KEY POINTS

  • British man David Fuller pleaded guilty last week to the 1987 murders of two young women
  • He also admitted 44 charges in relation to necrophilia involving women and girls
  • The mother of one of his victims was arrested after rushing to a police station with a knife with the intent of punishing him

A U.K. mother was arrested after she took a knife and rushed to a London police station to "punish" the necrophile who raped the body of her daughter.

David Fuller, 67, pleaded guilty last week to killing Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, in separate attacks in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, nearly 35 years ago. He also admitted 44 charges in relation to necrophilia involving women and girls aged between 9 and 100 in morgues in Sussex and Kent.

Azra Kemal, 24 — who died after falling from a bridge in Kent in July 2020 — was among his victims. When police informed her mother, Nevres Kemal, that Azra's dead body had been raped by a man while she'd been in the morgue in Tunbridge Wells Hospital, the 57-year-old mom was consumed by a frightening rage.

Nevres, a social worker from north London, told the Daily Mail that she took a knife from the kitchen and ran to the nearby Colindale police station, where she believed the man was being held, to "punish" her daughter's abuser, whom she knew only as Dave.

"I felt I had to take things into my own hands — find him, punish him. I’m her mother," Nevres said. "If I’d found him, I’m 99.99% sure I’d have put that knife straight through his heart because he'd put a knife through mine."

When she arrived at the station, however, she recalled how "all hell broke loose." Around eight police officers apprehended her and handcuffed her before she was thrown in a jail cell and made to stay there for 34 hours.

Nevres said the officers at the police station "didn't know what had happened" and thought she needed psychiatric help before family liaison officers came in to explain what happened to her daughter.

"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," Nevres recalled.

Nevres also revealed in an interview with Sky News that she'd been told her only daughter — who died from trauma, with a dislocated arm, cracked ribs and a pelvis that was split in half — was raped at least three times, with the first attack happening hours before the mother said farewell to Azra and the second one hours after she left the mortuary.

"I was told that my daughter had been violated... on three occasions in the mortuary," said Nevres. "What does one think? How do you comprehend such a thing?"

During the time Nevres had rushed to the police station, Fuller had been detained in Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, where he had been awaiting trial since his arrest in December last year.

He was arrested after DNA evidence pointed to him as Knell's and Pierce's killer and rapist in what has been dubbed as the "Bedsit Murders." Police also found in Fuller's home hard drives containing millions of images of sexual abuse, as well as videos of him violating dozens of corpses in morgues.

Fuller admitted to raping almost 80 bodies, but police believe he may have assaulted hundreds more over the decades he worked as a maintenance man and electrician — first at the Kent and Sussex Hospital, where he worked from 1989, and then the Tunbridge Wells Hospital, to which he moved in 2010.

Nevres said she chose to speak out due to the need for "law changes."

"I understand the penalty for raping a corpse is two years. How can that be right in the 21st century?" she told Daily Mail. "Our legal system has to acknowledge that the dead have rights and the sentencing tariff has to be such as to let society know the law will respect the dead. It’s their duty to do so."

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Representation. A knife. Pixabay