The NHS, despite what we get told by politicians and NHS cheerleaders, is not the ‘envy of the world’. In reality it’s a third rate service that all too often fails those who have the misfortune to have to use it.

It’s also a service that vets and monitors those who work for it in a completely piss poor and ineffective way. As well as the often rude and incompetent NHS staff that the general public has to deal with, it has been recently revealed that the NHS did not realise that one of their support staff was abusing bodies in the mortuaries of two NHS hospitals over a period that may span decades.

David Fuller recently pleaded guilty to the murders of two women that he carried out in the late 1980’s. Up until relatively recently he’d not been connected to these murders but later developments in DNA technology allowed Fuller to be identified as the murderer.

Fuller is now looking at a whole life tariff prison sentence but what has come out about Fuller and his activities which were discovered during the investigation not only turn the stomach. The details of these other crimes make me wonder why Fuller’s other sexually deviant activities which took place in two NHS hospitals were not discovered earlier?

The Daily Mail said:

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, his youngest just nine. He filmed his perverted acts, and took photographs of his victims’ identity bracelets and mortuary log entries. He recorded their names and searched for information about them on social media.

With psychopathic precision, he kept files on those he violated in an upstairs office at his home in Heathfield, East Sussex, which the prolific hoarder guarded 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.

Hundreds of families who have lost loved ones at the former Kent and Sussex Hospital and Tunbridge Wells Hospital where Fuller worked, will be haunted by the thought that they might have been among his victims.

I’m absolutely gobsmacked that Fuller was allowed to abuse corpses for so long in two separate NHS hospitals. This fact raises a few questions for me and the biggest one is. Why was he able to get away with this behaviour for so long? Were there no mortuary techs around, no CCTV, no supervision of Fuller whilst he carried out his work as an electrician? Were suspicions raised about Fuller’s activities but not followed up? Even taking into account that necrophilia didn’t become a specific offence until the 2003 Sexual Offences Act there was probably plenty of scope for the management of these hospitals to find some reason to sack him even if he could not be arrested and charged prior to this act coming into force? Surely if there were rumours that Fuller was abusing bodies in the mortuary then this would have been a clear case of gross misconduct? What we have here is incompetent, incoherent and uncaring NHS management at its very worst.

For Fuller to be able to abuse corpses in a mortuary as well as photograph the bodies and articles personal to the deceased, then he must have had access to the bodies for a considerable amount of time on each occasion that he carried out his abuse. I find it difficult to understand how he was not apprehended for these activities earlier or why suspicions were not raised about Fuller? After all if he was entering the mortuary to for example change a light bulb which is a quick job but taking an inordinate amount of time doing so, time Fuller was using to abuse the dead, then why was this not noticed and noted?

This is yet another NHS vetting and management failure. Fuller should have been noticed and sacked for gross misconduct and the fact that he was not makes me wonder whether Fuller had help to do what he did, which is a worst case scenario or whether he was able to carry out these acts of abuse purely because NHS management is so unbelievably crap?