Just after 9:00 PM, Sarah Everard left her friends house
and began her familiar walk home in the dark.
She stuck to well lit roads. She had her boyfriend on the
phone. Everything about this journey
actually felt safe. But just as she was starting to
get close to home, someone stopped her and took her.
The more details that emerged, the more unsettling this case
became, because the person responsible for Sarah's murder
was someone that most of us would have trusted, and her
killer knew it. Outlaw.
Hello and welcome to Outlaw Podcast.
I'm Ellen O'Neill and in today's episode we're in South London in
2021 where the boyfriend, friends and family of Sarah
Everard are starting to realize that something isn't right.
It's a Thursday, a work day, and she should be in the office by
now. But her Co workers are saying
that she never turned up. They realise that texts are no
longer delivering to her, phone calls aren't going through and
the concern only grows as the hours pass and soon her
boyfriend has reported her missing to the police.
Within days, a full scale operation to find her is
underway. Only Sarah Everard wouldn't be
found alive. For international listeners, I
really can't overstate just how huge this case became here in
the UK. It stayed in public conversation
for such a long time afterwards. Even still to this day,
especially among women, everyone was genuinely shaken.
It was like the rug had been pulled from beneath all of us
and a false sense of security that we had was exposed and
broken. Years later, it's a case that
still gets brought up constantly whenever conversations around
safety and trust come up, so I think it's about time we bring
it into the conversation here on Outlaw.
Now, before we get into the case, I do just want to give my
usual disclaimer that I mean absolutely no harm or disrespect
to anyone that we talk about in this video.
Our episodes are made with the utmost care to honour those who
lost their lives and respect the profound grief their loved ones
and joy. By covering these cases, we aim
to keep the victims names and stories in conversation and
highlight the vital work that so many of their loved ones do in
the wake of their deaths. Given the nature of today's
episode, we'll be covering some very sensitive topics including
sexual assault, rape, abduction, violence against women and
murder. This episode is created with the
hope to raise awareness to inspire change and further
Victim Support. Viewer discretion is advised.
Now it's time to introduce you to Sarah Everard, a kind,
intelligent, beautiful girl who would devastatingly cross paths
with evil in disguise. But before the awful thing
happened, Sarah had made an incredible life for herself,
filled with happiness, love and ambition.
So let's begin with who she was before anything else.
Sarah Everard was born in Surrey in the South of England on June
14th, 1987 to parents Jeremy and Susan.
They already had two kids, James and Katie, so Sarah was the baby
of the family and they all adored her so much.
It was a super close from supportive family units.
The Everads were very family oriented and would do anything
for one another. While Sarah was still very
young, her family picked up and moved to York in the north of
England so that her dad could take a job opportunity at the
university. So actually York probably felt
more like home to Sarah than Surrey ever did.
She really grew up there in York and she spent her formative
years there. So York in part helped to mould
Sarah into the wonderful young woman that she would someday be.
Very early on in her life, one thing was very clear about her,
and that was that Sarah was a very clever girl.
She was naturally gifted with intelligence.
But don't get me wrong, she was also a studier, a hard worker.
She didn't close by on her natural abilities.
She worked hard to strengthen them.
Doing well in school meant a lot to Sarah.
I mean, she was a good egg. She was honest, she was
dependable. She was reliable and thoughtful.
The kind of person that you would want to be friends with or
the kind of student that you would want to teach.
Her parents must have known very early on that Sarah was going to
grow into a wonderful young woman.
She had super strong values. She was deeply compassionate.
Trust, generosity and empathy were of utmost importance to
her. And just by the way, I can't not
mention how stunning, cunningly beautiful she was.
She had this gorgeous, warm, welcoming smile, long blonde
WAVY hair. At the age of 18, when she had
finished her eye levels, Sarah bagged a spot at the prestigious
Durham University, which is consistently ranked in the top
five universities in the whole of the UK.
It's in the top 100 worldwide. If that doesn't tell you just
how intelligent and promising this young woman was, then I
don't know what can. The entry requirements for
Durham are very, very high and there's a lot of competition,
but Sarah damn well deserved that spot.
She earned it. She studied a human geography
course there. And honestly when I read that I
was like, hold on, what is human geography?
And actually it made me feel a bit silly when I looked it up.
And it is quite self-explanatory.
It's the study of the relationship between people,
communities and cultures and their environments.
Basically, how the planet that we live on is affected by the
humans that inhabit it. And Sarah loved her time in uni.
Between 2005 and 2008, she made a wide circle of friends,
including a bunch of very dear close connections as well.
One of which was a girl named Rose.
She and Sarah were on different courses, but they became very
close, and particularly when Rose's mother passed away during
their studies, Sarah was really there for her.
In fact, she told Rose whatever time it is, day or night, call
me, I will be there. She was more than and selfless,
it just came so naturally to her to care for those around her and
those who needed it. After she finished uni, Sarah
took some time out to travel the world and soak up all the
culture and education that the real world had to offer.
She went to Vietnam, Cambodia and India.
Those are just a few of the many, many countries that she
explored. And then when it was time for
her to come back home, well, she decided that home was about to
be somewhere different. Her mum and dad were still based
up in York, but Sarah had big ambitions, the kind that
required a big city with big opportunities.
So London it was. She moved down to the big smoke,
settling in South London. And actually, it made total
sense for her because her older brother and her sister had
already moved down to the capital before her, so she had
family around here as well. Sarah worked her way up in a
marketing career, and all of her colleagues had nothing but
glowing reviews for her, both as a worker and just in general as
a person, as a woman, as a friend, she was amazing to be
around. By 2020, Sarah had bagged her
dream job and a pretty damn good salary with it as well.
One that meant she might actually be able to buy a house
and support a family there in London one day.
Which is difficult. That's putting it lightly.
For most people, it feels quite impossible.
The thought of ever being able to buy a house in the capital
city. But Sarah had grafted for this.
She had worked for and earned everything that she had.
She was so incredibly happy and and then in walks Mr. Right, she
met and fell for a man named Josh who was equally as
ambitious, intelligent and accomplished as her.
It was a perfect match and actually he only lived just down
the road from her. It was an absolutely ideal
situation, and by all accounts Sarah was loving life.
But soon disaster would strike. Not to Sarah or Josh
specifically, but to the whole entire world.
Actually, in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began to
spread and overnight daily life changed for billions of people.
I'm not entirely sure how Sarah herself spent the first
lockdowns. We had at least three separate
lockdown periods here in the UK over 2020 and 2021.
Honestly, it all feels like just one big blur now, doesn't it?
And mind you, the rules and regulations here in the UK were
constantly shifting and it was so hard to keep up.
One minute we were told not to leave our homes unless it was
absolutely necessary, and then the next we were being
encouraged to go out to restaurants for the Eat Out to
Help Out scheme to keep the economy going.
And then when that inevitably made the spread of the virus
worse, it was back to a lockdown.
It felt like no one knew how to handle this, especially our
fucking government. Sorry.
And then there was the concept of having a bubble, which was
like one or two people that you were allowed to meet up with
inside. And the rules around your bubble
were even more vague. Quite frankly, everyone was
doing the whole bubble thing differently, and a lot of people
were doing it wrong, but actually no one really knew how
to do it right. And by March 20/21, it had been
just over a year of these constantly shifting rules.
And to say that it had gotten messy and confusing would be the
understatement of the century. At this point in time, the legal
wording around it all was that you weren't allowed to leave
your house without a reasonable excuse, which is obviously down
to interpretation. What counted as a reasonable
excuse was different for each individual.
But if a police officer deemed that your excuse wasn't
reasonable enough, you would technically breaking the law and
there could be consequences. You could be fined or even
arrested. On the evening of March 3rd,
2020, 133 year old Sarah Everard was headed to her friend's house
for dinner. It was about a 45 minute walk
away and it wasn't a particularly warm day, so she
was bundled up in a raincoat and a beanie hat.
Along the way. She popped into a Sainsbury's
and picked up a bottle of red wine for the two of them to
share. And before long she arrived and
the two of them had a lovely evening.
They caught up, they laughed, they shared stories and good
food. And then just after 9:00 PM,
Sarah gathered her things and set off on the rather long walk
back home. Shortly after she began the
journey, she called her boyfriend, Josh, and they caught
up on their days for about 15 minutes.
