RedHanded - Episode 330 - Sarah Everard: The Betrayal

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Deep in the middle of the UK’s shambolic COVID lockdown, 33 year old Sarah Everard went for a walk. That night she crossed paths with a man who would abduct, rape and kill her.Within days detectives had a man named Wayne Couzens on their radar, but with this breakthrough came a huge reckoning for investigators - because Couzens was a serving London Metropolitan police officer.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus Content Follow us on social media:InstagramTwitterVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti. I'm Hannah.

And welcome back to Red Handed. Happy New Year. Happy 2020-fo. Hopefully it will be a merry one. So yes, by the time you're listening to this, Hannah and I will have had two glorious weeks off to just lay on our sofas and eat potatoes covered in custard or whatever else we want to do. But in real life, reality, right now, this very second as we hit record, it's actually still December. And Hannah and I sat here staring at each other, not in any way really filled with any festive spirit, putting off getting into this week's case because it's horrific. Mind-boggling in its brutality and just plain shocking as to how it was allowed to happen in the first place. The murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 became one of the biggest, most notorious and most publicised cases in UK criminal history. It appalled a nation already reeling from months of being on lockdown and deepened the public's distrust of the police,

to an extent that the London Metropolitan in particular may never recover. If you are British, you know this story. Everyone else, prepare yourselves. At 5.50pm on the 3rd of March 2021, a year into the UK's shambolic Covid lockdowns, 33-year-old Sarah Everard left her house to go to her friend's place for dinner. Then she left her friend's house in Clapham Junction, South East London, at 9pm and set off on the two-mile walk back to her home in Brixton.

CCTV cameras picked up Sarah cutting through Clapham Common, which is a big urban park. And during her walk, Sarah called her boyfriend Josh and spoke with him on the phone for 14 minutes. They planned to meet up the next day. But Sarah would never show up. Her friends, family and Josh tried desperately to get in touch with Sarah, but all of their messages went unread. And all their calls are answered. So, on the 4th of March 2021, Josh called the police. If you don't know this case, let me tell you now.

Throughout this entire saga, the police were largely outed for their incompetence, corruption and cover-ups, for reasons that will become painfully obvious very soon. But we do have to give credit where credit is due. The officers who investigated Sarah Everard's disappearance did an outstanding job. As soon as Sarah was reported missing, they were on it. They took her disappearance incredibly seriously and they started investigating immediately. Detectives put out a call for CCTV and any dashcam footage from anyone who had been driving around the area of Clapham

on the night that Sarah vanished. They then ploughed through over 1,800 hours of footage to piece together what had happened to the 33-year-old marketing executive. And using the CCTV recordings, investigators were able to almost step-for-step retrace Sarah's movements. 26 minutes after leaving her friend's home, she was spotted on a street called Cavendish Road. Six minutes later, at 9.32pm, the camera on board a bus captured Sarah on the side of the road, speaking with a man. The man appears to be showing her something in his hand.

Another six minutes later, at 9.38pm, witnesses reported seeing Sarah Everard getting into a car. She was handcuffed. This set alarm bells blaring. So the police checked the car's registration, only to discover that it was a hire car. And it had been rented not in London, but almost 80 miles away in the town of Dover on the far southeast coast of England. And it had been rented by a 48-year-old man named Wayne Cousins. So just six days after Sarah went missing, investigators had Wayne Cousins

on their radar, which in a stranger homicide is very fast. But they had to be sure that this was their man. So investigators checked the CCTV from the car rental shop. And bingo, there he was. Cousins was a perfect physical match for the man who had put Sarah in handcuffs and then into the back of his car on the night that she vanished. He was even wearing the same exact clothes when he was hiring the car as when he was spotted by that bus camera taking Sarah. It was a huge breakthrough but it also must have no doubt brought with it

a deep feeling of horror for the officers who tracked this man down. Because Wayne Cousins, the now prime suspect in the disappearance of Sarah Everard, a story that was already dominating the headlines, was a serving London Metropolitan Police officer. In fact, Cousins was part of an elite team within the London Met. He was a member of the Parliamentary Diplomatic Unit, an armed response team charged with protecting top diplomats and politicians, as well as guarding embassies. And at 7am on the 3rd of March,

the day Sarah Everard disappeared, Wayne Cousins had just finished a 12-hour shift at the US Embassy. He called his wife in the lovely town of Deal, Kent, and told her that he had to work an extra shift so he wouldn't be home that night. But that was a lie. Wayne Cousins left work and drove to Dover, parked his car on the quiet street of North Military Hill and then went to pick up his rental car. He used his real name and he didn't even try and hide his face from the CCTV

cameras in the car shop. Now some people wonder why he did this. Why didn't he try and obscure his face? Why didn't he try and hide? Why didn't he try and hire a car in a way that he didn't even have to go into a shop and be caught on CCTV? He was a cop. Surely he knew he was on camera. Now I don't really have an answer for this other than he was so supremely confident maybe that he'd get away with it and that he didn't care. I really don't know because it's such a stupid mistake to make. But another question is why get the rental car at all if he was so obviously going to link that rental car back to himself anyway?

I don't know. I think the only answer I can give as to why he even bothered to get a rental car given that he hires it in his own name etc etc is because I think he knew that his own car which was a bit of a banger may have made an intended victim be less likely to get into his car like if you drive up in a shitty car and then tell somebody they're under arrest and you're an undercover plainclothes officer, they're going to have a few more red flags going off if you're driving around an old banger. So I think that's the reason for the hire car, because he absolutely makes no attempts whatsoever to de-link himself from the rental car. What a massive, massive, like, sliding doors moment that the police even get that break. Because if that bus hadn't driven past Wayne Cousins at the exact moment he's talking to Sarah Everard and showing her something in his hand,

and then you can match it with the eyewitnesses that saw her getting into his car, those eyewitnesses never would have remembered the registration. The registration is only known because that bus happens to drive past them at that exact moment. So, after getting that upgrade, Cousins drove his hire car almost three hours from Dover to London, stopping on his way to fill up his vehicle with 30 litres of petrol, which is enough fuel for a very long journey. So clearly, by this stage, he already had a lot of driving planned. Once in south-west London, Wayne Cousins was caught on cameras at a Tesco buying hairbands.

