Eleanor Neale

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 gonna 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, a 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 thirties.

And we'll 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.