She walked and they talked. They made plans to see each
other the next day. And then at exactly 9:28 PM, the
phone conversation ended. And that was the last time that
anyone heard from Sarah Everard. It wasn't until the next day,
when she didn't show up to a work meeting and her boyfriend
couldn't get a hold of her, that people began to realize that
something was wrong. This was totally unlike Sarah.
An ambitious woman dedicated to her career, a loving,
commutative girlfriend. She wouldn't just ghost on
everyone around her like this. Something immediately seemed
off, and it became even more concerning when texts stopped
delivering to her. Phone.
Calls weren't going through. It had either run out of battery
and she hadn't charged it up again, which would have been
weird enough, or it had been completely switched off.
It got to a point where there was really no reasonable
explanation for her radio silence.
And so at 8:00 PM that following night, almost 24 hours since she
was last heard from, Sarah's boyfriend reported her missing
to the police. Within hours, news of Sarah's
disappearance was spreading like wildfire.
Social media posts were going viral with her picture and her
description appealing for anyone with information to come
forward. And the very next day, it was
all over the news, national news sending shockwaves not only
across London, but the whole entire country.
Rather quickly, people were starting to think the worst,
that she hadn't just gotten lost or decided to go off on her own.
For a while, everyone feared that something really bad had
happened to Sarah. Her family shared that exact
same fear and they immediately made the 220 mile journey down
South to London from York to join the search multiple times.
The route that Sarah would have taken home that night was
retraced and retraced. Search parties walked those
exact streets again and again, just praying that there was
something that they had missed, a clue that might lead them to
her. Within just two days, police had
received over 120 phone calls, reporting tips and potential
sightings. Everything was followed up on.
None of them led to Sarah. Door to door inquiries had
officers speaking with over 750 households in the area to see if
they'd seen or heard anything from the night of the
disappearance, but again, they got very little from this.
Appeals went out to the public for CCTV footage, both from
businesses and even from people's private security
cameras like dash cams in their car or smart doorbells to see if
the anyone had caught Sarah at all.
And only with this could police begin to piece together what had
really transpired on Sarah's walk home.
CCTV footage captures Sarah during the 1st 15 minutes of her
journey. She's going the exact route that
would be expected and everything seems fine.
There's nothing immediately suspicious or concerning.
It doesn't appear as though she's being followed or that
someone's watching her. But after that first 15 minutes,
the footage of her journey becomes inconsistent.
Not all of it is caught on camera, since some of the walk
she did was on residential roads or through public parks that
didn't have cameras. Police needed to figure out as
accurately as they could at what point during the walk that
something had gone wrong, and slowly it began to piece
together. Police had asked an estate
agent's office close to Sarah's home if they could send over
their security footage, and they did, but Sarah didn't appear on
it at all. Now, this was definite proof
that Sarah hadn't made it home that night, because I guess
there was always the possibility that she might have gotten home
safely from that walk and then gone back out again.
Or, or something could have happened to her at home, but now
they knew for sure that she had disappeared in this rather small
time frame and from those streets around Clapham.
And if anything, this actually made it even more concerning and
even more difficult for the investigation because Sarah's
route home would have possibly involved her taking a shortcut
through Clapham Common, which is this giant 220 acre public park
with wooded areas and bodies of water and very few cameras.
Within 48 hours of her being reported missing, the search had
intensified to a full scale search and rescue operation
focusing mainly on Clapham Common, that giant piece of
land. The whole thing was meticulously
combed through and the same went for the surrounding streets.
You know, drain covers were lifted, bins were searched, but
there was nothing, not even a slight clue as to Sarah's
whereabouts. The police got in touch with her
phone network provider and they found that the last time that
her phone had been used was on a street called Cavendish Rd. just
off of Clapham Common. CCTV from that road shows her
walking with her phone to Haria, presumably speaking with her
boyfriend, and that was the last thing she did on her phone.
There had been no activity at all from Sarah's phone since, so
it was becoming horrifyingly clear to her loved ones and to
the public that Sarah had not gone willingly.
She had been taken. In fact, further investigations
into that specific area discovered that in the months
leading up to Sarah's disappearance, several women had
reported being followed along those exact same roads.
With that, police released a statement urging women in the
area to stay extra vigilant, saying the local community
should expect to see more police officers on patrol in the area
as we continue to search for Sarah.
If you want to approach them about any concerns you have,
please do so. We're here to support the
community and we genuinely want to help in any way we can.
By now. It was a few days into the
investigation and police are still scouring through every
security table that's been submitted for review.
Most of them are turning out to be useless, but every so often
they would spot Sarah. These videos and still images
would be released to the public as quickly as possible in hopes
that it could jog people's memories if they'd seen her that
night. And then one tape comes in that
changes everything. A car's dash Cam had caught
Sarah standing on the side of the road, speaking to someone.
White Vauxhall Astra had been parked up on the side of the
road, its hazard lights flashing.
The driver had seemingly pulled over and gotten out to speak to
Sarah Everard. It was, it was at about 9:30 PM
and it was already dark outside. So the footage of this
interaction is so blurry that the person stood there with her
can hardly be identified. I mean, Sarah was only really
identified because she was wearing very distinctive
clothing that day. She had a blue raincoat on and
like diamond patterned leggings. She was quite easy to make out
even in grainy dark footage. But this person with her, I
mean, it was believed to be a man.
And that is literally all they could really tell from this
grainy image. So it was also out of the
question that the vehicle's registration plate could be
figured out. All in all, this footage was a
major lead, yet a relatively hard one to actually follow up
on. But just this in itself, that
Sarah had been stopped and spoken to by an unidentified
man, I mean, it practically confirmed police's worst fears.
Sarah had been intercepted. An unexpected encounter took
place, and then she vanished. So was this man responsible for
the fate of Sarah Everard? Police did more appeals for
footage taken specifically on this road now.
And thank God, several of the vehicles that drove down there
around that same time actually had dash Cam footage, one of
which caught the white Vauxhall Astra with both of its front
doors open, the driver's side and the passenger side,
suggesting that Sarah had actually gotten into the car
with this man that she'd been speaking to.
And then the clearest shot of the interaction came from a bus
driving past. And this time, it actually
captured the license plate in enough detail that police could
trace it. It turned out to be a hire car,
which made all of this even scarier.
I mean, had this man anticipated kidnapping a woman that day and
hired a car in order to cover his tracks?
Well, if that was the intention, it wasn't going to cover his
tracks for very long. Police got in touch with the
hire company, which was actually 75 miles away in Dover, and they
could immediately hand over the details and the contact
information of the man that had hired that vehicle.
The last person known to have interacted with Sarah Everard.
But the last thing police expected was for this to lead
back to one of their own. The man captured on camera
speaking to Sarah on the night that she disappeared was
identified to be 48 year old Wayne Cousins, a husband, father
of two and a serving police officer in the Greater London
area. He lived about 75 miles out of
London in Deal in Kent with his wife and their young son and
daughter. Cousins had been in the police
force in some capacity for 15 years at this point since his
early to mid 30s and will dig further into his career journey
throughout this section of the episode.
But from what I can glean, he'd sort of had everything handed to
him since he was very young. His first job was at daddy's
company. His family was pretty
financially well off as well. The only thing that he couldn't
get handed to him were women, and that would remain A touchy
thing for Wayne through his whole entire life.
Women didn't want him as much as he wanted them.
When he reached his mid 20s, Wayne watched his older brother
go into the police force and this seemed to be a real Eureka
moment for him. Wayne was a man that had always
craved a little more power and authority than what's afforded
to your average Joe. Imagine you could tell someone
to do something and they just do it, no questions asked just
because you have a badge. It's something we see time and
time again with power hungry cops.
There's a certain type of person that gets into law enforcement
not because they give a shit about public safety and
protecting people, but because they only give a shit about
themselves and what it could do for them to have that much
power. It likely crossed his mind many,
many times. The kind of things that he could
order someone to do. The kind of silent intimidation
he could have when he walked into a room just by displaying
his badge or having a set of handcuffs chained to his belt.
So in 2004, he tried to get into the Kent Police force and failed
at the interview stage. The exact reason for this?
I'm not entirely sure, but this rejection didn't deter him.
He was going to have authority somehow.
He just had to figure out a way to get there.
Now and then a loophole presented itself.
Two years later, Wayne would have been in his mid 30s when he
applied to be a special police constable and he finally got
accepted. Now this role isn't quite as
special as it sounds. Despite the name, it was a part
time volunteer role and the vetting process was much
different to a full time regular police officer role.