Cousins is totally bald, so why he needed these hairbands is theorised to be for a very grim reason. Some have speculated, including law enforcement, that Cousins brought these hairbands in order to prolong an erection. That's horrific. I didn't know that. So after this, ANPR, which is Automatic Number Plate Registration Technology, caught Cousins driving around the Earls Court area in London for almost an hour. He didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular.

He didn't look lost. He just drove around and around. We know now that Officer Wayne Cousins was stalking. He was out there that night looking for someone, anyone who fit the bill. He was on the hunt that night for a victim. And that's exactly what he's doing in Earl's Court. Like, if you don't know where this story ends, his behaviour looks really odd. But he's out there looking for somebody that he can take. And he had already planned exactly what he was going to do. He has the hairbands. Police also later discovered that he had had a kill kit in that rental car. a kit that he had been putting together over months. It contained the police-issue handcuffs that he'd bought online and then used on Sarah, as well as a

roll of self-adhesive carpet protector and Velcro straps. By 9.30pm, as Sarah was walking home, Cousins had given up on Earls Court and was driving over Battersea Bridge, heading straight in Sarah's direction. Cousins first encountered Sarah when they both ended up on Pointers Road in Clapham. And this is where Cousins stopped Sarah Everard. On the bus camera footage, officers could see that he was showing Sarah something in his hand

and it turned out to be his Metropolitan Police ID. And he used that ID to falsely arrest Sarah, telling her that she was in breach of COVID lockdown rules and that she needed to go with him to the police station. And by 9.38pm, Cousins has got Sarah in his car, with her hands handcuffed behind her back, and he begins driving away. But he's not headed to the local police station. He drove a no-doubt terrified and trapped Sarah Everard 80 miles back to Dover. I think it's important to say, like, that people were getting arrested for being outside.

Oh, yeah. It was such a... Oh, we come on to that. Fuck it, Al. It's horrific horrific such a violent time yeah i mean so much of this story is infuriating for multi layers of reasons but we will come back to that shortly for now i want to talk about sarah and the intense fear that she must have been when she was in that car. 80 miles, three hours, he drove her back to Dover.

I can't even imagine how scared she must have been. It's absolutely, I don't even know what the word is, gut-wrenching to think when she must have realised that Cousins wasn't taking her to the police station at what point did she realize and also this is something that i heard emma kenney who is a pretty well known psychologist here in the uk if you've ever seen any uk true crime documentary emma kenney is probably being interviewed in it we love emma kenney fabulous fabulous makeup she's always got fabulous makeup on she made this point and honestly when i heard her say it i was like oh my fucking god that is horrific because how was he with her that's three hours is a long time to spend in the car with

somebody and she's completely immobilized her hands are handcuffed behind her back there is nothing she can do how was he with her did he taunt Sarah now that he had her in his car and knew that there was no way she could get out did Wayne Cousins get off on scaring Sarah and watching her panic like a sadist or maybe did Cousins just completely ignore her freaking her out with his lack of responses I also can't even imagine being locked in a car with this man and he just stops responding to you. We don't know. Or maybe he tried to keep her calm.

Maybe he tried to tell her everything was going to be fine. I don't know. We just don't know what happened. All we do know is that Sarah, like I said, had her hands cuffed behind her back. It's not like she could even have fought as Wayne Cousins drove. He, by this point, was in complete control. So there is no doubt in my mind that Sarah spent those hours absolutely petrified.

And there's no way that during that journey she didn't realize the immense level of danger she was in, whatever Wayne Cousins was saying to her. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes.

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a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. So given all of the footage that they now had, officers decided it was time to pay their colleague, Wayne Cousins, a little visit. And this police interview is one of the strangest we've ever come across. Let's have a listen now.

So we're here to talk to you about Sarah. I'm going to show you a picture. Do you know Sarah? I don't know. OK. Sarah went missing. I'll show you some pictures of her on the day. Sarah went missing on Wednesday and her parents obviously, and her family are really worried about her. The inquiry

that's been conducted so far has let us come and speak to you about it and to see what we know about Sarah, okay? So would you like to, do you know where Sarah is? No. Right, okay. Do you have anything about what happened tonight? I know that she went missing up in London somewhere about a week ago or so, just from what I got on the news. Okay, have you ever personally met her? No, not personally, no. about a week ago or so, just from what I got on the news.

OK. Have you met her personally? No, not personally. Have you had any interactions with her at all? No, why would I have personal interactions with her? Well, it's very difficult because I can't go into a lot of the evidence because that's not part of what an urgent interview is okay. This interview is just about trying to find her. 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 as 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. So we are trying to find her. Obviously everybody is very worried about her. She's got you know parents, she's got you know she has siblings, she's got a boyfriend. There's a lot of people that care about her. You've seen on the news that there are people that reach out about her, out there looking for her every day and she's missing and our job, our primary job here is to find her and to try and find her safe and well. Okay. Now we believe that you know something about where she is and that's why we're here to look for her and to try and find her and that's why we're talking to you now is to try and find her. And that's why we're talking to you now, is to try and get you to have a good think about it.

At this point, Cousins knows that the jig is up and he caves very quickly. But he doesn't exactly admit to what he's done. Instead, he now starts making a series of strange claims about an Eastern European people-trafficking gang. OK, well, I am in financial... ..and I've been lent one by... I don't know who they are. They're a group, a gang, whatever, and they told me that I need to go and pick up girls and give them to them. So I said, not happening.

And it then came through that they're going to harm my family, take them away and they'll use them instead. At that point I had no option to try and find somebody. So I don't know. There's just a couple of names I was told a place to take her. That's it. That is all I know. I see this group of people. Tell me about them. I need to find them. Tell me everything you know. Okay. There was a white Sprinter van. They are between sort of Lennon, Maidstone area that I got her off.

I still don't know, I don't know, they just, I just parked my car up and then the van come up behind me, flashed me and they all jumped out and then they took this girl. They said, they said you've done good and I don't know whether my family's going me. So, at that point, I'm doing what I can to take my family. That's it. So all I know is that it was a roundabout. We could drive there now, I could show you. But roughly I don't know Lennon, Maidstone area at all. If you did it on Google, if you did it on Google Maps, it would be like Google Earth if you drove it. Right. I drove from Ashford to Maidstone. There's a roundabout that breaks up i guess so this is the first big roundabout

you come to you carry straight over to maidstone but instead i went round that roundabout and back up another road um and at that point that i was flash. The guys got out, opened my door, opened that door, pushed me out against the front of the car, took the girl, drove 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 for my family. They come for my family. I've got nothing myself. I've got no choice.

