funeral services called to regulate themselves after a series of scandals, including rape of corpses

An independent regulator must be urgently put in place to oversee England’s funeral services sector, the head of a public inquiry into the rape of corpses in hospital morgues urged on Tuesday. “A lot of people assume that the sector is already regulated, they are shocked when they find out that is not the case,” said the official, Jonathan Michael, a former doctor and public sector hospital administrator who chairs the commission. investigation.

David Fuller, a 70-year-old British man, was sentenced to life in prison, in 2021 and again in 2022, for raping at least 101 deceased women, the youngest of his victims was nine years old, the oldest a hundred years old , and for the murder of two young women in 1987. He committed the rapes while he was employed as an electrician in two hospitals in Kent (south-east England), between 2005 and 2020. He acted at night and had easy access to the morgues where the bodies of the deceased were stored.

“Preserve the safety and dignity of the deceased”

Last year, in its first conclusions, the commission of inquiry led by Jonathan Michael had scrutinized the hospital group in which the criminal worked for a series of failures which had allowed him to commit these acts without being detected. In an interim report published on Tuesday, which focuses more broadly on the care given to the dead in private morgues, ambulance services and funeral directors, Mr. Michael calls for increased monitoring of the sector “to preserve the safety and dignity of deceased”. These recommendations come earlier than expected, following “recent information on negligence in the funeral sector”, he specifies.

Earlier this year, police in Humberside, northern England, launched a major investigation following concerns over the storage and handling of 35 bodies at a funeral home in Hull, which led to several arrests. The public inquiry also heard allegations of abuse at other funeral services.

According to the report, “most” funeral directors are professional and act with dignity and respect but “there are exceptions”. “Anyone can set up as a funeral director, do it from their home and keep the bodies of the deceased in their garage without anyone being able to stop them. This is unacceptable,” he denounces.