I'm assuming it was much less strict.
And with that, Wayne Cousins had found his way in.
He got his foot in the door. He was handed a certain an
amount of police authority so from there his career could
continue to build and along with it his power over everyone else.
Soon he tried out for the Kent Police once again for a regular
full time role, but he was turned down again, this time due
to concerns with his finances. See Wayne was in a lot of debt
and I actually wasn't aware of this even though it makes total
sense now. I am aware, but they don't let
people in major debt become a cop.
The reason being they'd probably be more susceptible to
corruption and bribery from criminals to turn a blind eye to
what's going on if they were being paid.
There's not much faith that a man in majorly stressful debt
wouldn't be swayed by dirty money like that.
So Wayne was turned down from the full time officer position,
but for some reason he was still allowed to keep his special
constable role? As if the exact same concern
wouldn't apply to that as well. In fact, surely it would be even
more worrying since he's literally doing volunteer work.
He's not getting paid for the hours that he is putting into
the special constable role. If someones going to be more
susceptible to financial bribery, it's going to be when
they're working for free. No obviously I'm not saying they
should have given him the full time role instead.
More like he should have been encouraged to take another
career path entirely. The police force should never
have been a place for Wayne Cousins for way more reasons
than just his finances. Of course you will see very
soon, but he did end up getting a job in the Civil Nuclear
Constabulary, which is a special police force unit specifically
protecting our nuclear sites and the transportation of nuclear
materials. Somehow the vetting process for
this job missed the fact that Wayne was in major debt on or
maybe it didn't miss that fact. Maybe they knew when they hired
him anywhere. I wouldn't know.
I'm not accusing them of that, but I wouldn't know.
He worked there for many, many years until eventually he
applied for a full time role in the Metropolitan Police Force,
which serves and is supposed to protect the Greater London area.
I'd say that working for the Met Police is kind of the dream for
an aspiring police officer in the South to work for the main
police force in the capital city of our country.
And in 2018, a 45 year old Wayne applied and got the job.
Not only had the vetting process missed his troubling debt once
again, but in the time since the last vetting, Wayne had gotten
up to some even worse shit. This time the vetting process
had somehow missed the fact that this man had been reported for
indecent exposure. And that's an awful enough crime
in itself. But the person that Wayne was
allegedly exposing his naked body to in public was a child.
This had been reported in 2015, three years before he was given
the Met Police job. The victim's parents had
reported his vehicle and it was traced back to Wayne Cousins.
They had his name, they had him. But frustratingly, he was never
charged with anything, and I firmly believe that to be down
to police incompetence. An appointment had been
scheduled with the victim's family to get more information,
but the officer assigned failed to show up and even then failed
to follow up and schedule another appointment.
So there was no interview, there was no arrest, nothing.
Police had Wayne's name, they had his address, and they knew
that he was an active Civil Nuclear Constabulary officer.
And I wonder if that had anything to do with them failing
to follow up. His work was never informed that
this had been reported. Nothing was put on his file.
And so three years later, when he applied to be a Met Police
officer, they didn't seem to clock that they were inviting a
sex pest into the force. And if they'd done any form of
checks on his electronic devices, which should be part of
the vetting process if it's not already.
If they would have checked, they would have discovered that on a
number of occasions he had sent unsolicited indecent images of
himself to women online. He was a repeat perpetrator of
sexual harassment. And on top of that, they would
have found a huge collection of violent pornography on his
devices. Wayne Cousins was into rape
fantasies, sexual abuse, sexual violence.
He had spoken to many, many people about this.
He had shown other people the material that he was getting off
to, including other police officers on the force.
His colleagues knew that he was a twisted man that fantasized
about sexual violence. The content that he was watching
was intended to be viewed as a crime taking place.
Now we know that there is such a thing as consensual non consent.
Some people enjoy with their partner in the privacy of their
home, consensually acting out a scene of non consent, but it is
all consensual. Do you get what I mean?
It's acting and that is supposed to be what a lot of the porn
actors are engaging in. I mean, you would hope.
Tragically that is not always the case.
And that's a whole other awful tangent for another day.
But assuming that the content that he was watching was
consensually acted out, it's not an actual crime taking place.
But that's not the point, is it? It's supposed to look and feel
like a crime to the viewer who is getting off on it.
And Wayne Cousins, his Co workers knew that he as a police
officer fantasized and got off to sexual crimes taking place.
But no one ever raised any alarms.
There were no notes on his record.
His boys had his back I guess. For three years before he ever
met Sarah Everard, this man had been a problem waiting to happen
and working for the Metropolitan Police.
And God did he love to show off the fact that he was a cop.
By the way, he would tell anyone and everyone that would listen
while he was off duty. Maybe he's at the pub or
whatever. He would tell strangers and
acquaintances alike, despite it being wholly unnecessary and
unrelated to any topic of conversation.
He just loved that the phrase I'm a police officer carried a
certain amount of power and intimidation.
He'd even walk around while he was off duty and in normal
clothes with all of his police. Geist still attached to his
belt, handcuffs and what have you.
Again, wholly unnecessary. Is that even allowed?
Actually, I wouldn't know, but it feels like that shouldn't be
allowed if he's off duty to be walking around with handcuffs
attached to him and visibly displayed as well.
But you see the kind of man that this is, he wanted everyone to
know that he had control and power over them, especially in a
physical sense. I mean, carrying restraints and
displaying them openly while you're off duty, why else would
you ever do that unless you wanted people to know that
you're willing to use them? He didn't even need to say
anything to be seen as threatening.
In his first year with the Met Police, Wayne was a part of a
Safer neighborhoods team in South London.
And that's the kind of role that's there to give the
community reassurance that they are protected, which is brutally
ironic in retrospect of this case.
Then in 2020 he became a part of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic
Protection Command. It's a high level position with
a hell of a lot of responsibility.
I mean he is literally guarding and protecting some of the most
important people and important buildings in our country.
Mother fucker was given firearms for this position and he was
usually stationed at the Palace of Westminster and the embassies
surrounding it. Then in 2020, when the pandemic
hit, several existing officers were tasked with with COVID
patrols. They would be out and about,
making sure that people were sticking to the enforced curfew
and the increasingly complicated rules.
And even though Wayne was working his way up in the police
force, a job that he had literally dreamed of, a job that
granted him all the power and all the control that he could
ever want, he was still willing to risk that to gratify his
depraved sexual desires. In February 2021, not even a
week before he came into contact with Sarah Everard, Wayne
Cousins was still committing acts of indecent exposure.
He drove up to a McDonald's drive through, and while he
collected his order, he exposed himself to at least two of the
women working there. In fact, there were multiple
reports. I'm not sure if all of the women
saw him, but there were more than two reports about this
incident. And this kind of thing like
indecent exposure, forcing someone to see you naked, that
kind of thing makes me feel so physically sick.
These women are just trying to do their jobs and they're being
sexually harassed and traumatized while their guard is
down and while they're expected to be polite and calm and normal
and he is forcing them into an interaction like this.
Now, these women took his license plate down.
They even got his bank card information from his order that
he had just made, and it was all reported to the police, but
absolutely nothing was done about it.
Police had his name, but when wasn't followed up on, he wasn't
given a warning, nothing was put on his file for committing a
crime like that. He should have lost his job, he
should have been kicked off the whole police force and banned
from ever being allowed to serve or protect ever again.
But that didn't happen. Indecent exposure is often
dismissed as a low level and maybe less concerning offence,
but criminologists warn that it can be a red flag for
escalation. A leading homicide specialist
and professor said flashing is an act of sexual aggression.
If someone has flashing in their past, I'd expect there to be
problems in their future. It may lead to domestic abuse,
coercive control, stalking or sexual violence.
Research shows that over 4 years, more than 200 people
convicted of rape actually had prior indecent exposure charges,
and eight of which had even gone on to commit murder.
Wayne Cousins, from what we know, had allegedly committed
indecent exposure and gotten away with it on at least two
separate occasions, one of which was towards a child.
In fact, police now believed that he could well be
responsible for at least eight separate counts of indecent
exposure over the years, but it could be upwards of 17.
This man was a ticking time bomb and he was about to explode in
just a few days after his last alleged offence, on the night
where he saw Sarah Everard walking home in Clapham, six
days after Sarah had vanished from the streets.