I'll go back through the route with you in a minute, all right? But how do they contact you? How do you contact them? I try to talk over one of their call girls and rip her off. So she's told them and they've got me. How do they contact you? How is it they've been in contact with you to make those threats? They just tell me, be here, be here. So Hotel Burstyn down in Folkestone, be here.

Okay so I turned up but 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? How is it that they give you those directions? Yeah they'll come outside, So they'll be outside here. And then they'll say, well you're going to be in Folkestone at this time, or you're going to be in Ashford at this time. That's it. There's no links, no telephone numbers. I'm completely on my own, but at the same time being threatened. It had Romanian plates on the van. White, like Mercedes Sprint type van. OK, so what we have here is a man who has a prepared narrative.

This whole Eastern European gang thing wasn't just dreamt up on the spot. Cousins knew that they might come for him. In fact, just 35 minutes before the police knocked at his door, Cousins did a full factory reset on his mobile phone. This has led to a lot of speculation that he was tipped off by someone inside the investigation. And that may well be true. It does feel like quite a large coincidence. And we all know that the Met are all out for each other. But it is just speculation. We have no public proof of Cousins receiving any sort of heads up

from another police officer, but would we? But getting back to the interview at his house, it's so interesting to listen to Cousins. He's so obviously lying. In the video, because obviously you guys are just listening to the audio version but we will post a link to the video so you can go watch it you can see how hard he's breathing the whole time he's being questioned even though he's not speaking the officers are just questioning him you can literally see his entire chest rising and falling with the fear and the panic that is coursing through him.

And in a classic move, after Wayne Cousins realises that the detectives know it was him, he starts to minimise. With this whole Eastern European gang thing, he turns himself into the victim. He was being blackmailed by a gang. They had threatened his family. What could he possibly do? Surely they had to understand why he did what he did. He's not a bad guy. He just made a bad decision. It's unbelievable. The idea that Cousins was being forced into kidnapping a girl and handing her over to this Eastern European gang because he'd had a run-in with one of the girls at this Eastern European gang's brothels? What? It doesn't even make any sense.

I mean, the idea that he really thought that rather than just admitting that he'd been paying for sex and reporting the gang to the police when they started to threaten him, he thought that abducting a girl and handing her over to a sadistic gang was a better option. Like, it doesn't make any sense. Obviously, the police aren't buying it either. And it just is further proof that Cousins is for a police officer, somebody who should have been able to cover their tracks better, not a very smart man in terms of how he tries to get away with this. No, and I genuinely think he thought he was going to. Oh, 100%. 100%. But like we said,

the police aren't buying it. And Cousins was arrested that night in connection with the disappearance of Sarah Everard. Remember, by this point point Sarah is missing, they do not have her body. So who is Wayne Cousins and what if any warning signs were missed? Well by the time he was arrested Cousins was a married 48 year old police officer with two kids living in Deal in Kent. He was born in Dover on the 20th of December 1972 and he spent much of his life in that area. Friends from when he was growing up described Cousins as a weird kid. He seemed to live in his own little world and he enjoyed extremely violent films and equally violent pornography. Once he even shot his friends in the legs when they were just teenagers. By 1989, when he was 17 years old, Wayne Cousins started working at his family business,

a car garage. And again here, colleagues were put off by his love of porn, and he seemingly very openly shared that fact. In 2002, much to the relief of the other workers at the garage, Cousins left to join the Territorial Army, or the Army Reserves. From here, Cousins was able to move into the Kent Special Constabulary. So essentially, he became a part-time volunteer police officer with very limited powers. But soon, Cousins got a taste for law enforcement. And now that he had his foot in the door, this enabled Cousins to move around within different policing units and jurisdictions with shocking ease and very little oversight. Can you believe that when he applied for his role with Kent Police,

there wasn't even a mandatory requirement for forces to interview special officer applicants like they didn't even have to talk to them you know just to sanity check who you're letting wear the uniform and represent the police to members of the public you could just be like oh that's a special officer to the member of the public who looks at that uniform they don't know the difference no so the fact that you are willing to put people on the streets without vetting them thoroughly is a shocking oversight. And it is just, it's diabolical that this man was allowed to go in and then just move, move around within the units. So during his time with the Kemp police, no obvious red flags went up around Cousins, that we know about anyway. Those who worked with him described Cousins as being overly deferential to authority.

They said, quote, And I think you can see here that connection that Cousins is making with power and authority within the police. I think there is something there with Cousins about, like, I follow the rules, outwardly at least. I'm respectful of authority. I have the shiniest boots on the force. And in turn, he's going to expect that those that he administers to, i.e. the public, listen to him unquestioningly. So after a few years with Kent Police in 2011, Wayne Cousins joins an armed police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. It's essentially a unit within law enforcement made up of 1,500 officers or thereabouts who are charged with protecting

civil nuclear sites and providing security when any nuclear materials are moved around within the UK. And unbelievably, despite this being an armed unit and the fact that all officers who join are given firearms training, there was barely any vetting done on Wayne Cousins. No clear psychological evaluation, nothing. Yeah, it's like because this particular unit within policing doesn't really interact with the public, they guard, like you said, nuclear sites. They provide protection when nuclear material has been moved around. So because they don't do that, they're just like, oh, we don't do it to vet them.

But you are giving them firearms training. So for the next seven years, Cousins spent his life guarding power plants all over the country, usually in far-flung, isolated locations. But it was during this time that Wayne Cousins gamed himself the cute little office nickname The Rapist. Yeah, and this is where any benefit of the doubt

that I'm willing to give the police goes thoroughly out of the window. Because, look, I'm not here to be some cop fetishist. What I'm saying is the people that did the investigation into Sarah proved that good policing exists. Obviously it does. Otherwise we'd be living in fucking Mad Max times. But this kind of shambolic lack of vetting, lack of oversight, lack of any kind of alarms being raised of a man who is exhibiting clearly problematic behaviour is the start of the very slippery slope that we're about to go down today. Now, depending on when Wayne Cousins was branded with this particular label,

we can take a pretty good guess as to why. If the nickname came after 2015, it was because that was the year that a man was reported for exposing himself. Yes, that is correct. Armed police officer Wayne Cousins was caught driving around Dover naked from the waist down. He was reported, but nothing was done. He should have been let go there and then, but he continued to work at the Civil Nuclear Constabulary for another three years. We're going to talk about this at length in this episode but how anybody in the police force in this armed police unit could have looked at that behaviour and

thought it was anything short of deranged is honestly beyond me. Yeah it's really not the type of person you should be giving a gun to. No. And wayne cousins joined the london metropolitan police the largest police force in the uk do you know what percentage of the total budget that we set aside for policing in this country the london met get what percentage? No, it's 25. But it is, it's absolutely massive. It needs to be, I mean, this is a separate conversation, but the London Met needs to be broken down. It's too big.

