Criminal Justice Bill

Debate between Greg Clark and Tracey Crouch

Report stage
Wednesday 15th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I am grateful to the Government for signing new clause 62 which I and my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Dame Tracey Crouch) first tabled. We are both grateful to our hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) who moved a similar amendment in Committee.

This is distressing subject matter for an amendment to a Bill, and we regret having to bring it to the attention of the House. It relates to a criminal trial in 2021, when David Fuller, as the Minister mentioned, was convicted of the murder of two young women in Tunbridge Wells—Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce—in the 1980s. That recent conviction followed a forensic lead that eventually led to his identification. In the course of the police’s gathering of evidence for his murder conviction, for which he received a whole-life tariff, video recordings that Fuller made of himself were found. For context, Fuller was an electrician whose employment by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust gave him access to hospital mortuaries, in which he filmed himself sexually assaulting the dead bodies of women and girls. There were over 100 female victims of such abuse in the film discovered in his possession. They ranged in age from nine to 100.

Some of Fuller’s convictions were for the offence of sexually penetrating dead bodies, which under the current law carries a maximum sentence of only two years in prison. As I say, it so happens that he received a whole-life tariff for two particularly abhorrent murders for which he was convicted, but had that not been the case, the maximum sentence available would have been two years for each offence. The evidence gathered by the police showed that Fuller also seriously sexually assaulted victims in non-penetrative ways. I will not go into detail, but I can tell the House that those crimes were extensive and grave.

Given that 100 victims were identifiable, more than 33 Members of this House, spreading right across the country, have in their constituencies the families of victims who are known to the police and to the NHS trust. All Fuller’s crimes are frankly unspeakable, but as well as the current sentencing limit being absurdly inadequate to deal with, in effect, the rape of dead bodies, the law does not cover any form of sexual assault that is non-penetrative. In her opening speech, the Minister referred to its being unusual for the House to consider an area of criminal law that simply has not been addressed before. There is clearly a gap that I hope all Members will agree needs to be closed. That is what we aim to do with the new clause.

[Dame Tracey Crouch]

This is one of the most harrowing pieces of casework that I have been involved in during my 14 years in this House. My right hon. Friend will remember that the gap, as he has just referred to it, was identified to us by one of the police officers who was involved in the horrific task of going through the evidence, and who said that the case shook him to the core, as I am sure it would many people. Will my right hon. Friend join me in paying tribute to the police officers, and of course the civilians who support them in going through the evidence at a forensic level, which I am sure many of us could not compute, and certainly could not comprehend?

[Greg Clark]

I completely share my hon. Friend’s desire to pay tribute to the police officer who brought this gap in the law to our attention, to all his colleagues who had the painful duty of viewing the images, and more generally to the family liaison officers who had to support the 100 families of the victims, and indeed the staff of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, who—knowing, in many cases, this individual—were devastated to discover what had gone on, completely unknown to them.

The new clause will make an important change to the law. It will increase the maximum sentence for the sexual penetration of a dead body from two years to seven years, and create a new offence of sexual activity with a corpse, which will carry a maximum sentence of five years to cover non-penetrative offences. Victims of Fuller were robbed of their lives and then their dignity, and the victims’ families have been robbed of adequate justice. The devastation of the families of Fuller’s victims has been heartbreaking, as my hon. Friend and other colleagues will know. They suffered the deaths of their daughters, sisters, nieces, aunts, wives, mothers and grandmothers. Then, having laid them to rest and grieved for their lost lives, hundreds received a knock on the door one night from the police, who had to tell them that the body of a person who was so precious to them had been desecrated in the most sickening ways by this vile individual, in a place—a hospital mortuary—that they thought was sacrosanct, safe and protected.