When two police officers arrived at Nevres Kemal’s North London home less than a month ago to deliver the horrific news that her beautiful, bright, feisty daughter Azra had been raped after she’d died — not once, not twice but three times — in a hospital morgue, she was consumed by a frightening rage.
Believing that her precious daughter’s monstrous abuser, whom she knew only as Dave, was being held at nearby Colindale police station, she took a knife from the kitchen and ran, shaking and crying, from the house to ‘punish Dave’.
‘The rage . . .’ she says now. ‘My only thought was, “He is not going to get away this.” I’d just been told he’d raped her in hospital when she was dead. It was incomprehensible. I felt I had to take things into my own hands — find him, punish him. I’m her mother.
When two police officers arrived at Nevres Kemal’s (pictured) North London home less than a month ago to deliver the horrific news that her beautiful, bright, feisty daughter Azra had been raped after she’d died — not once, not twice but three times — in a hospital morgue, she was consumed by a frightening rage
Believing that her precious daughter’s (pictured) monstrous abuser, whom she knew only as Dave, was being held at nearby Colindale police station, she took a knife from the kitchen and ran, shaking and crying, from the house to ‘punish Dave’
‘If I’d found him, I’m 99.99 per cent sure I’d have put that knife straight through his heart because he’d put a knife through mine. The thought of him violating her — of touching her hair, touching her skin . . .
‘But as I walked towards the police station, all hell broke loose. Police officers seemed to spring from everywhere. I was handcuffed and thrown to the floor by eight or nine of them.
‘The two officers who had come to the house had telephoned in and said I was running around with a knife. But the police who arrested me didn’t know what had happened. I was crying: “My daughter was raped in hospital and she’s dead.” They were looking at me, going, “Does this woman need psychiatric help?”
‘They read me my rights but I had this rage. I was shouting, “What are you doing? I need to put an end to this. No one is violating my child. I am her mother. I’m here because I’m looking for Dave. He needs to be punished.”’
As it was, Nevres herself was thrown into a cell and kept there for 34 hours.
‘They kept me there that long because they thought maybe I’d hurt myself,’ she says. ‘They were also trying to get some family liaison officers there to tell me the exact details of what had happened to Azra.
‘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.” ’
In fact, ‘Dave’ — whom we now know is David Fuller, 67 — was in Belmarsh Prison in South-East London, where he had been awaiting trial since his arrest in December last year.
In fact, ‘Dave’ — whom we now know is David Fuller, 67 — was in Belmarsh Prison in South-East London, where he had been awaiting trial since his arrest in December last year
This week, he pleaded guilty to the murder of Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, in 1987 and admitted 44 charges in relation to necrophilia involving women and girls aged between nine and 100 in morgues in Sussex and Kent
This week, he pleaded guilty to the murder of Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, in 1987 and admitted 44 charges in relation to necrophilia involving women and girls aged between nine and 100 in morgues in Sussex and Kent.
The true number of those he violated is believed to stretch into the hundreds, if not thousands.
Nevres, 57, is the only member of one of the victims’ families to speak out so far about the sickening 30-year crime spree that has shocked the country.
She is doing so because, she says: ‘Azra was always loud and proud and passionate. This is what she’d want. I understand there is a lot of shame and embarrassment around this. People think, “Do I want my kid or relative to be remembered as someone who was raped or abused in a morgue?”
‘But we need to come forward so the law changes. I understand the penalty for raping a corpse is two years. How can that be right in the 21st century?
‘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.’
The true number of those he violated is believed to stretch into the hundreds, if not thousands
Nevres, a social worker who was so appalled by what she witnessed while previously working for disgraced Haringey Council that she turned whistleblower, is a strong, passionate woman with a deeply ingrained sense of right and wrong.
Indeed, so horrified was she about Haringey’s dire treatment of children in its care that in 2007 she wrote to ministers to warn of an imminent catastrophe. Six months later, Baby P was dead.
You sense that, since the death in July 2020 of her 24-year-old daughter, a law graduate from the London School of Economics, her crusading spirit is all that gets her out of bed in the morning.
Azra, who was conceived with the help of a sperm donor, was Nevres’s soulmate. Nevres wrote a letter that she put in her daughter’s coffin, in which ‘I thanked her for all her craziness, all her stress, all her madness, but also for making me complete for however long she lived.’
Azra died from the fatal injuries she sustained after falling from a bridge on the A21 in Kent after her car caught fire. She had phoned her mother in the early hours of that July morning to tell her about a row she’d had with a friend, ending the call, ‘I love you. I’m on my way home.’
‘That was it,’ says Nevres, who has never felt her daughter’s case was thoroughly investigated.
‘My heart had already been broken,’ she says. ‘Once that happens you’re beyond that. There’s nothing left to break. I sat there in the cell, thinking, “I wish I hadn’t given birth to Azra.”
‘I’ve been fighting for the last year to have her death properly investigated and here I am in a cell, and someone has raped her.’ After her 34 hours in custody, Nevres was taken to an interview room, where two family liaison officers told her the terrible details of her daughter’s abuse. ‘They had to give a disclosure saying, “What we’re about to tell you is going to be very distressing.”’
Nevres is in tears again. She tells me she rarely cries, particularly in front of strangers, but the tears have rarely stopped coming in the past three weeks.
‘They told me the dates, the times and where Azra was penetrated,’ she says.
She had been to visit Azra’s body for two hours on one of the days the assaults happened. ‘I