It's completely unruly. It needs to be broken down into like three or four different units. But it is a massive gargantuan beast that is completely out of control, that nobody could have any oversight over, certainly not the people that have tried to do so, at least. So yes, he joins Atlanta Metropolitan Police, and as if this isn't horrifying enough, that a man who had been caught indecently exposing himself

had just walked into the Met. Wayne Cousins, in fact, joined an elite unit within the Met, the one that Hannah told you about earlier, the parliamentary armed unit. And again, no checks were done. And this is because of the massive and successive cuts that we've definitely been importing a lot of American concerns, saying things like defund the police. Now, in the US, most sane people who say this, I understand, mean demilitarise the police, and that would be a good thing there,

though it is a poorly phrased slogan. But here in the UK, it makes no sense. And cutting funding for our police service when it comes to vetting, training or pay helps no one. The victims of underfunding the police will always disproportionately affect lower income people who are living in high crime neighbourhoods and need good policing.

Not aggressive policing, not over-the-top policing, need good, well-funded policing. And you also have situations like this one with Wayne Cousins. Because when you cut police budgets, what happened in organisations like the Met is that they had a huge dearth of police officers with firearms training. Firearms training is expensive to give to officers. So they had a real shortage of police officers who had that kind of training. And after the 2017 Paris attacks, the London Metropolitan Police realised that they needed more armed cops. So this is the perfect point of weakness for somebody like Cousins to exploit. When Cousins applied for the Met and was able to say I'm already a firearm trained officer

I work to the nuclear civil constabulary they literally fucking bit his hand off because he was already trained they didn't have to pay for it so they took him into the Met without even looking at his record and this is the kind of problem you have when you make huge public sector cuts

is you let people like this fall through the gaps and this point just can't be stressed enough. Wherever you have vulnerable people, wherever you have the power to be taken, you will get predators. That's a fact. It's a given. How many times have we talked about on this show people who crave power and authority and how they're drawn to roles like the police, the army, bouncers, security guards, that sort of thing. That is by no means to say that everyone in those jobs is wrong and obviously not. There are people who work those fields out of a sense of duty to serve. The issue is what systems do our societies or our institutions have to root out the bad actors? But when cutbacks mean vetting processes are sidestepped,

this is the mess that unfolds. And the stakes and dangers of recruiting the wrong people into the police are massive. Now, none of this is letting the London Met or the police in general off the hook. I'm not saying, oh, look, they were so underfunded and that's why they let him in. That's a reason.

That is absolutely a reason for why Wayne Cousins was able to walk into the Metropolitan Police. But even if cuts were made, there is rampant inefficiency in the Met in particular. It is absolutely massive. Like I said, it needs to be broken up into multiple different police forces if it has any hope of operating successfully. But that's a boring rant for another day. The point here is that there were multiple opportunities to stop Wayne Cousins before he killed Sarah Everard. This didn't happen out of the blue.

There are situations where, yes, no one could have known, no one could have stopped something happening. This is not that case. Sarah could have known. No one could have stopped something happening. This is not that case. Sarah could have been saved. And when you unpick the story, as trite as it sounds, honestly, this entire case is like watching a car crash in slow motion. And all of the signs were ignored. Nobody took responsibility.

Nobody did the right thing. And the eventual response of Cressida Dick, the then chief commissioner of the Met to say basically that it was just one bad apple was a major dick move even for Cressida because of course it's not all police officers otherwise like I said we'd be fucked but that one bad apple as they put it was allowed by continuous institutional failings and a total lack of any kind of reporting or whistleblowing or taking anything seriously to slip through the net time and time again until he ended up killing somebody.

They say Hollywood is where dreams are made, a seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine

and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast,

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Also, it's hardly just one bad apple. Like we said, a job in the police has the capacity to draw in a certain type of person. And it's also hardly just one incident where red flags are ignored. And actually, a Freedom of Information request to the UK police forces in 2023 found that in the last four years, 500 police officers and staff were reported for sexual assault. That is staggering. And 351 of those people are still serving today. And I'm afraid it just gets worse. The same request found that 2,715 police officers and staff had been reported

for some sort of sexual offence in the last five years. And that 1,694 officers and staff had been reported for domestic abuse, 78% of whom are still serving on the force. And the cherry on the cake? In the last six years, 259 officers and staff have had multiple allegations of sexual offences made against them. Two of these people have faced more than 15 allegations. So just one bad apple? I don't think so. No. And as like we said, this kind of role with this level of power and authority attracts people that are drawn to that. And letting the wrong person in then allows those people to abuse their power and get

away with whatever they're doing. It is a horrible cycle and again like you said it is inevitable that wherever you have power up for grabs, wherever you have vulnerable people there's going to be people that want to take advantage of it. It's the fact that the institution of the police is so poorly equipped at rooting these people out is the problem. Now, perhaps you're wondering, lovely listeners, why if so many police officers and people who work within the police forces in this country have been reported for sexual violence, why is it not constantly front-page news?

Well, it's because more often than not, the victims of these perpetrators are their spouses. And let's be honest, if Sarah had been in a relationship with Wayne Cousins, and he'd still been a police officer, and he had still raped and killed her, we probably never would have heard about it. It never would have ever even made the news. Because since 2009, 15 serving or former UK police officers have killed women. Most of these women were their partners.

And that is why we haven't heard about any of them. And again, look, that is taking absolutely nothing away from what Sarah went through, all the horrors of her murder. I'm not saying, oh, well, look, everybody heard about Sarah Everard and nobody cared about these. I'm saying what happened to all of these people is horrific. I'm just explaining why Sarah Everard made front page news and none of those women did. The murder of Sarah Everard became a national obsession of a story

purely because it was so shocking, so extreme and so unique. Stranger attacks are thankfully incredibly rare in this country, particularly against women, actually. Typically, men are much more rare in this country, particularly against women actually. Typically men are much more likely to be victims of violent crime in the public, think bar brawls etc. Women are much more likely to be killed in the home by their current or former intimate partners and it is no different when it comes to the attacker being a cop. The added trauma here, when the abuser is a cop, is that while it is already an indescribably difficult task for someone in an abusive relationship to report that and then

escape, imagine that your abuser is a police officer. Who would you go to? Who could you trust? It's an impossible and absolutely terrifying thought. So yes, this tragic story unveiled yet more issues within policing in this country. It highlighted that the Met in particular is an institution seemingly incapable of and unwilling to deal with abusive officers and staff. And there exists a culture more concerned with arse covering than with safety of the public.