It was the evening of March 9th 2021.
A full scale search and rescue operation had revealed
practically nothing about her whereabouts or her current
safety status. They didn't know if she was
still alive and out there somewhere, or where she could be
if she was. All they knew right now was that
the last person she had been seen with was Wayne Cousins
caught on various car cameras, and the last clip of them both
even shows that the front door of his car was wide open,
suggesting that Sarah had gotten into the vehicle with this man.
By this point, police had actually looked into Wayne and
discovered that he was one of the top suspects in that
indecent exposure case from the McDonald's just three days
before Sarah went missing. If everything was adding up
correctly, this meant that she had gotten into a car with a sex
offender. So immediately police go down to
his house and they make an arrest on suspicion of kidnap
and on suspicion of indecent exposure from three days prior.
On the day of his arrest, Wayne had just been at home doing
nothing. He'd called off from work
claiming that he was ill with stress, and now he's a suspect
in the country's biggest current case.
The officer arresting him said that as soon as Wayne answered
the door and saw that it was the police, all the colour drained
from his face. He went completely grey.
He knew it was over. So we're here to talk to you
about Sarah. Let me show you the picture.
Do you know Sarah? I don't know.
OK. Sarah went missing.
I'll show you some which is of of her on the day Sarah went
missing on Wednesday and her parents obviously and her family
are really worried about the inquiry that's been conducted so
far has let us speak to you about it and to see what we what
we know about Sarah. OK, So would you like to do you
know where Sarah is, right? Do you know anything about what
happens or not? I know that she went missing up
in London somewhere about a week ago, so just from what I've got
on the news. OK, have you had a person now?
No, not personal man you had. Any interactions with?
Her at all? Why, why, Why do I have personal
interactions with her? It's very difficult because I
can't go into a lot of the evidence because obviously that
would require. That's not part of what an
urgent interviewer is. OK?
This interview is just about trying to find her because she's
been missing for a while. Now I'm sat in handcuffs and I
know her, so you must have something to say that I know
her. Well, I said you've been
arrested on suspicion of kidnap and we believe that you've been
involved in her disappearance and taking her away from her
family. OK.
So we are trying to find her. See, everybody is very worried
about that. She's got, you know, parents,
she's got she's got a girlfriend.
There's a lot of people that care about that.
Sure. If you've seen how the news, the
people that are reaching out out her, they're looking for every
day and she's missing. And our job, our primary job is
to find a strong finding that safely.
Well, OK, we believe it. You know something about where
she is and that's why we're here to look for her.
Let's try and find her and that's why we're talking to you
now. I'm just trying to get you to
have a good think about it. After initially telling police
officers that he had never met Sarah and has absolutely nothing
to do with her disappearance, Wayne Cousins rather quickly
changes his story. He tells police that he's in a
lot of debt and has recently been in contact with a gang who
I presume had promised him money in exchange for carrying out
their dirty work for them. OK.
Well I am in financial shift and I've been leant on by.
I don't know who they are, they're a group, A gang,
whatever and they told me why I need to go and pick up girls and
get them to them. So it then came through that
they have been harmed, my family take them away and they'll use
them instead. At that point, I had no option
to try and find somebody. So all right, then there's just
a couple of names. I was told a place to take her.
That's it. That's all.
That is all I know. He threatened to take my family
away from her. You.
Must know more about where she is or how I can find her.
I'm sure I don't know. I know you know, and you I.
Don't know if that's taken in the sand then they've taken her.
I don't know at. Some point you're going to end
up looking to his family and wise, your family are going to
be there. Oh no, you've got an opportunity
here right now to help us find Zara and bring her back home to
her. Final I can't.
I don't know where she is. I hunt hand on heart.
I don't know where she. Is you need.
To help. Us.
I just need to know where she is.
If I could tell you why there must be something, If I honestly
could tell you anything else, then you have it right now.
Without explicitly saying it, Wayne Cousins just implied to
the police that he had kidnapped Sarah Everard in order to
appease this gang who would threaten to come back for his
family if he didn't follow their orders.
It was a tall tale and I'm sure police had their doubts about
its validity right there in that moment.
But regardless, they let him continue trying to explain
himself and describe the situation that he was caught up
in. He says that he was given the
name of a place to take her and so he did.
And then he's saying, but that's all I know.
That's that's all I can tell you already.
It's suspicious just how little detail he can give about the
gang or about the day that he actually carried this out.
If you had actually been ordered to human traffic, a poor
innocent woman off the street, surely you would sound a little
bit more shaken up than Wayne Cousin sounds in these clips
tell. Me about it, I need to find it.
Tell me everything now, OK? There was a white sprinter van.
They are was between sort of Lennon Mainstone area that I've
got to off. I still don't know.
I, I don't know, they, they just, I just parked my car up
and then the van came up behind me, flashed me and they all
jumped out. And then they, they took this
girl. They said, they said you've done
good. And I don't know whether my
family's going to be or what still, but they, they
threatened, they threatened to take my family away from me.
So at that point. I'm doing what I can to.
My family, he recounts the. Very moment that the men came to
collect Sarah from him. But weirdly, he doesn't seem to
say anything about Sarah herself.
There's nothing about how she reacted at all.
He doesn't mention anything that she said or did not to mention.
He doesn't explain how he got her in his car in the 1st place,
what he said to her to make her get in, or where she thought she
was going with him. So many large portions of his
story and major details are missing.
But then he tells police he can vaguely remember where he
dropped Sarah off if they want to know.
So all I know is it was a. Roundabout, we could drive there
now, I could show you, but I, I roughly, I don't know Lenham
Maidstone area at all. I did it on.
Google, if we did it on Google map, it'd like right I drove.
From Ashford to Maidstone there's a roundabout that breaks
up, I guess. So this is the first big
roundabout, the carriage straight over to Maidstone.
But instead I went round that roundabout and back up another
road and at that point that was flashed and pulled over.
You guys got out, opened my door, opened that door, pushed
me out against the front of the car, took the girl.
Trade off, that's it, they said. We'll be in.
Touch. So I'm here, I'm off work with
stress because I'm here to protect my family.
I want to be here 24/7 from my family.
They come from my family. I've got nothing myself, if
Wayne Cousins is telling. The truth about this human
trafficking gang that are pulling people in to kidnap
women off the streets for them. Then police need to get
investigating this right away. They make it clear to him just
how serious this is. They ask how the gang had even
gotten in touch with him in the 1st place and Wayne says that he
had been with one of their call girls.
I'm assuming that he's saying that he had solicited the
services of a sex worker that was connected to this gang, but
he says that he tried to fuck her over and RIP her off.
This fucking horrid man just keeps getting worse.
Imagine trying to scam a sex worker that has already given
you her services. If this story is even real, you
know what I'm saying? But Wayne says that she must
have told the gang that he tried to fuck her over and they then
tracked him down and began threatening him to do their
dirty work or they would come for his family and either kidnap
or kill them. So the officers are like, OK, so
how did the gang contact you? How do you communicate with each
other? You know, kind of asking, do you
have a phone number for these people?
They just tell me being here. Being here so hotel bursts
through gang pledge through could be here.
OK, so I turned up. I've got I've got no mobile
number and they have got my mobile number.
They're obviously outside watching, following.
Just honestly, how are they telling you to be there and be
there? How?
Is it that be in those directions?
Yeah, They'll, they'll, they'll come.
Outside. So they'll be outside here.
And then they'll say, well, you're going to be in.
At this time or you're going to be in Ashford at this time, I
said there's no links, no telephone numbers.
I'm completely on my own. But at the same time being
threatened, he insists that he has.
No way of contacting the gang and all of their communications
are done in person, which is awfully convenient, isn't it?
Almost as convenient as how much his story changed in the space
of less than 5 minutes. That questioning that we broke
down and showed clips of was no longer than 7 minutes in total.
But remember, at the very beginning he was quite insistent
that he didn't know Sarah. He was saying things like, why
would I have personal interactions with her?
He was insisting that he had only ever seen her on the news.
And then all of a sudden, he admitted that he had kidnapped
her and handed her off to a gang.
The police weren't buying his story about this human
trafficking gang, and they continued to look into Wayne
Cousins as a suspect. They pulled up absolutely
everything that they could about him, and they quickly learned
that he owned a plot of land about an hour away in Ashford,
Kent. That's never a good sign when
they're investigating someone connected to a missing person.
