I pray Sarah’s family got some succour from their eloquence

LAST night I had a nightmare about Wayne Couzens. I’m sure I am not the only woman to be chilled to the bone by this man who is, according to his victim’s mother, ‘the worst of humanity’.

The kind of monster who frightens women out of their wits, with good reason. Home alone, heart pounding, I got up to secure the doors and windows, then checked to see he wasn’t hiding in the bathroom.

Irrational, of course, but midnight fears have no logic. Couzens is the new urban bogeyman, an ogre cloaked in the police identity that gave him power over defenceless Sarah Everard.

In my dream he was prowling the streets of the neighbourhood, hunched over the steering wheel, boiling eyes scouring the empty Covid pavements for a victim.

Inside the rented car, his rape kit was ready, his boot already lined with protective polythene.

The awful thing is that this dream was rooted in cold reality. For Couzens did indeed prowl near my home, near where I live now and also where I used to live in Clapham, when I was about the same age as Sarah. But it doesn’t need a geographical link to chain us all together in united horror.

Before Couzens was sentenced this week, Miss Everard’s family read their victim impact statements as he sat shaking in the dock, a snivelling coward refusing to meet their gaze. Their eloquence was moving, the depth of their grief awful to behold.

Her mother spoke of how every night, at the exact moment Sarah was abducted, she silently screams: ‘Don’t get in the car, run for your life.’ This is not just wrenching, but unforgettable,

Before, I have always been rather against these victim impact statements, arguing that the kind of emotions they unpeel have no place in a British courtroom. It was an idea copied from America and introduced by Harriet Harman when she was minister for constitutional affairs back in 2006; a development that tried to make the legal process an ‘inclusive’ experience for victims and their loved ones.

I still have my doubts, to be honest. Should there be a layer of emotional justice piped into any trial? These statements are not supposed to sway a judge regarding the tariff he or she imposes, but judges are only human, too. To suggest they will always remain immune to suffering, especially when it is movingly expressed, is unrealistic.

My worry about impact statements is that it gives an advantage to the articulate and educated over those whose statements can only ever be plodding and mundane, despite the fact that all parties feel the same depth of bereavement and loss.

However, after reading the statements of father Jeremy Everard, mother Susan and sister Katie, it would feel like another cruelty too far to deny them this moment to confront this killer.

THERE is little respite for the Everard family in the long road that stretches ahead without Sarah. For them there is no comfort, only loss. Along with the mental torture when thinking about the manner of her death and how she suffered.

So if they take a tiny bit of succour from being able to confront Couzens, if there is a glimmer of closure in being able to express their feelings in front of the monster who destroyed not just Sarah’s life, but theirs, too — then I am glad.

Perhaps victim impact statements have their place after all, especially if they can bring a drop of peace in an ocean of grief.

The dignity and eloquence of the Everard family was as awful to behold as it was inspiring. One can only hope their words seared into Wayne Couzens’s soul and shame him until the day he dies.