And if you need more proof of this, one day after Wayne Cousins was arrested, another woman reported another Met officer of rape. And seven months later, in October 2021, Dave Carrick was arrested. Ugh, Dave Carrick is from Stevenage. So close to where I grew up. Oh, shit. Yeah, and this was one of the cases where we did actually hear about a man

who had abused his partner. But it's a very rare one. But I think it's just because of how extreme he was. And David Carrick was also a Met Police officer. He had actually worked in the Armed Parliamentary and Diplomatic Unit alongside the rapist Wayne Cousins. What Dave Carrick did needs a whole episode itself to go through, but let's have a very quick and very grim rundown. Officer Dave Carrick was a serial abuser of women. He was in a relationship with a lady who we will call Claire. They met

each other on a dating app in 2010. At first, things were great. But soon, Dave the Bastard Carrick, which was his nickname at work alongside the rapist, told Claire, And after that, Carrick began to regularly abuse Claire, physically, sexually and emotionally. Carrick would often lock his terrified naked partner in the cupboard under the stairs for days at a time. He would whip her with a belt, urinate on her, rape her, always anally, until she bled, reminding her every day, I am the law. But Clare was far from his only victim. In his 17 years as a cop, Carrick abused countless women. He admitted to 71 incidents of sexual violence against 12 victims.

And on the 7th of February 2023, Dave Carrick was sentenced to 30 years. Now for the WhatsApp groups. I hate this bit. So just six weeks after Sarah's murder, with Wayne Cousins under arrest, investigators turned

their attention to his colleagues. Jonathan Coburn, 35, William Neville, 34, and Joel Borders, 45. The men were looked into with regards to a WhatsApp group called Bottle and Stoppers slash Atkins Puppets, which I

must be an in-joke because I don't understand what the references are to anything. And these men had been in this WhatsApp group with a strange name, with none other than Wayne Cousins. And in this WhatsApp group, these officers had been sharing what's been described as racist, homophobic and misogynistic messages. And yes, there's no doubt about that. They talk about their struggle snuggles

after one of them pinned down a 15-year-old girl to the floor during an incident. And another suggested that he would rape and beat a named female officer. In a different conversation, these men also laughed at the idea of using tasers to torture animals and shooting people with Down syndrome. All three men had also worked at the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, just like Wayne Cousins had. And all of them, just like Wayne Cousins had, had transferred to the London Metropolitan Police in February 2019. And look, I've read the texts.

You can read the texts. They are out there. They're gross. I don't really want to go through them in a huge amount of detail here but yeah like I don't know some people say like to be a police officer you have to have a certain level of gallows humor which like okay fine this is what the men claimed in court as well and also yeah like I'm not going to sit here and pretend that we all don't say things in the safety of groups that we trust, with friends that we trust, make off-color jokes or jokes that would otherwise get us cancelled if they, you know, became public. And I don't think that people should be rounded up and imprisoned for jokes, however off-color. But these men have real power. Their actions have consequences. These

men were all firearms-trained police officers and they were all in roles where they could have done the things that they were saying they were going to do. So of course that kind of thing cannot be ignored. I think you know if you're going to be a police officer the things that you're saying and the way that you conduct yourself with that kind of power comes responsibility and therefore you need to be held to a different account and a different standard to your average person. And to be honest I'm glad that two of those three officers were eventually sentenced to three months in prison. And when you see these chats, if you do choose to go and find them, you also realise that that's why no one complained about Cousins. They just called him the rapist. WhatsApp chats like that were mutually assured

destruction. If you start talking out of turn, rocking the boat, the other officers have a whole litany of nasty shit on you. And in an interview that we watched with a junior cop, he says standing up to that kind of culture is impossible. You either have to take part or stay silent. So the whole WhatsApp chat part of this case, again, really highlights that culture of covering up and complicity within the police. Yeah, I mean, if you're all in it, you're all in this chat like this, even if you're not saying anything, you're associated with that conversation. You are immediately assuring yourself and everybody else that there's no way that you can point the finger at anybody else,

because they're saying, look at the shit I've got on you. Are you really going to turn me into the higher ups? Mate, you've said far worse, et cetera, et cetera. And that's why that culture is so dangerous and so pervasive because it serves a purpose. Did you ever watch The Secret Policeman? No, I didn't actually. No, I didn't. It's a really good documentary about, I think it's the Manchester Met actually,

and someone goes into the police academy undercover and films everything. And I mean, it's quite old now. I think I watched it's the Manchester Met, actually. And someone goes into the police academy undercover and films everything. And I mean, it's quite old now. I think I watched it at school. But it's all this sort of stuff, all of it. So it just goes to prove that, like, this is not a new problem. In fact, this kind of thing, like the WhatsApp groups, was an open secret. After Wayne Cousins was discovered for what he was, the higher ups told everyone just to delete everything. Get rid of all of the WhatsApp groups. We don't want to see it. Yes, they knew that all of their police officers were in groups like this saying stuff

like this. And I get it. How many man hours can they put aside to investigate all of their officers for all of these groups? So they're just literally like, delete everything. We don't want to fucking know about it. Get rid of it all right now. But now let's get back to the investigation into Wayne Cousins. After his bizarre story about the Romanian gang, the police had to follow up. But guess what? They found no trace of him on CCTV at any of the places he claimed that they had forced him to meet them. Because, you know, in the interview that you heard, he's saying things like, they told me where to be they were just like you need to be here you need to show up here or else we'll kill your family but the police can't find any trace of him actually being in any of those places that he said that he was what they did discover however was that using

cell site data they could track cousins's movements from dover to london and back again on the day that sarah disappeared they could place cousins having arrived back on north military road where he'd They could track Cousins' movements from Dover to London and back again on the day that Sarah disappeared. They could place Cousins having arrived back on North Military Road, where he'd parked his car, with Sarah at 11.30pm. Here, he presumably forced Sarah out of the hire car and into his own vehicle. And we know this because just 12 minutes later, he was caught on CCTV driving his own car. He then drove Sarah out to the middle of nowhere. Between 11.53pm and 1am, cell site data placed Cousins in the vicinity of Sibbetswold, a rural area of Dover. And this is where it is believed that Wayne Cousins raped

and killed Sarah Everard, who was now more than 70 miles away from her home, having left to go and have dinner with a friend two miles away. At 3.21am, Cousins' car passed a camera near Hodes Wood, an 80-acre plot of woodland in Kent. It didn't take much digging for the police to discover that back in 2019, Cousins had actually bought a small plot of land in Hodes Wood. It had been advertised as the, quote, perfect place for day trips. But in reality, the area was a dumping ground, littered with abandoned cars, fridges and all sorts of rubbish.