And it's not exactly clear why he owned this plot of land in a
wooded area. He'd bought it two years prior
in 2019. But of course, it was of
immediate importance for the police to search this plot of
land, especially when they checked his phone records and
they found that his cell signal had pinged in that area of this
random plot of land multiple times since Sarah's
disappearance. So the very next day after his
arrest, it was March 10th, when police search teams arrived and
began combing through every nook and cranny of that plot of land.
They spared no expenses, too. There were sniffer dogs.
There was a police helicopter overhead.
There were diving teams searching the pond close by.
And it was in there, in that body of water that they
recovered the dead body of Sarah Everard.
Her remains had been burned beyond recognition, and so her
dental records had to be used to identify her.
Two days later it was confirmed and the search for Sarah Everard
came to a tragic and abrupt end. In the days, weeks and even
months following the announcement that the search for
Sarah was over, the whole entire nation seemed to go into
mourning. The City of London especially.
I remember it so clearly. Clapham Common had become a
place of grieving and remembering Sarah, with it being
one of the last places she ever walked.
It became a place for candlelit vigils and protests, for women
to come and cry together, to remember Sarah and reflect on
what had happened. And through it all, there was an
overwhelming sense of fear and unease.
One of our women had been taken from the street, driven over 80
miles away. She had been brutally murdered
and burned, her body disposed of in a pond.
Like she wasn't someone's child, someone's best friend, the love
of someone's life. Like she wasn't a human being
with the right to life. Members of the royal family even
went down to Clapham Common to pay their respects, to leave
bunches of flowers and speak with these protesting, mourning
women. Both the Mayor of London and the
UK's Prime Minister at the time released statements
acknowledging the immense pain her family were in and the
urgency that they're now had to solve this crime and to keep the
streets safe for other women. And once the news broke that the
man responsible for this horrific kidnap and murder was a
police officer, well, it only made all that anger and fear
even sharper. One of the very people who
trained to protect us had done this to one of us.
He knew that any random woman on the street would trust him and
would do what he said. And he played on that trust to
kidnap, rape and murder Sarah. Now, of course, trust in police
has never been a universal thing, especially among
marginalized communities, and especially in countries where
corruption within law enforcement is even more visible
than here in the UK. But the Metropolitan Police,
police in London are meant to represent safety.
They're meant to be the people that you would run to in a state
of emergency when you need help and protection.
And for so many people in the UK, especially for women,
Sarah's case completely shattered that illusion.
We are not safe. There was immense pressure on
the police to reassure the public in the aftermath that
they, as an institution, they were taking safety concerns
seriously. Women were rightly saying that
if they were now approached by a police officer they would be
scared, they wouldn't have trust in him.
And so different police officers and officials were making very
ham handed statements across the media, including this one prick
called Philip Allert. He was a crime commissioner in
North Yorkshire at the time and got the disappointment that I
felt when I heard that this was a fellow Yorkshireman.
He went on the BBC News in October, so a month after
Sarah's murder, and he said that women need to be more
streetwise, they need to know their rights, they need to know
when they can and can't be arrested.
He said that Sarah never should have submitted to the fake
arrest by weighing cousins. Women, first of all, just need
to. Be streetwise about when they
can be arrested, when they can't be arrested genuinely the most.
Disgusting misogynistic victim blaming I've heard in a while.
I actually can't even talk about that for much longer because I
can feel myself getting like hot and angry.
You guys don't need me to sit here.
And we feel back every layer of how disgusting that is,
especially given the fact that we are raised and taught as a
society to blindly trust the police.
The promise that we are supposed to have from them is that they
are right and you listen to them.
So to imply that Sarah did the wrong thing by going with him
when he handcuffed her is just so out of the realm of
understanding. It's just the worst take I've
ever heard anyone have, never mind another police officer.
Of course, Philip Allot resigned after the backlash over those
comments. Over 100 of his colleagues
actually signed an open letter getting him to resign.
No one wants a man that thinks like that to be in a position of
power. And then of course, there was
the official advice that was given to women who were now
terrified at the thought of being approached by a police
officer. Police said that if you had
doubts or concerns about the validity of an interaction that
you had, then you could do one of the following things.
Now hold on to your chairs because so much of this is so
stupid. It's actually like laughable.
We'll start with the milder ones.
They said that you could call 999 in front of the police
officer that is trying to arrest you.
OK, Or you could ask the police officer to radio back to
headquarters so that you could speak to someone on his
walkie-talkie to verify him. Or, now this is where it gets
insane. You could flag down a passerby,
you know, just yell to someone, hey, I'm getting arrested, and
have them to come over to witness the situation.
What? Or they said that you could flag
down a car or a taxi or a bus to come and witness the
interaction. Or failing all of that and this
is the craziest 1 yet, you could just run off into the nearest
house. Genuinely that was the advice
that they gave women. If you felt unsafe with a lone
police officer, you should run away and close yourself in a
strangers house while you call for further help.
Now, surely that's actually grounds for resisting arrest?
Surely that police officer would chase you down.
Surely you would get into trouble for running away from an
interaction. And you know, as laughable as
all of this advice is, it's actually really not funny at all
because the burden was put onto women to keep themselves safe
through the most ridiculous means possible in order to just
stay safe from male violence. It's just, it's batshit insane
when you zoom out and you really take in the concept that this
advice is being issued to women to protect themselves from
police officers. Like what the fuck is going on?
In the aftermath of Sarah's murder, everyone was terrified
and enraged and they needed something.
They needed a movement, and with that, Reclaim These Streets was
formed. They organized vigils and
protests to challenge the narrative that women should just
be more careful, be more streetwise.
They shouldn't submit. Instead, the movement demanded
better protection and accountability.
But when these women tried to meet up in Clapham Common to
show just how horrified and angry they were, the Met Police
made everything as difficult as they possibly could.
Officers were literally seen getting physical with the women,
restraining them and shoving them down to the floor, which
led to even more outrage. Given the context of these
protests, Sarah had been murdered by a police officer
using his powerful position over her.
And I think all of This is why Sarah's case became so much
bigger than one horrific crime. Because for a lot of people,
especially women, it tapped into years of fear, frustration and
anger that had been building long before March 2021.
The danger we face just as women going about our lives is always
apparent to us. We know not to play music too
loud in our headphones while we're walking alone so that we
can stay alert to anyone approaching us.
We frequently look over our shoulder to check who's around.
We do an instinctual threat analysis on any man we see.
It's sad, but we've been scared into living this way.
And for many women that fear even once they walk through
their front door, a place that should feel safe could actually
hold the biggest threat to them in the form of domestic violence
or domestic abuse in general. And that's why I want to take a
moment to platform a crucial UK charity named Solace, who for
over 50 years now have been supporting women and children in
London escaping violence and abuse.
And it's not only domestic abuse survivors that they help, it's
those facing gender based violence, victims of human
trafficking or rape exploitation.
Solace helps so many people, mainly women and children, to
escape and then to heal. On their website you can find so
many different forms of support, from emergency accommodation to
therapy to a dedicated number to call just for advice.
And if you need to communicate in a different language, they
can offer face to face support in that language.
All you have to do is ask. If you're in London, please do
take a look at their website and familiarize yourself.
If not for yourself, then maybe for a friend or someone that you
haven't met yet. You never know when you might
need their services or when you might need to tell someone about
their services. So the link to their website
will be in today's description, along with our usual link tree
full of even more resources if you need them.
And for anyone who does need solace, you have my full support
in doing that. Please do look after yourself.
You deserve to live a healthy, happy, peaceful life away from
whatever dangerous situation you might find yourself in.
I believe in you, Outlaw believes in you.
And now let's pick back up with today's case.
Now that police have recovered Sarah's body and identified her
killer, they need to fill in the gaps of what actually happened
on that night, March 3rd, 2021. So by this point in the
investigation, police had begun gathering Intel and evidence
surrounding Wayne Cousins. They wanted to piece together
his movements in the lead up to the murder so that they could
try to figure out how he he had crossed paths with Sarah Everard
and why he had done what he'd done.
Well, they already knew that he had specifically hired a car to
carry out this attack in, so there's an immediate level of
premeditation. But they had no idea at this
point just how far back that premeditation went.
