MISSED CHANCE TO STOP MORGUE MONSTER
‘Hounded’ dad took taint to grave
COPS missed the chance to catch morgue monster David Fuller decades ago after wrongly probing a taxi driver over the Bedsit Murders.
Cab driver William Piper’s daughter says he went to his grave under a shadow after being “hounded” by police over the murder of Caroline Pierce, 20.
The “loving family man” dropped the waitress at her basement flat and was the last person to see alive.
Daughter Julie, 59, claims he was tormented by officers who repeatedly turned up at his home, combed his taxi for clues, examined their rubbish and held him in a police cell.
She said he was only cleared after his death, when DNA proved he was not responsible. Quality control
worker
Julie spoke after David Fuller, 67, admitted the 1987 murders of Caroline and Wendy Knell, 25, and abusing more than 100 corpses as he worked as an electrician in a hospital mortuary.
Julie said: “Every time the doorbell rang we didn’t know if it was the police. Everyone was pointing the finger.
“If the police hadn’t been chasing my dad they might have caught the killer.
“All he did was drive a taxi and drop her off. He was just doing his job.”
Caroline had been out for a meal and drinks on November 24, 1987, and called a Starline cab at 11.40pm.
Vanished
Dad-of-five Mr Piper, who lived in Southborough, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, picked her up at 11.49pm and dropped her off at 11.55pm.
But she vanished and her body was discovered in a dyke three weeks later by tractor driver John Minness.
Julie said Caroline had declined her dad’s offer to shine a torch on her door and he kicked himself afterwards as he thought he would have seen the killer.
She said a forensic team searched his car, their flat and their rubbish bags.
“They just kept coming back. Every time the bell rang my mum said, ‘Oh no, not again’. They quizzed him again and again over weeks and months.”
William, 71, died in 1997 but two years later cops turned up at Mr Piper’s home to demand a DNA swab. When wife Joan, now 83, told them he had lost his battle with cancer, they took a sample from his son, Stephen.
Despite ruling him out of the probe, she claims they never even contacted his family to tell them he was no longer a suspect. Julie said: “It was so hard for him. People were talking about it and saying, ‘I heard that taxi driver had something to do with it, I’m sure he did it’. Mum couldn’t keep her mouth shut after a while and said, ‘I know for a fact that taxi driver didn’t do it – he’s my husband’.
“He loved his family, would do anything for his children and grandchildren.”
Police fear Fuller could be involved in more murders and the sexual abuse of thousands more dead women in morgues where he worked.
Searches of Fuller’s home uncovered evidence he had abused corpses over 12 years in the mortuaries at the now-closed Kent and Sussex Hospital and its replacement, Tunbridge Wells Hospital.
He had filmed the unspeakable acts and horrific images of him defiling bodies aged between nine and 100 were found concealed in a box-bedroom he had converted into an office.
Fuller, of Heathfield, East Sussex, will be sentenced later.
The Prime Minister has not ruled out a public inquiry into Fuller’s offending. The daughter of one of his sex victims said on Friday: “It kills me to think of David Fuller’s hands on Mum in the mortuary.”
Det Chief Supt Paul Fotheringham said: “In order to catch the man responsible for these murders, officers cast their net wide and took DNA samples from hundreds of local men while following hundreds of other lines of enquiry; this work included looking closely at those who had last seen both Wendy and Caroline alive.” COPS are probing Fuller over the murders of two women found in a forest 11 miles from his home. The first, possibly an Eastern European hitchhiker in her 30s, died in October 1979 and her head was beaten. The second, a mum-of-three, was found in June 1982.