Cousins had paid five grand in cash for this odd, dirty little spot of land. But now it made sense. And the purchase of this land back in 2019 also pointed at just how long Cousins may have been planning a kill. Investigators also soon discovered that Cousins, before his arrest, had been taking his family for picnics to his plot of land in Hodes Wood. This wasn't typical for him. He had also apparently stopped going into work. He should have gone into work on the 6th of March, two days after the murder, but he didn't. He called his boss on the 8th and claimed that he wasn't feeling very well, saying he was stressed and he doesn't want to carry a gun anymore, so he needed some time off. To the police, it looked like he was cracking,

and the constant trips to the woods may have been Cousins nervously checking in on his body disposal site. So on the 10th of March, police went to search Hodes Wood. By 4.20pm that day, they had found Sarah's remains. Now we don't know exactly what happened. This case never went to trial, and so a lot of information has never been made public. And also Sarah's remains were so badly burned that she could only be identified by her dental records. What we do know is that Sarah was raped and strangled to death with a belt. The coroner reported that it likely would have taken two

minutes of consistent pressure to kill Sarah that way. There was also DNA evidence that Wayne Cousins had used Velcro straps to restrain her. And after he killed Sarah, Wayne Cousins left her body in Hodeswood, on his own fucking plot of land. A few hours later, at 8.15am, Cousins was caught on CCTV at a nearby Costa Coffee ordering a hot chocolate with coconut milk and a Bakewell tart. He looks totally chill and calm. He's just killed a woman and left her body in the woods. On land that he owns. And he's just as cool as can be.

There's no hint of panic at all. An hour later, Cousins drove to Sandwich. As in the town in Kent, not the snack. There he removed the SIM card from Sarah's phone and chucked it in a river. Cousins then drove back to Hoadswood, stopping only to buy a jerry can full of petrol. Once back on his fly-tipped land, he found an old abandoned fridge. Cousins then put Sarah's body inside this fridge and set it on fire using the petrol that he'd brought with him. He then made another trip to a DIY store, bought some heavy-duty rubbish bags,

filled them with Sarah's now burned remains, and then dumped them in a pond about 100 feet from his land. And then he went about his life. Wayne Cousins went home and tried to act normal. He took the kids to dentist appointments. He even called the vet to talk about some concerns he was having with the family dog the day after he killed Sarah. Yeah, I was wondering if I could book my dog in for the vet so I can have a discussion about her issues, please. Yeah, it's Cousins. C-O-U-Z-E-N-S. Is Maddie. That's the one.

No, no, no, no, no, that's fine. I work shift work, so either um let me think um but would it be possible the friday the 12th um sometime after half past three that would be brilliant yep no that's fine um she well we think she's suffering from like separation anxiety and we have tried absolutely everything we've tried to like to give her puzzles and and bits and pieces with treat puzzles and everything we take for walks every single day um but we've been told i've got a camera set up as well but we've been told reliably by our neighbors um so we know there's issues that and she just barks and howls constantly all day but obviously and we're there um and then when we come home she's like so excited and worked up that she kind of wheeze and um she's shaking um but where she

jumps up and she's got longer claws she like scratches the kid she scratches us um not all by accident but we're just wondering we have read online about if it gets to a like a quite a bad degree of separation anxiety then potential medications like try and calm her down so that's what we want to talk to the vet about really in a way forward with it yep okay that'll be really appreciated thank you thank you bye bye so some people listen to that and they're like oh my god

he cares more about this dog than he cares about the life of another human being well firstly yes it is his dog it's not unusual for people like Wayne Cousins

to be able to form bonds with animals especially dogs they're loyal they obey and they love you no matter what even the most psychopathic individuals can love other creatures or people.

It all comes down to the purpose they serve. But I don't think that's what the interesting thing is about this call to the vet. I think it's much more likely that Cousins, who was likely covered in scratches, needed an excuse as to why. Maybe someone had asked him what happened, and he lied that it was his dog. And now he wants to file a report with the vet to back this up,

if anyone asks again later. Following Cousins' arrest, vigils erupted in London, with women taking to the streets to highlight how unsafe they felt. And look, I get it. What happened here was a huge betrayal of the public. A police officer, a serving police officer, pretending to be on duty, had killed a woman that he had abducted off the streets using his own ID to quote-unquote arrest her. It's terrifying. But thankfully, it is incredibly rare in this country, and that's why we were so shocked by the Sarah Everard case. Predominantly in this country, as with much of the

rest of the West, like I said, women typically are killed in their homes at the hands of their current or former intimate partners. In fact, at the time of Sarah's murder, of the 1,500 murders of women that had occurred in the previous 10 years, just, and I don't mean just as in, oh, who cares? I mean, 8% of those women had been killed by a stranger. That means 92% were not. And the overwhelming majority of those women were murdered by their partners or their exes. So I just want to put that into perspective because I don't want to perpetuate this feeling of women feeling like prey or constantly viewing ourselves as potential would-be victims when we're just out there living our lives. At the same time though,

I don't want to pretend that women aren't at risk of male violence, but we just have to put it into perspective, we have to put it into context. So of course anything can happen as people who consume true crime we all know that all too well but we have to all of us balance our fears our freedom and the reality of the situation and like I don't know I guess my perspective is based a lot on the fact that I've also lived in a country where women are absolutely controlled by fear in In India, particularly rural India, and I understand that things are changing in the cities as women get more freedom, but in India the cultural norm is good girls don't go out late, they don't go out alone, they don't drink, they don't dress immodestly. But saying that, there is also a very real and much more prominent

danger of violence from stranger attacks in a country like India and I wouldn't behave in India how I behave here not just because of the cultural norms but also because of the reality. Now in the UK that real actual risk of something happening to you down to a stranger in public is much lower and I speaking for myself value my freedom and I value that really highly because I very easily could have grown up in a country where I didn't have any of those things and while it's up to everyone of their own to manage their own appetite for risk if the situation was as bad in this country as I felt some people were saying it was in the aftermath of Sarah's murder, none of us would ever go outside.