On February 10th, almost one whole month before Sarah's
murder, Wayne Cousins had gone on Amazon and purchased a
standard issue police handcuff key for £2.50, clearly intended
for personal use since it didn't go through his work.
Why would he need a spare handcuff key?
And on top of that, in the two months before the murder, so
this is as far back as January, Cousins was found to have driven
the 80 mile journey from Kent to London for no real reason on at
least three different occasions. The police believe that this was
him scoping out the areas looking for some quiet, darker
roads where he might be able to one day strike.
And in the meantime, while he was driving those roads, he's
probably just fantasizing and and trying to get some sort of
high from driving the roads that he would one day take when he
did murder someone. Clearly, he had decided on March
3rd or even sooner that the time had come he was ready to act on
his urges and attack a vulnerable woman.
Cousins waited until a day that he had off from work, but he
told his wife that he was working that day so that she
wouldn't worry or get suspicious when he didn't return home.
In fact, he'd even written on their family calendar that he
was going to be working overtime that day.
Even more coverage buying, even more time where people won't
wonder where he is. Around 4:45 PM that day, he goes
to a rental car place in Dover and hires a white Vauxhall
Astra, which he drove all the way up to London.
Around 8:00 PM, he's already in London.
He parks up in a Tesco car park in Kensington and he goes into
the shop and buys just one thing, a pack of 14 elastic hair
ties. Now the possible use that Wayne
had for these hair bands has been debated.
Clearly it was a very significant purchase, to the
point where he paused his journey to go to a shop solely
to buy hair bands. Some people think they could
have been used to restrain Sarah, but it's also been argued
that they could have had a sexual purpose as well.
Hair bands are sometimes known to be used as an alternative to
a cock ring, which is a tight band worn at the base of the
penis to trap blood inside in order to stay erect for longer
and delay ejaculation. And he had purchased these ahead
of going out in his pre hired car to find an unsuspecting
woman to kidnap, rape and murder.
It's sickening to think that he might have made this purchase in
order to prolong that sexual attack on his victim.
Alongside the hair bands, Wayne had already been putting
together what has been referred to as his kill kit, which
included plastic stick sheeting and carpet protector film.
So he's clearly not just planning to kidnap and rape a
woman and then let her go, is he?
Those purchases he made in advance show his intentions loud
and clear. He wanted to murder a woman.
He knew that there might be a mess.
He wanted to cover his tracks. It's genuinely spine chilling to
think how much he prepared, how much he thought about each
element as a police officer as well, he probably knew ways in
which he could be caught out and adapted his methods accordingly.
It gets to a point where it's like, are we sure that the
murder of Sarah Everard was the very first time that this man
had ever killed anyone? I mean, there's no current
evidence to say that Wayne Cousins had murdered anyone else
before. But at least in my opinion, the
way that he went about this seems really advanced, almost
like he was practised or experienced in some way.
He clearly knows a lot and I don't want to get lost in
speculation though, so let's just talk about what we do know.
Wayne was prepped. He had got all of his equipment
ready and within the hours after buying those hair bands, Wayne
was putting his plan into action.
He was driving around South London just hunting for a woman,
any woman that was alone and looked vulnerable enough for him
to approach and manipulate, And it was around 9:30 PM that he
spotted Sarah Everard walking down Poinders Rd.
She was just halfway through her walk home.
Cousins pulled his car over, turned on his hazard lights, and
got out to go and speak to her. At the time, he was wearing
handcuffs attached to his belt, and when he spoke with Sarah, he
flashed his warrant card, immediately establishing his
power over her, immediately intimidating her, manipulating
her, and making it clear that he was someone that she was
expected to obey. Wayne proceeded to question
Sarah about where she had been that night.
Remember, the Super confusing Covad rules at the time were
that you had to have a reasonable excuse to be out and
about, and he proceeded to lie to her and tell her that she was
in breach of Covad regulations. He told her that she was
breaking the law and that he needed to arrest her for this.
The rules were truly so messy at the time that Sarah could have
easily been convinced that she was in the wrong.
Even if she wasn't, Cousins would have been able to play on
some specific wording or a new rule that she might have only
vaguely heard about in order to make her believe that she was
actually committing a crime. And if a police officer who was
shown you his warrant card says that you're breaking the law, I
think most people would actually believe them, even if you think
that you're in the right. I mean, at least prior to this
case, I myself would likely have gone with him too, because we
are taught to trust the police, trust that they know the rules
even better than us, trust that they are acting in good faith.
Even just walking past the police in the street can make
you feel like you've done something wrong, even when you
know full well that you haven't. I think it's quite a natural
response to fawn when faced with that level of authority.
And so it doesn't. It seemed like Sarah put up a
huge fight when Wayne Cousins proceeded to take the cuffs off
his belt and restrain her in them.
Which realistically, if this had been a genuine arrest on the
grounds of violating the COVID regulations, then handcuffs
wouldn't be at all necessary. Police don't use them a lot of
the time when they're making a relatively calm arrest like
this. But the reason we know that
Sarah was handcuffed by Wayne before he led her into the car
is actually due to a witness that had driven by this
interaction taking place. This woman in her car didn't
think too much of it at the time.
She just saw a woman on the side of the road being handcuffed by
a plainclothes officer. And she remembered actually
remarking to her partner that she thought that that was quite
unusual because police don't tend to handcuff women very
often. She just assumed that it was
some sort of undercover operation.
Little did she know she was actually witnessing the
abduction of Sarah Everard. And now that Sarah was
restrained, Cousins LED Sarah into his hire car and drove her
away, presumably under the pretence that he was taking her
to the police station. But in actuality, he began the
75 mile journey down to Dover, almost two hours away in a car.
And we don't know at what point during that journey Sarah
realized that something wasn't right.
But after a certain amount of time, you'd be wondering why
it's taking so long to get to the station, why he's taking
motorways and not turning off. Of course, we don't know if
there was any level of communication going on in the
car between Wayne and Sarah. Maybe she realized very early on
that this man wasn't genuine and this hadn't been a legitimate
arrest. But this is one part of the case
that I always think about, even now years out.
How scared she must have been on that car journey after having
worked out that they weren't going to the police station and
no one knew where she was or who she was with.
She had no idea where this man was taking her and why.
He drove her to a secluded Rd. in Dover where he asked her to
get out of the car and transferred her into his own
vehicle, Now the family car that he takes his wife and kids
everywhere in. He parked it on a quiet Rd. away
from residential areas ahead of time.
Another piece that he had put into place well in advance
knowing that he was going to do this.
By that point, Sarah must have known exactly where this was
going. There would never be any
legitimate reason for a police officer to make you get into a
different vehicle to continue the journey, especially when
that vehicle is parked in the middle of nowhere.
It's not a marked car, but Cousins was covering his tracks,
making sure that one vehicle couldn't be traced all the way
to the end destination. And by now it was reaching
midnight. Sarah had first been approached
by this police officer at 9:30 PM, so now she had been with him
for 2 1/2 hours, and finally he drives her to a rural area just
north of Dover, where it's believed that he carried out her
rape and murder in the back seat of his car.
It's unclear just how long the attack lasted for, but it ended
with him strangling her to death with his police belt.
He would have had to apply pressure to her neck with that
belt for at least two full minutes straight before she
passed out or died. Two whole minutes where Sarah
struggled and knew that she was about to die out in the middle
of nowhere at the hands of this stranger.
Sarah was 33 years old when her life was stolen from her in the
most horrifying way imaginable. And not only did he take her
life, he put her through what I can only imagine to be the worst
fear and trauma imaginable for hours beforehand.
And now her family are left to carry on life without her.
So abruptly she was gone and never coming back.
And the thought of her last hours on this earth replay in so
many people's minds, even now, years out, including mine.
Wayne Cousins is a monster of epic proportions.
He had a burning desire to harm and murder a vulnerable woman
that night. And what's worse, this man had
been reported and identified relation to an indecent exposure
case just a few days prior that the police failed to follow up
on. Had they done so properly,
Cousins would have probably lost his job, therefore he would have
lost his warrant card, he wouldn't have had his handcuffs,
and therefore he would have been unable to trick and lure Sarah
Everard into his car and to her death.
Instead, he used that exact warrant card and that exact
authority that he was allowed to maintain in order to carry out
the rape and murder of an innocent woman.
