Sarah Everard: a chilling, premeditated murder
At his sentencing hearing last week, prosecutors summed up Wayne Couzens’s crimes in just five words: “Deception, kidnap, rape, strangulation, fire.” But in their impact statements, the parents of his victim, Sarah Everard, described their feelings in heartbreaking detail, said The Times. Everard’s mother, Susan, was the first to stand up. “There is no comfort to be had, there is no consoling thought in the way Sarah died,” she told the packed courtroom, at the Old Bailey. “In her last hours [Sarah] was faced with brutality and terror, alone with someone intent on doing her harm... I am haunted by the horror of it.” She said that every morning, she wakes up to “the awful reality that Sarah is gone”, and that every evening, at the time of her daughter’s abduction, she lets out a silent scream: “Don’t get in the car, Sarah. Don’t believe him. Run!”
When Everard was abducted in south London in March, I – like many women living in that area– was struck by the thought that it could have been me, said Helen ChandlerWilde in The Daily Telegraph. Now, it is clear just how true that was: the court was told that Couzens had spent the evening driving around London, “hunting for a lone young female to kidnap and rape”. He selected Everard at random, said the Daily Mail, accosting her as she walked down the well-lit A205 South Circular road at around 9.30pm. He told her she’d broken lockdown rules, and staged a false arrest, using his warrant card and handcuffs to get her into his car. A couple driving by saw her being cuffed: she was “compliant”, they reported, “and did not appear to be arguing”. Couzens’s parked car was also captured by the CCTV camera of a passing bus. This clip would be pivotal to the police inquiry: it turned out to be a hire car that the police officer had booked for that day, presumably because he thought his own was too scruffy to pass for an unmarked police vehicle.
By combing through CCTV footage, phone records and other data, police were able to build up a picture of Couzens’s movements, before and after the attack. He’d booked the car online on 28 February; two minutes later, he’d ordered a roll of film on Amazon that claimed to provide “a protective barrier from liquid spillages”. Hours after that, he’d exposed himself to two women in a McDonald’s; the matter was reported, and his car caught on camera, but police did not regard it as a high-priority case, and he was not apprehended. On 3 March, he left his home in Deal, Kent, telling his wife he was working a night shift. In fact, he picked up the hire car and drove off in search of a victim. Everard was last seen alive in the back of his rented Vauxhall on dashcam footage at 9.37pm. He then drove her 80 miles back to Kent. Police believe that by 2.34am, when he was filmed buying Lucozade at a garage, she was dead. For the next couple of days, he went about seemingly as normal – ringing the vet, having a meal at McDonald’s – while also buying petrol with which to burn her body, which he then threw into a pond.
News of Everard’s murder caused a nationwide outcry, and weeks of soulsearching about violence against women – yet it seems to have changed nothing: in the months since her death, 80 more women have been killed by men, said Julie Owen-Moylan in The Independent. In most cases, “we don’t even remember their names”. Imagine the laws that would have been passed had there been 80 terror attacks since March. After a man tried to set his shoe on fire on a flight, we had to take our shoes off at airports all over the world. But when women are killed or raped every single day, nothing happens: misogyny is not made a hate crime; violent porn is not banned; serious offences such as “flashing” are still regarded as mere nuisance crimes.
Whenever these issues are raised, the cry goes up that “it’s not all men”, said Boris Starling in The Daily Telegraph. And that is true; but all men are involved in this, because “attacks on women start long before” the violence begins. They’re in the unwanted comments, “the jokey banter, the touch which lingers too long, the constant low-level hum of threat and entitlement”. Of course, not every man who demeans or objectifies women will become a killer; but no man who does kill “has started right at the deep end either”. There are all sorts of measures that might make women safer, from tougher penalties and higher conviction rates for sex crimes to better street lighting; but only a seismic shift in the idea of what it means to be a man will “act as a cure”. Changing attitudes will take decades. In the meantime, I urge any woman who is groped, or flashed, or kerb crawled to report it, said Elise Johnson in The Independent. It may not always lead to a conviction, but if we flood the police with complaints, it will make the scale of the problem clear, and remind the authorities that such behaviour is unacceptable.
“Women are killed and raped every day but nothing happens; flashing is still seen as a mere nuisance crime”