And a lot of us who did would get attacked, which just isn't the reality. The question here isn't why did Wayne Cousins kill Sarah Everard? He's nothing special. He's like every other killer we've come across. Pathetic, deviant, selfish, empty, and a broken loser. The real question that we have to ask is how could this have been allowed to happen yeah i mean everybody obsesses over this thing's like why did he do it why did he do it why was this police officer i was like that's not the fucking

question listen to any episode we've ever covered he is just a guy who happened to fall through the cracks and become a police officer. Why he did it is fucking because he's a selfish prick, like you just said. The really crucial part of this is how. And I think that's the bit we should all be really angry about. And the rage that the public felt only got worse when more of the truth came out. Wayne Cousins had exposed himself publicly to more people than just the little drive he took around Dover in 2002 with his trousers off. Not that that incident shouldn't have been enough to get him kicked out of the police anyway. A few months before he killed Sarah on the 13th of November 2020, whilst on duty, Wayne Cousins

stepped out of a wooded area in Deal, his home fucking town, totally naked. And then he proceeded to wank himself off in front of a female cyclist. He's a fucking police officer at this point. Can you imagine? He just walked out of the woods naked and starts wanking. How? How? Oh my God, it just gets so much worse. This is unbelievable. And then, on the 14th of February, a few weeks before he killed Sarah Everard, Wayne Cousins went to the McDonald's drive-thru in Swanley, with his trousers pulled down. He had his penis above his waistband. But

he wasn't done. On the 27th of February, my brother's birthday, just four days before he killed Sarah, Cousins went back to the very same drive-thru. Only this time, he was completely naked from the waist down. And completely erect. On the second occasion that Wayne Cousins turns up at this McDonald's, the staff there actually called the police. And they even gave them Wayne Cousins' car registration and his credit card details with his fucking name on it. But no one called the victim or asked for a statement. Absolutely nothing was done about it. Why? Why are they ignoring this?

It's not even just some random fucking pervert that's done it. He's a police officer and they know that he is. Unbelievably like this, Wayne Cousins racked up six offences for flashing. That we know about. But he continued to be a serving police officer. An armed one, no less. I honestly can't keep stressing this enough. He should have been stopped after the first time.

Because let's be clear, someone who flashes people and exposes themselves in public is not just some sort of harmless little, you know, trench coat wearing deviant that's funny to laugh at. No. Exposing yourself like that belies a dangerous mentality, one of boundary pushing and getting a thrill out of exploiting

someone else's discomfort and vulnerability it should be seen as a serious and very real precursor to future violence and deviant behavior and we see it time and time again in the background of people who go on to kill did you know hannah that until 2003 in this country exposing yourself wasn't even a crime i did not know that that is is shocking. That is shocking. Also, it seems highly unlikely that Wayne Cousins went from exposing himself to scared women straight to rape and murder overnight. It feels like there's a huge missing part of this story,

one that we sadly can't fill today. Because the question that we cannot shake is what else has Wayne Cousins done? Rapists don't usually kill straight away. And killers like Cousins rarely start killing in their late 40s. He was 48. Yeah, no way. There must be more in his past, but we just don't know what.

But I am certain that there are other women that he victimised who perhaps just haven't come forward. So after his arrest, Cousins stayed completely silent for three months, flat out refusing to speak to anyone. But eventually, in June 2021, he pleaded guilty to the abduction and rape of Sarah Everard. And a month later, at the Old Bailey, he also pleaded guilty to her murder. Though he claimed that he had been depressed, sleeping badly, dealing with tinnitus,

and huge amounts of stress because he was in over £29,000 worth of debt. Okay. He also claimed that he had never planned to kill Sarah. He had simply got confused. Okay, yeah, sure, with all of the planning that he had done. He had a fucking kill kit in his car. He said at the old Bailey that he was only ever going to rape her. Even though, and this is the part that tells you everything you need to know about the fact that he wasn't just going to rape her. He had murder on his mind from the minute he saw Sarah

because he shows Sarah his face in that bus footage. He's not wearing a mask. He even shows her his fucking ID with his name on it. Do you really think he was just going to rape her and then let her go? She knew who he was. So as frustrating as it is, we'll never really know how Wayne Cousins thought he could explain everything away. Because there was no trial. And Cousins was sentenced to a whole of life order. Because the judge rightly ruled that there were serious aggravating issues in this case. Normally, to get a whole of life order in this country, there needs to be more than two victims. But due to the serious planning

involved here, the sexual nature of the crime, and crucially the fact that Cousins was an active police officer who was acting like he was on duty when he abducted Sarah, the judge was able to hand down the maximum sentence. The judge even placed this crime in an exceptional category, saying that although there was a lone victim, Cousins' actions were akin to committing an act for a political or religious motive, i.e. terrorism. Which feels like a strange connection. But I think what the judge is saying here is that what you did caused such a level of public fear that it was akin to you acting as a terrorist. Because you should have rightly known that as a serving police officer to abduct using your ID, rape and murder a 33-year-old woman would have caused such public outrage and such public fear and public mistrust in the institution of the police that it is akin to terrorism. And that is what allowed that judge to sidestep the guidelines and give

Wayne Cousins the whole of life order that he so thoroughly deserves. The judge also commented on the investigation, saying, like I said earlier, that it was the best and most extensive police investigation that he had ever seen. So we're talking here specifically about the team of detectives who investigated the disappearance of Sarah Everard. The judge also said that no officers who had worked on the murder of Sarah Everard tried to cover up the facts or slow down the investigation. And I have to say from our research that also appears to be true. Though of course we cannot simply forget the massive failings that led to Cousins remaining in his role as an officer for years and Cousins due to the seriousness of this case

was sentenced to a whole of life order meaning that he will never be released from prison. And although it was decided not to go after Cousins for the WhatsApp group chat in February 2023 Cousins was charged with three counts of indecent exposure. He pleaded guilty and 19 months were added to his life sentence. But that's pretty much, you know, I think it's a bit of a late gesture with all of that. As of now, the Independent Office for Police Conduct is conducting an independent review into this case, and we're still waiting for the results. But the Met did decide to issue the public with some advice, following the concerns about safety following Sarah's murder.