But before I get too irate, let's round off the timeline and
discuss what Wayne got up to in the hours and days after
committing such a heinous crime. At 2:34 AM, he pulled into a
petrol station and bought a bottle of water, a leukocyd, and
an apple. And at this point we to assume
that Sarah's body was in his car.
He just parked it and left it outside while he ran into the
shop. I'm not sure where else it would
have been at that moment if not in his car, because following
the visit to the petrol station, he was driving to that plot of
land that he owned where Sarah's body was eventually recovered
from. It's believed at this stage that
he hid Sarah's body on that piece of land.
It was actually a hotspot for people fly tipping, which is
basically just dumping rubbish dish that's too big for them to
dispose of. So there was a load of just shit
around, and it's believed that he had found an industrial
fridge to hide her in or under, at least for the next few hours
while he drove back home and tried to upkeep his normal
family life without suspicion. By 7:30 AM he drove back to
where he had left that rental car the night before, and he
switched again. Now he was going to take the car
back to the shop. In total, he had racked up
around 300 miles on that thing in less than 24 hours.
And then just before he returned home to his family once again,
he stopped in a Costa and bought a hot chocolate and a sweet
treat for himself. The fact that he can eat at all
after what he had just done is one thing, but the fact that
this is a hot chocolate and a Bakewell tart, not even a
coffee, you know, for the caffeine, for the energy.
It's almost like he's trying to comfort himself with comfort
food. A hot chocolate is that to me.
And he can actually be seen on CCTV inside that Costa Coffee
shop rubbing his hands anxiously and looking around.
Seems like the guilt was already plaguing him.
Mind you, he still has to fully dispose of Sarah's body later
on. And I think that makes his
little hot chocolate run even more horrifying because this is
a man that is mid murder cover up, stopping off for a sweet
treat before continuing to execute his plan and handle this
dead body. The next thing he did was take
care of Sarah's phone. This is around 9:30 AM.
It seems he had cut up her SIM card and thrown her actual phone
into a ribbon in Sandwich, Kent. Later on in the investigation,
parts of her SIM card would be found in his car.
That was crucial evidence that linked him to her in those early
days of the disappearance. By 11:00 AM he had pulled into a
service station and bought an empty Jerry can that he
proceeded to fill at the pump with six litres of petrol, fuel
that he would later use to burn Sarah's body beyond recognition.
It's quite interesting to me just how brazen he is at this
point in time. It's not even been 11 hours
since he committed this murder, but clearly he's quite confident
that the crime won't trace back to him because here he is, full
face on display his in his own car and knowing that all of this
will show up on this car garage's CCTV footage.
He's not even trying to cover his tracks or obscure his
identity in the process. But his plan was quite clear.
He would drive back to that plot of land, pull Sarah's body out
from where he had hidden her, and he would try to incinerate
her body to get rid of all the evidence.
But quickly, before he did so, it was time for another sweet
treat. Wayne Cousins bought a salted
caramel latte at the petrol station and then he stopped off
at McDonald's drive through for some lunch.
Yes, a McDonald's drive through. As if he hadn't sexually
harassed the women at one. Just five days prior to this.
A little over an hour later, Wayne's car was parked up by
this plot of land that he owned, and a fire was spotted in the
area. That evening he would return
home to his family, to his wife, to his two young kids, as if
nothing had happened. As if for the last two days he
hadn't been committing heinous crime after crime.
As if he wasn't now a murderer. And it seems that his family
didn't really notice anything unusual about his behaviour.
He was acting normal as ever, be it because he truly was
completely devoid of empathy or because he was doing a good job
at hiding his anxiety and his guilt from those around him.
Because while I do believe that this man didn't feel any empathy
towards Sarah, I think he felt a lot for himself.
I think he felt sorry for himself now because he he was
dealing with a lot of guilt and a lot of stress thinking about
about how he was going to get away with this.
He actually called off of work the next day saying that he
wouldn't be able to make it in due to stress.
And you know what? I do believe that he was
stressed. I think the amount of sweet
treats and warm drinks, salted caramel lattes, hot chocolates,
little pastries, to me that does strike as a very pathetic man
trying to comfort himself in any small way that he can.
Not that he deserves to feel any level of comfort right now, but
it seems to me that he's trying to self.
He also emailed his supervisor around the same time saying that
he no longer wants to carry a firearm and I don't know the
exact reason that he gave. But given the fact that he has
just emailed and taken time off with stress, maybe he was
insinuating with this that he thought that he could be a
danger to himself if he was allowed a firearm the day after
the cover up. It was March 5th and Cousins is
still trying to move as normally as he can, even calling up the
vet to book in their family dog for an appointment to discuss
her separation anxiety. Yeah, I was wondering if I
could. Book my dog in for the for the
vet so I can have a discussion about her issues please.
She, well, we think she's suffering from like separation
anxiety later on that same day. He went to AB and Q which is
like the UK's version of Home Depot, and he bought 2 giant
builders bags that are usually used for shifting like super
heavy materials on a building site like rubble and rocks and
bricks. It's believed that Wayne had
bought these in order to drag Sarah's body between where he
had been burning it and storing it into the pond where it was
eventually found. Somewhere along the way he had
also placed an order on Amazon for a big plastic tarp and a
bungee cargo net. I now he will have been very
aware of the intensifying investigation into Sarah's
disappearance. I mean, it was the main news
story in London already. By day two he will have been
stressed, but just the concept of a murderer having a day off
of work for stress afterwards, it's laughable, isn't it?
On March 7th, 72 hours after murdering Sarah, it's the day
before he was about to be arrested in his home.
Wayne Cousins takes his two kids out to play for the very last
time, but he doesn't take them to a park or to a soft play
area. He took them to the plot of land
that he owned where he was storing his murder victim's
body. And it's unclear actually when
he used those builders bags to transport her body into the
pond. The idea that it could have
actually been then while his kids were playing meters away,
it just makes you feel sick. The following day was March 8th.
Wayne was still off of work for stress, and it seemed that he
spent most of his day just at home.
Around 7:10 that night, he tried to wipe his phone completely.
He reset the whole thing to factory settings, deleting
absolutely everything he could on there.
And it's not 100% clear what kind of evidence he felt like he
was getting rid of, maybe like location data.
But no doubt there were a lot of important things on that phone
that were probably caught in the crossfire.
We can only imagine pictures of his kids, his wife, their
memories and and he's willing to delete it all forever in order
to get away with the rape and murder of a young woman.
A little under an hour later the police knocked on cousins door
and arrested him. After that brief conversation
where he was still mostly denying the accusations against
him, police took him into custody at Belmarsh Prison and
there he would be checked on every 15 minutes.
After being deemed A vulnerable prisoner, police likely felt
based on something that he'd said or done, that he could
possibly be a danger to himself. And actually they would be right
because the following day news broke that the man arrested in
connection with Sarah Everard's case was now in hospital.
He had been found collapsed in his cell with pretty bad head
injuries. I think he was unconscious.
He had been alone at the time, so officers immediately knew
that whatever had happened to him was self-inflicted.
It turned out that Wayne Cousins had smashed his head off of his
cell toilet bowl and knocked himself out, but he was treated
in hospital and sent back to his cell within a matter of hours.
By now police had seized his car and forensic tests had been
performed that not only revealed those fragments of Sarah's SIM
card, but also traces of her blood and Wayne's semen in the
back seat of the car. A number of other things had
been seized from his family home by now, including a petrol can,
boxes of latex gloves, a police badge, plastic cuffs, along with
a sex aid that was not further clarified in reports.
So we can only imagine. I know Wayne knew that the jig
was up. I don't know how long exactly it
took, but he very quickly came clean to the police about the
fact that he had indeed murdered Sarah Everard.
Couple of months later, June 2021, Wayne Cousins pled guilty
to the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah, and this meant
that the case wouldn't have to go to trial.
Sarah's loved ones were thankfully spared the prolonged
trauma of having to endure a trial where all of the evidence
would have to be laid out in excruciating detail, all while
her murderer would be pretending that he's not responsible.
Luckily, he did plead guilty before he got to that point, but
when the time came for Wayne Cousins sentencing, he was
handed the most severe punishment possible in the Uka
whole life order. He will be spending the rest of
his working life in prison and he will die behind bars.
He's also serving concurrent shorter terms for two cases of
indecent exposure, including the McDonald's incident.
And even though he did actually try to appeal against his whole
life order, I don't know if he was trying to say that it's not
fair to keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
Regardless, in July 2022, his appeal was dismissed.
