When police family liaison officers knocked on the door, they looked visibly distressed.

Nevres Kemal, a social worker from north London, couldn’t imagine what bad news they could possibly have. Her only daughter had died just over a year ago, she didn’t have any other family.

The scene was similar to when, in July 2020, Nevres had been told her beloved Azra had fallen from a bridge in Kent suffering fatal injuries. She said what followed was like hearing the same terrible news all over again.

Warning: Contains descriptions that some readers may find distressing

The officers explained how Azra’s dead body had been raped by a man while she’d been in the morgue in Tunbridge Wells Hospital.

It would emerge that Azra was one of at least 100 victims of a prolific offender, David Fuller, who had worked in the hospital trust as an electrical maintenance manager and got away with his crimes for years.

The victims ranged in age from nine to 100 years old.

Azra, 24, had died from trauma, with a dislocated arm, cracked ribs and a pelvis that was split in half. The detail you are about to read, of what happened to her after she died, is incredibly upsetting, but Nevres wants people to know.

‘My daughter was violated hours after I left’

“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?”

The first attack on Azra happened only hours before Nevres herself had come to say farewell to her daughter in the mortuary – and it happened again hours after she left.

Nevres told me: “I had spent two hours in the mortuary sleeping with her. And that gave me some sort of comfort. Little did I know that my daughter had been violated prior to that day and the evening of that day.

“So, whilst I’m stroking my daughter’s hair, sleeping on her hair, a man had… crawled all over her skin… And there’s me kissing and cuddling and saying my last goodbyes.”

She added: “And that is quite awful, quite awful, however, it is not Azra’s shame. It is not my shame.

“Like women who are raped around the world they have a voice, Azra has a voice – I am speaking out for my daughter.”

The horrific detail of this case isn’t the only reason why this was perhaps the hardest interview I’ve ever done.

Azra and I were friends

She was my fixer on several stories I worked on at Sky News, helping me gain interviews with people from difficult backgrounds including drug mules and dealers. I wrote a tribute to her when she died. I’ve also been friends with her mother, Nevres, for over a decade.

Nevres was told that Fuller researched Azra online, he may well have read my tribute. He would photograph his victims’ names on the mortuary record log and sometimes their identity tags.

He later told police that he only researched victims after the offending, rather than before. However, in relation to one name on his browser history, he couldn’t explain why he had searched for her when, in the event, her body had been taken to a different morgue.

Fuller used a compact digital camera to film his crimes. He would then upload the videos to his home computer, storing the footage in digital folders that he would sometimes title with the victim’s name.

Officers who searched his home found a homemade box had been attached to the back of drawers within a cupboard. Inside the box were four hard drives with five terabytes of data storage.

The court in Maidstone was told they contained “a library of unimaginable sexual depravity,” all filmed in the mortuaries of the two hospitals at which he worked, first the Kent and Sussex Hospital, where he worked from 1989, and then the Tunbridge Wells Hospital, to which he moved in 2010.

Fuller was brazen

He first assaulted Azra for sixteen minutes on 20 July 2020, a decade after he’d first arrived in the hospital. The second time was the next day when Nevres visited – that evening he was with Azra for twenty-three minutes. Two days later he came back to abuse her again for thirty-five minutes.

These assaults didn’t happen in the dead of night – the first occasion was at 4.50pm and the second 9.20pm, the third, 6.15pm.

“He seemed very confident, to spend so much time with Azra,” said Nevres. “Late afternoon, early evening – he was very brazen.”

To understand how this could happen, Nevres demanded a meeting with the senior staff of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, which they agreed to in mid-October.

She discovered that as an electrical maintenance worker he had some legitimate reasons to access the mortuary, and this meant he had his own swipe card.

The mortuary had five staff, who tended to work from 8am to 4pm. Fuller’s shifts were 11am to 7pm. So, his attacks took place during that window at the latter part of his shift.

Of course, hospital porters could come down to the mortuary with new bodies at any time of the day. However, Fuller had worked out that no one came into the separate post-mortem room out of hours. The fridge doors in the centre of the mortuary open onto both rooms.