According to the Metropolitan Police, what should you do if you encounter an officer trying to arrest you? You should call 999 and ask, shout to a passerby, run into a house or flag down a bus. I'd forgotten about that. What the actual fucking fuck are they talking about? Firstly, if a police officer is trying to arrest me and I'm just like, on there I'm gonna call 999 and ask what am I even hoping to ask there and what help am I hoping to achieve and also they fucking tell you not to even call 999 call 111 for basically everything because everything is again so underfunded who's gonna be dealing with my bloody call and everyone's call who calls to ask if they're allowed to be arrested what an inefficient inefficient, stupid system. So leave that aside.

Shout to a passerby. What, and hope that a passerby is some sort of legal expert? If somebody shouted to me, OK, let's just, you know, role play this situation. You're walking down the road, minding your business. Somebody's being arrested by the police and they shout to you. Are you going to get involved? Nope.

No, thank you. Please, officers, carry on with your day. day i'm not gonna get involved in that situation run into a house what yeah and again if i'm living my life in my house and somebody bangs on my door saying that being arrested by the police i would shut the door and then finally flag down a bus what are we giving london bus drivers or bus drivers generally i'm saying london because this was advice given by the london metropolitan are we giving bus drivers in this country some sort of um i don't know negotiation training are we giving them some sort of legal advice trade like what what do we think a bus driver is going to be able to do in that situation? It is mind boggling in its stupidity. And it's terrifying that that's the best that they could come up with.

Yeah. And again, look, we can't all live in a perfect world where we're always safe all the time. That's impossible. There will always be men like Wayne Cousins. And we've been doing this show long enough to know that he was always going to do what he did. But the fact that he was a police officer and that he was protected and the warning signs he was giving off were just ignored and made into a joke by calling him the rapist

is horrifying. And the idea that police advice was to go against everything we're ever taught. We're taught to listen to authority, to comply if we're approached by the police, to follow orders. Take lockdown itself. It was the clearest example of governments all over the world, ours very much included, having a little taste of authoritarianism. We were told to stay locked up in our houses for two years, to be quiet, come out and clap once a week for the NHS, say that we were all in it together. All as we watched our economy fall off a cliff, people's mental health go with it, children sitting at home out of school for years.

Domestic abuse and child abuse go through the roof, along with preventable deaths from other conditions like cancer absolutely skyrocket. All that complicity that was demanded of us absolutely enabled Cousins to do what he did. We all watched on the news every night as the police, using those weird, unkeepable, appable COVID laws, hammer the public. Arresting people for going on walks, throwing homeless people out of parks, screaming at people having coffees with a friend outside. Do you remember when you saw that footage of people being chased by the police around national parks with drones? What harm were they doing anybody? Except not to themselves because their mental health wasn't going to fly into a fucking wall.

I mean, what the fuck? We allowed that to happen and those who protested and any dissenting voices that were out there were quickly deplatformed or quite literally punched in the face by police at rallies so when you take all of that into account of course sarah wouldn't have felt sure enough in herself to challenge her arrest by cousins the laws at the time was so bizarre i remember leaving my house and being like can i go outside how long can i be outside for have i been out once already today am i going to get arrested if i go out again it is not hyperbolic to say that we were living in a state of fear and so on what basis would sarah alone at night what confidence would she have had to turn

to wayne cousins and say, no, you can't arrest me? She would have believed it because it was all so fucking bonkers. Also, Cousins had been working on enforcing the lockdown laws for months by that point. He was well versed in what he needed to say to Sarah. And even if he hadn't, he had the police ID and none of us understood what the hell we could and couldn't do day to day anyway. So of course Sarah Everard complied and she died for it and that should enrage each and every one of us. And if that doesn't do it, Sarah's family's impact statements will. They told the world about their beautiful, kind, smart and driven Sarah.

She was born in Surrey in 1987. She grew up in York and then she went to Durham for university. Sarah had moved to London for work and got a new job as a marketing manager at a digital agency. She was excited about the future. Her and her boyfriend Josh had been together for a couple of years, and they were planning a holiday to Ibiza in the summer. And they were talking about moving in together. Sarah had her entire life ahead of her, and it was all taken from her. Sarah's mum, Susan, stood in court and faced down her daughter's killer and read the following. And honestly, this is just one of the worst things I've ever read.

I'm tormented at the thought of what she endured. She spent her last hours on this earth with the very worst of humanity. She lost her life because Wayne Cousins wanted to satisfy his perverted desires. It is a ridiculous reason. It's nonsensical. How could he value a human life so cheaply? I cannot comprehend it. I am incandescent with rage at the thought of it. He treated my daughter as if she was nothing

and disposed of her as if she was rubbish. In the morning, I wake up to that awful reality that Sarah is gone. In the evenings, at the time she was abducted, I let out a silent scream. Don't get in the car, Sarah. Don't believe him. Run. Fucking hell hell that's grim it's so awful oh yeah so we really started the year off here with a cheery case but i think i think this was a particularly timely one because it's not like the anniversary or anything the time you're listening to this, but I think the COVID reviews are currently underway.

And they are as much of a whitewashing fucking cover up as you could expect from a government that went full force down the road of lock up, lock up, lock up. They will not listen to any evidence that suggests that they made mistakes with regards to this. And so while it may be, I don't know, people might find it hyperbolic to say this, I really don't think. The headlines around the Sarah Everard murder that read things like, while Westminster partied, Sarah Everard was being murdered. I think that Wayne Cousins is a piece of shit and he was going to hurt somebody at some point but we enabled this thing to happen and it is absolutely devastating yeah and that is not to mention all of the other peoples whose lives were massively also destroyed by lockdown

so a strong start for us at red handed but yeah it was just one we were going to have to do at some point and it is now done. That is the case of Sarah Everard. Now, yes, don't be angry forever. We'll be back next week with something else. And yeah, Happy New Year, guys.

Happy New Year. Look after yourself. Yes. And if somebody yells at you when they're being arrested, I don't know, presumably look after them, but I don't know how you do that. So yeah, we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye-bye. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life.

You can listen to Finding Natasha right now, exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part,

Three years ago today, that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me, and it's taken me to a place

where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame,

fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Combs. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution.

I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom. But I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is The Rise and Fall of Diddy.

Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery+.