Of course, in the aftermath of this case, the whole UK was
shaken with the absolute shattering of trust in our law
enforcement, not only based on the fact that a serving police
officer had used his position in order to to kidnap and murder a
woman, but also because there were so many chances to prevent
this, so many chances that were missed.
The amount of times Wayne Cousins managed to pass police
vetting despite being in major debt, despite having several
reports of indecent exposure against him, despite literally
being identified as a suspect in one of them.
Police had his name, they had his car registration plate, but
they failed to look into that incident quick enough.
So Cousins was able to keep his job, to keep his warrant card,
to keep his handcuffs, and he was able to use them to murder
Sarah Everard. The Met Police did try to defend
themselves on all of this, saying that there was actually
nothing in Wayne's background at the time that he was hired and
the time that he was vetted that was cause for concern for them.
And I actually think that just makes them look even worse.
Like that's not a defence. Sure, Wayne Cousins didn't have
any convictions, but as several reports and accusations, not
enough to call. What was concern?
We're still going to let that man become a police officer?
Even in the aftermath of this case, more women came forward
with allegations and reports of previous encounters with Wayne
Cousins. They had seen his face on the
news related to this case and they had finally recognised that
he was their attacker as well. So many more indecent exposure
incidents were reported and even an attempted kidnapping at
knifepoint from 1995. One woman had been carrying that
with her for decades and finally she had a name to pin to her
traumatic memory. I do need to clarify that Wayne
Cousins has never been charged or convicted of anything in
relation to that allegation. An allegation is all.
Well, it is right now at least. But what is incredibly clear is
that there is a pattern of sexual deviance that was never
taken seriously enough to stop Wayne Cousins in his tracks.
He was allowed to simmer in his sick actions and even escalate
to the point of murder, all while clocking in for his high
power job. And I'm not entirely sure where
to add this into the episode, so I guess I'll just say it now.
One or two of his old friends came forward to say that Wayne
had always been a weird and perverted person.
Back when he was in his 20s, he was dating teenagers as young as
14. A fully grown legal adult dating
a child. It's horrifying to see just how
far back these patterns go. Oh, and also, he was discovered
to have been in possession of indecent images of children at
some point in his life. I don't know if they were in his
possession at the time of his arrest, but this is what an
inquiry found later on. I believe there were multiple
different inquiries done internally within the police and
issued by the government to dig into the workings of the Met
Police and all the other institutions that Cousins had
worked for in his life in order to figure out how the hell this
could have happened. 12 Different gross misconduct on
misconduct notices were issued to different officers as a
result of these inquiries. 12 There was so much shady shit
going on behind the scenes that had been flying under the radar
this whole time. It soon came to light that many
of Wayne Cousins colleagues were very aware of his depraved
sexual predilections. As I mentioned earlier, he'd
been very open with them about the fact that he liked violent
pornography, but now it was discovered that back at the
Civil Nuclear Constabulary, many of his Co workers gave him the
nickname The Rapist. That was because he made a lot
of female members of staff uncomfortable, be it with words
or actions, we don't know. But they called him The Rapist
as like a friendly jokey nickname.
It's unbelievable that a serving police officer had that nickname
from other officers. A few of these fellow officers
were investigated regarding this nickname and many of them denied
it. No, I've never heard that.
I've never heard him being called that.
I've never called him that. But enough of them came out
saying that it was true that it really makes you wonder, was
there a level of protection between these officers?
Were they covering for themselves now?
Were they covering for each other?
It also came to light that there were a lot of highly
inappropriate messages shared in Group chats among police
officers, many of them Wayne Cousins was a part of.
In fact, a conversation that Wayne had with another officer
went like this. PC Jonathan Cobbin had messaged
into the chat saying that he had just seen a woman drunk and
unconscious as he was getting off of the train.
Wayne texted back. Did you finger her to see if she
was OK? PC Cobbon texted back.
I considered it, but she was a right old lump so I just raped a
bystander instead. Another conversation that they
had about the fear of losing their jobs went as follows,
Cousins said. Mate, they aren't going to ditch
you with your skill set unless you finger a DV victim, unless
you sexually assault a victim of domestic violence that is coming
to you for help. He quickly follows up with PC
Coburn. If that's the case, you're
probably fucked. And he responds, that's all
right. DV victims love it.
That's why they're repeat victims.
Then another officer chimes in just to make a comment about
repeat victims of domestic violence.
APC Joel Borders says no, they just don't listen with a
laughing face. In these chats, they would share
graphics depicting violence against women and making a whole
manner of inappropriate comments, be it in relation to
cases that they were working on or just in general.
There was misogyny, racism, violent comments, being
dismissive, and joking about rape complaints.
A number of police officers lost their jobs in the aftermath of
these inquiries, which is bittersweet news because, well,
good, they shouldn't be allowed to keep those jobs.
But also, how the hell had all of this flown under the radar
for so long? Inquiries revealed that in the
five years prior to Sarah's murder, 27 different people
working for the Met Police had committed offences including
rape and possession of indecent images of children. 27 different
police officers in London alone. These are the kind of people
that are slipping through the cracks of these abysmal vetting
processes and being able to have authority over the rest of us.
And let me tell you about the worst of the worst.
Right behind Wayne Cousins was a man named David Carrick.
He had been brought to police attention by a woman.
The very next day after Cousins sentencing, she came forward to
say that she too had been raped by a serving Metropolitan Police
officer, PC Carrick. As investigations into this
progressed, everyone was horrified to learn that this
woman was just one of many. This man was a serial rapist
still actively working for the police in the same unit as Wayne
Cousins. There were at least 12 different
women that he had done this to her 12 and just like with
cousins, there had been so many red flags.
In fact, enquiries found that there were sixteen chances to
stop David Carrick that had been missed.
As if our trust hadn't been shattered enough, now there's
two of the most dangerous men in London that had been employed by
the Metropolitan Police. As the year went on, 2021 into
2022, more and more complaints came out about police officers
in different scenarios. One of them had pretended to be
a model scout and filmed women without their permission.
There were the officers that had taken photos of the dead bodies
of Bieber, Henry and Nicole Smallman and sent them into a
WhatsApp chat with other police, calling them the dead birds.
The amount of horrific group chats that were exposed was
immense with one colleague reading I would happily rape
you. These are the people that are
hired and paid money to serve and protect us.
Thankfully so many pieces of shit lost their job and were
handed prison sentences themselves In the aftermath of
this case. It was like Wayne Cousins had
opened the floodgates that had been locked for far too long and
finally all of this horrific activity could be exposed.
Eventually, even the top dog herself lost her.
The head of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida
Dick, had said right from the start that she would not resign
from her position, despite the public calling for her to do so.
But eventually, as things got worse and worse, she lost the
support of our mayor at the time and she handed in her
resignation. Now, we've spent the latter part
of this episode talking about the horrendous police officers
that do need to be named and shamed.
But now I think it's time we bring it back to the woman at
the centre of this case. Sarah Everard should still be
here. She should still be living the
amazing life that she had built for herself.
She would be turning 39 years old just next month.
She might have gotten married or had kids of her own by now.
And I think that's part of why this case stayed with so many
people in the way that it did, because Sarah Everard felt
familiar to many of us young women.
She could have been a friend or a colleague or someone we'd gone
to uni with. She was all of us and what
happened to her was horrific. It was cruel, it was deeply
unfair and while Wayne Cousins will spend the rest of his life
behind bars, that can never undo the pain caused to Sarah's loved
ones or the impact that this case had on so many people
across the UK. So, as always, I want to end
this episode by remembering Sarah first and foremost for the
life that she lived, rather than the way that it was taken from
her. Sarah's mother Susan spoke of
the loss of her daughter, saying I yearn for her.
I remember all the lovely things about her.
She was caring, she was funny, she was clever, but she was good
at practical things too. She was a beautiful dancer.
She was a wonderful daughter. She was always there to listen,
to advise or simply to share the minutiae of the day.
I'm following her mum's words. As we come to the end of this
episode, I want to take one last moment to remember Sarah Everard
from all US here at Outlaw Podcast.
We send our sincere condolences to her loved ones, and that is
all we have for today's episode. Thank you so much for tuning in
to this episode of Outlaw Podcast.
If you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe, leave
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And you know, with all that being said, I'll see you in the
next episode. Thank you so much for watching.
Bye.