'Watching the Sarah Everard documentary is a raw reminder of how ...

In the opening few minutes of Sarah Everard: The Search for Justice, we’re reminded of the details of the case we’re sadly so painfully aware of. On 3rd March 2021, while the UK was easing out of the grips of a nationwide lockdown, 33-year-old Everard left her friend’s house after visiting her for dinner. She never made it home.

The hour-long BBC documentary soberly and methodically documents how police officers pieced together CCTV footage to uncover what happened to Everard that night, tracking down and arresting then serving Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens, who will now remain in prison for the rest of his life for Everard’s kidnap, rape and murder.

Three years have passed since Everard’s murder, and the outpouring of anger and grief from women that followed in the aftermath. But the documentary still evokes a sickening feeling as it painstakingly points out what Everard must have endured on the night of her murder. It’s underscored by footage of Couzens being interviewed in his Kent home by arresting officers. We see the barefaced lies he tells the police, his monstrosity a jarring contrast against the mundane domestic setting – the comfy armchair he sits in, the tabby cat stretching in the corner of the room.

The banality of Couzens’s actions is all the more nauseating when The Search of Justice follows his movements in the immediate aftermath of the murder: he stopped for a drink at Costa. He made an appointment at the vets. He continued to live unabashed and unbothered, as Everard’s body lay in woodlands. The programme shows a map of where Everard was found in Kent, and the distance from where she was targeted by Couzens in Clapham, South London. It’s a long drive. The fear she must have felt is unimaginable and leaves a searing pain.

As well as feelings of sickness and horror, the documentary also provokes rage and fury, serving as a reminder of just how many times police failed to stop Couzens long before he murdered Everard. We are told how he exposed himself at a McDonalds drive-through just three days before he committed the murder. Another incident in 2020, where a woman saw him publicly masturbating while down a country lane, is also recorded. The inquiry that followed Everard’s death found Couzens was accused of serious sexual assault involving a child ahead of joining the police in 2002. In total, there were eight opportunities when Couzens was a serving police officer where he exposed himself that he could have been disciplined. None were taken. Should this have happened, it’s unlikely Everard’s murder would have ever taken place; we’re reminded that police believed he used his authority as a serving officer to lure Everard into his car with his warrant card, and how the status he had as an officer allowed him to act without impunity.

It would be somewhat reassuring to say, that while what happened to Everard was a tragic and gross miscarriage of the police’s responsibility to serve and protect, Couzens’s is a rare monster, “a bad apple”. But he’s far from the sort. In 2023, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found on average, one police officer is accused of rape a week. Over the past five years, more than 300 officers have been reported for rape and 500 for sexual assault. Only ten of those accused of sexual assault have been convicted. The vast majority – 350 – are still working for the police. We’re reminded of police officers like Dave Carrick, who now serves life in prison for raping and abusing numerous women between 2002 and 2021. He was merely nicknamed ‘Bastard Dave’ by his colleagues, in the same way Couzens was affectionately called ‘The Rapist.’

Sarah Everard: The Search for Justice ends with a list of offences against women and girls – how in the year after Everard was killed, 138 women were killed by men, or were murdered in cases where men were the chief suspect, in the UK. In the same year, an estimated 798,000 women experienced sexual assault in England and Wales, and 100,000 were victims of rape or attempted rape. The figures are stark, horrifying – but not surprising.

As the credits roll on the documentary, we’re left with a feeling of simmering rage and an aching sadness that after three years, nothing really has changed. Everard’s death is just another reminder that it could have been any one of us.

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.