was doing in there, there was no cameras. The post mortem room, the place where the dead are kept and examined, had no CCTV at all. And the reason it had no cameras is the detail that genuinely turns my stomach. Because it comes from a good place. They didn't film that room out of respect, out of a sense that the dead deserve their privacy, and you don't point a lens at someone in that state. A decent instinct for sure. And one man quietly turned that decency into the thing that hid him for fifteen years. He admitted himself later that had there been a camera in that room, he would not have done it. And it gets colder because none of this is frenzied. The inquiry found he chose who he wanted to abuse. He read the mortuary logbook, the running record of who had been brought in, and then he made selections off that list. He specifically steered clear of anyone who had died of an infection because he was protecting his own health. That is not a man swept away by something he cannot control. That is a man making cool, deliberate, repeated decisions night after night inside a system that had quietly agreed nobody needed to keep an eye on him. So the master key was never really the card in his pocket. The key was everything just around it. The card plus the dark, unwatched room, plus the 400 trips. Nobody counted, plus that gentle, fatal assumption that the dead are past being harmed. So why would anyone bother to stand guard over them? Put that all into one ring, and you've handed a predator the only thing he ever actually needed. To be left alone in the dark. So what happened to David Fuller? In the autumn of 2021, four days into his murder trial, he stood up and he pled guilty to killing Wendy Nell and Caroline Pierce. He also admitted to the mortuary offenses. Dozens of charges covering the women and girls investigators had been able to identify from his recordings. That December, the judge handed him a full life order for the two murders. In Britain, that's the most severe sentence there is. He will die in prison. No parole, no release, no someday. He got an additional twelve years, served at the same time for what he did in those mortuaries. And the prison sentence answers the question of a man and does nothing about the question of the door. To their credit, the British government actually went and asked the harder one. They opened a full independent inquiry, not to relitigate Fuller, but to figure out how a system let this run for 15 years and how to make sure it never runs again. The first report came out in late 2023. It folks focused on those two hospitals, interviewed about 200 witnesses, and laid out 17 recommendations, things that shouldn't have been obvious and somehow weren't. Put cameras in the mortuary. Don't let a contractor wander into that room alone. It also turned up a small telling detail. Fuller routinely worked behind beyond, sorry, beyond his actual hours and took on tasks that didn't need doing. The signs were there, just nobody was breathing them. And how could they? I mean, really, how could they? This this whole episode just blows my mind, you know, and for Breton, I mean their law, he just got additional 12 years for what he did in those hospitals, in those mortuaries to those people. I I just can't fathom him looking at those logs and picking his victims. It's absolutely disgusting. So back to the inquiry. It widened its lens to the whole country. And what it found in 2025 is the park I can't shake. When investigators look past those two hospitals in every place in England a body passes through, whether it's a hospital, pure homes, every link in the chain, they concluded that the arrangements for caring for people after death were, and I'm quoting their own finding, tertial, ineffective, and in some areas completely lacking. They found that England had no organization whose actual job was to protect the security and dignity of the dead. Not an underfunded one, not a weak one, just none. It was nobody's job. So the inquiry's headline recommendation was to build one, a statutory regulator headed by a chief inspector whose entire reason to exist would be guarding the people who could no well guard themselves. 75 recommendations in all. And here's where it sits as I record this episode. As of the government's last update, at the end of 2025, they reported real progress on 54 of those 75 recommendations, with 21 still under consideration. They promised a full final answer by the summer of 2026. Which means that as you're listening to me, the answer might not exist yet, but the most basic Question this whole nightmare force into the open whose job is it to protect the dead. You still this may be sitting in a government inbox just waiting on its reply. So hopefully we know by the end of the summer. Now let me step out from behind the reporting for a minute, and you'll know it's me talking because I'm telling you, I grew up in Kansas, and there was a whole thing about farm country, and I didn't recognize as a gift until I was much older. It's the way we tend to the dead. When somebody passes, you know, the community shows up. There's a viewing, there's a line out the funeral home door, there's more food on the family's counter than can be eaten in a month. The neighbor mows the lawn. You know, somebody's uncle might be the one digging the grave. We just don't hand our people off to strangers and walk away. We walk them all the way to the end together because around here that's just what you do for your own. And I think that's the exact reason this case got under my skin the way it did. What David Four exploited wasn't a broken lock or a budget shortfall. It was a good instinct just gone and guarded. The decision to look away out of respect, to give the dead their privacy, to refuse to put a camera on something that felt sacred. That is a decent impulse. He found the soft spot in it, though, and lived there for 15 years. We build our protections for the living. We do it because we tell ourselves the dead are beyond reach now. They can't be hooked, can't be frightened, can't take the stand and name what happened to them. This case, though, is proof that the assumption itself is a kind of door left unlocked in a dark room where nobody's standing in front of it. And I don't believe dignity is something person stops being owed the second their heart quits. If that word means anything at all, it has to mean we keep watch, even when, especially when the one we're watching over will never know we did. That's not a favor you do for the dead. That's a line you hold for the living, so that all of us can believe that the people we love are safe after we hand them over. Now, you might be sitting there telling yourself, well, this is a British problem. An ocean away, a strange story from a strange place that couldn't happen here in the United States. I need you to come back next time because it did happen here. More than once, and there's a county morgue in Ohio with the man on the night shift did almost exactly what Fuller did for almost as long. And his own wife tried to warn them, and she got told it was county business. There's a crematory in the Georgia Woods where investigators found 339 bodies that were never cremated, and the families had been handed urns full of something else. And there's a building in Colorado that the EPA had to condemn as a toxic site with almost 200 people inside it who were supposed to have been laid to rest. And there's the ward at the most prestigious medical school in America, where the manager was quietly selling pieces at the donated dead through the mail. Same question. Every one of them, who was supposed to be watching? That's part two, and it's called The Bodies Nobody Burned. Buried close, not bird. It's the bodies who Nobody Buried. So don't miss that line. Before I let you go, I want to leave you with the question that this case left sitting on me. And I genuinely want to hear where you land because I go back and forth on it myself. When something like this happens, who do you hold responsible? Only the man who walked through the door? Or also the people all the way up the chain who decided that the door didn't need anybody standing in front of it. Can you be guilty of a terrible thing just by looking away from it? Take that into the Time Killer files and send me your thoughts. You can email me directly at just killing time podcast at gmail.com. That's also where you can send me the case files that are gnawing at you the local stories the rest of the country has never heard, and the ones you think I ought to be looking into. I read them. But for Wendy Nell, for Caroline Pearson, for the 101 women and girls whose names the court chose to protect and whose dignity an entire country is finally arguing how to guard, they deserved far better than the room that they were left in. The least the rest of us can do is refuse to look away from what happened there. I'm Elizabeth Stanton. Thanks for spending a little time with me today. Come find me for your next time with the bodies nobody buried. And until then, you're Dell, we're all just killing time.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrail. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.