Warning: Some readers may find this story psychologically distressing. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
North London resident Nevres Kemal reacted to the news from police that necrophiliac and murderer David Fuller had sexually molested her dead daughter Azra at a hospital morgue by grabbing a kitchen knife in a rage and running out seeking revenge, mistakenly believing Fuller was being held by authorities at a nearby police station.
“My only thought was, ‘he’s not going to get away with this.’ I’d just been told he’d raped her in hospital when she was dead. It was incomprehensible. I felt I had to take things into my own hands – find him, punish him. I’m her mother,” Kemal revealed to The Daily Mail.
Police informed Kemal last month that her deceased 24-year-old daughter, who had died in a car wreck in July 2020, had been sexually molested three separate times by Fuller, including before and after the mother visited the hospital morgue to say goodbye.
“If I’d found him, I’m 99.99 percent sure I’d have put that knife straight through his heart because he’d put a knife through mine. The thought of him violating her – of touching her hair, touching her skin…,” the devastated mother recalled.
“But as I walked toward the police station, all hell broke loose. Police officers seemed to spring from everywhere. I was handcuffed and thrown to the floor by eight or nine of them,” Kemal added, explaining that the officers who’d come to her home to inform her of Fuller’s crimes had called into the station to inform them that she was running around with a knife.
“But the police who arrested me didn’t know what had happened. I was crying ‘my daughter was raped in hospital and she’s dead.’ They were looking at me, going, ‘does this woman need psychiatric help?’” Kemal said, recalling the ordeal.
The mother said that while she was being arrested, she shouted “I need to put an end to this” and that she was “looking for Dave,” who “needs to be punished.”
At the time of Kemal’s arrest, Fuller was actually being detained in Belmarsh Prison – the notorious maximum-security penitentiary in southeast London, since his arrest last December.
Kemal was put under arrest and detained for 34 hours, in part due to concerns from police that she might harm herself. “When they knew what had happened to Azra they were softer to me. One officer in the custody area was crying as she took my fingerprints, photographs and DNA. She said, ‘it’s awful. We can’t believe it. We’ve never heard anything such as this,’” she said.
In a separate interview with Sky News, Kemal said that she had spent two hours in the mortuary with her daughter to say her last goodbyes, unaware that she “had been violated prior to that day and the evening of that day” by Fuller.
“He had entered the morgue and autopsy area thousands of times, not hundreds, thousands and no one ever stopped him or asked what’s this guy doing here,” Kemal said. The mother said Fuller had slyly earned the trust of mortuary staff, who came to believe he was “a great guy,” allowing him to enter and exit the premises at will without suspicion.
Unimaginable Crimes of Unprecedented Scale
Following his arrest, Fuller was charged in the 1987 murders of Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20 in Tunbridge Wells. A police search of his home found images and videos of “unimaginable depravity,” including hard drives, CDs, USB sticks and hard copies documenting self-recorded images of him molesting female bodies, including three children, between 2008 and late 2020. Fuller’s victims are thought to have ranged in age from nine to 100. In addition to abusing them, he reportedly used social media resources like Facebook to research their lives. Fuller has admitted to the abuse of 100 girls and women, but authorities fear his abuse may stretch back to before 2008. He was hired as a hospital electrician at the Kent and Sussex Hospital in 1989, and moved on to work at the Tunbridge Wells Hospital in 2011 after the former was shuttered.
Fuller pleaded guilty to the murder charges on Thursday, with a revival of the cold case made possible thanks to advances in DNA evidence. A date for his sentencing has yet to be announced, but he is broadly expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Britain abolished the death penalty in 1965.
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Prosecutors have called Fuller’s case “unprecedented” in UK legal history, and said that “no British court has ever seen abuse on this scale against the dead before…it’s the stuff of nightmares.”
Police have spent the equivalent of $2.6 million on victim support programmes in Fuller’s case, with over 300 officers assigned to track down relatives and provide psychological support. Police have acknowledged that some of the victims may never be identified.