New documentary reveals moment Sarah Everard's killer was found

New details about the murder of Sarah Everard are set to be revealed three years after her death in a BBC documentary.

Sarah Everard: The Search for Justice will see how detectives from the Metropolitan Police tracked and uncovered Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer who raped and murdered Everard.

Couzens, who was working with the force’s Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection unit, targeted and snatched Everard while she was just walking home in Clapham, South London, in March 2021.

In the new documentary, Detective Chief Inspector Katherine Goodwin speaks candidly about the moment investigators realised that Everard murderer was a police officer.

Couzens was uncovered after CCTV from a passing bus showed the officer sitting in his hired car alongside Everard.

Detective Goodwin explains that as a team of officers raced over the Couzens’s home in Deal, Kent, a detective sargeant sprinted into her office.

“He said, ‘We need to shut the door. You need to hear this’,” she explained.

“He then put one of our researchers on speaker phone and she said, ‘He’s a police officer. He’s a serving officer in the Met.’”

Arresting officer Nick Harvey, who put Couzens in handcuffs, said his team “went silent” when they were informed the man they were arresting was a Met Police officer.

“We knocked on the door. Actually, he opened it. I just put my foot straight into the door. I showed him my warrant card and he just went grey. Just... all the colour just ran out of his face,” he recalled.

Inside, Couzens told a story about his family being threatened by gangsters if he did not deliver a woman to them, which was quickly found to be fabricated.

Everard's body was found dumped in a nearby woodland.

The documentary comes after an inquiry found Kent Police, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary and the Metropolitan Police missed glaring red flags about Couzens’s conduct almost two decades before he murdered Everard.

In a moving new statement, the Everard family – her parents Sue and Jeremy, and siblings Katie and James, said the investigation made them feel as though Everard life was “valued and her memory honoured”.

Their statement added, “It is obvious that Wayne Couzens should never have been a police officer. Whilst holding a position of trust, in reality he was a serial sex offender.

“Warning signs were overlooked throughout his career and opportunities to confront him were missed. We believe that Sarah died because he was a police officer – she would never have got into a stranger's car.”

Kimberley Bond is a Features Writer at Cosmopolitan. After gaining her MA in Magazine Journalism from the University of Sheffield in 2016, Kimberley first started her career as a showbiz and culture writer, where she interviewed A-Listers (and Z-Listers) on red carpets, at awards ceremonies and at parties.

After the pandemic put a hold on the showbiz circuit, Kimberley turned to features and has written for a number of publications including The Independent, The Telegraph, Evening Standard, Stylist and Glamour amongst countless others.

She’s still a complete celebrity gossip hound, and when she’s not scrolling through the sidebar of shame you can find her on X, LinkedIn or in the gym where’s trying and failing to get an arse like JLo.