Never-before-seen photographs of Sarah Everard have been released by her family (Picture: BBC/Everard family and friends/PA Wire)
Sarah Everard was just walking home.
The marketing executive was once a smiling university student. She was once someone who lounged by the swimming pool at the Brockwell Lido, close to where she lived in south London’s Brixton.
But on March 3, 2021, aged 33, she was abducted, raped and murdered by Wayne Couzens, a Metropolitan Police officer, as she walked home from a friend’s house in Clapham.
Couzens was later sentenced to life in prison for the killing, one that set off a reckoning fuelled by grief and anger about violence against women in Britain.
Now Everard’s family have released new photographs of her ahead of a new BBC documentary which comes days after the three-year anniversary of her murder.
One photograph shows Everard in the summer of 2008 graduating from Durham University, where she studied geography at St Cuthbert’s Society.
Everard at a public swimming pool in south London (Picture: BBC/Everard family and friends/PA Wire)
Everard has been remembered by those who knew her as someone who embraced life (Picture: BBC/Everard family and friends/PA Wire)
A new BBC documentary will shed light on the aftermath of her murder (Picture: BBC/Everard family and friends/PA Wire)
Couzens, then a diplomatic protection officer, conducted a ‘false arrest’ on Everard to get her in his car.
He flashed his police ID and handcuffed her before driving her outside of London to rape and kill her and set her body on fire.
Her remains were discovered some 80 miles away from the capital in a wooded area in Kent.
An inquiry into Everard’s murder found that Couzen’s initial vetting when he applied for a job at the Met in 2018 saw troubling incidents about his past left out – and would be again when he applied for a specialised firearms role.
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Among what was left out, ‘evidence of his preference for violent and extreme pornography and history of alleged sexual offending dates back nearly 20 years prior to Sarah’s murder’, the inquiry found.
But when Chief Inspector Katherine Goodwin was informed by colleagues that Couzens was the chief suspect in the Everard case, his name meant ‘nothing’ to her.
Everard at her graduation (Picture: BBC/Everard family and friends/PA Wire)
She was killed three years ago (Picture: BBC/Everard family and friends/PA Wire)
‘So immediately we start researching the name, also the phone number and the address that had been given when he’d hired the car,’ she said on Sarah Everard: The Search For Justice, which will air on BBC One tomorrow evening.
Investigators quickly filled the gaps. ‘Whilst I might have hoped that Sarah had got into the car with someone she knew, suddenly it was clear to me that she’d got into the car of an alleged sex offender,’ said Goodwin.
Yet Goodwin and her team still had no idea their suspect worked at the Met alongside them even after she sent a team to Couzen’s house to question him.
That is, until a researcher ran into Goodwin’s officer and told her: ‘You need to hear this.’
‘I knew that I had to tell my boss and I can just remember the shock of having to just sit on the floor of the office and say to her: “You’re not going to believe this, that he’s a police officer.”
‘And then the same questions went through her head as went through my head: “Are you sure?”‘
Everard’s death touched off a wave of anger, grief and soul-searching (Picture: PA)
Former Met detective Nick Harvey, who was the first to quiz Couzens, added that when they knocked on his door, Couzen’s face ‘just went grey’.
Fopotage of the interrogation showed an officer saying to him: “People trust us to look after them. People trust us to help them.
‘You know, protect and serve, that’s what they say, isn’t it? That’s what we’re here to do. We all took that oath, you included.’
Couzens remained silent.
Sarah Everard: The Search For Justice will air on Tuesday from 6am on BBC iPlayer and at 9pm on BBC One.
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