Chapter 1: What happened on the night Sarah Everard went missing?
Just after 9pm, Sarah Everard left her friend's 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. Hello and welcome to Outlaw Podcast.
I'm Eleanor Neale and in today's episode, we're in South London in 2021, where the boyfriend, friends and family of Sarah Everard are starting to realise 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 wanna 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 endure.
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.
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 14 1987 to parents jeremy and susan
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Chapter 2: How did the police respond to Sarah's disappearance?
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 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, 2021, 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 were technically breaking the law and there could be consequences.
You could be fined or even arrested. On the evening of March 3rd, 2021, 33-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.
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Chapter 3: What details emerged about Sarah Everard's background?
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.
A 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 at about 9.30pm 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 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.
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Chapter 4: Who was Wayne Couzens and what was his role in the case?
Now, the possible use that Wayne had for these hairbands 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 hairbands. 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.
Hairbands 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 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 practiced 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 9.30pm that he spotted Sarah Everard walking down Poinders Road. 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 COVID 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 COVID regulations. He told her that she was breaking the law and that he needed to arrest her for this.
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