He was able to enter the post-mortem area through the clinical office. The configuration of the rooms was such that he could get in and leave unnoticed by any porter who happened to enter the mortuary on the other side of the fridges, while he was there.

No CCTV in the post-mortem room

Unlike other areas of the mortuary, there was no CCTV in the post-mortem room, which is usual practice in many hospitals to preserve the dignity of patients during post-mortem. So he could open the fridge doors to access bodies, because, whilst they were locked in the receiving area, they were unlocked in the post-mortem room.

There are CCTV cameras in the corridors leading to the mortuary, and the swipe card system keeps a log of people coming and going in case there is an incident, however, these logs were not checked to see if any staff member was making an unusual number of unnecessary journeys into the area.

“He had entered the morgue and autopsy area thousands of times, not hundreds, thousands,” said Nevres, “and no one ever stopped him or asked what’s this guy doing here?”

“I’m told he was the man to go to. He always made himself available to the mortuary staff. They thought he was a great guy and basically, he groomed them. They became compliant and they never questioned him.”

An NHS trust spokesman told me that Fuller would have had many legitimate reasons to visit the morgue – for example temperature checking the fridges.

The court was told: “CCTV from the mortuary area shows that when on cameras he carried items or performed actions that would afford a legitimate explanation for his presence.”

But Nevres feels security was lax

She told me: “We have swipe cards and cameras for a reason. How could they not have records that are automatically exposed to managerial people at the NHS trust?

“No one checked. It was so simple. He would actually abuse women while porters were bringing in bodies.”

On meeting the Chief Executive of the Trust, Miles Scott, Nevres said her first question was “why are you still here?”

She added: “His response was it’s up to the board and he had the backing of the board, and I told him; ‘the victim’s families are the board – I am the board’.

“I believe he needs to resign,” said Nevres.

“He should ask the victims ‘do you think I’m the best person to be managing this hospital trust?’ If you are truly sorry, you would step aside.”

As a social worker, Nevres blew the whistle on Haringey council over the baby-P scandal in 2007 and said as someone involved in the protection of children she would resign if something like this happened on her watch.

Since Fuller’s arrest, the trust has asked Sir Jonathan Michael to chair an independent investigation into whether anything more could have been done.

A maximum sentence of a few years

Another thing that has shocked Nevres is the length of sentencing for people who commit this kind of crime. The law attached to Fuller’s crimes is section 70 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 – penetration of a dead body – for which the maximum sentence is two years imprisonment.

He also pleaded guilty to section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 – extreme pornography involving a dead body – which can carry a sentence of three years.

Nevres believes there should be a clearer law of necrophilia with much greater punishment for someone who commits a crime on this scale, similar to the sentencing of a rape victim, which can be between 4 and 19 years for each victim.

She said: “Men and women up and down the country will be appalled by what they are reading. And I remind them that if this was your loved one you would roar with rage – and I am silently roaring and I am beseeching people who make laws to create a law that this becomes an offence and the appropriate sentence is passed down.

“We need to respect the dead and this must never happen again.”

Nevres was already dissatisfied with the investigation by Kent police into her daughter’s death. Azra died after falling through a gap between two sides of the A21 dual carriageway near Tonbridge in Kent.

She and a male passenger had been trying to get help after their car caught fire. Essex police have been investigating whether Kent police did a thorough enough investigation into exactly what happened.

So, Nevres was already distrustful of the authorities and police when they came knocking on her door a second time.

Azra was an extraordinary human

Like her mother, Azra was someone who had strong feelings about injustice and, in particular, the protection of women. She would stand her ground against anyone. Once, after meeting a domestic violence victim, she went around the couple’s house and told the man to get out.

“Azra was an extraordinary human being,” said Nevres.

“She lived for 24 years, but she touched so many people. She was compassionate, warm. An LSE law graduate. She became a beautiful woman and didn’t see any barriers. She was individualistic and smart. She lived life to the full. She was my only child.

“I’ve tried to protect Azra all my life and when she was really helpless, lying there still being raped and abused – she couldn’t scream out, couldn’t call me, she couldn’t call the police.

“But I will ensure her voice is heard and that will be my mission.”