The Murder of Sarah Everard

On the night of March 3rd, 2021, during the Covid lockdown, 33-year-old Sarah Everard was walking home from a friend's house in south London. She never arrived. Days later, detectives raced the last person seen with her to one of their own: a serving Metropolitan Police officer named Wayne Couzens.

In this episode, forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes pieces together Sarah's final journey and examines the failings that let her killer hide in plain sight inside Britain's biggest police force.

In this episodeThe eerie, near-empty London of lockdown, and why the phrase "she was just walking home" struck such a chord with the publicThe dashcam and bus footage, and the car registration that led detectives to CouzensCouzens's bodycam interview, and the "gang" story he invented when police pressed himHow deception experts read his body language and his wordsHis careful planning, the "kidnap kit" and the rehearsal driveThe vigil on Clapham Common, the police response, and the sentencing at the Old BaileyWhat came out afterwards about his earlier offences, and the Met's promises of reformKerry's psychological insightsWhy Sarah's disappearance gripped the country, and affected the everyday safety calculations so many women makeThe warning signs colleagues reportedly saw, and why Kerry calls him a "ticking time bomb"What his planning tells us about the fantasies he had likely nursed for yearsHow an egocentric killer can compartmentalise and put on a show of normality

FeaturingKerry Daynes, forensic psychologist and presenterSteve Keogh, former Scotland Yard homicide detectiveDan Rivers, ITV NewsMinnie Stephenson, Channel 4 NewsProfessor Dawn Archer, linguistics and deception expertContent note: This episode deals with abduction, rape and murder. Listener discretion is advised.

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